How To Write Outreach Emails That Drive Results [+1 Template]

There are plenty of people who do not know how to write outreach emails that people will actually read.

You crafted what you thought was the perfect subject line.

Your pitch was quite detailed and long to make the person or company understand your proposal.

You sent out the email… and even after three weeks, there is no reply.

So, what went wrong? Did you miss something?

To help you grasp how to write clear and concise emails, this blog discusses the seven best practices you can follow:

• Share a proposal that benefits the person or company
• Write short and clear subject lines
• Keep the emails short
• Send personalized messages to each recipient
• Include a call-to-action
• Check the outreach emails before sending
• Follow up twice

Let us get started.

7 Tips on How To Write Outreach Emails

1. Share a Proposal That Benefits the Person or Company

If you are asking the recipient for something, it is only fair that you should provide something else in return. This is a give-and-take situation. 

Requesting the recipient to link back to your website in return for simply sharing their article on Facebook does not make the cut. 

Therefore, write an outreach email copy that does not make the message only about you. The recipient should also get something beneficial from this deal. If there are no such chances, why would they help you? Only because you met them before at a conference? No.

Before sending out the email, ask yourself: What is in it for them? Does it cater to their pain points?

Instant money or web traffic does not count as a benefit. It might be a short-term benefit, if at all, but you should provide the recipient with something that would benefit them in the long term. 

How about an invitation to collaborate on a project, enter a new market, target a new audience, or anything of that sort? 

Keep in mind that you should not beg for the deal. It should also not seem like you are doing the recipient a favor by simply messaging them. You have to earn the deal by writing a mutually beneficial outreach email.

2. Write Short and Clear Subject Lines

Being too focused on your pitch does not mean you can ignore the email’s subject line. Do not forget that the subject line is the first thing the recipient sees. They are going to open the email only if they think it is worth their time. 

Even if you have crafted an amazing pitch, it will have been for nothing if the recipient deletes the email without reading it. 

For this reason, writing clear and summarized subject lines is a critical aspect of writing outreach emails. It will help boost your email open rate by hooking the recipient. 

Here are a few tips for you to write an actionable subject line:

• Do not be too vague or formal, such as “Collaboration Request” or “Read my blog”.
• People typically open emails out of curiosity. To spark that curiosity in the recipient, try making your subject lines interesting to them. For example, “I have an idea to improve your content. Call at 10?” or “Feedback on your latest blog post” might make more headway than “My blog has 500 followers and counting”. Why would the recipient care whether your blog has 2 or 500 followers?

3. Keep the Emails Short

After reading the clear subject line, the recipient can shift their focus to the pitch. 

This is where you explain why you are writing to the person or the company. You might be inquiring about an open position, improving their website’s SEO or content, asking for a backlink, or pitching yourself as a webinar presenter. 

No matter what you pitch, you should know how to write clear and concise emails. For all you know, the recipient might be a busy person. 

So, the longer your email is, the greater are their chances of not reading the email till the end. 

Therefore, the ideal length of your email should be between 80 and 150 words. 

For example, suppose you have just published a blog post on the best content marketing metrics, and you want to promote it. 

At the same time, you have discovered a resource article online on how to create a content marketing strategy. Now, you want to get a link back from the resource article to your blog post. 

In this case, your email’s pitch section should explain to the site owner how you came across their resource article, and how and why you think a backlink to your post can add value to their audience. 

This approach shows the recipient that you are thinking about their audience, too, and not just about yourself. 

4. Send Personalized Messages to Each Recipient

Remember, the person you are sending the email to does not know you. It is only when you build a connection with this person that they might read the rest of your email. 

To build such a connection, your email needs to be hyper-personal. If you send a generic email that you can address to anyone, the recipient might not be motivated enough to open and read it. 

For instance, “Dear Sir/Ma’am” is now an old-school way of addressing someone, bordering on ‘boring’.

On the other hand, a personalized email makes the recipient more curious about what you have to tell them. 

