If you’ve ever popped into your spam folder, you’ve seen what a lousy outreach email looks like. You may have even seen one creep into your main folder.

Because of this spam, email outreach has gotten a bad reputation. But not all outreach is spam.

Blogger outreach, link building outreach, digital PR outreach, and affiliate partnership outreach all have their place in the marketing mix.

Each has nuances and goals, but after sending and receiving thousands of emails over the 10+ years, I’ve realized they share similar traits.

And like them or not, if you are serious about digital PR or starting a link building strategy, you need email outreach.

This post will give you an overview of five simple steps for using email outreach to build links and promote your content.

1. Create a List of Relevant Prospects

You can’t just email anyone these days.

As of May 2024, Google and Yahoo have new email guidelines to avoid spamming users with unrelated emails.

So, emailing the correct, relevant prospects is vital to your outreach success.

There are a few simple ways to get started.

Try a Google Search

The easiest way to find relevant people to email is via Google Search.

Your searches may differ based on the kind of outreach, but in most cases you can kickstart your outreach by finding people and sites writing about the same topic as your campaign.

If you wanted to do an email outreach campaign to get people to link to a new travel report, you’d Google search for travel blogs.

Searching like this will get you closer to your target audience.

I also adjust the timeframe of my Google search to no longer than the past six months to ensure I reach sites currently discussing the same topics.

Confirm They Are Relevant

Once you find a site, you’ll want to visit it to ensure it matches your target.

I typically browse their homepage and about page and read recent articles.

For example, here is a site called The Blonde Abroad, which is an “award-winning female travel blog”. That sounds relevant to me!

If you find that the sites uncovered by Google aren’t close enough, you can change up your search and get more descriptive.

Instead of travel blogs, search for something like “travel report 2023.”

Find Real People

When doing outreach, you always want to find actual people to reach. This will get you much better response rates and allow you to personalize your message (more on that in the next step), all of which help to avoid the dreaded spam filter.

You can find them as an author name listed on a post or sometimes mentioned on a website’s About Us or Contact page.

For instance, Chris Dong talks about an American Express Travel report:

Keep Track

After identifying a potential site or author that looks like a good fit, keep track of them on a list.

Some people use Google Sheets, others use a tool like BuzzStream.

After you’ve built your list of prospective sites or people, you have to look for their contact information.

2. Find The Right Contact Info

I’ve outlined the best ways to find email addresses in a post, so I won’t recap everything here. Instead, I’ll show you a few tried and true approaches.

Use BuzzStream

BuzzStream extracts any/all email addresses it finds on the site automatically.

For example, the contact information is automatically pulled when using Chrome’s Buzzmarker (one of my favorite SEO extensions).

About Pages

You can also look at the website’s About Us page. Travel and Leisure lists their entire writing staff on their About Us page.

Others may list a generic email on their About page, so it’s always best to try to hone in and find a real person.

Social Media

You can also check Facebook, X, or LinkedIn accounts for mentions of email addresses.

X is excellent for finding journalists or personal emails. LinkedIn is better for finding B2B site emails.

For example, when I click Contact Info on Linkedin, you see my email address right there (yikes!)

Facebook is relatively universal.

But you most likely came here to write and send email outreach, so let’s get into that next!

3. Write a Killer Outreach Email

I always prefer to write my outreach email first and then move on to the subject line.

I won’t discuss the email templates in full because we have an entire post on them that you can just cut and paste.

The most important thing is to personalize your emails.

No one wants a generic email like this:

(They didn’t even get the right company correct!)

Instead, let me lay out what makes a good outreach email. I prefer to use the C.H.A.M.P. Outreach Method. The main points are:

Personalize Your Message

For starters, you want to personalize your message. Add something that makes this email uniquely relevant to your target.

Read their bio, blog post, or social posts. Is there anything that you found interesting? Can you relate to anything?

Once, someone saw that I went to music school and mentioned that in an email.

Provide Value

Never ask for something for nothing in return.

You can provide value through acts of service, like offering to write a blog post. Or you can provide value by spelling out exactly how you’d like the person to help you.

Don’t leave it up to them to figure out what you need.

This one person reached out asking me to include a link in a post, told me exactly where and how, and even offered a custom copy to add to the post.

Once you’ve written your email, you only need one more step for successful email outreach: the subject line.

4. Craft Better Subject Lines

We’ve written extensively on subject line best practices.

Ultimately, it depends on the kind of email outreach that you are pursuing.

So, let’s nail down some universal best practices for subject lines.

Keep It Short… But Descriptive

In a study BuzzStream did with Fractl, we found that 6-10 words are the best length for outreach to journalists (aka digital PR outreach).

Yet another study from Reboot found that 4-8 words were the magic number.

Ultimately, it comes down to saying just enough to be descriptive.

So, don’t get too caught up in the numbers; just try to write enough to be descriptive.

Use Personalization

Personalizing with either [First Name] or [Website Name] in the subject line is the most apparent and reasonably scalable approach for any email outreach.

And this tracks my experience.

When I was with Siege Media, we found that including the site name in the outreach subject line encouraged more clicks.

Watch Your Word Choice

There are also a lot of studies that examine word choice and how it can impact subject lines.

For example, BuzzStream did another study with Fractl that found keywords like “game” or “video” hurt email conversion.

The best way to know for sure is to test for yourself. A tool like BuzzStream makes it easy to A/B test subject lines.

With your subject line set, let’s turn to sending your email.

5. Send and Track Efficiently

At this point, it’s time to start sending emails.

Many, like myself, start with Google’s tools, like Sheets and Gmail, for sending outreach.

After sending a few campaigns, I found myself with 100+ tabs open and your computer grinding to a halt. That’s when I moved to a tool (Surprise! The tool was BuzzStream.)

Depending on the kind of outreach you plan on sending, we’ve outlined several tools that make this much easier: blogger outreach tools, tools for link builders, and digital PR tools.

Space Out Your Sending

Bulk sending is risky if you don’t know what you’re doing.

And sending your outreach emails too quickly can cause some big problems.

Aim for at least 1-2 minutes between emails if you plan on sending in bulk.

Verify The Email Addresses of Your Prospect

Even if you aren’t sending in bulk, verifying your outreach lists is essential for sender reputation and deliverability.

Sending to too many undeliverable addresses can hurt your deliverability.

Use a tool like Neverbounce to verify your prospect list in bulk.

P.S.

Email outreach works.

Our case studies section is full of evidence to support it.

Virtually every major brand you’ve heard of has some outreach to push and promote their campaigns and products.

The good news is that it’s easy to do at scale while still being able to personalize emails to cut through the clutter.

Check out how BuzzStream can help.

The post How to Do Email Outreach in 5 Simple Steps appeared first on BuzzStream.

Are you sending a ton of emails and waiting for responses? We’ve all been there. Unanswered emails can quickly become a complicated mess of variables.

Is the subject line not grabbing them?

Does the data need to be more compelling?

Did I reach out to the wrong person?

Is my email not grabbing their attention?

After you’ve found their email address, focus on your email messaging.

I’ve been sending emails for years and getting pretty good links. I’ve also had thousands of emails that have gone unread and unanswered. So, I decided to develop a handy acronym for my methods.

I call this the C.H.A.M.P. outreach method. This method uses five checks to ensure your email clicks with your target audience.

