Source: Freepik

Email is one of the most popular communication channels in the world, with more than 4.4 billion email users globally.

And it’s really effective. According to a survey from Salescycle, 59% of people claim that their purchase decisions are influenced by marketing emails. The same survey found that 50% buy directly from a marketing email every month.

Outreach email marketing is one of the best ways to reach a large number of customers quickly and at a relatively low cost.

But it’s also difficult to get it right.

If too many recipients mark your email as spam, email servers will blacklist you. If this happens, the server will send your emails straight to the spam folder.

This article will show you how to write compelling outreach emails that your subscribers will love. We’ll also explain how to execute effective campaigns targeting the right audience.

So, What Is Email Outreach?

Email outreach involves sending marketing emails to people you don’t yet have a relationship with.

It aims to get your recipients to take positive action in response to your message that’ll help you achieve various business goals. Outreach emails are sometimes called cold emails.

Examples of the goals you can achieve with email outreach campaigns include:

• To generate leads.
• Link building.
• Securing opportunities to guest post.
• Promoting a piece of content.
• Reaching out to influencers and investors.
• Pitching partners to collaborate with on campaigns.

Source: Freepik

What Is an Email Outreach Strategy?

Your email marketing strategy is how you go about achieving your goals. A good strategy will give your outreach campaigns direction and ensure success.

Your cold email outreach strategy should include:

• A goal: As mentioned above, what action do you want your recipients to take?

• Customers: Which customers do you want to target with email campaigns? What do you want them to do? What are their needs and desires? When do you want them to take action?

• Expectations: What will success look like? What return on investment (ROI) do you expect?

• A wider strategy: How will outreach email marketing fit your business strategy? Are you aiming to create leads that you will nurture? Or do you want to make a sale?

• Cadence: How often will you email your contacts? How will you approach those who don’t open, take action, or respond to your email? Will you send a follow-up email?

Source: Freepik

How Do Outreach Email Campaigns Work?

There are six main steps to get email outreach campaigns right:

1. Prospecting

Successful cold outreach campaigns are all about targeting the right people. By only sending emails to people you think really want or need them, you’ll get better open rates and better quality leads.

Prospecting is choosing which type of person or company you will target to achieve the best results. The most effective way to do this is to develop ideal customer profiles (ICPs).

Once you’ve decided which prospects you want to target, do research so you know what exactly makes them tick. You can use this information to craft your email content to meet their needs and interests.

2. Creating a contacts list

Now, you need to gather the email addresses of people who match your target ICP. You might already have email addresses in your customer relationship management (CRM) tool, which you can quickly download. Or you might want to buy a customer database.

However, these days, scraping software like Hunter.io is becoming more popular. Hunter searches thousands of web pages quickly and looks for email addresses of people who match your ICP.

3. Writing an outreach email

This is probably the most important stage. That’s why we’ve broken it down into four simple steps:

• Write a catchy and personalized subject line.
• Optimize the preview text.
• Keep your outreach email short and sweet.
• Personalize as much as possible.

You can read about each of these steps later in this article.

4. Testing

Imagine you spend lots of time and money to prepare a contacts list and write outreach emails, but the call-to-action link is broken.

People will get your email, but then they won’t be able to take action. Testing ensures your email is perfect and you don’t waste valuable time and money.

5. Follow-up emails

If you want to build a relationship with your recipients, response rates are important.

People get a lot of emails, and some don’t have time to read them or forget to respond. So it can be helpful to send them a friendly reminder. It’s also important to get back to them promptly when they answer.

For example, if a customer reads your email and makes a purchase, you could automate an email thanking them and explaining what happens next. But, if they ask questions about a seminar you have invited them to, they will require a bespoke response.

6. Reporting

Finally, collecting data such as open rates, click-through rates, and ROI is critical. These numbers will help measure whether your campaign succeeded and show how you could improve your next campaign.

How to Write an Outreach Email in 4 Steps

Source: Freepik

As mentioned above, good content is key to a successful outreach email.

People sometimes view cold emails as spam because they don’t know the sender. To ensure your email is not ignored or flagged as spam, your outreach email should:

• Grab attention.
• Encourage the recipient to open it.
• Get the reader to take action.

