May the Outreach Be With You! How to Create Stellar Email Templates & Become a Backlink Jedi by Bibi Raven of Bibibuzz
Bernard Huang
We hosted Bibi Raven (aka Bibi The Link Builder), founder of Bibibuzz for a webinar on how to create stellar email templates.
Bibi shared how she approaches creating stellar email templates with her 3 step process. She shares her favorite tools and gives feedback on several audience member’s emails.
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About Bibi Raven:
Bibi the Link Builder is the founder of Bibibuzz, a link-building agency that spans the globe. She dreams up content ideas that lure passive links and charm link prospects with creative outreach for guest posts. She loves training link builders and wrote the foreword for Ahrefs’ book ‘SEO for Beginners’. You can find her stuff on Search Engine Journal, Pitchbox, Authority Hackers, and much more. Or watch her talk at industry conferences like BrightonSEO, SEO on the Beach, and Chiang Mai SEO.
Follow Bibi on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BibiBuzzCom
Read the transcript
Bibi: So today, we're talking about outreach, and I like Star Wars and sci-fi and stuff. So I thought I would give the first title slide a little sci-fi theme in the right corner. You can see one of my favorite animals that tardy grade looked at shit up. It's so cool. So I won't be able to see this, but I'm gonna make an educated catch.
So raise your hand if you love email. And how many people did raise their hands? Probably like, maybe only one or something. You're good. A couple. Oh, Google. Wow. In general, not a lot of people like email, so no wonder conversion of links through email sucks. Right. And, and that, that's, that's annoying.
I don't like bios. They're boring. So I thought I'd share this picture. With you of my cat in a hat. She literally was sitting in this hat, so she, she was the cat in a hat. But now we go into the meeting. So let's first talk a little bit about the link-building process. There's a lot of moving parts, right?
In link building, you have to target the page; you have to have a good target page that's relevant to your prospects. You have to find good. Prospects, you have to do content ideation. Maybe you wanna create a linkable asset that gets passive links. That's, by the way, one of my specialties. You wanna analyze your competitors, and the most painful thing is cuddling stakeholders.
So you have to talk to the PR department, the marketing department, your boss, or whoever. You have to explain to them how link-building works. So after all of that, You realize, oh shit, now I need to email people. And this is what happens with a lot of link-building campaigns where you have to do outreach. Is that creating the email is like a last afterthought, right?
That's a bit double. But yeah. So you start to panic, and this is what a lot of link builders do. They think, oh, we need to email people. Oh, no. And the other one says, okay, you know what? Let's Google templates. Let's find out what already works. And luckily for you, there are a lot of marketers that create templates for you that you can just copy and paste.
But what happens then is that you copy, copy, copy, copy, copy. You try to scale everything. And you beat the template death, basically. And this is also why I asked for a pitch box. That's a tool I use for outreach to analyze 10 million emails and to identify which phrases are used the most by link builders.
So here is a little taste of that. I hope you're well; I wanted to reach out. I came across your website, and I am looking forward to hearing that kind of stuff. Right? I went a little bit further, so. I took the entire list of all the expressions that a lot of link builders use, and I asked Jet tbt, and I usually call them to to create an email and incorporate all those sentences.
So if you screenshot this, it's kind of cool because you have an example of an email of what you wanna try to avoid if you wanna create a more creative email, right? So it goes on; there's even a page two with all that stuff. So what is the result of that? Oh, this is gonna load really slow. There's actually supposed to be, ah, there you go.
There's the dragon. What happens is that all these link builders are copying all these templates. Prospects get emailed like a hundred times a day, especially if they're good sites, right? And your email is holding people's time where they could actually run on the beach and enjoy themselves hostage.
So that's not, that's not what you want to do. What you wanna do is create a connection with your prospects. So the best way to do link buildings is actually through relationships where you have, where you can do warm outreach, right? What we're talking about here is cold outreach, and in cold outreach, you don't have a relationship with a person, so you have to make an instant connection, and I'm gonna try and show you how to do that.
I don't wanna talk too long about it so that we have some time to actually live, work on some emails together, and to find out how to make that instant connection. So how do you do that? Especially if you are shy, s e o that spend all your time behind your laptop and actually trying really hard to avoid dealing with people, right?
There are three main pillars that you wanna follow when you're doing link-building outreach. You wanna establish some common commonality. I don't know how to say that word, actually, but anyway, you wanna establish something you have in common with the person. You wanna be relatable. You don't wanna be a corporate dick.
And speaking of dicks, you also wanna be you wanna use non-city, so don't be a dick in your email. A lot of link builders are actually dicks, and it turns prospects off. Right, especially sometimes when they have a first email that's really nice, and then a prospect replies, and then you do a huge style break, and you start being pretty rude to the prospects.
