Improving your campaign reach means connecting with people likely to buy from your business. But you already know that. The question is how.
Done right, outreach marketing helps you generate quality leads and maximize conversions. In this article, we’ll cover the best outreach strategies to expand your brand’s net and capture more engaged prospects.
Let’s go.
What is the purpose of outreach?
Outreach is a marketing tactic that businesses use to reach out to new customers, influencers, and brands to elevate their profiles, generate brand awareness, and drive more sales.
Broad examples of outreach include:
- Requesting authority backlinks from reputable websites
- Creating customer communities
- Sending feedback surveys
- Making general introductions for affiliate recruitment purposes
The focus of your outreach efforts should be to proactively reach out to the audience segment most interested in your content, services, and products.
What is an email outreach tool?
Marketers, sales professionals, specialists from upwork vs fiverr, and bloggers use email outreach tools to contact potential customers via email. This process is called cold outreach, and it can be incredibly effective.
Email automation tools handle creating personalized emails, sending them according to a schedule, and tracking the responses and behavior patterns of the recipients. Businesses that use email outreach tools usually send large volumes (thousands) of marketing emails to a targeted audience or segments of their audience.
Some examples of occupations that benefit from using email outreach tools include:
- Marketers – Sending lead nurturing campaigns, webinar invites, new product launches, and newsletters
- Bloggers – Reaching out to publishers to develop partnerships
- SDRs (Sales Development Representatives) – Delivering cold email sequences to prospects
An email outreach tool eliminates most of the manual work of a typical email marketing strategy.
What are the most effective outreach techniques?
- Email outreach
Regardless of your product/service, industry niche, or business size, email outreach should be pivotal in your marketing strategy.
Recent studies show that email advertising has a higher click-through rate (CTR) than social media ads. By 2025, there’ll be 4.6 billion email users in the world. So don’t miss out on the opportunity to reach your audience.
A successful email outreach campaign can result in the following:
- Increased traffic: Just one link from a powerful influencer boosts traffic to your website.
- Increased reach: Your content will reach new audience segments and build brand awareness.
- Enhanced credibility: A combination of excellent content and innovative email outreach will encourage experts to link to your website and grow your credibility online.
But it takes the right ingredients to create a successful campaign.
Audience research
You can customize your outreach campaigns to specific audience segments by doing comprehensive research on your target audience. Doing this leads to higher CTRs and conversion rates.
The easiest way to document your research is through buyer personas. These can be as detailed as you’d like. Make sure your personas cover each relevant segment of your target market.
Targeted reach
An email outreach tool helps you personalize your emails and send them to the correct prospects at scale. It also gives you confidence that your outreach emails are delivered, relevant to the recipients, and have the best chance of being opened.
Because email outreach tools help you segment your audience, creating sections in your contacts based on details like industry, company, and stage in the marketing funnel is easy, so you don’t have to do any heavy lifting.
After email marketing segmentation, you can create the right email with the right tone.
Create emails
Personalized emails that look as though they were written just for the recipient are what you should aim for. Your email content should contain value and spark a response. Reference your buyer personas for each segment to ensure you address pain points and objections.
You should also compose different email templates for each audience segment’s different stages in your marketing funnel. That way, your bases are covered; you only have to personalize and send.
Every email should begin with an eye-catching subject line that acts as a hook to convince the prospect to open the email and keep reading.
The body of your email should use a winning copywriting formula like AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) or PAS (Problem, Agitate, Solution) to compel the reader to act.
Finish with a clear call to action (CTA). This can be a link to your website content, a signup form, or a landing page.
Automate
An email outreach campaign is more than a one-and-done.
The most effective method is a drip email campaign consisting of several emails and messaging tactics to build awareness and nurture your prospect through your funnel. Email outreach tools automate emails based on a prospect’s behavior and stage in your funnel.
They ensure that each prospect gets the right message at the right time, depending on their engagement with your previous emails. Tools like Constant Contact and ConvertKit offer easy-to-use platforms where you create your campaigns, and the tool then runs automatically.
Make allows you to create workflows that integrate various apps (like Gmail and Notion) you use, so you choose a trigger that starts a workflow, and the rest happens automatically.
Schedule
Ensuring your outreach email arrives in your prospect’s inbox at the right time means a higher open rate.
Plenty of research is available on the optimal send times for email outreach in various industries. Investigate your industry and reap the rewards of sending your email campaigns at the perfect time.
Monitor
Once you send out your outreach emails, the next step is to track and measure the campaign results. Each email outreach tool offers the following analytics:
- Email open rate
- Click-through rate
- Reply rate
- Bounce rate
- Email forward rate
- Number of unsubscribes
The tool can connect these KPIs with other factors like email delivery dates, the target audience, and more to extract valuable insights.
Some email outreach software provides A/B split testing. Through this testing, you can compare the performance of two email sequences over a set period.
Your discoveries will influence your future email campaigns and the types of content marketing you develop.
- Social media outreach
Another outreach technique is through social media. Let’s explore your options:
LinkedIn’s current membership is over 875 million professionals. Typically used for B2B messaging and marketing, using LinkedIn as part of your business’s outreach campaign can be a smart move.