This section explains how to do this in four steps:

1. Write a catchy and personalized subject line

The first thing your recipients see is your email’s subject line. Since they don’t know you, it’s the one element that might encourage them to open your email.

That’s why you must invest time in creating a subject line that elicits opens.

Here are a few tips on crafting outreach email subject lines to increase your open rate:

💡 Get personal

One of the best ways to double your response rate for a cold email outreach campaign is to use personalized email subject lines.

These work well because they make your recipient view you as a connection, not a stranger.

This strategy works well. Studies show that personalizing an email subject line boosts open rates by 26%. A few ways you can add personalization to your subject line include:

• Do the name drop: Name-dropping can boost your credibility. Use it if you have a mutual connection or work with someone well-known to the reader—an industry influencer, for example.

• Use your prospect’s first name: This is the most basic form of email personalization. Using a prospect’s first name makes them feel you know them. It also makes them feel valued.

• Mention a pain point: Highlighting a reader’s pain point shows that you understand their challenges. It also encourages them to open your email if they are looking for a solution.

💡 Arouse your recipients’ curiosity

A few pointers on how you can leverage curiosity to create enticing subject lines include:

• Using curiosity power words: Curiosity power words evoke feelings of intrigue and play on our desire for knowledge. Examples of curiosity power words are words like “secret”, “elusive”, and “little-known”.

• Creating a knowledge gap: This refers to the gap between what your recipient knows and what they want to know. Creating a gap in your subject line leaves the recipient wanting to know the missing piece of information. A good example might be: “One mistake ALL outreach emails make”.

• Asking questions: Questions either highlight a common problem the ICP faces or create curiosity. Either way, they’ll open your email to get the answer. A good example of the former is: “Do you struggle to write good outreach copy?”

2. Optimize the preview text

The preview text is the copy that appears immediately under the subject line or next to the subject line, depending on the device used and the email client.

This small piece of text gives you another opportunity to convince your recipients to open your email.

This is why it’s vital to optimize your preview text. Here’s how you can do this:

• Continue where your headline left off: Conveying your full message in the subject line can be difficult. Use the preview text as an extension to paint a clearer picture.

• Pitch the contents of your email: Use the preview text as a teaser of what follows in the email or tell recipients why they should read on.

• Include a call-to-action: Consider putting a call-to-action (CTA) in your preview text to encourage more opens. For example, the subject line “One mistake ALL outreach emails make”, could be followed by: “Dear X, Read this email to learn why most sales emails suck.”

One thing many marketers make the mistake of doing is ignoring the preview text. Doing this will result in the default preview text being displayed. Typically, this text snippet is the first few words of your email. You’d want to make them count.

3. Keep your outreach email short and sweet

You must get to the point quickly for your cold email to be effective. People are busy. Plus, they receive over 121 business emails per day. This is why you must keep your outreach email short.

Crafting short outreach emails shows your prospects you value their time. It also ensures your copy is easy to read, which keeps the audience engaged.

4. Personalize as much as possible

Email personalization is key to successful outreach campaigns. Personalization doesn’t simply mean using your prospect’s name. You can add personalized images and include their job title, a screenshot of their website, and more.

Personalization is all about creating relevant and helpful email content. It’s especially beneficial in your:

✔️ Subject line.

✔️ Email copy.

✔️ Images.

✔️ Call-to-action.

If your prospect feels you know them and that your offer is designed to make life easier for them, the chances of getting a positive response are higher.

One example of a business that got this right is Orca Security. They’re an industry-leading cloud security platform. The company wanted to improve attendance and bookings for its demo presentations by offering attendees a free gift.

However, a text-based outreach email didn’t communicate this offer effectively.

The company used Hyperise’s image personalization toolkit to help grab its prospects’ attention.

They A/B tested three images with varying levels of personalization. The most successful image featured the recipient’s face, along with details of the offer and a personalized message from Orca’s sales director:

Email conversions increased by 3.1% after the personalized images were implemented.

The company then used our toolkit to create personalized GIFs. The one shown below saw the conversion rate increase to 5.7%:

Over a campaign of 7,000 messages, Orca would normally get around 120 bookings. With Hyperise, it managed to book 262:

4 Types of Cold Outreach Email Explained

Here are some types of outreach emails to learn from:

1. An influencer outreach email

Source: Freepik

Influencer marketing is when you get well-known industry figures to promote your product or service. It is a great way to boost brand awareness, gain customer trust, and drive sales.