So maybe try this. Show your interests. So show them that you're actually interested in what they're doing on their side. So when I started Link billing, all the link builders were telling me, oh, everybody hates link builders, and all these people are asking for money and da da da. So I went into a group of a media fine group of mommy bloggers, and I asked them, what do you hate about link builders?
And funnily enough, they said that. What they hated most was that people didn't look at their site; they weren't interested in them; they just wanted to link, right? So if you can take that away, you can have a way bigger conversion. Another thing is also to share their interests. So going back to commonality, you have to show that you have some interests in common because then they really feel that you know what they're about.
So here I'll show some ways to do that. One very easy way that takes 15 minutes of research on Google is that you have to use words that fit within their interest or within a niche. So here you see Matt, Matt Dignity, his friend of mine who. And he plays dunson dragons. So you could use the term shaving throw.
Economic entity assumption is something in the housing market. I think Morice and the tenant joined something with carpentry. This is Sydney. She works for me and focuses on stacking something with photography. So you have to use words in your template that align with their niche and with their interest to make that instant connection.
So, Another thing, and here's where everybody's probably gonna eye roll, is that you have to try to be different. I know it's easy to copy templates, and they might work at some point, but if they do, they do have an expiration date, so they do get overused. So why not try and learn how to create more creative templates?
Don't be a corporate song, corporate zombie. So be a creative snowflake. If you're not creative, by the way, then hire a copywriter. I'll give you some examples. So here is the subject line, right? The top one says Request guest post. And this can work, but it's such a transactional subject line that you're probably gonna end up with a lot of paid links.
So people are immediately are gonna ask you for money because it doesn't show any interest in them. It doesn't show you like you did a lot of effort, right? I don't have a problem with paid links. I think they can work. But for a natural backlink profile, you kind of wanna have a varied Very profile.
So it would be nice if you could win some unpaid links. The bottom subject line is very different, raising tiny humans, a daily dose of colorful kales and love. So this was a subject line for parenting sites, and they felt like we really understood them. So it was a great open rate and a good conversion rate as well.
Here's another example. A bad example. So this is an intro. I hope this message finds you well. While browsing the internet, I came across your blog and was impressed by the exceptional content quality, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's so boring. But here's an intro made by one of my team members.
Sammy, you wanted to be a pineapple? Turtle. I don't know why. But anyway, the top part of this is a subject line question. Do you know what the first tenet of design is? So this was going out to graphic designers, and then when they open the email, it says, using the word tenets instead of principle because it's symmetrical.
So this is something only a graphic designer will find funny, right? Nobody else cares. And then it goes into hello world greets, the mildly humorous AI eating through all our personal data within the trenches of the internet. If you are a robot, this is urgent. So this is a little bit of storytelling.
It's an old email from like two years back before the whole hype of AI hit. But I still think that talking about AI is very current. So you could incorporate it in some of your templates. If you wanna see more examples of comparing things that I don't like with things that I like, you could go to this video.
I don't know how to make it a link. You could just search it on YouTube or something where Sam O, from his, asked me to analyze one of his templates, and I did that. And now we're not friends anymore, but, Very important. Don't copy. You can copy some stuff, right? I know that everybody who sees the templates that I've shown in this presentation is probably gonna, you know, copy them all, but don't do it.
You need to learn how to create your own stuff because, like I always say, marketers ruin everything. So how do you create your own? Creative email. It's actually two sides. There are two sides to it. One is to target your prospecting more. So a lot of times people, they prospect in terms of keywords that the site ranks for or topics that they talk about, but there are way more angles for prospecting that you can choose; for instance, You can prospect only companies that cater to restaurant owners or fitness apps or accountants or something like that, right?
So, and when you, when you segment your prospecting like that, it allows you to use all these lingo and really go into their wants and pain points and an interest to create a themed template. So it's segmenting and theming. So, like I said before, segmenting makes you think about what all these prospects have in common, and then you create a single group out of those prospects.
And theming is where you choose a theme, and you do your whole template sequence according to that theme. So not just the first email but also the follow-up email. So let's say you're doing something about kickboxing, then you could use a quote from Bruce Lee or something in your subject line.
And then, in your intro, you use an interesting stats about kickboxing and so on. So that's the theming part. I wanna show you a bit of an example of a workflow. I hope you're taking notes because this is what we're gonna do after this talk. Hopefully, if there's still time and nobody has run away looking at you, Alex.
Anyway, so step one is to dig and dump. So you Google rounds. A specific niche or specific type of company of or sites, and you look at what is going on in their realm, right? You can look at their industry leaders, their influencers, trends that are upcoming for 2024, or facts or phrases. The jokes work really, really well.
So every. The professional group has their own inside jokes, and if you can use those jokes or puns, you can make an incense connection. It's a really easy way to do it. A lot of people have started copying these jokes, though, so jokey emails. So you might wanna try it out to see if it works, and otherwise switch to some other tactic.
