This is the cold email plan we'd run for a link building agency that serves one industry. It leans on one simple fact. A company's links and its competitors' links are public and you can compare them in a minute.
Your market is every company in your industry where rankings decide who gets the client and where good content already exists. Links help a good page rank. They do very little for a site with nothing worth linking to.
Narrow the list to companies with decent content and weak authority. Those are the ones where links make the clearest difference. These are the signals worth looking for.
Ahrefs or Semrush shows how many sites link to a company and to its competitors. A company with a fraction of its rival's links and similar content has a clear gap.
Pages with solid content that sit between position 11 and 20 are often short on authority. Ahrefs lists them by keyword.
Ahrefs shows new links by month. A competitor adding links month after month while this company stands still is a race worth pointing out.
Ahrefs lists links from other sites that point to pages which no longer exist. Those links are wasted until someone adds a redirect.
News articles and industry sites sometimes mention the company by name and never link. Search their name in quotes and check the results.
A company that publishes a survey or a report has something reporters and bloggers want to cite. A report with few links pointing at it was never promoted.
Lead with the two link counts side by side.
Lead with the number of broken links and one example from a site they'd recognize.
Lead with their own report and the kinds of sites that should be citing it.
Lead with the one page closest to page one and what it would take to push it over.
Legal links and software links come from different places. Keep the campaigns apart so the examples always fit.
The best lead magnet here is a list they could act on today. Their rivals' links make it personal.
Twenty-five sites that link to their two closest competitors and not to them. Ahrefs builds it with its link intersect report in a few minutes a company.
It works because it is a ready target list with their rivals already on it. The obvious next step is someone going out and earning those links.
The links pointing at broken pages on their site with the redirect that recovers each one. Their developer can fix it in an afternoon.
It works because it gives them something back right away. Once they see links sitting there unused they ask what else is being missed.
Pick a handful of sites from the gap list and earn the first links at no charge. Share the live links as they land.
It works because it is the same work the retainer pays for. Live links are proof they can click.
Set a clear window like 30 days so both sides know when to judge it.
For companies with lots of broken links. Build the redirect file that recovers them and hand it over.
Hi {{first_name}},
{{competitor}} has links from {{competitor_domains}} sites. {{company}} has {{company_domains}}.
Pulled the 25 sites that link to them and not to you. A few of them cover {{industry}} every week.
Want the list?
{{sender_first_name}}
Hi {{first_name}},
{{broken_count}} sites link to pages on {{company}}'s site that no longer load. One of them is {{example_site}}.
Those links do nothing until the old pages are redirected.
I mapped each one to the right page. Should I send the file?
{{sender_first_name}}
Hi {{first_name}},
We earn links for {{industry}} companies from sites their buyers already read.
{{proof_line}}
Worth a conversation?
{{sender_first_name}}
Swap {{proof_line}} for one real result of your own. A page that climbed after you built links to it. If there is no result yet then leave the line out.
At small companies the founder or the head of marketing decides. At bigger ones it is the head of search or content.
Results depend on the offer and the list. Three outbound agencies that publish their own numbers land between one booked meeting per 1,000 people contacted and one per 2,000. One of them also tested 650,000 cold emails with a plain offer and got about 3 to 6 interested replies per 10,000 people.
Those are other people's numbers and not a promise about your market. Your market's number only comes from testing it.
We build and run this campaign for one agency per industry.
Thirty minutes on your market and how we'd reach it.