Influencers are inundated with requests from companies. Here are a few pointers to make sure your email stand out:

✔️ Find the right influencer: You must find an influencer that resonates with your target audience.

✔️ Let them know why you chose them: Let your influencer know why you picked them and what makes them the best person to collaborate with your brand.

✔️ Speak their language: To catch an influencer’s attention, speak their language. Learn how they communicate with their audience and replicate that in your outreach email.

✔️ Create a unique pitch: Influencers receive many cold outreach emails. Make yours stand out as much as possible by being unique.

An influencer outreach email example

Hi <First Name>,

My name is <Your Name>, and I handle influencer relationships for <Your Brand>. We’re great fans of yours (as are our clients), and we would love to collaborate with you on <campaign>.

We were greatly inspired by your <video, blog/social post, talk, etc.> on <topic> and thought you’d be a great fit to help us get the word out.

We know you’ve probably not heard from us and our product. That’s why we’d love to send you some of our best stuff so you know why our customers (and hopefully you) love us so much. We’re sure your audience will appreciate knowing about <problem your product solves>.

Let me know if this sounds interesting, and we can pick it up from there.

Sincerely,

<Your Name>

2. A brand outreach email

Source: Freepik

Brand outreach involves reaching out to brands with products or services you’d like to promote because they complement your own. The goal is that they will promote yours in turn.

For example, if you sell shoes, you could reach out to a popular clothing brand and propose a promotion where your shoes match their clothing.

Here are some tips for reaching out to other brands and building solid relationships:

✔️ Choose your partners well: Pick brand partners who you can create a mutually beneficial relationship with. Ensure there’s no risk of clashing with each other if it’s a brand-to-brand partnership.

✔️ Reach out to decision-makers: Find decision-makers responsible for the type of campaign you want to run. Do in-depth research and get to know them well before you send them your first email.

A brand outreach email example

Hey [First Name],

My name is [Your Name], and I’ve helped brands like [name brands] sell more products online.

I’ve been blogging for over [Years] and have grown a [size of audience] strong audience that would be interested in your product. 

I’ve heard great things about [product], checked out your website, social media profiles, and even tried [product]. To say that I love it (as would my audience) is an understatement.

Would you be interested in working together to promote [product]?

If you need more information on how the partnership would work, pick a date on my calendar [link], and we can have a chat about it.

Looking forward to our chat!

Thanks.

[Your Name]

3. A public relations (PR) outreach email

Source: Freepik

Public relations (PR) outreach refers to reaching out to media outlets to build relationships that ultimately drive brand awareness.

Here’s how to boost the chances of getting a positive response:

✔️ Only target relevant prospects: For example, if you sell eCommerce tech, it’s a good idea only to target technology and business media outlets.

✔️ Find content gaps: Look for content gaps you can fill for your prospects. Find popular topics or types of content that the publication doesn’t yet cover and offer to help them fill this gap. This will help to increase your success rate.

✔️ Focus on building relationships: Get to know the individual and speak to them on the phone. Don’t pitch straight away. Instead, get to know them first. Ask them what content they are interested in and what they focus on. This will help you get your prospects to care about what you want to pitch to them.

A PR outreach template example

Hi [first name],

My name is [your name], and I am the [position and company].

I’m a fan of [outlet name], and I loved your article on [topic] and found it really helpful. I particularly loved [point].

We recently covered a similar topic and would love to collaborate with you on similar projects in the future. We can provide deeper insights, insider tips, and stats if this interests you.

There’s a similar collaboration we did with [relevant outlet]. You can check out one of our recent articles [link] on their site.

Let me know if you’re interested.

Thanks,

[Your signature]

4. A blogger outreach email

Source: Freepik

This type of outreach involves reaching out to bloggers and asking them to write about your product, service, or brand. It’s also excellent for obtaining backlinks and boosting your search engine results.

For best results:

✔️ Target bloggers whose primary audience demographics and psychographics match your ICP.

✔️ Ensure your offer adds value for the blogger’s audience.

