What is the best wording you have seen in an outreach email?

[tonyatfat]

We all get them and most of them are rubbish, very few of them have taken the effort to find out who they are emailing. So making it personal and doing some research first is essential but what about the wording of the email... can you share examples you like & that have had more success for you than others?

[SteveOllington]

Something that meets all of the following criteria:

• Transparent/Honest/Genuine (not insulting my intelligence with obvious blags)
• WIIFM (Offers me something of value, clearly defined and not a load of baloney)
• Personalized enough that research has obviously been carried out about our company (so not generic)
• An apology for contacting out of the blue along with an unsubscribe/removal from list option for is I'm unhappy about it
• Something simple, clear, straight to the point immediately as I don't have time to read lots of rubbish
• Nothing with offers or sales pitches of any kind of products or services
• Nothing from a throw-away email address, spoofed domain, or a domain that has an unfinished template site
• Nothing with an irrelevant subject purposely trying to deceive me into opening it

With that lot covered it wouldn't get deleted instantly

[EGOL]

Get to the point FAST with WIFM.

One sentence of yada yada yada text and I hit "mark as spam" or ban all future emails from your domain from my inbox.

If I don't reply to your email don't call me on the phone... I will not be nice to you and you will hear my employees laughing in the background.

[SteveOllington]

Haha excellent... if we had forum sigs in here, mine would be:

"If I don't reply to your email don't call me on the phone... I will not be nice to you and you will hear my employees laughing in the background." - EGOL, 2011

[EGOL]

They were laughing last week because I yelled the F word at some weasel who called me on the phone.

I am usually a nice and helpful person but when someone interrupts me,  tries to use me and doesn't take "no" gracefully, I get really mad.

[asimahme]

My most successful emails have consisted of the following

• Ego-Stroking:  Make them feel like they are important and valuable
• WIFM:  People want to know what are they getting first before you can really grab their attention and negotiate a link/social mention/interview/ etc.
• Personalized:  Obviously don't be a robot and try to be genuine.

Also when contacting other webmasters/bloggers try to find out what kind of person they are, meaning are they humorous, boring, academic, liberal, etc.  The reason why is because people enjoy like minded individuals, so if you find a webmaster/blogger that tries to be funny in their blog posts than try to add some kind of humor in your email outreach.

This might sound like a sketchy method, but I have seen some good results out of trying to personalize my emails to match the webmasters/bloggers personality.