So here's an example of a doc where I make all these notes about the people that I wanna reach out to. So what works really well for me is to make all these notes without thinking about how I'm gonna use them. So you make these notes, and you don't think about the templates. Just I I always use one page, and I just put anything random in there.
So this all has to do with graphic design. So, one of the things that really jumped out at me was that one of the biggest pain points and annoyances of graphic designers is their design clients that want a last-minute change. So that was an angle that I chose for that email. Step two is graph craft, the draft.
So from all your notes, I always say it's just like Michelangelo, you know, where, where the thing is already in the stone. If you make all these notes, some pattern or some kind of theme starts bubbling up, and that's when you are ready to make your template. By the way, this takes about one to four hours.
It might seem long, but in the end, if it's a better converting template, it saves you a lot of emails that you have to burn through. What's really important when you're crafting a draft is that you are aware of all the different elements of an email. So not just the subject line, but also the footer, right, or the follow-up or the segue.
For instance, you can have a really great value proposition, but if your subject line sucks, Nobody will see your value proposition because they're not opening your email when you're crafting a draft. You can start at the bottom; you can start at the footer. You can start at the sign-off. You can start at the subject line.
It doesn't really matter. You can start anywhere in the email that you want. And you'll slowly start molding your templates. You can also use to. So here it is, an oh-sign check. Oh no. That's for my Google Chrome. I have a, I have a time limit on how long I can do screen time, so I hope I don't jump out of it.
But I'll get back to you anyway, so you can help Chipo with parts of your email. I would never ask them to write a whole email cuz then they're gonna do a sake job; just do it part by part. So I had an intro, and I asked to pedal to make it. About a bad day, and then I asked them to create, to make it more weird.
So I'll, I'll read a little bit of it. Sure. Here's a more weird version of the bad Day in the style of Samantha Irby. So in the style of, is a really great way to give it some flavor. So make a list of all your favorite copywriters or writers, and then use those as styles. Today's been a wild ride.
I'll, I spilled hot coffee on my shirt, missed my train, and left my phone at home. But that was just the appetizer. My boss chewed me up for a mistake I didn't make. I got caught in the rain, and my umbrella turned into a fish, and then I stepped into dog poop. That was actually a port to do. Another dimension.
I mean, what even is happening today? Is this real life or some twisted episode of Twilight Zone? So I use this in the email I make. I made it shorter, or I asked Tippe to make it shorter, but. It, it's a bit of storytelling. It can work really well, and everybody has ever had a bad day, right? So that's a way to make an instant connection when you have a more generic prospect list.
So this is step three, and it's really important you have to, your first version of your email, you have to read it out loud. Because you can think that you're charming and funny, but when you read it out loud, you can hear that you're actually creepy, right? So read it out loud, read it out loud for somebody else, or read it out loud the day after.
And these are the things that you wanna look out for. You don't wanna sound corporate-y because then you're a business and not a person. And if you're a business, the prospect can think, oh, it's a business. They have a monetary interest. I'm gonna ask for money too. Right? Another thing you wanna avoid is fake flattery, is when you say, oh, I'm such a fan of your blog.
I read all your stuff. That's not true. You're lying, right? But most importantly, you're not backing it up. So if you give a compliment, it has to be backed up by something. I love your blog, especially your piece on this vegan green smoothie. I tried it out, blah, blah. Right? Something like that. Empty statement.
So if you're pitching something, for instance, you say I have a great article on, I don't know, on something. But you don't back it up. You don't say, I have a great article, which ties in perfectly with your whatever, with your previous article on this or something like that. Fluffy and repetitive is also really important to me cuz it reflects the quality of you as a writer.
And you can also ask AI to help you with that. And one really important thing is an ism. So you also have to think about who you are, who your persona is. If you're a white male, something you can say that's a little bit flirty can hit on the other side very differently. So, Be aware of well avoids anything that can be construed as sexist or racist or ageist or body shaming, or anything like that.
Cuz you, the last thing you want to do is have somebody screenshot that and tweet it out, and you're canceled, right? So, yeah, be aware of that example time. So let's show some examples. Or just one example, actually, this is an ex example of graphic design. You know, where I, I saw that their pain point was clients wanting to change something at the last moment.
This was the subject line. So it goes, we love your style, but. And then they open the email. This is actually a follow-up, so don't neglect your followers. Your follow-ups need to be just as good as the first email. So here I quote an imaginary client. Try a thinner black line, lots more color, and lose texture.
And if you can make the characters look more normal, that'd be great. Oh, and we need for tomorrow four noon. I know how bluesy a designer's inbox can get. So no worries if you haven't gotten to my pitches yet. Whenever you're ready. I'm right here to lighten your content load; crop it like it's hot. So the cats weren't in there, by the way.
