In link building, few things are more frustrating than finding the perfect link opportunity but being completely unable to find a contact email address.
It’s probably happened to you — if you’re trying to build links or do any sort of outreach, it almost always entails sending out a fairly significant amount of emails. There are plenty of good articles out there about building relationships within the context of link building, but it’s hard to build relationships when you can’t even find a contact email address.
So, for today, I want to focus on how you can become better at finding those important email addresses.
Link builders spend a lot of time just trying to find contact info, and it’s often a frustrating process, just because sussing out email addresses can indeed be quite difficult. The site you’re targeting might not even have a contact page in the first place. Or, if the site does have a contact page, it might only display a generic email address. And, sometimes, the site may list too many email addresses. There are eight different people with similar-sounding job titles — should you reach out to the PR person, the marketing director, or the webmaster? It’s not clear.
Whatever the case may be, finding the right email address is absolutely imperative to any successful outreach campaign[1]. In our industry, the numbers around outreach and replies aren’t great. Frankly, it’s shocking to hear the industry standard — only 8.5% of outreach emails receive a response.
I can’t help but wonder how many mistakes are made along the way to such a low response rate.
While there are certainly instances where there is simply no clear and obvious contact method, that should be the exception — not the rule! An experienced link