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My guest post outreach totally backfired on a big project
I sent out a batch of 50 emails for a client last month and got a 2% reply rate, all rejections. Turns out my template sounded way too salesy and generic, which I only realized after a blogger actually wrote back to tell me. How do you make your outreach feel more personal without spending hours on each email?
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the_jana1mo ago
Oof, a 2% reply rate with all rejections is brutal. At least that blogger gave you the courtesy of telling you why it flopped. My rule is to mention one specific thing from their last article or their site's "about" page in the first line, makes it impossible to sound like a copy-paste bot.
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hannahs451mo ago
Funny enough, the thing nobody ever talks about is timing. Sending a pitch on a Monday morning when everyone's drowning in emails is basically asking to be ignored. I've had way better luck hitting that send button late on a Thursday afternoon or even on a weekend when people actually have a minute to breathe. Personalization matters for sure, but if your email lands in the middle of a inbox flood, even the best opener gets buried. Might be worth testing when you fire them off before worrying too much about the content.
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matthewkim1mo ago
That blogger's feedback is actually a huge win compared to radio silence. My own reply rate jumped from maybe 5% to over 20% when I started personalizing, but I skip the last article trick. I look for a podcast interview they did or a guest post on another site. It shows I dug deeper than just their homepage, and it often gets a "Wow, how'd you find that?" response.
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