The bluesy with the color was in there cuz it, it will de graphic designers are very visual, so this will catch, you know, their eye. But as you can see, I used a lot of lingo that they used. I go into specific Pain points, and I use a joke. So here's an example of somebody's reaction. So this was to another email of ours.
It said, may your coffee be strong; your mind needs to be short. And somebody said it was the Leslie Kno quote that pulled me in and your topic ideas that got me to respond. So here you can see that you don't know beforehand which email elements are gonna win your prospects over. So, I mean, it's, it, it's gonna sound really stupid, but I did this outreach, well, the outreach that I showed before, right?
From the graphic design, I did this for a really big computer brand. So it's not about, oh, we can't use this because it's not professional enough or whatever. But what I, what I'm trying to say is that I've had, I've won links because I use the stupid cat giff, right? So you don't know what is going to win somebody over; just try stuff out.
In this case, it was a quote from the office. Yeah. So here are some other reactions of people, and one of my favorites is when a person says that your email made my day cuz I remember the dragon I showed you in the beginning that was stealing people's time. We went from spam to people actually enjoying a link build, building, outreach, email.
And that's, that's, that's the goal that you wanna go for. I'm thinking about taking a course, but it's a lot of work, so I'm waiting for enough people to say that they're interested. You can go to this link and then opt-in. It doesn't mean that you're, that you actually have to buy the course, but then I know that people want it.
I, I'm, I'm so chaotic, so I have no idea how I'm gonna do this, but, you know, we'll see. I'll try my best. Yeah. So let's try some shit. I've never done this before on a webinar. But I kind of need emails from people that they've used or that they've seen. And then we can work on, you know, some ANA analysis, try to make it better or something.
We could also work with some sites or some niches and then just try to, you know, do that. So, I don't know. I'm gonna; I'm here right now. Make, please make a course. Okay. Yeah. Dan, thank you. I'll, I'll, I'll try. I'm
Travis: getting nervous now. Yeah. Patrick said he is gonna send one over, but he needs three minutes.
In three minutes. It's
Bibi: Okay. Cuz you, you sent some stuff over, right? Yeah.
Travis: I'm gonna put that document in. Yeah. Chat to kind of get us kicked
Bibi: off. Yeah. And then I'll go to that, and she and I'll, I'm still sharing my screen, right? Yes.
Travis: Yeah, you should be able to see it now.
Bibi: Okay, cool. So I'm opening here.
I'm almost so scared when I share my screen that all my porn is gonna pop out.
Yeah. Anyway. So these are, this is an email example, right? So are you guys interested in me doing some kind of feedback on this? Yeah. So we'll try that. I'm gonna read this one, so there's no subject line, so I cannot analyze the subject line. But it's okay. Email I'm Ben, co-founder and c e O of Acme, a platform that makes booking phishing guides quick and easy.
Yep. We'd like to team up to make it easy for you to offer guests a seamless booking experience with our quality vetted guides. We care deeply about what we do, and I'm proud to say our average review score is 4.9 out of five stars. After booking thousands of trips, interested in offering guests an additional value add.
I'm really confused about what the offer is. So that's, that's the first thing. There's also no citation, but I think that maybe got taken out. Let me see. So is this a sales, what, what do you think Travis, is this a sales email or is it, what kind of email is this?
Travis: Yeah, I think it's more of a sales email.
Yeah, I, I agree with it being a little cloudy as far as the ask since they Yeah. Offering guests an additional value add.
Bibi: Yeah. Yeah. So I think I don't know what the value add is in this case. Maybe, maybe they're reaching out to hotels or something and are saying, can you, or travel sites, travel companies and are saying, can you add this to your offerings?
Yeah, this is, so this is a hard email for me to look at because I don't know the intent. I also don't know the prospect that they're reaching out to, but I'm gonna try, right? So first off, I'm Ben, co-founder and CEO of Acme. A platform that makes booking phishing guides quick and easy. I think it's okay, but prospects usually don't care about you.
So, except if you are like a really big brand, if you're well known or, or big brand or some kind of authority, then it's great to do this intro. Otherwise, they don't really give a fuck, usually. So, I would do an opener. A that's a, a little bit more interesting. So it's a phishing guide, right? Yeah.
So what I would do, yeah, so I would probably let's see. Oh, this is the same thing. Phishing guides,
quotes, phishing quotes, something like this. I Googled this; you have a quote. A bad day is fishing is better than a good day at work. Fishing is a passion, and there's no such thing as a bad thing when you're fishing. Yeah. So, Ooh, oh, I can't, I'm, I'm gonna make me change that. Make a new duck. I would just make a note here of
Travis: this quote.
You can edit the new doc if you want to too.
Bibi: Yeah. Great. So, by the way, if anybody's talking in a chat and they have some ideas or questions or something, then just tell me, right? Because yeah, I hope that we can do this a little bit together. A bad day of phish fishing is better than a good day at work.