C.H.A.M.P. stands for:

• Connect
• Help
• Adapt
• Make it scannable
• Personalize

With this method, an optimized email would look like this:

Before I get into the details of each check, the C.H.A.M.P. outreach method is tailored towards a targeted, personalized email outreach approach (sometimes called the sniper method) vs a bulk send (or shotgun method).

However, this method has components you can apply to a bulk send approach.

Without further ado, here is the C.H.A.M.P. outreach method.

C – Connect

Make sure your email immediately connects with the reader.

Connecting isn’t exactly personalizing (as that will come later). The connection we want here is contextual. This connection should be natural. If you set out to build relevant links, for instance, there should be a clear connection between your pitch and your target.

An immediate, snap connection should answer most people’s question, “Who the heck are you, and why are you in my inbox?”

For example, if I write about travel and receive an email pitch, it must be immediately apparent why you are contacting me.

However, depending on the type of email you are sending, you might not have an immediate connection as obvious as the one in the image above. So, it’s OK to remind them about the connection.

Or if you’re lucky, maybe you know the person already and can remind them where and how you know them. For example, I recently received an email from someone who made a clear connection in both the subject and first lines of the email, reminding me that I tagged them in a LinkedIn post.

You’ve gone too far if it takes 2-3 lines to connect.

If it takes more than a line to explain the connection, it probably isn’t a fit as a prospect.

H – Help

The name of the game is to provide value in some way. Your outreach strategy should never make the other person do all the work.

At BuzzStream, we use the term “Relationship stage” for a reason.

When you perform email outreach, you are building a relationship. However, some forms of email outreach, especially link building, may seem one-sided. How am I helping someone by asking them for a link?

Help can mean many different things in the context of the C.H.A.M.P. method. It can mean providing value by:

• Pitching them a great shareable asset that they can then share on their blog, impressing their readers
• Pitching some helpful data they can share to get more views on their story
• Giving them a free trial to a tool
• Offering to write an entire post for them

Help can also mean providing clear instructions for your ask. For example, in resource page outreach, broken link building, link moves, link reclamation, unlinked mentions, and other white hat link building tactics, helping means showing your target exactly where to find everything.

Tell them the exact page you are referring to on their site. If it’s a large site, provide the link. When the target page has multiple sections, suggest a section where you believe your resource would be a good fit.

Call out specific stats the journalist should know if you pitch a survey or data piece. Proactively provide a supporting quote from your CEO so the journalist doesn’t need to. We’ve outlined many of these in our email outreach templates post.

The name of the game is making it as easy as possible for your target to take action.

A – Adapt

Matching the style and language within a conversation has been used in sales and psychology to better connect with people.

Tailor your tone and presentation to the type of prospect that you’re reaching out to.

So, if somebody uses very bubbly language in their blog posts, lean into it. If someone is very formal, match your tone.

The above is an extreme example to prove a point, but the fact is that people respond better if you talk to them like a person, not a prospect on a list.

If you’re stuck finding the correct tone, AI can help with this. Copy and paste a few blog posts or stories from your target’s site into a tool like ChatGPT or Bard, asking them to analyze the style and tone.

Then, prompt them to write your email matching the target style and tone. (Don’t think it’s possible? We ran a study on using AI for pitches, and the results were very surprising.)

M – Make it Scannable

People view emails on different devices. Some might be on the train, scrolling on their phone, while others are home on a desktop with a 27-inch monitor.

It’s no surprise that users scan web pages. An American Press Institute study found that users understood 100% of the sentence, which was eight words long.

At 14 words, comprehension dropped to 90%!

Large blocks of text are immediately off-putting.

Consider the difference between these two email messages. One is on a desktop, the other on a mobile device:

Although both are rough to read, the mobile experience could be better. The long sentences more than double the number of lines before a paragraph break.

Some simple ways to make things scannable (and to help with accessibility guidelines):

• Break up large paragraphs into 1-2 sentences max
• Break up long sentences
• Use bullet points
• Use some bold text to make things stand out

Again, AI can come in handy with a task like this. Ask ChatGPT to take the same example email and make it more scannable.

Here is the same example from above after prompting ChatGPT to make the whole passage scannable:

Using bullets and bold text makes the email infinitely more scannable.

P – Personalize

Finally, we’ve come to personalizing your email. I could spin 10,000 words about the importance and impact of personalization, but instead, I’ll condense it down to a few tips for quick ways to personalize.

The cleanest, easiest personalization structure I’ve used throughout the years is to start each email with:

I saw you published [Recent, Relevant Post Title]. I really liked [specific thing you enjoyed]+ [why I enjoyed it.]. 

The more specific, the better. I’ll touch on this later.

Here are some other tips:

Read their bio. If you connect with someone based on their interests, you can easily connect there. I once found someone who was a fellow Phillies (baseball) fan, and we connected about that.

Read their most social posts. Sometimes, you can find notes about what they are working on or doing outside of work, like recent vacations. (Insights from social posts can even help prevent pitching content they might not personally agree with, politically, etc.)

Get their names right. Databases can be ancient and need to be updated. A prospect might prefer a nickname vs what appears on a public database (especially one they never wanted to be on in the first place).

People like to see their names. One study found that adding names into subject lines can increase open rates by almost 25%.

Reference a post that they’ve written recently. The most recent post is likely fresh in their memory. So you can extract information and personalize your email based on that.

Be specific. If you like something about an article your prospect wrote or shared, be specific and include details.

General statements sound inauthentic. Avoid statements like “It’s interesting” or “You do great work”.

Ready to be a C.H.A.M.P.?

The post C.H.A.M.P. Outreach Method (That Got Me Thousands of Links) appeared first on BuzzStream.

You can find anything on the internet, right?

It sure seems that way. So why is it so hard to find people’s email addresses?

Some people, especially freelancers, don’t like to be found (or emailed). Others may want their contact information seen but haven’t taken the time to update it.

Nevertheless, with new tools seemingly being released daily, finding someone’s email address has never been easier.

Whether you are doing blogger outreach, digital PR, link building, or even sales, these 12 techniques can help identify the missing piece of the email outreach puzzle.

1. Use an Email Lookup Tool

Email lookup tools exist to help simplify finding email addresses —mainly professional contact information.

They typically use a mix of public data, crawling technologies, and databases to find and verify email addresses.

Hunter

Hunter is a free lookup tool that allows you to find email addresses associated with a specific domain. One added feature we like is that if you know the website associated and the name, Hunter will suggest the most common email format used within an organization (which you can then verify!) They also have a free SEO extension.

Tip: Hunter also integrates directly with BuzzStream, helping you search for emails within the search process. You need an account with Hunter for this to work.

You get 25 monthly searches, and then you’ll at least need a Starter plan at $34/mo.

Wiza

Wiza is a free email lookup tool that finds real-time verified email addresses (and phone numbers) using company name, domain, and other filters.

In addition to their searchable contact database, they offer a free Chrome extension that reveals work and personal email addresses directly on LinkedIn profiles.

With a free Wiza account, you get 25 reveals every month. Their paid plans start at $49/mo and include features like CRM integrations (Salesforce, HubSpot, and more) and team analytics.

Get Prospect

GetProspect is a platform with a B2B database of 200M prospects, with many solutions to find an email address.

A free monthly subscription is available with the ability to find up to 50 valid email addresses per month. Paid subscriptions start at $49 per month with 1,000 valid email addresses.

