Multichannel Outreach for Link Building on Email and LinkedIn combined

According to 65% of digital marketers, link building is the hardest part of SEO.

But at the same time, “blog content and backlinks are the top two most important factors for ranking on Google for target keywords.” (Google)

It’s safe to conclude then, no matter how hard – it has to be done. Otherwise, your content will find itself among that 95% of all pages online with zero backlinks pointing to their website.

And that’s not much of an SEO. Or in simpler terms, that equates to “zero” traffic of potential leads for your sales team, and “zero” ROI from your content efforts – since the content will probably never see the light of day. 

Therefore, in this article, we will be breaking down the whole process into must-know units to prepare you for tailoring the optimal multichannel outreach campaign for getting high-quality backlinks.

We’ll also discuss how to target the right folks and include some additional tips and tricks along the way for optimizing your overall campaign. 

Let’s dive in. 

What is a Backlink Outreach?

Backlink outreach is the practice of sending cold messages to targeted people (webmasters, digital marketers, SEOs, and link-building specialists) with the purpose of asking them to place a link on their website that would point their visitors to your article.

It falls into the kingdom of off-page SEO – link building. 

Link building is a search engine optimization technique that has the power to increase your website visibility and therefore bring you traffic (read: leads) and build your search engine ranking. Implementing effective link-building strategies is crucial for the success of your website’s SEO.

The single most important thing here is to be relevant.

Your link should be placed on a relevant website (to your industry and niche), inside a relevant article (to your topic), using a relevant anchor (to your targeted keyword) in order to attract relevant leads (potential customers) to your website. Google loves it! Because readers love it as well – we’re happy when we find exactly what we were looking for, right?  It’s a win-win, it’s meaningful and gets your website placed higher in the search results. 

Rule no.1: Relevancy is key.

Here is an example.

Let’s say you have a really cool software that’s new on the market and helps business professionals solve some specific industry pain points. 

Since we live in a digital world, these people will eventually ask Google for their work-related problems and Google will serve them the answers that are the perfect match for the keywords they used when asking the question.

An example would be: Best cold email software for multichannel backlink outreach?

Guess what will be Google’s first results as answers to this question?

= hyperlinks to the articles on those websites that provide the most relevant answers, and have rich backlink profiles pointing to their content. Usually, they also have the highest domain rank and authority. 👏

Now let’s see what you can do to start placing yours among those triumphant websites.

Go towards what matters – your target audience. 

I’m sure you’ve heard this one before – do proper audience research before you start sending your cold outreach campaign to people. That’s because it’s true for any digital marketing campaign, including this one. Your target audience needs to be properly… well… targeted.

This will include taking a look at those companies that are in the same niche and industry as yours, and that share similar, relevant content on their websites as you do. I guess you already know a bunch of them, but there are many more on the world.wide.web that you don’t even know to exist. And since they are not infinite, sooner or later you’ll reach the limit of the already familiar ones.

Besides, you’ll also need the email addresses and personal LinkedIn profiles of the fellow digital marketing “colleagues” you’ll be actually reaching out to, right?

Knowing their job titles is also crucial since you’ll want to contact the right person in the company. Such as the link-building specialist, or the SEO manager, or the webmaster… as opposed to the sales development representative whose email address might be easier to find but they have nothing to do with backlinks really, so will just ignore you.

Well, there comes a point when you’ll seek the help of some quite brilliant tech tools that will provide you with every information you need, will assist you in your marketing efforts, and buy you some time and productivity in exchange for a monthly subscription fee.

I use Sales.Rocks to achieve my link-building goals, amongst the other tools and digital channels.

Let me show you how.

Find your Target Audience using Sales.Rocks

I will guide you through my own “real case scenario” of setting up a multichannel backlink outreach campaign via LinkedIn and Email combined using Sales.Rocks, as I try to get responses and some high-quality backlinks pointing to our website. So let’s do it together, shall we?

With Sales.Rocks, there are 2 ways to nail down your target audience. Using Company Search or Contact Search module.