So I could. Ask Bar to create a sensation for an email. Include a, include a phishing one.
Now wait for a second. Dearest Fisher of
Hi. Greetings from the deep. Okay. So I would probably use that. Or citations from the C. That could be cool. This is probably not gonna be the best of emails, so normally, I would make a lot of notes and then create the email, but now I'm going to Greetings from the Deep, or the other one was a citation from the C.
So what do you guys think? Do you like greetings from the deep A, or do you like facilitations from the C?
What are they saying?
Travis: Travis? Yeah, Alex. Alex recommended a sort of lampshade for this quote. It said something like, a wise fisherman once said, sometimes somewhere, Ooh. But it looks like people were saying, well, it's kind of mixed. Salutations from the sea. Greetings from the sea.
Bibi: What was the thing that Alex said?
Let me say where I said
Travis: yeah, A wise fisherman once said, sometimes somewhere, Why is Fisherman's? Yeah,
Bibi: right there. Okay. I
Travis: can't; I don't know where it's; scroll down. Oh, here a little bit. Right there. Re cursor is, yeah.
Bibi: Okay. So we can definitely use that somewhere else in the email as well. I'm gonna go with a citation from Sea for now, right?
Travis: Yeah. Doug pointed out it's gonna nice alliteration too.
Bibi: Yeah, that's true. Yeah. So. Let's say we're, I'm gonna go back to the original, see if we can find offer guest experience. Okay? So Worst thing to happen when you are fishing? I'm trying to look into what, what is like a really suck thing to happen when you're fishing, right.
What not to do while fishing? I like this.
And what I would say is, Not wanting to sound like a rusty hook, but I could use it somewhere in, you know. Okay. Travis, if you see any other, other ideas in the, in the chat and let me know. Right. Because then we're kind of doing it together instead of me sweat sweating here by
Travis: myself. Yeah. Alex just sent another example of something bad happening.
Is a catfish biting you or stinging you, perhaps?
Bibi: Okay, cool. Wait, okay. Says c. I hope,
I hope your to-do list is not biting you like a cafe. I don't know. It's really bad, but I hope you're done to do, I hope. Today's who is not buying you like a catfish, or it could also be like not dragging you down into the abyss of something that never gets done. Right. What, what would be some endless, endless one?
What? What would you say, Travis or
Travis: somebody else?
Yeah, I'm trying to think. Oh, chum,
Bibi: like endless chum, not great, but let's go with it. Yeah, I think, I think people are getting kind of like the picture of how I would make this email. So, After all that day, fishing is better than a good day at work. Okay, so here, this is really hard to do on spots.
Travis: Yeah, we got some more too. I think there's a, yeah, we just got two more email campaigns, so we, we can move on to email b. Yeah, but what,
Bibi: what I do wanna show you guys is that what, what, what I do hope that comes across, cuz it is really hard for me to do this, like, on the spot, but so normally it takes me hours, right?
So what I would do, I would think about all these pain points that people have and all the lingo that they use. And I would make the connection between having a bad day at work and fishing. And your to-do stuff dragging you down, you know, your anchor or whatever dragging, dragging you in the mud. And then that's and connect that to people having a bad fishing travel experience or a bad travel travel experience and then saying maybe, you know, how, how my offer would add some something extra.
Does it make sense, Travis, or do I sound it?
Travis: It does; no, I think it makes a lot of sense. You kinda immediately went to the pain point, and there were certain Yeah. Kind of digging into it. What would people say in this kind of industry? Okay,
Bibi: cool. Whew. Okay, great. So does anybody? I, I can go to the second email, but if people, Oh, I saw, I see that Patrick also had an email, second Quin, lemme see.
Yes, yes. Yeah, let's do the second email as well. Cause that's something that somebody filled in. Whoa. See Jesus Christ. This is a lot.
Travis: Yeah. Patrick's email thee. I think, and then I b
Bibi: C. Great. Ok. Let's do that. Hi Patrick. This is really nice. I'm suggesting stuff, so I'm making a copy so I get all the power.
Okay, here we go. This is the subject an apply, applicant's Terminator Systems. A pitch for, oh yeah, this is funny. can you guys see my screen? Looks great. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So pitch four is something that I use a, use a lot in my emails in the subject lines because I want to qualify the person getting it.
I wanna make clear that it's not a misleading email, and that's, they know it's a pitch, right? So people that don't want the pitch, they won't open the email and it's fine. That's, that's, that's, I think that's, that's cool. But however, I've been using it a lot, and I think other people have been using it a lot too.
And I feel like my response rate has been going down a little bit. So we started not using this anymore, and what you can do is you can take this subject line and then ask Bard. Or chat pt to rephrase it in a way that it doesn't use the word pitch, so replace pitch or something, and it did some really, really creative things.