A few other tools:

• Contact Out – This tool leans on LinkedIn for contact information and has newer AI integration to help find emails. Contact Out also has a browser extension.
• Voila Norbert is a free tool that finds individual email addresses if you know the name and domain. While it has fewer features than Hunter, it still gets the job done well. You get 50 attempts for free.

These tools are not built to find journalists’ email addresses

Since many of the email finder tools listed above operate based on pattern matching, they are not ideal for finding email addresses for journalists.

Our study found that more than half of the emails they found were incorrect.

That’s where you’d have to go to a tool like ListIQ, which I’ll cover next.

2. Use BuzzStream ListIQ to Find Email Addresses

BuzzStream ListIQ can find journalists’ email addresses directly from a Google News search.

For instance, if you are looking to do outreach for a PR campaign around interest rates, you’d search “interest rates” on Google News.

I add the URLs I want to find email addresses for and click to generate a Google Sheet.

Now I have a list of verified email addresses for the journalists in the Google News search results.

Since it’s a Google Sheet, I can import these directly into my BuzzStream account, which will automatically update and sync with the existing information or websites I have in the database. Then, I can move right into writing media pitches.

If ListIQ isn’t your thing, next I’ll show you how to find the email format.

3. Find the Email Format

Many websites and companies use the same format for their email addresses. For instance, ours is [firstname] @ buzzstream.com.

But, if you don’t know the format, you can use an email permutator tool and test the permutations.

Metric Sparrow

Metric Sparrow’s Email Permutator gets its from the work of Rob Ousbey’s Google Sheet. You enter the target name, and then it spits out a list of possible permutations.

The tool is entirely free.

Here are a few other similar email permutation tools that work that same way if you prefer to try out some others:

• Mail Meteor
• Xrilion’s Email Permuator (can support seven domains per permutation and has some slick UX.)

4. Verify the Format

It’s wise to verify before you email a contact you’ve never contacted. Sending emails to too many inactive or incorrect addresses will hurt your sender reputation and get your emails directly into spam inboxes. New email requirements from Google and Yahoo make keeping spam reports low even more important.

Luckily, several free tools on the web help with email address verification. Depending on your process, you can email an address list in bulk before you send or verify individual emails as you go.

When verifying, here are a few results that you’ll see from a lot of tools:

Tools for Verifying in Bulk

These bulk verification tools typically cap the number of verifications you can do before signing up. You can sign up for one you like or stack the free ones.

Bouncer gives five free verifications without signing up and 100 free if you sign up for a free account.

Bouncer’s verification tool provided an accurate report of my test email address.

Here are a few other free verification tools:

• Emailable gives 250 free verifications for a free account sign-up.
• MailerCheck offers 200 free verifications for signing up for a free account.
• Proofy offers 100 emails for free.
• Snov.io provides 50 free verifications with signup.
• NeverBounce can verify 10 for free before booking a demo.

Tools for Individual Email Verification

The tools below provide quick verification for single emails if you prefer to do it on the fly.

• ZeroBounce
• Verifalia
• Breadcrumbs
• VerifyEmailAddress.org

Tip: BuzzStream automatically finds verified email addresses only. So you’ll never have to worry about sending undeliverable emails!

5. Use Google Search Operators

Googling used to be my first tactic for finding an email address, but as tools have gotten more sophisticated, this has fallen on the list. But it’s still incredibly effective if you know where and how to look. Here are a few search operators:

If you know the website:

• site:companywebsite.com + “name” + contact
• site:companywebsite.com + “name” + email

If you only know their name, look for terms someone might use in an author byline:

• “name” + “email me”
• “name” + “contact me”
• “name + “connect”

You can also use the previously mentioned Email Permutator’s results and plug them directly into Google and see if you come up with anything.

6. Search Social Media for Email Addresses

The above tactic may surface email addresses on some social media accounts. But you can spend much time getting lost in social media if you don’t know these tricks. Here’s how and where to find contact info on each major social media platform.

Find an Email on Facebook

Many bloggers don’t include email addresses on their websites but have one on Facebook.

To find an email address on Facebook, you can find email addresses on the page’s homepage under the intro section.

If it’s not listed there, click on the About.

Find an Email on LinkedIn

Many Chrome Extensions integrate directly with LinkedIn to provide email addresses and pull contact information, but you can easily find it yourself.

To find a contact’s email address on LinkedIn, go to the Contact Info section on their profile page.

Note that you need to be connected to the person in order to find their email address on LinkedIn – which has its benefits and drawbacks.

For instance, you can connect with someone on LinkedIn, mentioned something unique in the connection message, and then email them and reference the same thing.

Find an Email on X

To find an email address on X, go to the Advanced Search page. Enter the account of the person you wish to search under Accounts, and then in the Words section, try words like:

• Gmail
• Contact me
• Email me
• Write me

Snov.io has a Chrome Extension, which uncovers email addresses based on the account name.

Find an Email Address on YouTube

Most active YouTube accounts will have an email address on their channel page in their About section, though the information could be much easier to find.

If you’re having trouble locating the email, go to the profile page and click on the arrow next to the sentence that appears below the channel title. You’ll then see the About page pop up. Then click on the “View email address,” which will further prompt you to verify that you are not a robot.

If you aren’t a robot, it will display the email address!

7. Ask a Company’s Site Chat

Many brands incorporate customer service chats directly into their website. If you’re stuck, you can ask the chat to get connected to the contact you are looking for or help provide you with the proper email address.

I like this approach because it is straightforward. For this, we’d recommend not directly revealing that you are actively pitching something; instead, say that you have an inquiry about the blog.

Note: Issues arise when the site’s chat is either an AI bot or monitored by a third party without all the contact details.

In cases like the above, try to push to speak to a live person.

8. Ask On Social Media

Some brands are very active on social media; you can simply ask to connect to the correct person. This tactic is essentially the same as the chatbot approach but can be more fruitful if you catch an active social media team.

The brand may not have messaging enabled on some platforms, like X. Look for it just below their profile banner. You’ll find the message option next to the Follow button on Instagram.

Be selective with your choices and match where the brand will listen. B2B brands are more active on X or LinkedIn, whereas B2C brands are more active on social platforms like Facebook or Instagram.

9. Search the Company Website

You can sometimes find an email address hidden on a company site if you know where your contact works. You will typically find individual addresses from companies with smaller teams or solo bloggers.

Check their About Us, Team, or Contact page for email addresses.

If you cannot find it on any of those pages, you can search their site with a site:search on Google. An alternative is a Chrome extension appropriately named Search the Current Site and search for the words “email” or “contact.”

Our contact info can be found on our About page.

Publisher sites tend to list their authors with accompanying email addresses.

10. Subscribe to Company Newsletters

After subscribing to a company newsletter, you typically receive an email from an active email account. In some cases, the email will come from an actual person who monitors the email responses.

For example, below is one from Nick LeRoy who has a great SEO newsletter called SEO For Lunch. I reached out to Nick directly from the newsletter to let him know that I enjoyed it and we’ve since connected multiple times.

Smaller or newer newsletters will typically have more active listeners on the other end.

11. Check Relevant Online Directories

Depending on the industry you are looking for, you may be able to find a directory available online.

For example:

• Yellowpages has contact information and sometimes individual employees.
• Better Business Bureau has contact information for many local businesses.
• Crunchbase has contact information for startups.