Let’s start with the Company Search module. My first step will be – Searching for companies (and their websites) in related industries and niches, and I will perform segmentation by industry simultaneously as I filter them down by:

• Company location; (cos’ I want to target English-speaking nations.)

• Industry and niche, using NACE codes. In this case, my first segmentation will be companies in:
  -Industry: Information and Communication;
  -Niches: Publishing activities, Programming and broadcasting, Computer programming, consultancy and related, Information service;

• My next two filters will be Website and Company LinkedIn Profile since I want to make sure that their company has an up-to-date website and that they are active on LinkedIn.
• And I will use a third filter for Company Activities – I just have to make sure that they’re in the SEO and link-building game. 😉

Later, when I unlock the results, I will perform a quick scan of their websites to check their domain rank (DR), page rank, domain authority, and whether they actually have relevant content and anchors that could be used for inserting a backlink to one (or more) of our articles. Consider this as a part of your personalization efforts.

As you can see in my screenshot, Sales.Rocks found 3.553 companies matching the attributes I asked for my first level of segmentation.

This will require some additional filtering and narrowing down the perfect match for our Ideal Customer Profile, but for the sake of brevity, I won’t go into detail in this article.

Now let me show you how you can use the Contact Search module to find your fellow digital marketing “colleagues”, (personal email addresses and LinkedIn profiles included), by filtering them by job title. 

Find Employees in a Company by their Job Position

The process is pretty much the same, but here we have additional filters on a contact level available to play with.

I will start my search for employees (contacts) filtering by:

• Job Position: their job title has to include SEO, Webmaster, or Link Building;
• Location and Industry – same as previous;
• Company Activities: exclude social media (they are a different breed of marketers 🤠);
• Contact information: direct email and personal LinkedIn profile with a confidence score of 95-100%.

Next, I have selected the first two hundred of them for starters, unlocked some of them to check them out, and now I will add all 200 fresh new leads to my list – Multichannel Backlink Outreach, which I created a few seconds ago for the purpose of this article.

I unlocked only 50 of them to which I will send my first outreach, testing the waters to get some initial results from the campaign so I can analyze and therefore optimize every next while, at the same time, keeping it easy for creating a true, hyper-personalized experience for each of my recipients. 💗

Here comes the fun part!

How to Create a Personalized Multichannel Outreach for High-Quality Backlinks

Welcome to the land of hyper-personalized outreach at scale. 🌄

Here you can use multiple channels for your email sequences, such as Email + LinkedIn simultaneously, and then put them on automation. 😎

Along the road, you will come across multiple levels of personalization that you can leverage to engage your audience. Some of them are merge tags, inserting their brand logo, “ice-breakers“(one-liner personalization), as well as screenshots & images.

There are some quick configurations you need to go through before you start playing with our drag & drop drip campaigns module and writing those words of link-exchange encouragement to your recipients.

This guide is here to assist you on how to connect your LinkedIn profile with Sales.Rocks and start your multichannel outreach.

p.s. Don’t forget to enable the option to Stop the campaign automatically for contacts that have replied… since you’ll want to take over the process from here on.

And then we come to the point when the true magic is being created and set to run on auto-pilot according to different triggers, delays, and conditions depending on email opens, link clicks, and LinkedIn actions performed.

Before we continue… let’s look at the aspects of why you should consider implementing a multichannel outreach campaign as part of your marketing efforts and what benefits to expect from it.

Why do you need a Multichannel Backlink Outreach?

The answer is quite intuitive.

In the B2B space, a well-defined multichannel outreach strategy will outperform any results derived from a single-channel (or linear) approach.

Instead of using only one channel to reach your prospects (e.g. cold email), you can now add LinkedIn to the mix and raise your outreach to the next level.

50% increase in chances of your message actually reaching your recipient >> 50% greater chance of goal completion (getting a high-quality backlink in this case).

Automating your overall outreach for link-building will leave your hands free to dedicate your time and effort to spend on other tasks requiring your full attention.

With careful preparation and a better understanding of the overall process, you’ll come to find that it is not “too good to be true“, but it’s actually possible. Use this article as a manual to assist you in creating the finest multichannel backlink outreach for your own marketing business needs.

