Reaching out to Prospects

Once you have narrowed the list of prospects down, based on their quality, authority, and relevance - you should end up with a list of website owners you are willing to contact with a proposal.

Collecting prospects' contact details

First off, you'll need to gather the emails you can reach the prospects at. In LinkAssistant you can quickly harvest the email addresses for the found prospects, if available on their websites: simply add the Prospect Email column to your workspace, and update the column on-hover; or select the prospects to be checked > click the Update button > choose Contact Info factor.

In case no contact details are found for the prospect by the program, you can enter the email address manually if known: simply hover over any prospect or double-click on it to edit its settings, and enter the address in the Prospect Email filed, then save changes.

Connecting your email account

LinkAssistant has an in-built mailing module to let you reach out to prospects right in-app, in a few clicks, and keep all the correspondence in one place.

To start using the mailing module, you'll need to set up your email account first. To do so, go to Email module and click on the Settings button to connect your email. In the wizard that pops up, you'll need to specify the Sender Name, and enter your email address and password. Optionally, you can Configure Advanced Settings in the next steps if you tick the box (you may need that for a custom email address that may have uncommon server/port/security settings to connect to third-party apps).

If you move on to configuring advanced settings, in Step 2 you'll need to enter the Incoming mail settings, including server, port, username and password, and security settings.

IMPORTANT: the software does not support IMAP, so to connect an email account you need to make sure that POP is enabled in its settings directly. If you're using a standard Gmail account, this can be done in General account settings in Forwarding and POP/IMAP section.

In Step 3 you'll be asked to specify the Outgoing mail settings, including server, port, security, and authentication settings.

Step 4 will enable you to adjust the settings that should be used to manage messages on your server.

Alternatively, you can connect the email account or change the existing settings from under 'Preferences > Email Management > Email Client'. Under each settings section, you'll find the Test Connection button to make sure the settings are correct and the account is connected successfully.

Managing your mailbox

Once your account is connected to the project, the Email module will allow you to fetch emails from e-mail server (Receive button), switch between your mailbox folders, open any of the existing emails to view the contents in the tab below. You can mark any of the emails read/unread or flag any important letters for easy reference. Right-clicking any of the emails, you can add sender to Prospects, change its status, assign anchor details to the prospect, or manage the message itself (reply, delete or move to another folder).

Hit the Reply button to compose a message in reply to any selected email. Once done, you can Send it right away, or put to Outbox for the time being.

Reach out to Prospects

To make the outreach process a piece of cake, LinkAssistant is equipped with a number of predefined email templates you can use for common situations. The templates include pre-written text for rather standard requests like Guest Posting Inquiry or Link Removal Request and others, with your data being applied automatically (project website, prospect's domain, etc). You can Edit, Clone, or Remove any template, or create your own ones. The full list of templates can be found and managed under 'Preferences > Email Management > Email Templates'.

Once everything is set up, you can start sending emails to prospects. Select the prospects that you'd like to contact with the same proposal, and hit the Email button. Choose one of the templates in the dropdown, adjust the text if necessary, and either Send emails out or put them to Outbox.

If you have any history with a prospect, you can hover over its Prospect Email and click on the envelope icon to get to the Email module and see all the emails associated with the given prospect, filtered out automatically.

This way you can create a bunch of emails using corresponding templates for each group of prospects, then revise the emails in the Outbox folder. You can send all emails from Outbox by clicking Send or double-click any individual email to send it out alone.

Right after sending the letters out, you can go to Sent folder, choose the prospects you've just emailed and click to Set Status, or access the same option from the right-click context menu. You can select any of the predefined statuses, or Add/Edit any. Assigning a status will help you track the progress with any particular prospect, and quickly see at which stage your conversation currently is.

In Inbox, you can select any prospect's email and click the Add button to harvest all the URLs from an email and add any of them to Prospects, or as your existing backlinks (to further monitor the backlinks you gained).