The Internet is flooded with articles covering every topic related to email deliverability. Many of these are quite valuable, but for marketing outreach professionals, the problem with this information is two-fold:

1. Most of these articles are focused on traditional email marketing, rather than the outreach that’s typical of PR, link building and influencer marketing.
2. These posts typically dive into the details without providing an overarching set of principles to consider when thinking about deliverability.

An exception to this is a recent podcast interview of Mark Risher. on the Converge Podcast. If you’re running media or blogger outreach campaigns, you can learn much of what you need to know from a 90 second segment of this interview. 

Risher, Google’s director of product management responsible for preventing unwanted emails, was interviewed by Casey Newton. The interview covered a a broad range of topics, but in the middle of the podcast they specifically spoke about deliverability as it relates to PR and blogger outreach campaigns.

What I found so valuable about this discussion was that, rather than dancing around the specific factors that may or may not be part of Google’s spam detection efforts, Risher explained their guiding principles for fighting “commercial annoyance and abuse” emails.

What also jumped out at me as I listened was the fact these guiding principles are the same ones that our most successful customers employ in their campaigns (as measured by open rates and coverage/placement rates). 

Transcript of the Interview

Here’s a lightly edited transcript of the relevant parts of the interview. If you want to listen to the actual podcast, this discussion starts at around the 33 minute mark.

Breakdown of the Interview

There are only fourteen sentences in this exchange, but if you look at each of Risher’s comments, there’s a lot packed in.    Let’s look at some of Risher’s comments individually so that we understand their full meaning and the implications to outreach professionals.

Google evaluates campaign emails holistically

and:

There are two key messages in these quotes.

First, even if the overall deliverability for your domain and email address is good, it doesn’t necessarily mean the deliverability of a specific campaign will be good. While there are a set of “signals” that impact your overall “sender score” (and it’s important to understand these), Google also makes deliverability decisions at the campaign level.  Through a mix of algorithmic methods and manual interventions, Google tries to identify emails that are part of a campaign holistically and then makes deliverability decision on them together.  

Second, people often think that they can avoid campaign deliverability issues by simply making some low-bar effort to personalize each email. This alone is unlikely to help your emails make it to the inbox. Just because your email includes a reference to a blogger’s website or the name of a post they’ve written in the past doesn’t increase the chances they’ll ever see your email. Again, because Google is making efforts to recognize that these emails are all part of a single list, they evaluate performance at the campaign level.

What this means for you

Over the past year, we’ve seen an increased effort by Google and other mail providers to identify emails that are part of a campaign.

When someone tries to blast a list without qualifying the recipients, increasingly we’ll see the initial emails go through, but shortly after, the sender receives an email saying that the emails are temporarily blocked. In most cases, the remaining emails are never successfully delivered.

While some have found ways to “beat the spam defenses,” we believe this is a short-term play. Bet on Google, Microsoft and other mail providers getting better and better at this over time.

Google’s Guiding Principle for Evaluating Outreach Campaign Emails

So, there you have Google’s guiding principle in black and white. If you look at nearly every individual “signal” that gets included in discussions about campaign deliverability (engagement levels, spam complaints, subject lines, etc) nearly all of them tie back to this.

What this means for you

At every stage of a campaign, ask yourself the following question:

 “Is this an email the recipient will want to receive?”

It’s worth noting that, in addition to ensuring that your emails make it to the inbox, this will also have a dramatic impact on conversion rates (as measured by open rates and coverage/placement rates). When we talk to our most successful customers about their approach to campaigns, they almost always talk about the importance of this, particularly at three stages of a campaign:

Segmentation

We often see outreach professionals try to expand the size of their outreach lists by reaching out to multiple verticals as part of a single campaign. This can be a really effective strategy, as long as you’re able to make a very strong case that the additional segments will be interested in your offer. Where we see people get in trouble though is when they expand their outreach to verticals that are only marginally related to their offer.

For example, if you’re promoting a campaign about drone technology, you’re likely to get yourself in trouble if you reach out to everyone in the technology beat…the blogger that writes exclusively about cloud computing isn’t likely to be too thrilled about your “new drone technology” pitch.

