The 12 Reply Mistakes That Cost You Links

All right, the next very important topic is how you handle your emails. If you don't reply in a suitable way, you could lose the link. And then all the work you've done before is actually for nothing. So you really need to pay attention to how you handle responses and how you train your team on replying to prospects. These are some of the most common email reply mistakes. A tone break, a lack of personalization, an overly aggressive pitch, typos and grammatical errors, slow response time, unclear call to action, failure to address concerns, missing context or background, poor objection handling, hostility escalation, question deflection and spam-like appearance.

Now I won't give you examples of all of these, but I'll give you some email examples that sort of highlight all these different mistakes. But always keep in mind that when you reply indirectly, you're representing a brand, whether that's your own company or your client. And the worst thing that can happen is that somebody screenshots your bad reply and tweets it out, and then you have to deal with brand reputation damage or even your client suing you because you damaged their reputation. So let me show you. This is a response about someone where we didn't use the first name.

That can happen. Sometimes a person that inspects and personalizes a prospect forgets to do the first name. You know, all errors happen or sometimes it's just not there. So this prospect responded, and I've changed it a little bit for privacy. I need to be clear about something. You're asking to leverage my community, one that I've spent years building and cultivating, yet you haven't taken even a moment to learn who I am. Despite that information being clearly displayed on my site. So they're very upset. And this is a very common problem that link prospects have when you reach out to them, that you don't even look at their site, that you don't even pay attention to who they are and what they are about.

Because this usually means that you just want to get your link in there and you don't really care about their business goals or their audience. This is what you would like to say if you're in a bad mood or have a defensive style of reacting. Excuse me, I was doing you a favor by offering my content. I have thousands of followers who would love this. So you're clearly the one missing out. I didn't need to look up your name. My work speaks for itself. Maybe when you learn how to treat real professionals with respect, we can talk until then, good luck with your little website.

So here you can clearly see there's a very defensive attitude and that doesn't really help no one. It might give you really short term satisfaction, but it's only going to cause more problems. A person could also flag you for spam, and that means that your email address is burned and you really hurt your deliverability. So pay attention on how you treat each and every reply. You show that your ego, you have a dismissive tone, you're passive aggressive and you're using an emoji in a kind of offensive way. Now here you can see how most link builders reply.

Dear valued website owner. I completely understand your perspective. I just wanted to highlight that my unique high quality content will be a perfect fit for your esteemed audience. I assure you, it will be 100% original, thoroughly researched and crafted with your readers in mind. Looking forward to our mutually beneficial collaboration, Best Wishes. So here you can see it's a very generic greeting. They still haven't learned the name. They use a lot of fake flattery, a lot of buzzwords and a lot of overused phrases by link builders. And you sound very corporate like a corporate zombie.

Now, there's nothing wrong necessarily with corporate speak or being polite, but you kind of have to avoid using phrases that are so overused that they lose all meaning and value. They just apologized and then they straight went into their own agenda. So that's definitely a red flag for the link prospect is that you just focus on your own agenda. Also try to avoid overused link building phrases like unique and high quality and thoroughly researched. Even if you use words that might seem unique at the time, at some point, all the link builders will copy it.

So try to every once in a while, make sure you sound different than everyone out there. Also avoid empty platitudes. So like I said, they did apologize, but it didn't mean anything because they didn't really go into the reason. So while you can be polite and sound professional, do not use all these typically corporate expressions. So in general, there are a couple of guidelines that you can follow for any replies. Avoid begging because you want to be at the same level as the person that you're reaching to, maybe even above, but don't dominate, don't push.

But you want to be seen as a peer, as an equal, that creates a really good dynamic. You also don't want to put the person under pressure, push your own agenda. You actually want to be more laid back. So what I notice that often when you really let the person not feel obliged to do anything and you're really like, okay, I just want you to be completely comfortable with this. If not, no worries, just be like that. That often triggers them to actually do the thing that you want them to do. Also very important, don't dismiss anything they say. Any concerns or issues that they have, you don't want it to be the main focus of your reply, but you do want to address it.

So you can address it, you can basically sandwich it in between all these other things. And that way it doesn't become the one thing actually standing out in your response, but you don't want to completely ignore it. So what you do want to do is charm. You can do this in a very casual way, but you can also do this in a very polite, corporate, professional way. Up to you, what style you want to use. Make sure that you show that you've listened to them. And then advance to something concrete. Basically create a call to action to take the next step, but don't do that in a pushy way.

It has to be, it has to sound like you're already, it has to sound like you're already working together, but you're not pushing it. And that can be a quite sensitive balance. So I'm going to show you how to do this with AI because it can take a lot of headspace and your team can do this too. So upload the negative response in AI and you can prompt something like this. Create a really great response. It should be clear, concise, casual and charming and include something that points to some CTA. So that's for the advanced part, right? Create three different versions in these styles.

Samantha Irby, a serious modern-day editor and Lin-Manuel Miranda. These are things that work for me, right? But you can pick any style you want. Just play around with it. What I would do is to add to this prompt that they shouldn't use some of the typical AI phrases, what I call AI cheese. You can leave this out as well and just let the AI do its thing. If you use certain styles, it might also avoid these phrases. Let me show you some examples of the responses that I got from AI. So this is the more neutral response. So this is in the style of the modern professional editor.

