As an SEO professional, you know how vital it is to snag those top-notch backlinks to boost your website’s authority and have higher rankings.
Easier said than done. The whole backlinking process can be a real headache and eat up loads of your precious time. Sure, you might be tempted to take shortcuts like buying links or joining some shady link schemes, but trust me, that’ll do more harm than good in the long run.
It’s all about having a solid backlinking strategy and finding ways to make it scalable.
Let’s say, you’ve identified a bunch of 500 potential link opportunities through competitor analysis, but reaching out to each one manually? Yeah, that’s a major time suck.
Doing it manually, one by one, from your email ID will take ages to reach 500 prospects. Moreover, managing replies, sharing for your backlinking details such as anchor text, to a particular blog or webpage is cumbersome. Too many emails firing from your account will be perfect to flag you as a potential spammer.
What if you are offered a solution that can automate your backlinking activities? A solution, using which you can send emails effortlessly, personalize them, and can be within the spam guidelines.
In this blog, we will see how a sales engagement platform can help you put your backlinking efforts on automation with the right scalability.
Challenges of SEOs in getting backlinks
Further to our discussion let’s understand what are the challenges SEO personnel face in completing their daily tasks.
Time-consuming manual outreach: Sending personalized emails to numerous prospects and managing replies manually can be extremely time-consuming and inefficient.
Difficulty in scaling: Without automation tools, it’s challenging to scale outreach efforts to reach a larger number of prospects and opportunities.
Risk of being flagged as spam: Sending a high volume of emails from personal accounts increases the risk of being flagged as spam by email service providers, affecting the sender’s reputation.
Lack of organization: Managing replies, tracking conversations, and sharing relevant backlinking details can become chaotic and disorganized without a centralized platform.
Limited personalization: Without automation, it’s difficult to personalize outreach messages effectively, resulting in lower response rates and engagement.
How SEOs get backlinks using a sales engagement platform
Sales engagement platforms offer invaluable assistance to SEO practitioners in their backlinking outreach efforts.
This will help you set the entire process, enabling SEO professionals to efficiently manage their outreach campaigns.
With features like email automation, personalized outreach, and contact management, sales engagement platforms allow SEO experts to reach out to potential link partners at scale while maintaining a personalized touch.
Additionally, these platforms provide insights and analytics to track the performance of outreach campaigns, helping SEO practitioners identify successful strategies and optimize their efforts for better results.
Sales engagement tools, similar to SmartReach.io, offer a platform to set up your entire backlink outreach process and help you build a reliable process for getting high authority links juices.
Let’s take a step-wise approach towards implementing a backlinking outreach strategy.
Build your prospect list
You need to have a prospect list to start with.
You can have this from your competitor’s backlink sources. Download the report using any SEO tool and you will have a list of sources for all their backlinks you can also target.
Now that you have the list containing the domains you might want to reach out, you can find each of these source’s information from LinkedIn using a prospect finder tool such as ProspectDaddy.
You can download it’s Chrome Extension. Once it is added to your browser, you can seamlessly find your prospect details.
ProspectDaddy will provide you information such as prospect name, email IDs, LinkedIn profiles,, designation, company name, place, etc.
Within a few seconds, you will have a list of prospects ready. You can either download it in a CSV format or directly import to your SmartReach’s backlink outreach campaign.
Once you have gathered all the information now you can start your outreach to these prospects and request for backlinks.
Getting engaged with prospects
ow that you’ve compiled your list of potential attendees, it’s time to reach out and start building connections.
Crafting your message is crucial. Make it personal and impactful. You can have a merge tag that helps you convert data from a specific column to make your email outreach more personalized & dynamic. You can customize anything that is relevant to your outreach. All you have to do is to add a column to your CSV file and map it to the platform during CSV upload.
With SmartReach’s AI content generator, creating personalized content is fun. Simply input details like email context, target persona, and writing style, and get your messages in seconds.
A sales engagement platform will offer you to connect with your prospects through a multichannel approach. People have their own preferences of channels to communicate and moreover using a multichannel will reduce your dependency on a single channel and will enhance your chances to get more replies.
