# Module 4.3: How to Write Email Outreach Templates That Don't Sound Templated

Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the
third&nbsp;lesson in the outreach module.
In this lesson, we're going to talk about
writing templated&nbsp;outreach emails that
are personalized and don't
feel or sound too templated.
Now, why does this matter?
Well, link building is often looked at as
a spammy tactic from both SEO outsiders
and insiders – and for good reason.
People are&nbsp;sending emails like this that
sound like they were&nbsp;swiped from templates
on blog posts.
They're&nbsp;disingenuous and clearly transactional.
Now, if you're sending these generic templated
emails, your chances of standing out are slim
and link building is truly only a numbers game.
In&nbsp;other words, emails like this are more likely
to get marked as spam than to lead to a link.
Now, there's no video, book, blog post,
or course that's going to make you
a master writer of outreach emails.
Practice and feedback are what
will help you&nbsp;get better at this skill.
And for that reason, I'm going to walk you
through some examples and&nbsp;an exercise
to help you get your reps in.
But before we get to this exercise, let's
look at a typical templated email and
talk about why it sounds templated.
So, in my opinion, a huge reason for these
robotic sounding emails is that people focus
on&nbsp;creating templates rather than writing emails.
And when you work off of a template, you're
basically&nbsp;searching for predefined personalization
fields to satisfy the template.
When in reality, it should be the other way around.
For example, a template&nbsp;might look like this.
"Hi {name},
I was reading your post on {topic} and really liked
how you&nbsp;mentioned {something_that_you_liked}."
No matter what you put into these
blanks,&nbsp;it's going to sound unnatural.
Now, a much better way to do this is to write
a personalized email to one of your prospects
and then extract personalization fields,
if&nbsp;any, to see if it can be templated.
Here's what an email might look like:
"Hey Frank,
Wondering if you've tried broken link building
since you wrote this post (in 2019 it seems).
I know that the Forbes writer you mentioned said
they converted links at 20%, but boy oh boy… it's
tough to believe you can still convert
links like that today with BLB."
So if we extract the personalization fields from
this sample, then we'd need to find the URL of
the contact's page, the publishing date,
the competing&nbsp;page's company name,
and the 20% part.
Now, the beautiful thing about the&nbsp;hybrid
method is that all of these&nbsp;personalization
fields aside from the year&nbsp;of publishing can
be easily templated because we're sending
emails to segments.
For example, our segment for the example
we just went through would be people who
link to&nbsp;Forbes' hypothetical page on broken
link building because of their 20% success rate.
Now, if we were to templatize this
email, it'd look something like this:
"Hey {name},
Wondering if you've tried broken link building&nbsp;
since you wrote this post (in year it seems))."
And we'd link to the prospect's URL
with some HTML and a merge field.
And everything after that would be
the same because we're only sending
this email to our 20% segment.
Now, if you struggle to write natural
outreach emails, you can do this simple
exercise of writing an email and
extracting&nbsp;merge fields from it.
Let's dig deeper into this exercise
and write an email together.
But&nbsp;first, we need a scenario to work with.
Let's say that you have a personal finance blog&nbsp;
and you wrote an awesome post on budgeting.
Now, as you're researching a competing
page's&nbsp;link profile, you notice that a good
chunk of their links are attributable to a point&nbsp;
around the 50/30/20 budgeting method.
Now, for illustration purposes, we'll say
that you have a way better budgeting
method that you created.
So a rough pitch angle can&nbsp;be something
like, "the 50/30/20 budgeting rule sucks.
I made this awesome new method that
you're going to love because of X Y and Z."
Great, we have a segment to work with
and it's&nbsp;time to start drafting our email.
The first thing to do in this exercise is to
choose one prospect from your segment
and write an email to them as if they're&nbsp;a friend.
Let's choose this one.
Now, the page is clearly recommending to
use the 50/30/20 budget rule and again,
our hypothetical post has a better method&nbsp;
– let's call it "the 40/10/10/40 rule."
So as a first draft, I might write:
"Yo! Quick question: I'm seeing that you
recommend&nbsp;the 50/30/20 budget rule
on your blog.
Are you personally using this?
