Personas for Outreach
Ingredients
- Personas for SEO Deck
- Gmail (and Canned Responses found under Settings > Labs)
- Rapportive
- BananaTag
- Streak CRM
Directions
- If you don’t already have Personas for your target audience you’ll want to read through Mike King’s presentation on developing Personas for SEO. There are free tools in there to make quick ad-hoc personas.
- In Gmail make sure you have ‘Canned Responses’ feature turned on and open a new Compose email.
- Type in a template email, click on Canned Responses, and hit Save. Make sure to name it something like ‘Persona A – Msg 1’.
- For running an A/B test you’ll want to create 2 Message templates for each Persona. If you want to test more than 2 messages at a time that’s fine as well.
- If you don’t already use something like Buzzstream or Toutapp for sending your emails but still want to track things like Open Rate, Click Rate, Reply Rate, Install BananaTag which works inside of Gmail. They have a free option which is limited to 5 emails per day but their paid version is only $5/mo.
- When entering email addresses of link targets, look to the right of main compose section to see the information Rapportive has pulled on your target. Do they fit into one of the Personas you’ve identified? If so choose a Canned Response from their Persona group. Make sure to randomize between Message 1 and Message 2 for each Persona for a 50-50 mix.
- Make sure to keep Subject lines consistent as well so the A/B test doesn’t contain too many variables.
- Using BananaTag’s Email Analytics you can compare performance of Message 1 vs. Message 2 after a sample size you’re comfortable with.
- Scrap the worse performing message and continue testing new messages or just focus on the winning message until its efficacy declines.
- To keep track of your link building emails use the Streak CRM for Gmail which can be easily customized for link building purposes and also works within Gmail.

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