You will likely run into more generic email addresses, but depending on the kind of outreach you are doing, this may be all that you need.

12. Send To a Generic Company Email

The generic company email address (typically something like info@site.com or contact@site.com) can still work when all else fails. You’ll have the most luck with this technique for a smaller business where general company email addresses are more likely to be monitored in real-time.

Remember – if it’s easy to find someone’s email, they probably receive many emails. Info@ emails are the most common type of email, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t hear back immediately.

Tip: Similar to the generic company email would be the contact form. You typically find these on the Contact or About page. BuzzStream lets you easily track and add your message in the contact form.

How to Find Email Addresses Based on Prospect Type

Depending on the outreach campaign you are working on, you’ll most likely start to identify patterns for where your contacts like to add their email addresses.

Here are some patterns I’ve noticed throughout the years:

DIY, Parenting, Lifestyle, Beauty, Travel, Health Bloggers

Most DIY, parenting, lifestyle, beauty, and other similar bloggers who don’t list their email addresses on their websites list them on Facebook.

Simply toggle to the About tab.

Tech, Finance, Business Bloggers

If someone is active in the tech or B2B space but it’s hard to find their email address on their site, you’ll have the best luck trying to find them on X or LinkedIn.

However, many thought leaders participate in guest blogging. So, you can find them via an author byline on a guest post or a former post on X. In each case, you can use search operators on Google to find them. Try searches like “name” + “guest contributor” or “guest writer.”

The above search surfaced an author bio page from Ahrefs. My email isn’t listed there, but my X handle and LinkedIn is.

In-house journalists

Many in-house journalists will have their contact info right in a byline on the publisher’s site. If you can’t find it there, you can look for their email addresses right in their X bio.

A quick search for “send me tips” uncovers a slew of journalists eager for your pitches.

Tip: These get spammed all day, so be direct and concise.

Freelance journalists

If you can’t find a freelance journalist’s email on the media site, look for their portfolio website.

You may have to search the page for contact information manually. Use the aforementioned site:search or Search the Current Site Chrome extension.

Also, note that they (smartly) don’t like to get spammed, so they will sometimes display their email address like this: vinnero (at) gmail (dot) com.

Government Sites, Schools, Libraries

Webmasters typically monitor resource pages for government sites, libraries, and other web pages that list many links. You can sometimes find a webmaster’s email right in the footer of the target page or site.

Can You Find Someone’s Email Through Their Number?

Finding someone’s email address through their phone number is not straightforward and can be challenging due to privacy and data protection laws. However, there are a few places to check:

Social Media and Messaging Apps: Some social media platforms or messaging apps like WhatsApp might link a phone number to a profile. You could find it this way if the person has linked their email address to their public profile.

Professional Networking Sites: Platforms like LinkedIn allow you to search for individuals by phone number, especially if you’re already connected, or the number is associated with a business profile.

Reverse Phone Lookup Services: Online services like NumLookup offer reverse phone lookup. These services provide information associated with a phone number, including an available email address. However, you typically end up with a person’s name, and then you can start your search from the start of our list.

Why is Finding the Right Email So Important?

The correct email can make or break a campaign.

The apparent impact of incorrect emails is that your campaign will fail because you aren’t reaching the right people. But perhaps you did not get a response because you reached out to the wrong person. Or your subject line wasn’t clickbaity enough. You can go down a rabbit hole with this many variables. Start your campaign on the right foot with the correct address.

Then, you can move on to crafting a winning email template.

Don’t Be Afraid to Use Email Tools

Scaling your outreach approach when finding someone’s email address, especially for link building, blogger outreach, and digital PR, requires balancing efficiency and personalization.

There’s no need to do everything manually. It may feel more effective, but it’s not efficient.

Ditch the spreadsheets, utilize tools like Hunter, and integrate them into your process with BuzzStream. These tools can automate finding email addresses based on names and domains, making your life easier and improving your campaigns.

The post How to Find Someone’s Email (For Free) in 2025 appeared first on BuzzStream.

Over 70 million new blog posts are published each month — and that’s just WordPress alone. With so much content getting produced, it’s easier than ever to find relevant blogs and bloggers open to sharing your content.

However, in the ten years I’ve been doing blogger outreach in various industries, I’ve found one common theme: blog outreach can be time-consuming for the underprepared.

That’s why building a tool kit is essential. Without the right tools, you’ll waste time on menial tasks and diving down research rabbit holes. I tested almost every AI PR, SEO extension, digital PR, link building, and content marketing tool available.

Here are my go-to blogger outreach tools and some tips on how to use them effectively.

Best All-in-One Blogger Outreach Tool

I’ve worked at agencies, worked with agencies, worked in-house, and hired freelancers for blog outreach help. I eventually took a job with BuzzStream because BuzzStream has been my go-to blogger outreach and link building tool. Built for

1. BuzzStream – Prospecting, Emailing, Relationship Building, and Reporting

BuzzStream is the best all-in-one blogger outreach tool for agencies, in-house teams, and freelancers. The tool has features that help with every step of the email outreach process, from prospecting to emailing to reporting.

Here is what stands out to me as the features that help blogger outreach teams the most:

Prospecting and Blog Discovery – integrates with Moz, Ahrefs

With Buzzstream, you can upload your prospects or use their helpful research tool to discover blogs and blog posts that fit your target audience.

You can vet the sites using integration with Moz and Ahrefs for information like Domain Authority, number of external links, or blog publish frequency.

Contact Information Discovery – integrates with Hunter

Once you have your blog list, Buzzstream can find email addresses and social accounts based on what is available on the site. You can even sync up your Hunter.io account to help find even more contact info.

Sending Emails – with a Chrome Extension

Once you have your list of prospects and contact information, you can set up email sequences with follow-ups based on fully customizable email outreach templates. You can email prospects from the Dashboard, but I like using the Chrome extension Buzzmarker. Using the Buzzmarker allows you to craft emails without leaving the blog page, so you can easily reference any information from the target blog post within your email.

Tracking Relationships and Results – within the app

Remember, real people are receiving these emails on the other end. BuzzStream gives you complete visibility into the emails sent to websites so that you can maintain relationships and, more importantly, avoid spamming the same bloggers with multiple campaigns at one time (this is especially helpful at larger agencies or large teams).

The app will also tell you when you’ve received coverage by looking for backlinks to your target posts.

Pricing: Free trial. $29/mo for the Starter plan.

Prospecting and Blog Discovery Tools

The first step to blogger outreach is finding blogs to pitch. There are a variety of tools available.

2. Ahrefs’ Content Explorer – Finding Top Linked Blog Content

Ahrefs’ Content Explorer feature is a must-have tool for content marketing and blog discovery. Enter a keyword, and Content Explorer displays top posts along with information like Domain Rating (DR), number of backlinks, organic traffic, traffic value, and other helpful metrics for determining if the site is valuable as a link building target.

Then, there are a handful of helpful filters to hone in on the content types that best fit your content strategy. For instance, you can filter by Publication Date to find the most recent content and active blogs for outreach. Or, you can filter by author if you want to identify specific content by an author to reference in your pitch.

Pricing: $99/mo for Lite Version

3. BuzzSumo’s Content Analyzer – Identifying Top Shared Content

BuzzSumo can find top-linked content, but its natural strengths are its social metrics.

