The outreach email that gets a reply

Four sentences. What you noticed on their page, why it matters to their reader, what you have, and a line that makes it easy to say no.

Subject: broken link on your uptime guide

Hi Marta,

The link to statuscheck.io in your uptime monitoring guide has been
dead since the tool closed, in the section on status pages. We built a
free checker that does the same job without an account:
pingfox.com/tools/status-page-checker. Worth a look for that section,
and the dead link is worth removing either way.

Thomas
pingfox.com

• Subject line: what it is about, in five words, lowercase, no urgency.
• First sentence: their page, named specifically enough that you clearly opened it.
• Second sentence: the thing you have, as a URL, with what it does in one clause.
• Third sentence: permission to ignore you.
• Signature: your name and your domain. No title, no logo, no legal footer.

The author, not the company. An email to info@ arrives nowhere, and a contact form arrives in a queue nobody reads.

1. 1

   Start at the byline

   Most articles name a writer and link to their profile. That profile often carries an email or a personal site with one.

2. 2

   Try the personal site

   Writers who take pitches usually say so on their own site, sometimes with the exact subject line they want.

3. 3

   Then the professional network

   A short message on LinkedIn to the person who wrote the page is fair, and often faster than email.

4. 4

   Last, the pattern

   If the site publishes addresses in a known pattern, use it once. Do not run a guessing tool through ten variants: bouncing four addresses is how a domain gets a bad reputation.

The template matters far less than the reason you are writing. These are the openings that exist, from the ones editors act on to the ones they delete unread.

Notice that the top three are about their page and the bottom three are about yours. Choose targets where you can honestly use one of the first three, and skip the rest rather than writing a weaker email.

Editors recognise these instantly, because they receive them daily. Any one of them ends the email.

The fix for all of them is the same: open with a fact about their page that you could only know by reading it.

The email is one-sided by design. You are offering something that helps their page, and nothing else.

• You can offer: the replacement page, the corrected fact, the raw data, an answer to a question, a screenshot they can use.
• You cannot offer: money for the link, a reciprocal link, a free plan in exchange, or anything of value in return for a link that carries no rel attribute.
• You can say who you are and that you built the thing. Hiding it is how a fair email becomes spam.
• You can ask once more, a week later, in two sentences.

Those offers are not a matter of taste. Buying links, trading links at scale and paying with products for unmarked links are all named in Google's link spam policy, and the links that result are ignored anyway.

One follow-up, a week later, in the same thread, shorter than the first. Then never again about that page.

Hi Marta, just bumping this once in case it got buried. The dead link
is in the status pages section. No worries if it is not useful.

Thomas

Two follow-ups is a sequence, and a sequence is what everybody else is running. The people you want a link from are exactly the people who notice.

Six columns in a spreadsheet. You need it so you never write to the same person twice about the same thing, and so you can tell which kind of email works in your field.

After thirty emails the sheet tells you something real: which angle gets answered in your category, and which pages are worth building next. That is worth more than any template, including this one.