How do you know if you’re sending enough outreach? Not enough? Many factors play into finding the right email outreach placement rate for your campaign.

In this video we discuss what a good email outreach placement rate is. Ross and Andrew talk about the various factors that impact placement rate such as industry and niche, content type, and if you’re doing broken link building.

Audio Version

Video Transcription

[Ross]: Hi, I’m Ross Hudgens, founder of Siege Media. And today, I’m excited to have Andrew Dennis with me today, Senior Content Marketing Specialist and Excellent Outreach Connoisseur of the arts of sending emails. And today, we want to give you some tips on what a good placement rate is. We get this question somewhat frequently about what a good percentage might be for the number of emails you send as a whole. And I think really, one of the first things really Andrew is it depends, right?

Industry, Type of Content, and Broken Link Building

[Andrew]: Yeah, yeah. So there’s a lot of factors at play here. One of the main things is that it depends on what industry you’re reaching out to, so different industries are going to have different conversion rates. Lawyers, for example, tend to not want to link out as frequently as say mommy bloggers who are a little more enthusiastic about their content and link to things that they like. So that can be a big part of it. And then another factor is the content type that you’re pitching. So if you’re pitching a high-end new story, that tends to usually have a higher conversion rate just because it’s unique and it’s timely. However, you can’t simply create “news”–journalists get thousands of pitches per day and only respond to the most interesting and newsworthy stories.

[R]: For sure.

[A]: People like that.  Then you could be pitching things like infographics or resource guides that might have a little bit lower conversion rate, especially resource guides. There’s kind of a smaller pool of people to contact and you have to find specific pages that they’d fit on.

[R]: Yeah that ties into kind of like broken link building as a concept. If you’re not familiar with that, it’s kind of like you’re reporting a link that’s broken on a resource page. A lot of those tend to by nature because there are so many broken links on them, they’re not updated as often. So a resource guide or a resource page might have a lower conversion rate overall for that reason. So yeah all those things can kind of go into that.

Time Spent Vs Links Secured

I do think based on that kind of idea and think, you know, it depends. I think thinking about outreach time generally, I think is maybe a better way of considering the performance of your campaigns versus just a placement rate because, yes, placement rate is good, but really what you’re trying to get is the outcome of a link. So you spent more time customizing an email on average, but you get more placements, that’s great as opposed to the reverse spending no customization and sending thousands. So I think thinking about it in that way might get you on the right path of thinking about the performance of what you’re doing.

[A]: Yeah. And I mean there’s definitely a point in time. You’re talking about time spent where personalization has a diminishing return where, you know, you want to personalize, but if you’re taking, you know, forever to send each one of your emails, you’re not going to be able to send enough emails at the end of the day to get the links that you want.

[R]: Yeah. I mean I think that goes back to one of the things I was kind of touched on was, I don’t think necessary high placement is always something to be super proud of. It’s like you might see people brag, “Oh, I got 20% placement rate,” but you probably spend a ton of time to get those placements overall. Really, what you should brag about is the outcomes not the placement rate. Of course, they relate in some way, but they’re not necessarily the end game. What the end game is, is the outcome. Which I guess brings us to our final point in why people are probably watching this video is, what is a good placement rate based on that people still want? And to answer that question, what do you think that is, Andrew?

What is a Good Placement Rate?

[A]: Yeah, so like we said it kind of depends. But what we’ve found here, with what we’re doing at Siege is kind of the 5%-7% range. It tells you that you’re on track with the time spent that you’re spending on your emails. And the fact that your emails are effective and you converting those into links. That’s kind of what we’ve seen.

[R]: Yeah, I agree. I think if you’re really killing it from an outreach perspective, 7% is possible if you’re getting really good volume. If you’re going in 10% range, you might need to tailored back to personalization and get out more volume, of course, do that analysis of your outreach. And then with broken link building occasionally, that’s when those numbers might drop and get down to the 5% range. But 6% to 7% I think is still achievable if you have great content, and you’re performing, and doing great from an outreach perspective. So, yeah, hopefully, you found this video valuable. If you liked it, give us a thumbs up, subscribe, let us know what you thought.

[A]: Yup. Thanks for having me, Ross. And thanks for watching, guys.

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