Like Ahrefs, BuzzSumo’s Content Analyzer allows you to search based on a keyword to identify top-linked content across the web. But BuzzSumo also displays social sharing data from X, Facebook, Pinterest, and Reddit.

You can then drill down into each shared post to identify users who have shared content. With this list, cross-check to find bloggers that have shared on social media but have yet to link to it from their blog.

Pricing: $199/mo

4. SparkToro – Identifying Influencers

SparkToro was co-created by former Moz Co-Founder Rand Fiskin and can be used in your blogger outreach campaigns to identify influencers.

Rand and the team learned from their experience with Moz that to truly expand your reach, you should look at what your users are talking about, not what they search for on Google. So Sparktoro uses data from social networks like X, LinkedIn, or Facebook to help you identify what topics your audience follows and interacts with on social.

Taking this unique perspective, you can pinpoint key influencers to collaborate with for blogger outreach, content promotion, guest blogging, or other partnership opportunities in a way that other tools can’t.

Pricing: Free, $38/mo Personal plan

5. Google w/ advanced search operators – Uncovering Guest Post Opportunities

By using specific search queries, such as “topic + write for us” or “topic + guest post,” you can discover sites actively seeking guest contributors.

But you can further level your game with Google search operators like inurl: and intitle: operators.

The Inurl: search operator finds you URLs with your search operator, and intitle: operator finds pages whose title includes your search operator. In each case, you can more definitively uncover blog posts related to the topic of your choice.

Pricing: Free

Blog Validation Tools

As you build your outreach list, shaving down your target list is critical to generating responses from bloggers. These are some tools that make the validation process quicker and more efficient.

6. Moz – Measuring Site Authority

Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) is a widely used industry metric built to help SEOs understand a site’s ability to rank. It isn’t the same as how Google ranks pages, but it has shown to be very directionally accurate.

DA is one way to assess a website’s perceived strength and credibility for a blogger outreach campaign. Simply enter the target site into the Link Explorer or Domain Analysis tools.

Moz’s Link Explorer tool can also help assess the quality and relevance of a blog’s backlink profile. If you see a high Spam Score, consider not trying to build a link from the site.

Pricing: Moz Pro has a 30-Day Free Trial, then $99/mo Standard tier

7. Semrush – Measuring a Site’s Traffic

Semrush, another powerful SEO tool with a similar feature set to Ahrefs, can help estimate the traffic to a particular page or site. Semrush’s Traffic Analytics compiles metrics like Visits, Pages/Visit, Avg using clickstream data. Visit Duration, all of which can help determine whether or not a site is worth investing your time in pitching.

Or, enter the target blog into their Domain Overview tool to see information like Organic Search Traffic and number of backlinks.

Pricing: $129/mo for Pro tier

8. Siege Media Chrome Extension – Validating a Target Site

Siege Media’s Chrome Extension provides a quick and efficient way to evaluate potential outreach targets using on-page signals. Content marketing agency Siege Media built the tool based on the insights of years of blogger outreach from the agency, and it is indeed extremely accurate.

The scorecard assesses the quality of a website or blog directly from the browser, considering factors such as words with intent to collaborate, number of nofollow links, etc.

It still takes a keen eye to manually quality and validates a site for outreach, but this tool gives an excellent head start.

Pricing: Free

Content Ideation

Even if you have the right person to email, you still need a solid, shareable idea to get a response. Here are two tools to help you brainstorm content ideas with backlink potential.

9. Ahrefs’ Content Explorer – Identifying Linkable Content Ideas

In addition to the prospecting capabilities, Ahrefs’ Content Explorer can help you identify content ideas that will likely get links.

Enter a topic or competitor site to see top-linked content over time. You can easily click on the backlink profile to determine whether the content drives valuable links.

Analyzing these successful pieces gives insights into content that resonates with audiences and will likely earn links. Then, you can replicate and expand on the content to pitch to target bloggers.

Pricing: $99/mo for Lite Version

10. Exploding Topics – Finding Trending Topics

Exploding Topics, co-founded by Brian Dean from Backlinko, helps with the blog ideation process by identifying emerging trends and topics that might not yet be mainstream.

This tool analyzes data across various platforms to spot these growing trends and allows you to ideate content around these trending topics.

You can search trends by topic or, with a paid plan, search for your keywords and topics.

Pricing: Free with limited features, $39/mo for Pro tier

Blog Content Creation Tools

Creating compelling blog content for outreach is as crucial as the outreach itself. Below are some of the best tools to ensure high-quality, engaging content supports your outreach efforts.

11. ChatGPT – Guest Post Outlining

For the most part, OpenAI’s ChatGPT powers most AI-driven copywriting tools, so it’s best to learn how to use it.

ChatGPT shouldn’t be used to replace writing altogether, but it can be a valuable tool for guest posting by assisting in writing initial drafts or outlines for guest posts. You can prompt ChatGPT with existing content to help build a brand voice for your guest blogs, ensuring they align with the target blog’s style. Or ask it to rewrite your content based on the new voice.

Furthermore, ChatGPT can assist in researching topics and generating ideas for blog posts. However, remember it doesn’t use keyword or backlink data to drive its ideas.

Pricing: Free version, ChatGPT Plus is $20/mo

12. Canva – Image Creation

Visual content is more shareable. And, if you are concerned about Google’s Generative Search taking over your content, create something that Generative Search cannot replicate: visual content.

Canva is a super simple yet powerful tool that helps create visually appealing content like infographics, diagrams, and other post images to take your content to the next level.

These visuals can enhance your blog posts, making them more engaging and shareable when pitched.

Pricing: Free version, $19.99/mo for Canva Pro

13. Pixlr – Photo Editing

Only some types of bloggers prefer images. Some bloggers and industries (like travel or beauty) prefer photography as their visual medium. That’s where Pixlr comes in.

Pixlr is an online photo editing platform that functions like a more accessible, free Photoshop. It operates directly in your web browser, so you don’t need to download any software.

Pixlr provides various editing tools, including filters, overlays, and text options, that you’d find in Photoshop but has a user-friendly interface, making it more accessible for amateur graphic designers out there.

Pricing: Free, with Premium upgrades

Email Discovery and Validation Tools

Once you have a list of prospects, finding accurate email addresses ensures the highest deliverability rates for your outreach campaigns.

14. Hunter – Finding Email Addresses

Hunter.io is a tool designed to help discover and verify contact information. If you are having trouble finding your blogger’s email address, it will search for emails associated with the domain and verify the validity of the contact info.

The piece I like the best is that it also presents you with the format of the email addresses on the site, so if Hunter cannot find the specific email, you can at least give an educated guess.

Pricing: Free for 25 monthly searches, $34/mo starter tier

15. NeverBounce – Validating Email Addresses

An accurate, clean email list is the most effective way to ensure your blogger outreach gets seen.

NeverBounce is an email validation software that cleans and verifies your email list, significantly reducing the chances of email bounces. This focus on better emails protects your email sender’s reputation and prevents your emails from going right to spam.

Pricing: Varies based on number of emails. See pricing page for details

What Features Should I Look For in a Blogger Outreach Tool?

Blogger outreach tools should help with some or all of the following tasks: blogger discovery tools (based on keywords, niche, and metrics), email campaign management, template personalization, reporting and link tracking, and CRM functionalities. Buzzstream does all of the above.

In this post, we’ve also added content creation and ideation, as both are integral to the blogger outreach process, but you can use separate tools for those.