This platform is valuable for finding tech co-founders, founders and brands you’d like to work with. There are also tools such as LinkedHelper to automate your LinkedIn lead-generation campaigns similar to email strategies.
DuxSoup is one of the best, but you must be careful since LinkedIn’s algorithms are especially sensitive to automation and bots. For example, there are limits on how many connection requests you can send weekly. Your account may also get flagged for looking at too many profiles.
However, if you’re careful and use automation delicately, it can be a great advantage, save you time, and generate amazing leads for your business via B2B lead generation with LinkedIn ads.
One of the best things about outreach on LinkedIn is that you can use advanced filters to find the best match profiles for your business’s brand. You can also scrape the profiles of users who engage with similar content that you produce.
Pro tips: Be personable and explain who you are, how you found them, and your core business value propositions. Generic messages will remain unread or get deleted, so create personalized messages and relevant posts for your target audience.
LinkedIn is a treasure trove of B2B networking and connection opportunities. So put in the time, and don’t rush it. You’ll be glad you did.
Facebook is the world’s biggest social media platform, with almost 3 billion monthly users, and a great place to find and engage with your target audience. Facebook also has a robust analytics platform to track your outreach campaign results.
Pro tip: Join Facebook groups to become part of communities and to better understand your prospects.
If your target market spends time on Instagram, influencer marketing campaigns and Instagram outreach might be valuable for your brand’s Instagram feed.
Instagram is best for B2C outreach, especially e-commerce. It’s built on images and video and lends itself to online shopping and influencer sponsorships.
One of the highest engagement strategies for Instagram is running contests and giveaways. Ask questions and conduct polls to a) find out more about your audience and b) generate engagement and excitement for your brand.
Three ways to approach influencer outreach are to direct message, tag influencers in your posts, and comment on their posts to start conversations with them. With similar approach, consider leveraging Threads, a new app developed by the Instagram team that offers a unique platform designed to engage more real followers through text-based posts.
Pro tip: To connect with powerful influencers, research profiles thoroughly. It’s essential that you seek to partner with accounts that resonate with your business’s values and are a good fit overall.
If a thought leadership approach to content would work well for your business, consider engaging with active Twitter users in your industry.
Twitter is also great for reaching out to communities and discovering more about your target audience’s thoughts about certain subjects that may relate to your brand.
For example, if you’re considering experimenting with Australian domain names to attract a new segment of your contacts, you can find out more in related com.au Twitter communities.
Pro tip: Start by tagging and engaging with some of your intended prospects to create interest and build relationships. Once you’ve established rapport, you can send them a direct message with personalized content that’ll appeal to them.
TikTok
TikTok is the ideal platform for experimenting with video marketing outreach campaigns if your target market is under the age of 24.
As with Instagram, connecting with potential influencers on TikTok means doing your research. Make sure the person you work with aligns with your brand.
Pro tip: Remember that TikTok’s primary demographic is Gen Z. This audience is highly visual and not open to hard sales tactics. Instead, create videos appealing to their lifestyle to gauge their interest.
- Link building outreach
Another outreach technique is link building, which involves adding backlinks to your website from high-authority websites and enhancing your search engine rankings.
Linking to a reputable website tells Google that your content is a trustworthy source of information. High-authority links include links from reputable businesses, social media influencer profiles, and popular industry bloggers.
However, it’s a waste of time to deploy effective link-building outreach campaigns if your website content is sub-par. Instead, follow best practices and Google’s latest updates, including E-E-A-T.
E-E-A-T stands for expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness and now determines the quality of content online.
The criteria focus on delivering the best user experience and information. Combining E-E-A-T and SEO is the winning formula for reaching quality leads and keeping them engaged with your content.
Quick tips to improve your campaign success rate
1. Consider setting up a separate domain and mailbox for outreach email campaigns
It’s not uncommon for mailboxes to be shut down or deleted as spam when associated with thousands of cold emails, unopened messages, and unsubscribes. Because of this, it can be beneficial to set up a separate domain and email for your outreach campaigns so your primary website doesn’t suffer downtime.
You can buy domain names from your current domain provider or choose a new one. However, be careful when you choose your new domain name. Select a name similar to your business domain so prospects won’t be confused when you contact them.
2. Whichever outreach route you take, make it personal
Personalization is crucial for outreach campaigns. At the start of each campaign, thoroughly research your target audience to discover their pain points, core values, and the aspects of your products/services/brand that appeal to them the most. Personalize your content with a clear call to action to optimize click-through rates.
If the call-to-action asks the potential customer to call you, you could use an 800 number, so the call is free for your prospect. This may help remove friction and improve conversions.
3. Ask for referrals
Word-of-mouth is still the best marketing there is. Don’t hesitate to ask for referrals when your outreach campaigns are successful. Happy customers will often be happy to spread the word about your business.
Wrapping up
So there you have it. The best outreach tips and techniques to improve your business’s campaign reach.
Experiment until you find the best approach for your company. Once you do, you’ll capture more qualified leads, enhance your brand’s awareness, and watch your conversion rates soar.