Because I think it's a super impractical way
for millennials to save with mortgage
payments, kids, college funds etc.
Basically, the money printers are going brrr.
If interested, I wrote about why the 50/30/20
budget rule is impractical and an alternative
method on my blog which is better for
millennials (the 40/10/10/40 rule).
There's a spreadsheet in&nbsp;there
too if you want to give it a shot.
Let me know what you think and a link to my
post would be&nbsp;super appreciated if you agree
with my method.
And if you don't… fight me.
Kidding. Miss you. Sam"
This is obviously far from what you might
send to someone, but the point of this step
is to a) break away from templates so
you sound&nbsp;a little bit more like yourself;
and b) to go in with the mentality of delivering
value because&nbsp;that's what friends do for each other.
Alright, so that email took me
around 4 minutes to write.
So I'm going to move on to step 2 which
is to go through our first round of edits.
And at this stage, you'll want to remove any
empty&nbsp;statements, false flattery, and language
you typically wouldn't use with a stranger.
So I'll change "Yo" to "Hey Frank" and
remove the "Quick question" part
because it's kind of pointless to have.
Now, this part where I say that it's "a super
impractical way to budget" comes off a bit
strong and arrogant, so I'll change it to…
"Are you using this method because I've
personally found it to be an impractical
way for millennials to save with mortgage
payments, kids' college funds etc."
And in my opinion, this "personal angle"
changes the context from "people who
use this&nbsp;method are dumb"
to "it didn't work for me."
Now, the "money printers going brrr" part
is a finance meme related to the federal
government printing money
which has led to asset&nbsp;inflation.
It doesn't really sit well with
me, so I'll change this line to:
"With rising inflation and wages having
barely budged, allocating 30% to wants
and 20% to&nbsp;savings seems
like a recipe for disaster."
The next part seems fine at first read.
But the&nbsp;"lmk" part that comes
after is a bit too informal.
Plus "let me know what you
think" is an empty&nbsp;statement.
So I'll rework this sentence to…
"If you agree with my method, a mention
in&nbsp;your post would be super appreciated.
Alright, so this looks okay for me so I'll
move on to the next step which is to ask
someone for feedback.
And to give you a real&nbsp;simulation
of what this might look like,
I asked my friend and outreach
extraordinaire, Bibi Raven, for input.
Let's take a look through her feedback.
So in the first part, "I'm seeing that you
recommend", she says that it's good to
get&nbsp;straight to the point but prefers to use
some sort of "nicety" comment before the intro
to make it sound more genuine
and not like a&nbsp;zillion other emails.
And the example she uses is&nbsp;wishing
people an excellent cup of coffee.
Now, she's not talking about
fake flattery or anything like that.
If you've ever talked with Bibi, when she says
these things like hope you&nbsp;have an excellent
cup of coffee, I think she actually means it.
But it's just not me, so I'm&nbsp;not going
to take her suggestion here.
And I think an important takeaway from
this is that you shouldn't try to sound or
be like someone else because it will surface&nbsp;
in your email copy and play against you.
Alright, so next, she left a comment on this
part: "your blog," and she suggests using
the brand's name because a lot of link
builders&nbsp;use this phrase in their outreach.
Now, while I agree on the whole,&nbsp;there
are 2 reasons why I'm hesitant&nbsp;to take
the suggestion.
#1. I don't think it'll be worth the additional
effort to manually format each person's
brand name.
And #2. Emails sometimes look more templated to
me when people use a personalization field here.
For example, if I had a blog at samoh.com
and someone said… "I'm seeing that you
recommend the 50/30/20 rule on
the Sam&nbsp;Oh blog," it just sounds weird.
So rather than potentially&nbsp;overcomplicating
this part, I'm going to pass on this suggestion.
Now, the next part, I say: "are you using
this method because I've personally
found it to be an impractical way."
And Bibi brings up a couple of great points.
First, she says that I've made this email about
me&nbsp;and the site owner/editor when it should be
centered more on their audience.
Agree!
Second, she says that this isn't really a
question, but it's actually implicit criticism.
And the example she uses makes it crystal clear.
"Are you still using hairspray
because I think&nbsp;it's bad for you."