Can I Automate Outreach With Blogger Outreach Tools?

Using email scheduling, bulk sending, and follow-up sequences, you can automate outreach with blogger outreach tools like Buzzstream. But, personalized emails are still the best approach to successful blogger outreach.

Is Blogger Outreach Spam?

Blogger outreach itself is not spam when done correctly (and ethically). The correct way to reach out to bloggers is through personalized, relevant information that offers value to the recipient.

What Are the Best Practices for Blogger Outreach?

The best practices for blogger outreach are similar to those you would follow when receiving an email yourself. Here are the top three tips that we recommend for all outreach campaigns.

Personalize: Don’t waste time on generic pitches. Find out what bloggers write about and ensure your pitch is related to their industry. Be specific.

Offer Something of Value: Don’t just ask for something with nothing in return. Offer content, insights, or collaboration opportunities to benefit the blogger.

Keep it Short and Sweet: Don’t over-complicate your outreach email. Simply tell the prospect why you are reaching out and what you want.

The post 15 Must-Have Blogger Outreach Tools for 2025 (Free and Paid) appeared first on BuzzStream.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more commonplace at the office and in everyday life, questions continue to arise: Will AI ever understand causation, or will AI take over the world and leave humanity in damnation? For media professionals, whose inboxes are flooded with a daily dose of hundreds of subject lines, the musings are less existential. Can AI write a subject line – a good one at that – and follow with a solid pitch? 

To determine the quality of writing produced by AI in PR, BuzzStream and Fractl asked 500 public relations specialists, journalists, and other media professionals to rate a series of subject lines and pitches generated using OpenAI’s GPT-3 text generator. Participants did not know any of the text was AI-generated. Read on to uncover why the question we should be asking is, can AI do it better than humans? 

AI-Produced Subject Lines Are Valuable 

Finessing a subject line may be the No. 1 priority for media professionals because, without the perfect one, emails face the same destiny – the trash pile. Using our AI technology, we generated three subject lines and tested each with our respondents. 

The majority (79%) of professionals said they would open the email based on the subject lines, and 62% revealed they were better than subject lines they wrote themselves or recently received. So, what made our AI-produced subject lines valuable? 

According to 88% of survey participants, the length of the subject lines were good to excellent. Although 71% also reported the quality being high or very high, the length is an important factor because achieving the point in “six to eight words” makes it more probable that your email will get read. 

Although a short, well-written subject line may get a media professional far, it will not do any good if it is one in a million of the same. As it turns out, 69% of respondents reported that the subject lines AI produced for our study were novel, and 76% said they were valuable. 

AI Writes Surprisingly Good Pitches

To discover if AI could maintain its positive track record with media professionals, we generated six emails using the GPT-3 text generator. Once again, 62% of our survey respondents shared that the AI-produced text – this time, email pitches – were better than the last they received or wrote themselves. 

Three-fourths considered the AI pitches valuable, and 72% deemed them novel. Also interesting is that 79% of respondents said the AI-produced pitches were convincing. Writing an email pitch worth reading is one thing, but crafting one that persuades a journalist or media professional to buy into your campaign is what success in marketing looks like – and AI passes the test.

For Media Professionals, AI Creates New Beginning 

It’s unclear exactly how these AI developments will impact the digital PR realm, but one thing’s for sure: Authenticity and authority are going to matter more than ever. Keep prioritizing your brand building (including your personal brand) and establishing trust now.

If AI pitches do become the norm, perhaps it’ll be a matter of spending more time on the creation of high-quality content to pitch and identifying the best journalists to reach out to. We’re in an extremely versatile industry, so as long as we continue to focus on what’s best for our audience, we should still be poised for success.

Methodology and Limitations 

We collected results from 500 Media professionals working in digital PR, journalism, digital marketing, and promotions. The survey was designed with the intent of testing human perceptions of AI-generated subject lines and email pitches presented to them. Respondents were not informed that subject lines and emails were AI-generated. Limitations due to self-reporting apply, including exaggeration, telescoping, and selective memory. Subject lines and emails were generated using GPT-3, a text-generating program from OpenAI. GPT-3 was given a set of prompts in order to generate email pitches, but for efficiency, not every variation of each prompt was used. GPT-3 output could vary based on word count and word variation of prompts. 

Fair Use Statement 

If media professionals trust AI to complete the tedious day-to-day work, what doors open for the marketing industry? Join in on the conversation by reading our research on AI-produced subject lines and email pitches. When you find something good enough to share for noncommercial reuse, please link back here so readers may view the project in full and review the methodology and limitations.

The post AI Writes a Pitch appeared first on BuzzStream.

To really bring the podcasting trend into perspective, a recent study from Statista found that, in 2006, only 22% of consumers knew what a podcast was, but by 2019 over 64% of consumers were aware of podcasting. And, by 2020, it’s estimated that podcast listening will grow to 132 million people in the United States – that’s a lot of subscribers!

As podcasts grow in popularity, so does the demand for finding engaging podcast guests that are able to share their expert opinion, thoughts and ideas. And although podcasting has become a very crowded market, you’d be surprised how few businesses are actually leveraging these opportunities. Maybe this is because we’re all so focused on trying to start a podcast of our own?  I digress…

Unfortunately many people tend to think that podcast guesting is a low impact, high effort task. This can’t be any further from the truth. While it certainly involves a few hours of prep work, the benefit of being featured on a podcast that is popular amongst your target audiences is worth its weight in gold.

If you consider yourself a subject matter expert, there are three main reasons why you should be incorporating podcast guesting into your content marketing mix, along with some considerations for once you get started with this strategy.

1. You’ll Extend Your Reach to Highly Engaged Audiences

Podcasts have built-in audiences of active listeners. Although many of us listen to podcasts while walking our dogs, cooking and doing other tasks, this activity actually makes listeners more receptive. According to a BBC study, brand mentions in podcasts deliver an average 16% higher engagement and 12% higher memory encoding than the surround content. This is because the intimate, conversational nature of the podcast environment creates an elevated state of engagement, even for brand mentions. They’re also moments in which we’re not traditionally being advertised to and many times the host will incorporate a personal anecdote or experience using the product, so it makes the ad more memorable and personable.

While your first instinct might be to pitch podcasts that can be found on Spotify’s Top Podcasts page, I recommend reaching out to lesser-known podcasts that discuss a niche topic that’s related to a topic you’d like to discuss. This is definitely the best route if you don’t have a lot of on-air experience. But even more importantly, it’s the narrow similarities that make deeper connections. If you share a very specific interest with the producer of the podcast and their audiences, the conversation is going to be more meaningful to those participating and those who are listening.

For example, I recently had the pleasure of working with Arielle Spiegel from CoFertility. CoFertility had just launched and Arielle wanted to help spread the word about this amazing resource, so I began researching podcasts that discuss the topic of fertility and found Beat Infertility.

Beat Fertility is all about empowering those experiencing infertility and is hosted by Heather Huhman, a career and workplace expert who specializes in helping people who dream of becoming parents navigate the complicated world of fertility treatments and other paths to parenthood. The podcast has an engaged audience of listeners who, while they’re all on their own unique journey, they share a similar experience and are compassionately engaged with each episode.