You're absolutely right and I appreciate you pointing it out. My apologies, I got a little too enthusiastic about the idea and jumped the gun without doing the prep work. Totally my bad. I'm actually working on revising my approach now. Would you be open to taking a look at and then you send something? When I finished it, I'll aim to have it over to you by... And I really like the dates. This is what I use a lot because you're negotiating about a date, but the person hasn't even said yes. But in a very subtle way, you're kind of talking as if you're already working together, right?

So that's why you put the date and time there. I would give AI feedback to tweak this. For instance, jump the gun is a little bit violent language. And some editors might be sensitive to that. So you might want to use a different expression than jump the gun because this refers to weapons, right? So here you can see the couple of points that make it a better email than the other one. You acknowledge the mistake, you thank them for their feedback, you explain so there's no fake platitude. You take responsibility, you're not defensive. You focus on solutions.

So the solution is the biggest part of the email. Then you offer a next step, you provide a time line and you keep a professional tone. So the style is completely up to you. And even though this is casual, sort of casual, it's still professional. Now here's another example. This is more personable. This is more the style that I would do. Ouch and totally deserved. You're absolutely right. I got excited about the idea and completely dropped the ball and doing my homework. My mom would be so disappointed. She always says enthusiasm is no excuse for poor manners.

Would you be open to me buying your virtual coffee and properly pitching my ideas? Promise I'll come prepared this time. So this is still a little bit wordy for me. I would probably shorten it. Maybe the comment about the mom isn't so necessary. But at the same time, I've seen some of my team members send a pretty lengthy response and actually win the link. So just try stuff out. Don't overthink it as long as it's not offensive. So here again, you immediately own the mistake. You use humor and a personal anecdote, which shows you're an actual human.

You keep a light human tone. You show personality by staying professional and give it clear, but casual next step and your brief and genuine. Yeah, so I would usually also stick the closest to the truth because that's usually comes the easiest and doesn't trip you up later on. And here is an example for the truly weirdo. So you could play around with this if you want. This is I asked him to do something in the style of Hamilton. So here it's like, whoops, my flop, my fumble, my total flop, a fear not name. I'm not throwing away my shot. I'll fix it up, make a brand new polished pitch just for you.

I'll send it soon with bells and whistles this time. It'll blow your mind. No bristles. So this is only for for the some of you that that are risk takers because a person could get offended by, you know, you're being overly creative, playful, you acknowledge the play, you acknowledge the mistake, you take responsibility, you show how you're going to fix it, you're enthusiastic and positive, you promise improvements, you provide some sort of fake timeline and you show creativity and you have a popular reference. So popular reference is also really great, especially if you reach out to specific niches.

So let's say you reach out to it nerds or something like that. You could actually do a Star Wars reference or something else to make that connection with a person. And again, if it turns out that this person really doesn't want it, don't push, be laid back and just let it go. But at least you try to turn things around. Oh, another really efficient way to create email responses is using the AI email feature inside of a tool, for instance, Pitchbox. But you always have to check if the reply actually is correct or suitable and that you do address any concerns that that's the person has and that it really fits the style on how you want to handle replies.

But it can be really interesting to play around with email features like this. So here you can see this person wrote, dear name, thank you for your charming email. It made me smile. If you are interested in writing for name, our guidelines on what we're looking for and how to submit an article can be found here and then they have the guidelines. Right. So now you can choose your type of response. There are some settings you can do here as well. But I'm not going to go into that. You have to choose adaptive response and here you can choose your tone.

Right. I'm just going to do a casual tone in this case and then I'm going to click the AI button and now it's going to create a base reply that I can tweak. Let's see what it comes up with. You can see high first name. It's using the name. Thanks for sharing the submission guidelines. I'm excited to explore the possibility of contributing to site name. I'll review the guidelines and refine my pitches accordingly. Smiley face best Jamie. Hmm. It's a little bit too dry for me. So I would probably choose something else. Maybe friendly could work or empathetic.

Let's see what happens with friendly. But it's completely up to you. Right. How far you want to take it with being charming and casual. Or if you want to keep a more professional tone. Another thing you can do is actually add more flavor by using additional instructions. But you really have to play around with it. So especially if you have a team because they have to kind of follow your guidelines. Right. So what I can maybe say is include a pitch that fits fits their audience around Gen Z. Video tech and human resources. Keep keep it short. Casual charming in the style of let's say Samantha Irby is going to be a little bit wild and include a clear CTA.

Let's see. I can keep these instructions for future use. But in this case, I'm just going to use these instructions for this specific prospect. So now I'm going to change this again. I'm going to go to empathetic. Let's see what happens with that. All right. Here you can see the AI does handle extra instructions. Hi name. Thanks for the lovely response. I've got an article idea that might resonate with the audience from emojis empathy, how Gen Z is revolutionizing HR with video tech. This piece would explore how modern digital tools are reshaping communication and management in workplace, particularly to the tech savvy Gen Z, which would be interesting in seeing a draft of this concept.

