What is Outreach and How It Works: A Strategy for eCommerce
Outreach marketing is a cornerstone of modern digital strategy, especially for eCommerce businesses aiming to boost their online visibility, authority, and traffic. It's the process of proactively connecting with other people, brands, and publications online to promote your content, earn valuable backlinks, and build beneficial relationships. This guide breaks down what outreach is, how to build a winning strategy, and how to measure your success.
What is outreach?
In simple terms, outreach is the art of building relationships. It involves reaching out to journalists, bloggers, influencers, and webmasters in your niche to get your eCommerce brand featured on their platforms. The primary goals are typically to acquire high-quality backlinks, which are crucial for search engine optimization (SEO), and to get your brand in front of a new, relevant audience. Unlike paid advertising, outreach focuses on earning media placements through value exchange, such as providing excellent content or data.
Pros of outreach marketing
- Improved SEO Rankings: High-quality backlinks from authoritative websites are one of the most significant ranking factors for search engines like Google. This can lead to higher visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Increased Referral Traffic: When a popular blog or publication links to your site, you gain access to their established audience, driving highly relevant traffic directly to your product pages or content.
- Enhanced Brand Authority and Trust: Being featured on reputable sites builds credibility. It acts as a third-party endorsement, making potential customers more likely to trust and buy from you.
- Long-Term Asset Building: A strong backlink profile is a durable asset that continues to provide value long after the initial outreach campaign is over.
Cons of outreach marketing
- Time-Consuming: Finding suitable prospects, personalizing emails, and following up requires significant time and effort.
- High Rejection Rate: It's a numbers game. Many of your outreach emails will be ignored or rejected, which can be discouraging.
- Can Be Expensive: While it's about "earning" media, some high-authority sites may charge a fee for sponsored posts or collaborations. Additionally, creating high-quality content for guest posts can incur costs.
- Requires Skill: Effective outreach requires strong communication, negotiation, and content creation skills. A poorly executed campaign can even damage your brand's reputation.
Outreach: A working strategy
A successful outreach campaign is built on a foundation of solid research and a clear, step-by-step process. Simply sending out mass emails won't work. You need a structured approach.
Analysis: Where it all begins
Before you send a single email, you must understand the competitive landscape. The goal is to identify what's already working for others in your niche. This involves analyzing top-ranking content and, most importantly, the backlink profiles of your direct competitors. This analysis helps you identify potential link-building opportunities that you can replicate or improve upon.
How to analyze a competitor's backlinks:
- Identify Your Competitors: List the top 3-5 eCommerce stores or blogs that rank for the keywords you are targeting.
- Use SEO Tools: Use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz to export their backlink profiles.
- Analyze the Data: Filter the backlink report to find their best links. Look for links from high-authority blogs, resource pages, and news articles.
- Look for Patterns: Do your competitors get a lot of links from product reviews? Guest posts? "Best of" lists? Understanding their strategy helps you form your own.
- Create a Prospect List: The sites linking to your competitors are your initial list of outreach targets. If they linked to them, they might link to you, especially if you offer something better.
Once you have a list of potential outreach targets, you need to vet them and execute your campaign. This checklist will guide you through the process.
1. How to determine the quality of a site
Not all backlinks are created equal. A link from a low-quality, spammy site can hurt your SEO more than it helps. Evaluate potential sites using these metrics:
- Domain Authority (DA) / Domain Rating (DR): A score from 0-100 (developed by Moz and Ahrefs, respectively) that predicts a site's ranking potential. Aim for sites with a DR/DA of 30 or higher, but relevance is more important than the metric alone.
- Website Traffic: Does the site get real visitors? Use tools like Semrush or Similarweb to estimate monthly traffic. A site with engaged traffic is more valuable.
- Relevance: Is the website's content relevant to your eCommerce niche? A link from a related blog is far more valuable than one from a completely unrelated industry.
- Site Quality: Does the website look professional? Is it updated regularly with high-quality content? Avoid sites that are covered in ads or publish low-quality, spun articles.
2. Choosing an outreach marketing method
There are several ways to acquire backlinks through outreach. Choose the method that best fits your resources and goals:
- Guest Posting: Writing an article for another website in exchange for a backlink. This is a great way to showcase your expertise and gain a powerful, in-context link.
- Broken Link Building: Finding dead links on a website, notifying the webmaster, and suggesting your own link as a replacement.