Here’s the message I sent to Heather:

When pitching to be a podcast guest, I incorporate the following elements into my message:

1. In the subject line, make it clear that you’re pitching a podcast guest.
2. Always link to the professional page of the person you’re pitching (or your own personal page if you’re pitching yourself). This could be a personal website, LinkedIn page or author bio on an outlet or blog.
3. Provide a brief bio of the podcast guest (less than 2 sentences, if possible).
4. Suggest a topic to discuss. If the topic has already been discussed, that’s definitely okay! Reference the episode in which it was discussed and explain what new insights or angle you’d like to talk about. This actually proves to the host that you are a listener of their podcast and will go a long way.
5. Offer to setup a time to discuss over the phone and brainstorm.
6. If applicable, provide an overview of the company that the guest would be representing (a boilerplate is also fine here) and make sure to call out what makes the company or product different from its competitors.

Heather from Beat Infertility ultimately was interested in having Arielle on as a guest and you can listen to the episode here.  Since airing, Heather has also introduced Arielle to others in the fertility space, including prospective clients for Arielle and her partner’s fertility-related marketing consultancy. All goes to show that the conversation doesn’t stop once the interview is over with. These are connections you’ll continue building relationships with and sometimes you might even be invited back on the show!

2. You’re Creating Content Without Actually Doing Any of the Legwork

If you’re a great conversationalist, the best thing about being a guest on a podcast is that you’re not the one who is actually producing the content. All you have to do is show up and talk. If you do find the idea of being interviewed tricky or intimidating, I’d argue that as long as you take the time to prepare thoughtful talking points you should be okay. Jay Baer from Convince & Convert has a really useful guide and to help with nailing a podcast interview and I highly recommend the accompanying checklist! Remember that you’re the expert and have faith in yourself – you got this!

After the interview is live and published, the content doesn’t stop there. Most times, podcast hosts will share the episode with their social media following on all of their various channels that they use. If they have a blog, they’ll also produce blog content summarizing the episode and will reference everything that was discussed in the episode itself (more on the benefits of all that later!).

Once the Beat Infertility episode featuring CoFertility aired, Heather posted three separate posts on both Facebook and Twitter encouraging her followers to take a listen.

This additional content from another authority in the space helps you gain credibility with other podcasters, as well. Slowly but surely, you’ll be able to pitch yourself as a guest on podcast shows with larger audiences and eventually your reputation will grow.

3. There’s Incredible Value From an SEO Perspective

Beyond the endless benefits of reaching highly targeted and attentive audiences (and even potential business leads) without actually putting in the legwork of producing the content yourself, being a guest on a podcast has a number of SEO-related benefits.

Along with releasing the episode, podcast hosts will publish either a summary or the full transcript of the episode itself. So with every podcast you appear on, you’re creating more backlinks to your site. I also always remind people that, if anything you reference during the interview has an accompanying page on your website with more info, share it with the podcast host afterwards in case they’d like to reference it in these notes. In the example with CoFertility, Heather included a bullet list of what the listener will learn during the episode and linked back to CoFertility twice:

This is especially of value because Google announced in August that individual podcast episodes will surface in search results and that they’re automatically transcribing all the podcast episodes it finds. Now, if someone does a Google search for a show about a niche topic or an interview with a specific person, the results will be potential podcast episodes that match their query. Google has also stated that it will eventually take specific signals into account when determining what episodes to surface, such as how many people listened or whether the podcast is one that has a lot of authority in the space.

Along with this, the backlinks that are created via social shares also contribute to your SEO profile and builds credibility with not only new audiences but also with Google. Needless to say, as you progress on your journey of podcast guesting and continue lining up interview spots, you’ll naturally grow your backlink profile with links from relevant, quality sources.

Tip: Once you are on the podcast, ensure that it can be found on available podcast forums like BusyLike.

Hopefully by now I’ve convinced you that podcast guesting is a strategy you should be incorporating into your content marketing mix. While having a recorded conversation with a stranger seems daunting, as long as you prepare accordingly it is truly an efficient and organic way to attract new audiences and build leads, all while boosting your SEO efforts. And once you’ve done a few, you’ll become a pro at podcast guesting!

The post Podcast Guesting: How to Get on a Podcast appeared first on BuzzStream.

What’s the state of doing outreach in 2017?

For starters, you need to know that everyone and their mother, father, and dog are doing outreach right now. However, the opportunities for coverage haven’t necessarily increased.

According to a study done by Fractl, “although most writers publish one story per day, 44% of them get pitched a minimum of TWENTY TIMES per day.” So to get coverage, you need a way to stand out from the crowd. That’s where using a strategic outreach personalization framework comes in.

The 4 step framework to effectively personalized outreach emails

1. Segment your audience

Segmenting your prospects is key to striking the balance between efficiently moving through a list, and putting together highly-targeted outreach.

In order to determine whether prospects are in the same segment, you need to ask yourself, “Will the people in this group be motivated by the same email message?” In other words, for each prospect, you need to ask yourself another question: “What is this prospect interested in getting from me?” Once you have your answers, you can group together the prospects that are looking for the same things.

You can boil down people’s motivations for covering a topic or piece of content into six main interest drivers:

1. They have an interest in/passion for the topic
2. They have a relationship with the person who emailed them
3. They want to increase their influence
4. They know this content will drive pageviews, traffic, etc
5. They need some new content for the blog and this piece is ready to go (i.e., pressures of a content calendar)
6. They want to write about this before their competition does

Generally a prospect’s desire or motivation to cover your content will involve varying degrees of all six of these interest drivers. However, your segments will weigh each of these drivers differently, which is something you’ll keep in mind once you start building your email templates.

2. Create email templates for each segment

Once you have your audience segmented, it’s time to create templates for each one. As you’re creating your templates for your different segments, here are some tips for targeting personal bloggers, journalists, and site owners:

Another aspect you’ll want to consider when creating your templates for your segments is whether you’ll want to use the two-step outreach process, or the one-step outreach process.

The Two-Step Outreach Process

The two-step blogger outreach process is when you pitch your prospect without linking to the content you’d like covered. If the blogger or publication is interested, they have to email you back, and then you’ll send the link.

What makes this process beneficial is that it creates interest and mystery around your content, while also giving you a clearer opening to follow-up with your prospect later. For certain segments, it can be a really good fit.

For example, Ross and his team at Siege Media tried the two-step outreach process on a few of their segments. They ended up increasing their placement rate from 4.6% to 7.5%.

In general, keep in mind that although this process works well on most blogger personas, it does not work well for resource pages, contacts with whom you already have an existing relationships, or journalists/editors of very popular blogs/websites. For those guys and gals, you’ll probably want to use the one-step outreach process.

The One-Step Outreach Process

The one-step outreach process is when you pitch your prospect and include a link to the content you want covered. That way, if your prospect wants to cover the content, they have all of the resources they need and can act on it right away.

Here’s an example of what a one-step outreach process email might look like (courtesy of Ross):

This process works well with the same people that the two-step process didn’t work well with. That is, resource pages, people with whom you have existing relationships, and journalists/editors of extremely popular blogs/websites. (AKA people who are low on time.) On the other hand, the one-step process is not as good of a fit for low to mid-high-end blogs. In those cases, you’ll want to use the two-step outreach process is.

In short, when putting together your templates for your different outreach segments, be sure to keep these two processes in mind, and choose the most appropriate approach for each segment.