Prospecting

Gisele Navarro of NeoMam Studios, one of the most respected outreach professionals in the industry, has said that she only emails someone if she’s 90% confident that they’ll share her confident. This seems a bit too selective, in my view, but I think the sentiment is spot on. After evaluating the journalist’s or blogger’s content, you should have a very high level of confidence that they’re going to be interested in learning more about the thing you’re pitching.

Personalization

What specifically does this person care about and what specifically do they need in order to cover you?  Ideally, each email you send will have been personalized to take each recipient’s interests into account. At a minimum though, you should be sending to a list that has provided some information that demonstrate a clear interest in the topic your pitching.

Final Thoughts

Often when people talk about deliverability, the discussion of the risks creates a fear of sending any emails that might possibly be flagged as spam. In my view, this is an unnecessarily high bar. It’s important to remember that this is all a matter of degrees.

If you’re sending a campaign that has almost no engagement and is getting marked as spam by multiple people, your risk is high. On the other hand, if you’re getting lots of opens and replies to your outreach, but a very small percentage of your emails are marked as spam, your risk is quite low.

To sum up: as long as you follow the “email the recipient will want to receive” principle, you’ll be fine.

*Thanks to John-Henry Scherck for bringing this interview to my attention.

The post What Google Says About Email Outreach Campaign Deliverability appeared first on BuzzStream.

Ryan Pitylak is the CEO of Unique Influence, a full-service search marketing and digital PR agency. Unique Influence is not only a BuzzStream customer, they also provide content creation and link building services to a number of other BuzzStream customers.  I’ve known Ryan for a long time and I’ve heard great things about their work from our customers, so when he offered to explain how BuzzStream and Citation Labs ties into his processes for link prospecting and relationship management, I jumped at it. 

Background

75% of a website’s ranking in Google comes from its link profile, according to SEOMoz.  This means that the quantity and authority of the links pointing into your website are critically important to its performance. At Unique Influence, we help our clients increase the number of organic, high quality links from relevant websites across the web.

We build relationships with top quality websites that are:

• Contextually relevant – Websites that are in the same industry or share the same audience
• High authority – Websites that have a high number of quality inbound links
• High quality – Websites that maintain a high level of quality in the content that they post on their site

Two of the key challenges to building high quality links are:

1. Finding acceptable websites
2. Contacting the sites in order to establish a relationship

Our Workflow

We use SEO tools like Link Prospector from Citation Labs (in collaboration with Whitespark.ca) and Buzzstream to build these relationships.  Here’s how you can use these tools to find and create relationships with relevant websites:

Citation Labs

• We brainstorm search queries that will return websites that are relevant to our client.
• We then use the Citation Labs Link Prospector tool.  Under the appropriate Campaign, we click on “Find Prospects” and define the search type, search depth and date range.  Then we enter our queries and hit submit.
• Once the report is complete we export a CSV file of the “paths” to get the full list of URLs that resulted from the search.

Excel

• We open this CSV file in Excel and filter the results.  For example, we may decide to eliminate duplicate domains or sort by a specific keywords etc.
• Then, we visit the websites in the list and check to see if these websites meet our quality filters.  We have a long list of qualitative quality filters, so most of the websites get rejected at this stage.  This is a critical step in the process because you want to make sure that you’re only building relationships with high quality, relevant websites.

• In Buzzstream, we import the qualitatively relevant websites into the appropriate project.  These websites are imported as “Link Partners”.
• Buzzstream examines each URL for authority information, such as PageRank and MozRank. We look for sites that pass our quantitative screening process and weed out the websites that have low authority.
• Once we have a list of websites that have passed both our qualitative and quantitative filters, we will contact the owner of each website.  Buzzstream can track your communication history if you give it your imap server information.  Alternatively, you can BCC Buzzstream during your email conversations.
• We change the “Relationship Stage” for the Link Partner to “Attempting to Reach” in Buzzstream after we contact the website owner.

We update the Relationship Stage once we are successful at establishing a relationship with the website owner.

Using Citation Labs Link Prospecting tool allows us to define a universe of potential websites with whom we can develop relationships.  Buzzstream allows us to filter out websites with low authority and track the conversations we have with the website owners.

