Create A Subject Line That Will Get Your Linkbuilding Email Opened

Posted in Link Building. Written by Justin Freid on December 17th, 2009

When I first broke into the SEO industry I was quite inexperienced but at the same time I was very ambitious and eager to learn. One of the first projects worked on was a major link building campaign. This involved both building new links and reaching out to current link partners and attempting to have them change the anchor text to one of the keywords I was attempting to rank for.

For this specific site, it had a great brand name and has been active online since 1996. So the amount of back links was staggering. There were hundreds of links pointing back to the domain with the brand name as anchor text that had PR of 5 and 6. So I looked at this as a great opportunity to work with some people who already saw this website as a resource and was able to pull quite a bit of data from my work.

I am pretty anal when it comes to keeping track of my work and kept thorough notes in excel of different content used in the email and most of all different subject lines I used and how often I received positive responses to those emails.

To make the data a little easier to work with and to decrease the variables involved, I used the following email with two different subject lines.

Dear NAME,

My name is Justin Freid and I work for COMPANY, first off I wanted to thank you for placing a link on your website to our site. We do see quite a bit of visitors coming over from your site.

In the coming months we will be re-launching our site and rebranding our website underneath the term “KEYWORD”. I was hoping it would be possible for you to change the anchor text of the link to “Keyword”

If this is at all possible it would be greatly appreciated. If you have any questions about the new site please feel free to call or email me.

We were not always launching a new site, but it did make it seem to the email receiver that there was a reason behind the request and not just relating to SEO. Keep in mind not everyone understands what SEO is. You may run into someone who does not understand the value of anchor text.

Now back to the data – I sent out 300 of the above email. For 150 of them I used the email subject line “Your current link to COMPANY.com” and for the second 150 I used the subject line “Changing anchor text of link to COMPANY.com”

I had a much higher success rate with the subject line “Your current link to COMPANY.com” as you can see from the data below. I actually double the amount of success I had with this subject line.

This subject line did not jump out as a request right off the bat and showed that I had dug deep into their site to find a link to this specific site. Once the linker opened the email they saw I was contacting them for a legit reason and not some fly by night email marketer looking for a quick link.

Here are the stats:

Subject line	Emails Sent	Anchor Text Changed	%
Your Current Link to COMPANY.com	150	36	24%
Changing anchor text of link to COMPANY.com	150	18	12%

So I guess in the end the first step in getting someone to change the current anchor text of a link to your site is to get them to open the email. When drafting the email make sure to not be too pushy or ask for something right off the bat. Present a valid reason why you would like this task to be done and hopefully you’ll get what you ask for.

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