It just sounds awful, so&nbsp;I think
this needs to be rewritten.
Now, the next comment is a small
one and I&nbsp;fully agree with her.
On the "etcetera" part, she says it just
adds vagueness to the&nbsp;statement.
There's no denying that.
Moving on.
The part where I say "if interested," she
suggests a small edit so that I'm speaking
directly to the reader – "If you're interested."
But, she offers an alternative
which I like better.
She says to not make it an "if"
thing but to write more confidently.
So&nbsp;this sentence needs to be reworked too.
Alright, on to the more critical stuff.
For the pitch part, she tells me that
it doesn't sound enthusiastic.
Why not mention&nbsp;why it's better, why it fits
their audience, results people have gotten,
and more juicy stuff.
Basically, she's pointed out how weak my
pitch is&nbsp;and she is absolutely bang on.
So there's&nbsp;another rewrite
that I fully agree with.
Now, on the spreadsheet part, she says it's good
not to push too hard because from her point of
view, it just sounds "whatever whatever."
And if&nbsp;I take myself out of this bubble
where all people&nbsp;love spreadsheets, it
becomes clear that it truly
is "whatever whatever."
And within her comment, a suggestion
that really resonated with me was to tell
them how my budgeting method
has&nbsp;brought value to others.&nbsp;
So I'll definitely&nbsp;take that
suggestion in my rewrite.
As for the last part of the email, she tells
me that this sentence sounds similar to
what other link builders use so basically,&nbsp;
another rewrite that I agree with.
And for the sign off, she says to&nbsp;use
a more creative, warmer sign off.
I'm actually fine with cheers, but her "may
the&nbsp;budget be with you" made me smile so&nbsp;&nbsp;
I'll use something along those lines.
Last but certainly not least, she made a
comment on the overall flow of the email.
She said: "Maybe it's weird, but I also like
to look at how you start each section in
your email.
In this case, it's I'm, if, if."
Now, when I saw that, I realized how focused the
email&nbsp;is on myself and my passive statements.
Alright, so after soaking in all of her feedback,&nbsp;I
took another 15-20 minutes to rewrite the email
and here's what I came up with.
"Hey Frank, I see that you're recommending
the 50/30/20 budget&nbsp;rule on your blog.
It's definitely a great method if you own assets,
but it has some drawbacks&nbsp;– especially for
millennials and households that
make under 80k/year in the US.
With rising inflation (money printer go brrrr)
and wages moving at a much slower pace,
most&nbsp;households need to allocate more than
50% to needs and have very little left for wants,
let alone savings.
Another budgeting method that your audience
might&nbsp;appreciate is the 40/10/10/40 rule.
It's when you [Whatever it does because
it's&nbsp;not actually a real thing].
It's worked for people like:
Jane, a single mom from Ohio, who's now able
to contribute to her children's college savings;
Derek, a recent grad, who was able to pay
off his student loans in 2 years with the help
of our spreadsheet;
Jamie, an executive at a tech company
that's now saving 23% more each year,
which she donates to charities.
I wrote about this budgeting method
on my blog and would love to get your
thoughts and opinions.
Also, if you dig it, a mention in your
post would send me to the moon.
Happy budgeting, Sam"
It's a bit long, but I'm relatively happy&nbsp;with
this email, so let's move on to the next step
which is to see if it can be templated
without sacrificing the personalized feel.
So assuming we were sending this to anyone
who's recommending the 50/30/20 budget rule,
I think the only thing that would need
to&nbsp;change is the name of the recipient.
And the size of our segment in this
case,&nbsp;would be up to 465 prospects.
Now, all you have to do is rinse and repeat
the same steps for your other segments
and you should be able to do hybrid
outreach&nbsp;in an effective and impactful way.
Now, everything I've shared in this course from
prospecting to vetting to outreach can be done
by yourself.
But if you really want to scale up your&nbsp;link
building operations, then you'll need a team,
a system, and workflows to follow.
And that's what the next module is all about.
In module 5, we'll be looking at link building
from a managerial and operational perspective
so you can help your team reach maximum
efficiency&nbsp;in your link building efforts.
I'll see you there.