✔️ Offer to write guest posts for the blogger, as this provides them with free content and gives you free advertising

A blogger outreach email template example

Hey [First name]

I came across your article [name and URL of article] on [publication], and I must say you really hit the ball out of the park with this one.

I couldn’t help but notice you recommended [product name] in your article. [Company name] inspired us a lot with that particular product, and we decided to create an even better (according to our customers) product.

We’d really appreciate it if you could help promote us in any other articles you publish.

If that sounds interesting, let me know so we can iron out partnership details.

Thanks.

[First Name]

How to Double the Response Rates of Your Email Outreach Using Personalization

Here are some tips to help you craft an effective outreach strategy:

Craft a compelling email and provide value

Once your prospect opens your email, you must give them a reason to read it and take action.

To do that, your email must provide them with value. This could include:

✔️ A special offer.

✔️ Something for free.

✔️ Information like a guide on how to do something.

✔️ The chance to partner on something that will benefit them.

✔️ The opportunity to solve a problem.

To compose a value-driven outreach email, you need to understand your prospects. Your email copy should align with the challenges they face or the goals they want to attain.

You should also highlight the benefits of choosing you over competitors—remember, they receive hundreds of similar emails.

Write a personalized introduction and pay them a compliment

The first line of your outreach email must make your prospect feel connected to you. To do that, you must ensure it’s personalized. Some tips to do this include:

✔️ Give a compliment: Make your prospects feel good about themselves and their work. Just make sure you’re sincere.

✔️ Mention something they have done: Mention a social media or blog post they’ve published or an event they spoke at and highlight the value you got from it. Bonus points if they directly relate to your offer.

A personalized email intro catches the recipient’s attention, shows your email is relevant, and proves you have something worthwhile to say.

A/B test for optimization

To optimize your outreach email campaign, it’s good practice to A/B test them. A/B testing simply means comparing the performance of two emails with the same end goals. These two versions are sent to two sample segments of your prospect list.

To conduct your A/B test:

✔️ Determine the metrics to track: This could be open rates, click rates, or response rates. Your metrics must be aligned with the ultimate goal of your outreach campaign.

✔️ Identify the factors influencing your chosen metrics: Different email elements trigger a response. Tie these to the metrics you want to track. For example, your subject line can be tied to your open rates. Other factors include copy, images, and CTAs.

✔️ Use the 80/20 rule: Make the email you think will likely be more successful the one you would normally send, the “A” email. Make your “B” email the experiment where you try a different approach. Send A to 80% of your subscribers and B to 20%. This allows you to reduce risk while testing out new ideas.

Once you’ve found out which email performed best in your 80/20 sample test, it’s time to send your winning outreach email to the rest of your prospect list.

Hyper-personalize your outreach email to stand out

Human beings are visually oriented. People process visual data faster than text.

That’s why adding images to your outreach email will help convey your message in a memorable way. And that’s why you must use hyper-personalized content.

Besides helping you convey your message, visuals also have the power to trigger emotions.

How is this useful to your outreach email marketing strategy?

If your email can elicit positive emotions from your prospects, the chances of you getting a positive response drastically improve.

With Hyperise, you can add dynamic personalization layers that will result in your prospect seeing an email that’s visually tailored for them.

For example, you can add text layers to images. This means they will see their name, company name, or other attention-grabbing personalized text on the image:

Other ways of using hyper-personalization in your emails include:

✔️ Adding their picture or business’s logo in the email. This helps your outreach email stand out in a crowded inbox. The result is increased engagement rates of up to six times higher.

✔️ Including a screenshot of their website in the email. This works particularly well if you’re discussing something related to their website.

The Key to Successful Outreach Email Campaigns

If you design your outreach email campaigns well, you can easily double your response rates and achieve your goals.

Of all the tips we listed above, hyper-personalization is the most important.

But don’t just take our word for it. Our friends over at Reply.io conducted a study on personalized images in email and found that using personalized emails had twice the response rate.

Here are more results some of our other partners managed to get with the help of image personalization:

• Encharge increased their email click-through rate by 14 times.
• Hubstaff boosted their click-through rates for opened emails by four times.
• Salesloft doubled their reply rates.

Sign up for a free Hyperise trial today. We’ll show you the amazing results you can get for your outreach email strategy with hyper-personalization.