3. Personalize each email

Personalizing your outreach is where the magic happens. It’s your chance to quickly communicate how interested in your prospect you really are, and how much work you’ve already put into your relationship with them. You can do this with the right blogger outreach tool.

If you’re just getting started with personalizing your outreach and you’re not sure whether your personalization will be effective enough, try asking yourself:

Could this personalization apply to a large number of people/bloggers?

If so, it’s not good personalization.

For example, if I write “I really like your home improvement tips post!” it isn’t nearly as interesting or engaging as “I really like your tip on using mirrors to make rooms feel bigger! I had never thought of that, though I do have a couple of mirrors lying around at home.”

Of course, there is a careful line to walk between too little personalization and too much personalization. As a guiding rule, Ross recommends that personalization elements should make up 10-25% of your email. We don’t want the emails to get too long with extra personalization, because shorter emails with the previously mentioned ratio are more likely to create an authentic sense of “this was written end to end for me” for your prospect.

The three core personalization elements

If you’re at a total loss with where to start with email personalization, you can always start by including these three core personalization elements in your outreach:

1. First name
2. Website name
3. 1-2 tailored custom sentence(s)

For extra credit, you can also include one or more additional custom fragments to these core elements, and you’re off to a solid start.

Let’s talk about flattery

Compliment authentically, or don’t compliment at all.

Your prospects can see right through fake praise, and the second they do, you can bet your relationship-building efforts have gone out the window.

Not at prospects are created equal

Different prospects require different degrees of personalization. Here’s a chart Ross put together that illustrates some situations that you’d want to personalize more heavily for, and some where you can lighten up.

4. Analyze your results

The very last step in this strategic four step outreach framework is to gauge your success. Ross and his team at Siege Media analyze their subject lines, email copy, and the content they’re promoting, as well as use the following benchmarks to track the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Open rate:

• 70-90% is a great open rate!
• 50-70% is average. There might be a problem with your subject line and content ideas.
• <50% may have a deliverability issue in addition to poor subject lines and content ideas.

Click rate:

• 25-35%+ is great! Keep doing what you’re doing.
• 15-25% is average. There might be a problem with your email copy, so it’s worth checking out
• <15% may have a deliverability issue in addition to poor subject lines and content ideas.

Reply rate:

• 15-20% of total emails sent is great and means your overall execution is on point.
• 10-15% is solid.
• Less than 10% means your content may be subpar, especially if there’s a big gap between opens and replies.

Don’t forget to compare your current campaigns to your past campaigns, as this can help you identify new or recurring weaknesses in your process. You may not necessarily be able to adjust your outreach mid-campaign, but you can use these use insights to inform future campaigns in addition to industry trends.

If you have any outreach personalization experiences, tips, or questions you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to leave us a comment below to join the conversation.

The post The Guide to Outreach Personalization with Siege Media and BuzzStream appeared first on BuzzStream.

For brands, retention is especially crucial because followers are often direct consumers. For example, on Twitter, 72% of followers of a brand are more likely to purchase a product from them.

So why do people start and stop following brands? BuzzStream and Fractl conducted a survey with more than 900 respondents to better understand why people unfollow brands in social networks.

How can you grow your following on social media?

If someone likes a brand, there’s a good chance they’ll consider following it via social media. Strategists can have a big impact with special promotions and offers that can only be seen by followers. Just don’t expect your new followers to jump into a conversation ― only 4% of our respondents said that they follow brands on social media to give brand feedback.

• 16% of the respondents said they will follow a brand because they like the brand
• 15% said they follow brands to be notified of special offers / promotions
• 12% said they follow brands to learn about new products and services

There are 30 million small businesses with pages on Facebook, and yet according to our survey, a majority of people only follow between one and four brands on social media. With so many brands competing for attention, it’s incredibly important they retain existing followers.

• 50% follow one to four brands
• 26% follow five to nine brands
• 22% follow 10 or more brands
• 3% follow zero brands

Facebook continues to be the most popular network for brands. We asked our survey takers, “What is your preferred social network to follow brands?”

• 38% of the responses indicated Facebook is the most preferred social network to follow brands
• 19% said Twitter is the most preferred social network to follow brands
• 15% said YouTube is the most preferred social network to follow brands
• Less than 2% said SlideShare, Vimeo, and Vine are the most preferred social networks to follow brands

How can you retain your followers on social media?

Getting people to stick around is more about avoiding activities that tend to turn off followers. Specifically, 45% of our respondents said that they will unfollow a brand on social media because of too much self-promotion (e.g., when a company ignores its audience and constantly promotes its brand). Another 34% said they will unfollow a brand on social media if it uses automated messaging (e.g., when you follow a brand and automatically receive a message saying “Thanks for following me!”).

People tend to have certain expectations when they follow a brand. For example, about a quarter of our respondents expect a response within an hour if they leave a comment on a brand’s Facebook or Twitter page. But 24% of our respondents expect a response to a comment they made directed to a brand they’re following on Facebook within 1 day or longer; 19% said the same thing, but for Twitter.

• 16% expect a response within 12 to 24 hours on Facebook; 13% on Twitter
• 13% expect a response within 1 to 2 hours on Facebook; 14% on Twitter
• 12% expect a response within 30 minutes to 1 hour on Facebook; 14% on Twitter

Perhaps brand perception is more important than a brand’s social media activities. In fact, 48% of the respondents that took our survey said it is likely that they would immediately unfollow a brand on social media if it garnered press for poor customer service. However, we gave our respondents five different social media blunders as examples of poor customer service and in three of the five examples, respondents told us that if the blunder did not affect them personally, they would not take action. A majority of the responses indicated that our respondents would not unfollow a brand because of these particular social media blunders.

• Customer service turned into a nightmare for US Airways when the company’s social media coordinator accidentally posted an X-rated picture. The inappropriate content was unexpected for their Twitter followers and resulted in a backlash.
• In an attempt to connect a current event like Hurricane Sandy to its marketing message, Urban Outfitters posted a free shipping offer on Twitter. The company’s followers responded that the offer was insensitive.
• When American Airlines announced its merger with US Air, it set up its Twitter account to automatically respond to any tweets in a positive manner. But when someone sent the company a derogatory tweet and the airline responded with a cheerful response, followers began thinking the airline was not genuine in its responses.

After a poor customer support experience, brands can use their social media channels to defuse the situation and engage with their current customers. Furthermore, they can create and post content that acknowledges past blunders and describes steps they took to remediate the outcome.

But how frequently should brands be posting content via social media? Posting too frequently or infrequently could lead to an exodus of followers. In fact, one of the more important social media activities people expect is a consistent frequency of posts. Generally, on all of the social networks people would prefer if brands post between two to five times per day. Brands that post content more than six times a day risk losing followers.

• On Facebook, 68% of respondents said that they would want a brand to post between 1-2 times per day on Facebook, while 19% want them to post 3-5 times per day
• On LinkedIn, 63% want brands to post 1-2 times per day and 24% prefer 3-5 times per day
• On LinkedIn, 72% want brands to post 1-2 times per day and 13% prefer 3-5 times per day

Lastly, 26% of our survey-takers’ responses indicated that when following a brand, what matters to them most is that it fits their interests.

• 25% said what matters to them most is that the brand offers high-quality products
• 21% said what matters to them most is that it fits their personality
• 17% said what matters to them most is that it is socially responsible
• 12% said what matters to them most is that it can be recommended to friends and family

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