Now let’s see how a sales engagement platform can help you automate your outreach on emails and LinkedIn.
Sample outreach sequence
Email Automation Sequence
Step1: Day 1
Hi {{first_name}},
Pleasure connecting with you.
Came across your blog i.e. {{blog_name}}. Loved the quality of your content.
Would it be okay for us to link back to some of your blog content? It would definitely benefit our readers.
We are also open to collaborating on other topics that are mutually beneficial to both our readers.
Let me know if this interests you.
Regards
Deep S1st Auto follow up on day 3
Hello {{first_name}},
Knocking you just to say that I would love to work with you to build a content marketing strategy that is mutually beneficial to both our readers.
Regards
Deep2nd Auto follow up on day 5
Hello {{first_name}},
I saw you opened up my email but didn't reply. If there’s any concern you can let me know.
Happy to connect with you.
Regards
Deep3rd Auto follow up on day 8
Hello {{first_name}},
I've reached out a few times and I guess you have not replied for either one of the below reasons:
This is not the right time. You aren't looking to collaborate
I am reaching out to the wrong person (If this is the case, could you connect me to the right person).
I won't bother you anymore. This is my last email.
Do reach out if you ever have the need.
Regards
DeepSimilarly, you can also create an automated LInkedIn sequence.
Day 1: LinkedIn view profile
1st auto LinkedIn followup day 3
Send connection request
2nd LinkedIn followup day 5
Send a LinkedIn message.
{{first_name}}, nice connecting with you.
Read your blog, i.e. {{blog_name}}. Great read. Loved it.
Would you be open to content collaboration that will benefit both our readers?
Let me know your thoughts.
Deep3rd LinkedIn followup day 7
Did you get a chance to look at my proposal?
Our readers would love your content.
Waiting for your reply.
DeepAnother way to to engage with your prospects is through a combination of both email and LinkedIn.
Once you have set up your outreach steps on email and LinkedIn, The next set of challenges will be managing the responses from these prospects.
Managing queries from prospects
SmartReach provides a shared inbox where all prospect responses can be accessed in one place. It keeps things organized and available to everyone on your team, so messages aren’t all over the place, and you don’t do the same thing twice.
This makes managing responses easier. Moreover, since you know who has replied, you can pause the auto campaign for LinkedIn so as not to overwhelm them with unwarranted messages.
Prospect management
nce the outreach campaigns are on, the responses will start pouring in. You will need some kind of mechanism to track and manage these responses.
The prospect feed feature of SmartReach keeps you updated in real-time on who has received your email, who has replied, and how many times your email has been opened.
You can filter prospects based on their status i.e. Email Open, Replied, Opened but Not Replied, Not Opened, Not Sent etc. Moreover, you can change the category of the prospect based on the response you get.
Must have features while selecting an SEP
Most likely, by now, you understand how a sales engagement platform can assist in securing backlinks with automated sequences to reach prospects.
Next, let’s explore the essential features you should examine before committing to a sales engagement platform.
Prospect finder
You must look for a prospect finder tool while selecting an SEP. Ensure that the platform you select offers a prospecting feature or allows integration with any prospect finder tool.
Opt for a prospect finder like SmartReach’s ProspectDaddy, which provides valuable information about prospective attendees, including business emails, LinkedIn profiles, names, companies, designations, locations, and more.
Email automation
Unlike Gmail or Outlook, where you’d need to manually copy and paste email content for each potential prospect, using a sales engagement platform streamlines the process. Simply set up a campaign with the introductory email content and follow-up sequences once.
Your campaign should run autonomously, without requiring manual intervention.
Ensure that your chosen sales engagement platform offers features like unlimited sequences, automatic pausing of campaigns upon receiving a response, direct and indirect reply detection, and a holiday calendar to avoid sending emails on prospects’ holidays.
A free AI content recommendation feature is a valuable addition. Additionally, look for platforms that offer A/B testing to assess which subject lines or email content elicit better responses.
Remember, you can also integrate email outreach with other communication channels for a comprehensive approach.
Email deliverability
Try to make your way directly to prospects’ inboxes.