The fact that these tools work together is a critical factor in delivering success for our clients.  These tools allow us to successfully develop high quality link profiles for clients across industries and business models.  Citation Labs, Buzzstream and Unique Influence are the ingredients in a recipe for search engine optimization success.

The post Case Study: How Unique Influence Uses BuzzStream and Citation Labs to Supercharge their Link Building appeared first on BuzzStream.

The dev team has been “en fuego” since our last product update post, so we have a lot to talk about.  Lots of powerful new features, including a slew of things to help with prospecting and research.  Without further adieu…

Tools for Researching Influencers and Link Prospects

We’ve added a number of tools for finding influencers and link opportunities, researching contact/social profile information, and determining relevance.

Prospecting Query Tool

This tool is currently only available in BuzzStream for Link Building, but it will soon be available in both products.  By automating much of the manual data collection required for effective link prospecting research, it allows you to significantly reduce the amount of time required to identify good link prospects.  Here’s how it works:

• Enter prospecting queries into BuzzStream (just like you would in Google), BuzzStream pulls the results back, de-duplicates them and converts them into “Link Prospects”

• Once collected, BuzzStream automatically collects metrics, contact info, social profile info and the RSS feed.  In addition to site-level metrics, you can see how well the site performs for the searches in the profile (e.g., how many times it shows up in the top ten across all searches, the highest position, etc.)

• Because these results are saved as contacts in BuzzStream, you can do anything to the links and the contacts that you can do with normal links/contacts in BuzzStream.  This includes documenting/tracking the links you want, adding tasks, adding notes, collaboration, etc.
• Results are retrieved daily, giving you a steady stream of new opportunities

Right now, the toolset is designed for advanced link builders, but we’ll extend it over the next few weeks with tools for intermediate and beginning users.

For more information, check out the FAQ or check out the video tutorial.

Automated Discovery of Contact Information and Social Profile Information

With the Buzzmarker, BuzzStream customers have always had tools for discovering contact information and social profile information. With this release, the same discovery capabilities are available for contacts you’ve added via an import or a manual add.  So if you import a set of contacts or manually add a contact, BuzzStream automatically begins looking for profile information, including email address, phone number, twitter ID, facebook, LinkedIn, and street address. And, to help keep your contacts current, BuzzStream looks for this information on an ongoing basis.

To see how this works, first click on the ‘Columns’ button in the toolbar and select ‘Suggested Profile Info’

In the column, you’ll see all of the information that BuzzStream found for that contact. You can add a single piece of information or click ‘Add All’.  To see where BuzzStream found the information, click the ‘source’.

Additionally, we’ve also enhanced the discovery capabilities to make it faster and to pull from more sources.

RSS Feed Collection

You can now view a contact’s most recent content by adding the RSS column to your list view.  This will give you a sense for the topics that a blog is interested in without leaving your BuzzStream account.

Whois Enhancements

We’ve made major improvements to the way that our whois lookup tool works.  In the past, we’d built our own software for looking up contact information in the whois record.  This was unreliable and hard to support because there are so many whois providers and no standard format for whois data.  We’ve switched to a third party service, which has dramatically improved performance.  Results are retrieved both faster and more reliably.

We’ve also made it possible to look up whois information for more than one contact at a time.  To do this, just select a set of contacts (by marking the checkbox in the far left column), click on ‘Research’ and select ‘Search whois Contact Info’.  The results will be populated in the ‘Suggested Profile Info’ column.

Improved Twitter Conversation Monitoring

Two major changes to how we keep track of your twitter conversations with influencers:

• By default, direct messages between you and your contacts are marked as ‘private.’  and are only visible to the BuzzStream user who’s connected to that twitter account.  So, if you send a DM to one of your contacts, only you’ll see it in the History.   If you’d like these conversations to be available to everyone on your team, just click on ‘Settings’, go to the ‘My Info’ tab, and change the setting in the ‘Twitter Information’ section.

• You can now add multiple twitter IDs to a single contact.  Right now, this can only be done for twitter IDs that are in the ‘Suggested Profile Info’ section, but we’ll make this available throughout the app soon.

Private Notes

You can now mark a Note as ‘private’, which will make it visible only to you.

