How to Segment Link Prospects for Scale

In today’s blog, we discuss the link prospecting module. We’re going to talk about segmenting your link prospects so you can send personalized emails at scale. Now, I want to clarify what I mean by “personalized emails.” In my opinion, good personalized emails are ones where the context of your pitch is relevant to something specific they’ve done or said, or something that’s important to them.

For example, if you wanted to get a link from a page on budgeting, saying something like this wouldn’t be personalized in my books. “Hey Mitch, I read your post on budgeting methods. I have a page on credit cards and how it can help people budget. Link to SEO experts UK.” All this shows is that you’ve extracted the main topic from the title. On the other hand, if you were to say something like… “Hey Mitch, I saw that you’re recommending the 50/30/20 rule in your budgeting guide.

Method for Budgeting

Not sure if you’re actually using this method for budgeting, but I tried it and it absolutely sucked. I found it to be flawed because of [this]. So I created a new budgeting method called the 90/5/5 rule which does [that]. My personal savings have gone up by 47% in the last year and should only compound going forward. Would love to get your feedback and perhaps a mention in your post if you dig it?” The context of the pitch, “feedback and a mention!”

A link, is relevant to something that they’ve said – and that’s recommending the 50/30/20 budget rule. Now, this blog is not about outreach pitches – we’ll get into that in a later module. The key takeaway from these examples is that linkable points AKA. The things that reveal your seed prospects, naturally make your outreach emails personalized. And because lookalike prospects are basically mirrors of your seeds, you can send almost the exact same email while maintaining the personalization factor, enabling you to scale your outreach campaigns.

Prospects by Segment

Now, to do it efficiently, all you need to do is group your prospects by segment. And each segment will get its own unique email. This, in my opinion, is a much better way to segment your link prospects compared to more common techniques based on metric groupings. Let’s run through an example of how we did this for our SEO stats page.

As I mentioned in previous blog, when we were creating our SEO statistics page, we looked at the anchors report of competing pages and noticed that the majority of links were attributable to a specific stat. you’ll see that the stat, 93%, which is  in the context of online experiences, has led to hundreds of referring domains.

But when we went to the page, there wasn’t even a mention of that stat on it. So we did some research and found a more recent stat and added that to our content – 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Now, by including this stat in our post, we could send a relevant pitch like: “Hey, you’re mentioning this 93% stat but it’s not on the page you’re linking to. Plus, that’s super outdated anyway. More recent research shows that 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine.” So with that solidified, we just needed to find lookalike prospects that mention the old stat, “93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.” To do that, we went to the Backlinks report and set the include filter to show backlinks that mention “93” in the anchor or surrounding text of backlinks.

Segment Over 800 Prospects

Just like that, we had a segment of over 800 prospects we could send virtually the same email to while keeping it personalized. Then we did the same thing for the next stat. And if we added that stat to our page, we would create another segment for our outreach campaign. And within an hour or so, our segments looked like this, where the stat column represents the segment, and the number of referring domains represents the size of the opportunity.

Also Read: Why Social Commerce Is The Future Of Online Selling

Now, let’s say that the number of links you got wasn’t enough to take pole position. How would you continue to find new lookalike prospects? Well, you could look for more seeds and lookalikes, or you can automate prospecting with your existing seeds with Ahrefs’ mentions or Backlinks Alerts. You can set up a backlinks alert with a competing URL and get notified when that page gets new links. But for link prospecting, I find mentions alerts to be much more effective.

Ahrefs’ Mentions alerts actually uses the same database as Content Explorer. So all you would need to do is set your search query to a footprint like “93% of online experiences” and set some base-level metrics filters. Now, anytime someone mentions that on a page and our crawler discovers it, you’ll get notified via email at your set interval and you can quickly reach out and ask for a link. This, my friends, is the power of segmentation.

Sound Like Monkey

I may sound like that monkey who won’t stop banging on the cymbals, but I really want to bring emphasis on the importance of these 3 steps in link prospecting. Finding good seed prospects helps you to carefully craft your content and define your pitch angles. Finding lookalike prospects helps you to create a sizable and relevant list of prospects. And segmentation helps you to scale personalized emails. Everything is connected. Now, when we had a list of well over a thousand link prospects, we didn’t just blindly email everyone who said a specific stat. There’s a process to choose who you should contact and that happens in the vetting stage.