So now you can see that it goes a little bit wild because this is not what she said. She was talking about the guidelines. So you have to be careful with her additional instructions and not give them too much information. But yeah, definitely play around with those types of features. If you're working with a team, it's really good to build a response playbook. So this has guidelines on it, but also something that helps them deal with the most common replies, because in the beginning, when you start link building, you could get scared from specific replies.

You don't know how to react. But when you're doing it for a while, a lot of these replies are the same. It doesn't happen that often that something happens that somebody replies in a way that's very unexpected. So when you're doing the inbox, you know it's the common replies and then you also include actions for difficult replies, you create base responses that your team can use to build their own response on. I wouldn't I wouldn't do templates because in my experience, when people reply back from a template, they can become a little bit too laid back and use templates, but not actually read the email at all.

So I would just use base responses and then they have to tweak it according to the response that they and then they have to tweak it to make it suitable for that specific prospect. Now, once you're done with noting all these common replies, including these actions and creating these base responses, you can actually create an SOP that also includes a workflow. So let's say somebody replies something like, oh, I want to go ahead and insert this link or whatever. You can also put that in your workflow on what they should do in the system that you have and what their next steps should be.

And I'll show you a little bit of my inbox SOP, but I do have to say it's something that does change regularly and sometimes people forget about it. I hope this will give you a little bit of a base to help start your own SOP. So in my case, I made a visual SOP, but you can make it in any way you want. And I also have recorded some videos and some articles, but this is just a quick way to look up what you're supposed to do with specific responses. So first off, the SOP asks, is this an auto reply? Yes or no? So let's say it's a yes, right? In that case, the auto reply can be different types of auto replies.

It can be don't email me. I'll get back to you, email someone else. I'm on vacation until, right? So let's go and look at the I'm on vacation. Then the next action is snooze email until set date. So what people do is that they when they go into the inbox and they see an auto reply in somebody's on vacation until a specific date, they snooze it until that date. Sometimes there's no date and then just snooze it maybe for two weeks or something. That's actually missing from the SOP so that should be in there. Or maybe they say don't email me. In those cases, you change the milestone to lost.

So this is something that we do in our company. And you mark the emails as unsubscribed and you archive the email. And these kind of actions are really good to keep a very clean inbox. So a lot of times what I see with people is that they don't archive the email. So every time somebody else gets into the inbox because maybe the inbox is shared with more people, another person goes through the same email. So it's really important to archive them. Otherwise, it's not efficient, right? So let's say it's not an auto reply. So in this case, I have a lot of options here.

Maybe somebody replies the article is live. So this could be already be a part of an ongoing conversation, right? Or maybe they say yes to an article. So let's open this one up. Yes. Did they pick a headline? So now you want to know did they actually in the case of guest post pitches, did they pick a headline? So we open this up and we have you can only pitch by submitting an article that could be an answer or yes, or they picked multiple. That can happen as well. Sometimes we have people that like all our pitches and they just want all of them, right?

And that can be your problem in the sense that maybe the client doesn't want to repeat links from that side. So then we have another solution. I think it's yeah, we order one article first and then we see if we can, if the opportunity is a good one, if we can swing it to other projects for the subsequent articles, right? So that's how you can reuse the prospect if it's suitable. And here you can see did they pick a headline? If they say yes, there's a lot of actions there and you can only pitch by submitting an article. That's when you tag it as submit only and you notify your team leads.

So in those cases, we kind of look at its case by case if it's a really good side and it seems like there's a really good chance that they could accept it. So in an inbox SOP, you can also, for some cases where they don't know what to do or they can't take the next step, you can put as an instruction to note your team lead and that can really help prevent things from just getting lost in the ether. So yeah, this SOP is quite extensive, so I'm not going to show the whole thing. And you don't have to build it out right away when you just start link building.

You can just start noticing things that keep coming back. And if they keep coming back and it's quite clear what the next steps are, you could put it in your SOP. All right, so in short, this is the way to put yourself above a majority of the link builders when it comes to how you reply in the inbox after you've done the outreach. Because the work, as I said before, doesn't stop there. So one thing I definitely recommend to save you some headspace and energy is to use AI as a base for responses. But don't just stop at the most generic prompt you can think of.

Don't ask the AI for a good email response. Really give it some added, really give it some additional instructions about the style that you wanted to have, if you want it short or long and what things should be added. Also, really pay attention to what your prospect says. One of the most annoying things for link prospects is when they raise a concern or ask a question that you don't address these in a good way, and that really can hurt your conversion rate. The people really want to have the feeling that you actually listen to them. And the third most important thing is to create an SOP, especially if you work with a team, create an SOP, create guidelines on how to reply.

And if possible, also create some instructions how to do the workflow after that you reply, because that will save you a lot of time. I would definitely recommend in the beginning to practice a lot with your team. So have them create mock responses to actual replies from the inbox, because this ensures that they reply in a way that fits your brand and the brand of your potential clients. If you don't invest that much time and attention in the beginning, it can definitely hurt your business and your links overall.