You can ask it to do it in a specific style as well, and it had some really cool other ways of saying it, like content gems or something. So here you could say something like content bytes or something, or, because it has to do with computer stuff. Okay. So subject line Applicant terminated systems.
Hi, first name ATSs. Scan. Job seekers resume what and parse the data, then eliminates candidates based on an algorithm. Removing the human from human resources means no call or story Email for applicants. Just hustle, baby. I love this email. This is wild. We think your users might want to know how to beat Skynet, and these systems affect them when applying for a job.
We recently wrote a blog on it and are working on the following guest content. Why designing a beautiful resume might be a mistake? How to write and design to pass the t s test. The A ts list of buzzwords not to use. If you want to pass the robot test, here are five CONVA templates for your resume that are an s friendly and why that's important.
Fancy resumes kill 70% of your chances of getting a job. Would any of these topics make sense for some guest content on your site? Happy to tweak or work with you on improving the fit note. The content does not have to be terminated. Themes such as me, I think it's really cute. Okay, so then we have the follow-up, but what I wanna try and do, Is involve people in the chat in feedback on this thing.
Oh, applicant tracking systems are called ATS for short. Aha. I knew that, actually, but I had forgotten. So what I, what I ask people in a chat, can you give one point of feedback on this email and then Travis, if you can read it out loud.
Travis: Yeah. Alex said he thinks the first sentence is confusing to read. Yeah, I would
Bibi: I agree with that.
Yeah. Yes, very. So this is why you need to read it out loud, because you can think that it makes sense, but the person's cold outreach is very cold. So a person has to, there can be no ambiguity, or it really has to be readable. I do really like that he used this theme. I think it's really cool. But it's kind of confusing.
So what you wanna, what you can do, if you copy this right, you can go to Bard, and it doesn't always work, but you can say fix for flow. And then you always have to say, keep it short cuz AI likes the ramble, and then you could put it in here. I hope it's not gonna make it normal cuz sometimes. Okay.
Applicant Tracker systems a DS scan job secret resume and parse the data. Then eliminate can based on the algorithm. This removes the human element from the hiring process, meaning that no calls or emails are sent to applicants who are not selected. We think your users might wanna know how to beat Skynet and these systems, as they can affect their chances of getting a job.
So this is great. It's already right, Travis. It's already, mm-hmm. He's easier to understand. Yes. But now we're gonna do a style. Does anybody have a favorite writer?
Travis: It does look like Patrick was influenced by it; you said he read your stuff six months
Bibi: ago? Yeah. I recognize, but this is, this is Patrick.
This is why I said don't copy. Cuz you might think a pitch four works well, but it stopped working. And I want to teach you how to fish, not to, what is it? Not to give you a fish or something. Dr. Seus. I love that. Patrick. I love Patrick. I like you. Okay, so here we go. Rewrite in the English style of Dr.
Seuss. Keep short, keep short. All this has to do. Keep short and see if it, they do it now. And what I also would do, I would ask sometimes to, if they can. Oh no. Oh. They didn't. They didn't poem it. Yes, they scan your resume, they par the data, then eliminate no calls. The email just has to leave the baby. Your chance of a job.
They're not so hot. Unless you know how to beat these systems, you're nuts. So learn how to beat Skynet and these things and get your foot in the door. That's what you'll be singing. I hope you like it. Can you make it rhyme more and shorter? So I would definitely go with the poem. I mean how, how insane is that?
So you do a surveyor theme because it's an applicant tracking, and then you add Dr. Susan into it, and you make a poem. If a person reads that email, they're gonna be like, whoa, you know, what's this? You have to be a little bit careful cuz I have a. I have a guy on my team, Sammy, and sometimes he goes so out of the box that prospects end up very confused, but you could play around with this, right?
So if we this can eliminate you, if they can see, okay, this, this is getting really confusing. Yeah. So, Alex or no, this was Patrick, right? Who made this one? Yep. Was it Alex? Patrick. Yeah, so Patrick, I would fix this intro because it's really confusing, and it's a little bit longer as well, but use Bart with it, right?
And use styles and, and short. You can also go a little bit more insane and add more chaotic weirdness to it. But yeah, up to you. Okay. So let's take,
Travis: I guess on this first email, do you recommend including, like he, the pitch is to write an article? Yeah. Do you commend him, including The article's ideas?
Yeah. Then email one. Okay. Yeah.
Bibi: I al I always do that. Because I'm, I'm lazy, so I wanted to be right. Be, I wanted to be clear right away what my intentions are. I don't want to; it's already so when, when somebody accepts a guest post, It's, a lot of times, it's a back and forth cuz they want a revision of it or they wanna send you guidelines.
If you do not do it on the first email, this pitch will involve two to three more back-and-forth emails. So I would just include it because it's really clear what you want. There's a lot of choices also in here. You can also ask Bart to rewrite these. If you want, and you can do this as well, if you do three of them and you go to Bart and create a bullet point short outline for each of these styles, you couldn't, oh fuck.