You can follow these quick tips when writing outreach emails to build a connection with the recipient:

• Do not send the same message to all the companies on your mailing list
• Find common ground between yourself and the recipient and include that in the email
• If you and the recipient have a mutual connection, mention that person in your email
• Change your message depending on how well you know the recipient. You might have met or collaborated with them before, in which case, you can keep your message casual. 

For example, the message could go like, “I’m A, we’d collaborated on the B project for the C client a couple of months back. Remember the XYZ idea that had popped into our minds then?”

• Congratulate the recipient and wish them luck for a recent achievement of theirs, such as a promotion or a new job
• Compliment the recipient’s work and tell them why you liked it
• Emails do not count as personalized if they contain the same message with only a name and a link being changed
• If you are still confused about how to write outreach emails that are personalized, imagine you are having a live conversation with the recipient. What sentences would you use? What kind of corporate language would you avoid? 

Do not use a sentence in your email if you would not use it in a live conversation with the recipient, either. 

• Most importantly, be authentic when trying to build a connection with the recipient. Do not lie about a mutual connection or a common interest. 

Similarly, praise the recipient only when you mean it. Lying will only hurt your prospects of getting what you had asked for, in your email.

5. Include a Call-to-Action 

Your work does not end after you write the pitch. You also need to let the recipient know what you want them to do after reading your message. For this, you should insert a clear call-to-action (CTA).

A CTA eggs the recipient on to take the desired action. For example, you might ask the person to link back to your site or blog post. However, this does not hand you the opportunity to fill your email with plenty of CTAs. 

You might naturally get confused as to whether or not you should ask the person to read your latest blog post and download a template, along with linking back to your site. Yet, the more options you bombard the recipient with, the more likely it is for them to get confused and make no choice at all. 

Ultimately, you need to single out just one option as your CTA - what is the most important action you want them to take? If it is the backlink, then your CTA should only have this option. This allows the recipient to either grant you the backlink or just ignore your email. 

For example, if you are an influencer who wants the person to reach out to you for promoting their product, your CTA could be like,” If you’d like to learn more about how I can help you with XYZ, feel free to book a call on my calendar for the next week [ideally followed by a Calendly link]”.                                                                     

6. Check the Outreach Emails Before Sending

The last thing you want your recipient to see is a spelling error in their name. Or that you praise them for an article they never wrote. Even worse, you meant to send the outreach email to one person and ended up addressing it to someone completely different. 

Each of these mistakes is a turn-off for anyone. Do you think anyone would want to work with someone who cannot even handle an email? 

Of course, mistakes are only human, but there is no harm in checking and cross-checking your emails before sending them out.

7. Follow Up Twice

So, you have sent your outreach email, but you are still waiting for a reply. That is alright because the person might have either missed your email or forgotten about it altogether. 

Some people might reply after you follow up the first time, while others might not. To know if the second category of people is still interested in your proposal or not, you need to send them another follow-up email. 

You might receive some replies after the second follow-up, but again, you might not. There lies your answer. 

In other words, if you get no reply even after your second follow-up email, you know it is time to bid the person adieu. Otherwise, if you keep following up despite getting zero replies, the person might get annoyed. 

This is because they have already indicated their lack of interest in your proposal by not replying to your emails. As a result, they might send your future emails to their spam folder. 

Outreach Email Copy Template

The reasons why it works:

• The subject line is short and clear
• The email benefits the recipient by having already published their blog post
• It is a clever way of angling for a backlink, since your article already features their post
• The email has a clear CTA, that is to check out your article
• It puts the focus on the recipient
• Its purpose is to build a connection with the recipient

Summary: How To Write a Good Outreach Email

Now that you know how to write outreach emails, it is time to get to work. With the seven key tips we have covered above, you have everything you need to boost your outreach campaigns.

Better still, you can reach out to the Email Marketing professionals at MyTasker, who are ever-ready to help you out. From crafting actionable subject lines to inserting clear CTAs, they can assist your email outreach campaigns and thus enhance your business’ growth.