Minor Features and Bug Fixes

• Outreach – you can now select a different template while you’re conducting outreach
• You can now select a different mail server for each project you’re working on
• “Domain age” bug – the wayback machine changed their html format, which broke our site age lookup
• Custom field values and Notes weren’t showing up in exports
• Deleting a sub-task was deleting the entire task
• Problem deleting projects and users
• Custom field values entered from the buzzmarker weren’t being saved in some cases

Next on the plate:

• Enhancements to the prospecting toolkit
• Easier tracking of email conversations with your contacts
• Tighter integration of BuzzStream for PR and Social with BuzzStream for Link Building

The post Product Update: Prospecting Tools, Twitter Tracking Enhancements appeared first on BuzzStream.

Corry Cummings is the owner and founder of Content Customs, an Internet marketing company specializing in content writing services.

About Content Customs

We conduct large scale link building for over a dozen different companies…What’s made us successful and what we think makes us stand out is that whenever we reach out to someone, we personalize it to the specific needs of each website owner, blogger, etc. Our approach with everything that we do is all about quality. We leverage our content creation skills and resources to build links.

As part of our link building efforts, we reach out to tens of thousands of websites to try to get placement in the areas we’re targeting.  Managing our activities was actually really simple when we were only contacting a few hundred sites, but when you scale this up, things can get out of hand.   It’s also very difficult to stay organized and maintain the quality that our clients and partners demand.  BuzzStream allows us to keep things organized, and to hit the scale we need. We have over 30 individuals who collaborate on link building projects at all times. This would never be possible to do efficiently without a tool like BuzzStream.

Our Workflow

For us, it’s really all about building relationships with other blogs and website owners. We have the resources to create high quality web content for a very reasonable price. That is valuable to many website owners. We want to reach out to them and see what we can do to get our content out there, which will in turn get more inbound links pointing to our sites (and our clients). We primarily use BuzzStream as our database for link opportunities and a workflow system for managing our outreach efforts.

We spend a lot of time researching sites that could potentially be link partners in the future. Our research team spends all day every day adding sites to BuzzStream. When they add a site to the database, they use Tags to categorize them.  We hold a high standard for sites that we are willing to work with. That enables us to basically just look for sites that hold those standards. Since we do such a high volume of link building, we are able to add any site (no matter what the topic) to BuzzStream because we know as long as it is a high quality site, we will have a place to contact and reach out for various opportunities.

When we’re working on a specific project, we use Filters to find the right opportunities for the client and then we move our contacts from our main database to a specific project. As we conduct outreach, we take advantage of BuzzStream’s relationship stages to manage workflow and we take a lot of notes with the note feature.

Why We Chose BuzzStream

It’s actually pretty simple for us…We’ve used a lot of different tools, and there really isn’t anything out there that compares.  BuzzStream is way ahead of the game when it comes to link management tools.  Even if there were comparable products, I doubt we would find another company that would work with us as closely as the Buzzstream team does. We have the need to scale very quickly, and BuzzStream has been flawless when it comes to working with us on that. When we have feedback and concerns about future developments of the product, our voice is heard and the feedback is actually put into work on new features.

Our Favorite BuzzStream Features

The ability to organize and track all of our contacts is absolutely huge for us. We don’t use all the bells and whistles that are offered.  The basics are key. Tracking our progress, and keeping notes on each of our contacts really is a huge time saver. BuzzStream also does a great job of pulling in the site metrics, which saves a lot of time. We have to know who we have already contacted, and who has been added to each project. We want to make sure that one of our team members is not contacting the same site that was just contacted yesterday for another project. That can get messy, and would happen consistently if we didn’t have Buzzstream.

What We’d Like Added to BuzzStream

The only way to check for live links right now is on a specific page.  If there were a way to check an entire site for our links, that would be extremely beneficial for us (and I am guessing most other BuzzStream users).  We’d want BuzzStream to  automatically find all of the live links that we have and add them to the contacts/potential link opportunities that we have added to BuzzStream. The ability to have custom statuses would also be nice. In other words, a way to change and add more relationship stages.

The post Case Study: How Content Customs Conducts Large-Scale Link Building With BuzzStream appeared first on BuzzStream.