That's where I want, oh, can I swear? Yeah, that's, that's fine. Okay. Oh, oh, I did it. Okay. So yeah, you have to play with this a little bit more. This is not the best outline, but one way you can also help the conversion of your email is to add some outlines so the person really knows what they're, what they can expect from me.
I can go on, but I was wondering if there's anybody else that has questions or an example, another example.
Travis: One of the questions was if an email is customized for each target. Don't you think it'll be a waste of effort and time if they don't accept?
Bibi: And then Alex, it's not customized for each target.
It's a template. Yeah. Yep. But it's, it's, you have to see, like, when you write a song, right? There are thousands of people hearing the same song, but still, you manage to connect with each one of them. If you go to a party, right, and you don't know anybody there, and then suddenly you hear, hear somebody talking about an email about Mayo Brothers, and you know about Mayo Brothers, and then you start using words from it and stuff.
You can connect with a whole group of people that are talking about it, but you're not saying something different to each person. So, yeah. So I just wanna make it clear. It's a template. It's not a bespoke email, actually. Absolute best way to do outreach, but that does take a lot of headspace and time.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Bespoke email is not templates. Bespoke email is a really unique email for each person, but that can have an 80% conversion rate. So when I train people in templates, I always tell them you have to do 10 bespoke emails first because it breaks them out of the box. Of emails, and then a pattern comes up, and they base their template on that.
So if you wanna learn how to do templates, try bespoke email first 10 times, and then suddenly you have a template as
Travis: well. So, it makes a lot of sense. And Dougs said in the question, do you have an example of subject lines that have the highest open rates?
Bibi: Yeah. So the one that I used is the What's Now; I love your style, but.
That one really did well. I have another one that we did a campaign, and it was supposed to do coffee people, but then one of my team members, they fucked up, and they did coffee and tea people and the same campaign, and it was okay. And then I thought, okay, now we have to do templates.
So I did a template myself, and then I thought, okay, let's do a coffee versus tea SmackDown. And that was in the subject line, coffee versus Tea SmackDown. And the open rate was insane. So it was like really, really good. I like that one. Yeah. So those are, those are two examples.
Travis: And then, if you go back to the Google document that I shared, there's one more template from the audience.
It's email B at the very top of the document. Oh yeah, this one. I
Bibi: reorder 'em. Yeah. Okay, cool. Okay, so. New provider for residents. Hi. Oh, no. Okay. I'm Dan, director of outreach@eighthundred.com. I recently, ugh, crossed page, name page on your website and noticed. The competitor has, as a service provider, gotten straight to the point.
We would love to get in on this list, too, if you're not already familiar with eight hundred.com. We are an affordable phone service for small business. It would be great to give residents another option when looking for a telecom mission. Let me know if there's anything else you need from me. Cheers, Dan, Annette.
So, Dan, I love you, and this is a great email. If you wanna pay for it for the link. So if you're okay with paid links, then use this email, right? Because it doesn't cuz it will end up in a paid link. So I'm gonna ask you, Travis, what would you change? What's the first thing you would change in this email?
Travis: Probably get to the point quicker. There's a lot of background that's probably not needed. As far as the first two sentences.
Bibi: Yeah, but let's say you wanna not pay for a link or something, right? So you wanna avoid all the stuff that I talked about in the presentation? So link builder terms, corporate stuff, sales stuff.
You guys gotta help Travis out and put it in the chat. Okay, cool. So I have somebody my good friend is Inster today. Oh, cool. So Patrick says a hundred percent his name, you name introduction Rockpool. The name part was its name.
Yeah, so I do use names because people do appreciate it when you use their first name, but this one there that people hate that. They really don't like that. So I would do something else. I would either just do hi, or I would replace this with something more creative. Hi, fellow. Fellow smartphone user. No, I wouldn't do that.
But something else, right? I would probably change this as well cuz it's, it, it reads like a sales thing, so it just reads like normal ads, a promotional thing you get in the email. So I would change that as well. For instance, why is 800 better, right? Let's see. I hope this is still helping people, but I'm gonna look at 800, get a toll-free number, and increase your sales globally.
Okay, great. So it's call forwarding zero fees, freedom with mobility, less reliance on voicemail, vanity numbers.
I would take some benefits of this site and then include that in the subject line. So I would probably look into your competitors and see what they're n, what they're not doing, and what you are doing. And I would mention this in the subject line. Another thing that you can do is if you.
Look at phone wording, stats, culture metrics, and phone. Okay. Business communication stats. Okay, so here, this is something you can always use for shopping lines as well. I would look at these stats and then take something that I think is really interesting. Maybe I don't see it here, but maybe a stat about how many.