- Resource Page Link Building: Finding pages that list useful resources (e.g., "The Ultimate Guide to Camping Gear") and asking to have your relevant resource or product included.
- Unlinked Mentions: Finding where your brand has been mentioned online without a link and reaching out to request that a link be added.
While you should personalize every email, having a solid template saves time.
- Find the Right Person: Address the email to a specific person (e.g., the editor or content manager), not a generic "info@" address.
- Craft a Compelling Subject Line: Make it clear and intriguing. Examples: "Question about your recent article," or "Content idea for [Website Name]."
- Personalize the Opening: Mention something specific you liked about their site or a recent article.
- State Your Value Proposition: Clearly and concisely explain why you're contacting them and what's in it for them (e.g., "I have a great article idea your audience would love").
- Keep it Short and Sweet: Respect their time. Get to the point quickly.
4. Negotiating and creating content
Once you get a positive reply, the negotiation begins. Be clear about expectations for the content, what kind of link you'll receive (e.g., dofollow vs. nofollow), and whether any fees are involved. Once terms are agreed upon, focus on creating exceptional content that meets their editorial guidelines and provides genuine value to their readers.
After your content is published, your job isn't done.
- Promote the Post: Share the article on your social media channels and email list. This sends positive signals to the host site and Google.
- Monitor the Link: Ensure the link remains live and isn't changed to "nofollow" without your knowledge.
- Track Performance: Monitor referral traffic from the link using Google Analytics and watch for any changes in your keyword rankings.
6. Examples of successful and unsuccessful partnerships
- Successful: An eCommerce store selling eco-friendly cleaning products writes a guest post for a popular sustainable living blog. The article, "10 Ways to Reduce Plastic Waste in Your Home," provides immense value and includes one natural link back to the store's relevant product category. The store gets referral traffic and a powerful, relevant backlink.
- Unsuccessful: A fashion brand pays for a link on a low-quality "news" site with a low domain rating and no real traffic. The link is placed in a generic, poorly written article alongside dozens of other unrelated links. This link provides no traffic and could be flagged by Google as part of a link scheme, potentially harming the brand's rankings.
Content for outreach: How to make it effective?
The success of your outreach often hinges on the quality of the content you're promoting. To make your content effective for outreach:
- Solve a Problem: Create content that provides clear, actionable solutions to your target audience's problems.
- Be Data-Driven: Original research, case studies, and data visualizations are highly linkable assets because they provide unique value that others will want to cite.
- Create Visually Appealing Content: High-quality infographics, charts, and videos make your content more shareable and more likely to earn links.
- Make it Comprehensive: Create "ultimate guides" or in-depth resources that are significantly better than anything else on the topic. This is known as the "Skyscraper Technique."
How to evaluate the results of an outreach campaign?
Measuring the ROI of your outreach efforts is crucial for refining your strategy. Track these key performance indicators (KPIs):
- Number of Acquired Links: The most direct measure of success.
- Quality of Links: Track the average Domain Rating/Authority of the links you've built.
- Referral Traffic: Use Google Analytics to see how much traffic your new links are sending to your site.
- Keyword Ranking Improvements: Monitor the SERP positions for your target keywords. This is a long-term metric, as it can take weeks or months to see an impact.
- Conversion Rate from Referral Traffic: Are the visitors from your outreach placements turning into customers?
- Google Analytics: The best tool for tracking referral traffic and conversions.
- Ahrefs/Semrush/Moz: Use these to monitor your new backlinks, track your backlink profile's growth, and check keyword ranking changes.
- Pitchbox/Mailshake: Outreach platforms that can track email open rates, reply rates, and conversion rates (i.e., how many emails lead to a link).
Common mistakes in outreach marketing
Avoid these pitfalls to maximize your campaign's effectiveness:
- Using Generic, Non-Personalized Emails: This is the fastest way to get your email deleted. Always personalize.
- Targeting the Wrong Websites: Reaching out to irrelevant or low-quality sites is a waste of time and can harm your SEO.
- Offering Low-Quality Content: No reputable site will link to thin, poorly written, or overly promotional content.
- Being Too Pushy: Sending too many follow-up emails or being demanding can burn bridges. A polite follow-up or two is sufficient.
- Ignoring the Website's Guidelines: If a site has guest post guidelines, read and follow them meticulously.
- Focusing Only on Links: Remember that outreach is also about building genuine, long-term relationships that can lead to future collaborations.