It’s ideal for any type of business, but so far it has been chiefly endorsed by startups and SMBs operated by small but vigorous teams that are striving to grow their company fast, on a tight budget. It’s the perfect solution for what the industry likes to call Growth-Hacking.

Here is an example of a multichannel outreach campaign✨, step by step, using LinkedIn + Email.

I decided to start my multichannel backlink outreach campaign with LinkedIn Action.

The first 50 recipients added to my campaign will first receive a LinkedIn Connection Request from me, with the following message.

At this point, I let them take their time to notice, open, accept and hopefully respond to my LinkedIn connection request by setting a delay of 2 days. 😇

After the two days have passed, my automated multichannel campaign will check to see if they accepted my connection request. There are two possible outcomes, of course, to which I have set two different conditions.

Condition #1. They have accepted my LinkedIn connection request – so my following action would be to like their most recent post on LinkedIn. (Cool, right? 🤖)

Condition #2. They didn’t accept my request 😔 – therefore, my smart drip campaign will send them an email to try my chances there. 🤞

Here’s the email template I prepared for the second condition. 👇

Then we wait again.

After another 2-day delay has passed, there are 3 case scenarios that might happen.

• • Condition #1. They opened the email.
    Since my email subject line was addressing the missed opportunity to connect on LinkedIn, there’s a high probability that they’ll check and either accept the connection request or not. Therefore, my next action is to check the LinkedIn connection again.

• • Condition #2. They clicked on the link to our website I included (in red) inside the email.
    This could mean they took the next step and are scanning our blog to see whether we are an actual fit for a backlink exchange or not. In this scenario, I’ll be expecting a notification that I have received an email from them (sooner or later).

• Condition #3. They did nothing.
  Ok, it happens, nothing to worry about. There’s always a plan B – send a follow-up email! 🌟

Provided that you got a reply from them to your first email, this stage will require your attention. After all, you’ll have to read their response in order to provide a related answer.

If they’ve replied to your email, you will be alerted by Sales.Rocks receiving a notification. The other way is the old way – check your actual email inbox.

Now that you have an overall understanding of how a multichannel backlink outreach campaign works, (at least from Sales.Rocks perspective)…  You’ve seen all the possibilities you have at the end of your fingertips and all the magic you can perform on auto-pilot with just a few clicks, I’ll leave the rest to you. 🔮

Some rules you need to follow for a Multichannel Success 💡

Since we create and send multichannel outreach campaigns on a regular basis, we will share some insights to keep in mind as you embark on this new outreach journey.

Multichannel or single-channel, whether it be LinkedIn or Email, sending a cold message to any person is still that – a cold outbound outreach. And generally, the same rules will apply.

• Find and target the right link building specialist and colleagues from your industry;
• Perform an Email Deliverability Audit and Warm up your email account before sending your multichannel outreach campaign to avoid the danger of being marked as spam;
• Remember to check email permissions and regulations depending on which country and location your recipients reside (GDPR, The CAN-SPAM Act, CASL, etc.);
• Invest more time & effort in personalization. If your message doesn’t resonate with them, you’ll be wasting your time;
• Don’t forget to Follow-up!
• Finally, optimize your LinkedIn profile (to win sales and influence prospects) for successful LinkedIn Prospecting.

Here are some Cold LinkedIn Outreach Templates, and 10 Highly Targeted B2B Cold Email Templates to assist your campaign for optimal success. Feel free to use them as an inspiration to write your own, or just take and adjust them to your own needs.

Before you go…

There is a difference between an outreach campaign and an actual multichannel outreach strategy.  The strategy should be your guiding light to every marketing outreach campaign you ever create and send. Besides, it’s good to know all the options you have in this digital world of endless possibilities. 🌌

Interested to know more on the subject?

A while back we wrote an in-depth guide on the power and importance of adapting your brand to your multichannel customers. Inside, we included all the best B2B channels available at your disposal, inserted some pretty interesting industry stats that will really make you reconsider your options, and shared with you all we know on how to build an effective B2B multichannel outreach strategy.

Feel free to dive in!

Until next time, best of luck. ✌️