How much business is lost due to not picking up the phone or faulty forwarding? Right. So it could be like 150 million is lost every year due to phone fails, and I would. Add that in the subject line cuz that's interesting. This is not so interesting. And I would go into that in the email.
I wouldn't talk about my; well, I wouldn't do all this cuz these is just really typical templates. I would talk about how, how about the pain point of the phone fails, and then I would say Then I would probably say like, we, we help people winning that business or something, or, and then I think it would help your audience a lot if you would add us to the list or something like that.
Sorry, I'm a little bit tapped out, so I was just like, at the end, I was like, Ugh. But yeah, so I hope that helps. So critically, this is reaching out to government sites.
What does, what do you mean by that, Alex? Subject? This is not a toll-free pitch for town and residence. Just a rough, yeah, exactly. So something else, right? Yeah, I like that. Cuz you're including lingo of it. So critically, this is, which I mean, it, it's just asking to be put on the utility page. Oh, okay.
Yeah, I didn't know that. What I would do in that case is just, Think about why somebody would wanna put it on their utility page. I don't know what the utility page is actually. What is the utility page? Oh, the context was above the email. Oh, sorry. Oh, here. Oh, right here. Oh yeah. So now, so what is your utility page?
I have no idea. I'm Dutch; I'm stupid.
I assume it's a page listing. It says providers in the area. Yeah. Okay. So, basically, reverse engineering. Yeah. I see. Yeah, so in that case, I would. Say, I would find out why somebody would want to add it to the utility page. You know, what's the added value? Maybe it has to do with complete data or completeness, and then I wouldn't say a new provider.
I would say something about something, you know, there's something missing on the page or something, I don't know, something like that. And then I would write an email about that. But I would definitely, yeah, I would avoid all these types. A typical link builder or terms phrases,
Travis: yeah.
Kinda makes sense. It's like a, it's a list of all their competitors, so they're trying to make a point of why they should be included on that list. So think it could give some insight into how to tailor the message.
Bibi: Yeah, so you wanna, you, you have, like I said, all the emails have all these different elements, right?
So your value proposition has to be strong too. If, if your email is great, but the value proposition makes no sense for somebody to take 10 minutes out of a day to add something to a page, then that's a waste of email as well. But it's a good strategy, Dan. Yeah. No, no, it's not. It's not. It's actually good, and maybe it works.
I don't know. I've never done that utility page thing. But if I look at the copy of the email, I would; I would change it so it doesn't say all those link biller terms and makes me a bit more sensitive person. Dan is probably, oh; he says I'm gonna mix it up. Yeah. Sometimes I also critique an email of mine, for instance, of my team as well; I say, oh, this sucks, and how can you do this?
And then I say, oh, but you know, I want like 25 links with it. I'm like, oh, okay. So I, I, I'm often wrong as well. I'm gonna stop with the sharing. I hope this is helpful. I can do some more questions. My brain, brain use is done, done
Travis: with yeah, I think this is super helpful. I think it helped kind of see how you approach writing these messages too.
So I think it's been very, its, it is been helpful for me as well. But kinda kinda wrap it up. You've mentioned a couple of tools already, but Doug asked. What other tools do you use? You mentioned Pitch Box, and ah, his; he kinda asked, like, do you use SpyFu or S scm Rush or Google Trends? What else do you kinda use in your tech, your tech stack?
Yeah.
Bibi: I use HFS a lot. I use the Content Explorer a lot in hf. I think it's an unused feature. In that content, Explore Explorer. I, I look, I reverse engineer what kind of questions people have, so, This is for, for linkable assets, by the way. But instead of looking for a specific topic, I use a footprint words.
So, for instance, if you go to content explorer and his and you put in how many, and then you filter on the amount of links pieces are gonna, are getting or amount of Pinterest shares or whatever Twitter shares, then you could see what kind of articles are around. That has a similar question, like how many are getting a lot of links?
I use exploding topics. So that's sort of similar. It's a Google Trends different, but yeah, exploding topics, Google Trends. I use Pitch Box. What else? I'm really a minimalist with tool tools, but I use Bard a lot. I used to use Chat g PT a lot, but it's, it's not so creative anymore. Even the paid version sucks now.
So, Bard, another question?
Travis: I think that's all we have for today. I know we're right at the end of time, so thank you so much. Be before, Yeah. Joining us today and giving us a walkthrough of how you approach prospecting.
Bibi: Oh, oh, oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One last thing. So if there are questions that you still have, just tweet at me, right?
And then I'll reply to them, ma'am. Awesome.
Travis: I'll tweet. And then we'll also include all the links that you shared from your slide deck and the recap email we send tomorrow. Along with the link about your course, or whether you should do it or not. But any last parting words before we give everyone their time back today?
Oh, yeah.
Bibi: I had a last I had a last slide. I wanna show it real quick. I don't even know what I do, so it also has my last words on it. Here look, it says thank you build links, maybe the link biller. Those are my last words.
