I’m sure you get a bazillion emails a day. I feel like I spend half my time weeding through them because I’m afraid I’ll miss something legitimate. I might open one out of every 30 emails that come from someone I don’t recognize.
The latest outreach email that really grabbed my attention had several things going for it:
First, it was very personalized but not over-the-top stalky. I’m a huge fan of the English character Alan Partridge, and Josh (the sender) knew that from Twitter. The subject was a famous line of Alan’s (“Smell my cheese!”), and the whole email was very funny and clever.
It was obvious that he knew how to get my attention, but he did it with something other than a cash offer or a “Please please please!! Please do this!!!” rant.
See below:
It was short and sweet: five lines. I knew what he was asking me to do. Sounds simple, but I have pored over some outreach emails where I truly have no clue exactly what I’m supposed to do. I get so many emails every day that if it’s going to have to be marked to read later in a quiet moment, it’s not going to get read for a while, if ever.
The information was 100 percent relevant to me. It was a post about link building, and I’m a link builder. It wasn’t about machine learning or meditation or cheap watch bands. (And yes, I get plenty of those.)
Let’s take a look at a few lines from emails that, in my opinion, totally failed.
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