Link building outreach: results and process from 515 emails

Executive overview

Getting links via cold outreach is increasingly competitive. More webmasters now demand exchanges, payment, or favours in return for a link. Ahrefs ran a controlled campaign — hiding the target page from all organic discovery — to isolate the true results of email outreach alone.

515 emails sent. 5.75% link acquisition rate on referring domains. A segmented, personalised approach drove a reply rate of 17.55%, roughly double the industry average.

Personalisation at the segment level — not the individual level — is the highest-leverage tactic in cold outreach.

Campaign results

• 515 emails sent; 473 deliverable, 42 bounced
• 83 replies (17.55% reply rate); 27 links from unique domains (5.75% conversion)
• 5 additional referring domains from organic discovery — total of 32 referring domains
• 36 editorial links from unique posts in total
• 28% of acquired links came from sites with DR 70+; one linking domain exceeds 1M monthly organic visits
• All links were editorial, on contextually relevant pages

Prospect research and segmentation

• Identified ~4,200 raw prospects from backlink profiles of top-ranking SEO statistics pages
• Used Ahrefs' Anchors report to find which specific stats were cited most (e.g. "93%" had 700+ linking domains)
• Built two outreach angles: (1) the page you link to doesn't mention the stat, (2) the stat is outdated — here's newer data
• Segmenting by stat allowed personalised emails at scale without manual effort per contact
• Deduplication and traffic filtering reduced 1,986 URLs to 902 prospects for manual vetting

Email finding and vetting

• Custom scraper extracted 741 author names from prospect URLs
• Hunter API returned 452 email addresses; NeverBounce filtered these to 168 valid, 92 catch-alls, 178 undeliverable
• Manual vetting applied criteria: excluded spammy pages, non-English sites, pages where no email could be found
• Outreach managed by one person working a few hours per week

Outreach template and personalisation

• Emails referenced the specific stat mentioned in the prospect's post — the segment defined the personalisation
• Template acknowledged the stat, flagged it as outdated, and offered a link to fresher data
• Closing was low-pressure: "Not sure if you're actively editing posts, but might be worth an update if you are? No pressure."
• Adding a first name is not personalisation — it is a merge field

Why conversion lagged behind reply rate

• 8 people requested link exchanges; 3 asked for payment; 6 asked for something else (free accounts, social shares)
• None of these were accepted — Ahrefs does not participate in link exchanges or pay for links
• Had exchanges and trades been accepted, referring domains would have reached 46 (9.7% conversion rate)
• 5 respondents linked to the original stat source rather than the pitched article — an inherent limitation of curated stats content
• No automated follow-ups were sent; Authority Hacker data suggests three follow-ups can double results

Key takeaways

• Outreach link acquisition is getting harder — more webmasters know the value of a link and ask for something in return
• Sending good, relevant emails still stands out against the volume of generic spam
• Segmented outreach at scale beats high-volume identical blasting
• Not following up was the single biggest lever left unpulled in this campaign
• Outreach for links remains worthwhile even at sub-10% conversion — quality and relevance of acquired links matter more than raw numbers