Some sales engagement platforms, such as SmartReach, utilize techniques that mimic human-like email sending to improve the chances of your emails landing in the primary inbox of your potential prospects.
When selecting a sales engagement platform, ensure it provides tools like spam test reports to address authentication or campaign setup issues, and email warm-ups to maintain a favorable email reputation.
These features involve constant monitoring and auto-corrective actions to ensure your emails avoid spam folders and reach the primary inbox.
Additionally, look for functionalities like email verification, auto-pause on missing or broken merge tags, spintax, or campaign soft start, which gradually increases email sending for new domains.
You need to find out if your SEP has an inbox rotation feature using which you can send emails from different domains with setting up a per day limit to follow spam guidelines.
Leveraging these tools enhances the likelihood of your emails reaching the main inbox, resulting in higher open and engagement rates, ultimately leading to an efficient backlinking process.
LinkedIn automation
Make sure the SEP you have shortlisted provides both semi-automation and fully automated LinkedIn campaign options. So that you can use either of them, based on your use case.
Utilizing features such as auto-status updates ensures seamless monitoring of all scheduled tasks, maximizing efficiency in outreach campaigns. Additionally, you have the flexibility to customize connection requests tailored to your target audience.By setting up automated LinkedIn campaigns, the process becomes streamlined. Simply locate prospects, upload the CSV file, and activate your campaign to autopilot mode, saving SEOs valuable time.
AI content generator
Not all sales engagement platforms offer AI-powered content generation. Ensure your selected platform includes AI-generated email content based on provided email and audience inputs.
Platforms like SmartReach.io enable content creation by offering prompts such as target audience, writing style, tone, and words, with various generation options available.
Additionally, verify if the tool provides the capability to generate subject lines based on email content, along with options to rephrase or shorten paragraphs, offering enhanced flexibility in content customization.
Personalization at scale
Sales engagement platforms (SEPs) should facilitate the creation of highly personalized outreach communication to numerous prospective attendees without the need for manual editing.
Ensure the platform offers hyper-personalization features such as custom columns, merge tags, spintax, and conditional merge-tag functionality. These features leverage prospect finder data to transform each email into a unique, personalized message for every prospective attendee.
Best of all, these processes can be automated, eliminating the need for manual intervention.
Prospect management
With this feature you can track email opens, replies, and the frequency of email views. It provides details about the campaigns prospects are associated with, the specific email steps they’ve received, and their interactions with each email.
Manage duplicates while uploading prospects. Utilize tags to categorize prospects, highlighting key lists, important prospects, and their email responses.
This feature is rare among sales engagement platforms (SEPs), yet it is crucial for consolidating all replies at a single place.
Your chosen SEP should offer a single sign-on option for managing all your sending email inboxes from a centralized location.
Moreover, the tool should provide transparency across your team so that SEO managers can monitor and track everyone’s activities in it.Reply sentiment is an important feature that will let you know the intent of your prospects’ responses and accordingly you can categorize them. WIth this feature you can identify interest prospects ready to exchange backlinks, and prioritize your chain of communications.
Detailed reporting
While every SEP offers reports, the effectiveness of these reports depends on the data they capture. The reports should be user-friendly and easy to interpret.
When selecting an SEP, prioritize platforms that provide insightful reports such as team activity reports, showcasing your team’s daily outreach efforts, and team leaderboard reports, indicating areas for campaign improvement.
Furthermore, consider other essential reports like advanced tracking, best time to send, and hot prospect reports, highlighting prospects who have engaged with your emails by clicking or replying. These reports offer valuable insights to optimize your outreach strategies effectively.
Final words
We discussed how to get backlinks using an SEP. It will be nothing less than a Herculean Ttask to do backlinking outreach without the help of a sales engagement platform.
Be smart to know how using an SEP you can put your backlinking outreach on automation by setting sequences using email and LinkedIn.
Once you set it up, all you have to do is to find prospects and just upload your CSV to your respective email and LinkedIn campaign.
A ton of features to make your outreach effortless and scale through automation.
Besides, now you know how to select an SEP and what features to look for.
Next time, when you try to reach out to your prospects for backlinking, make sure to use these features and be the start of your team.
