NinjaOutreach Review: The ultimate link-building black book - outreach emails included
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TL;DR
NinjaOutreach is an able side-kick for any SEO agency or enthusiast, helping you to quickly find and secure potential backlinking opportunities. Forget manual outreach. The service’s core features, such as an email address finder and auto-follow-ups, can also be put to use to get more guest-posts, source new business leads, land product reviews with influencers, and more.
NinjaOutreach Pros
- Recent UI makeover
- Powerful searching
- Email finder and auto follow-ups
NinjaOutreach Cons
- Contact info not always found
- Pricey for occasional use
The Story
What is NinjaOutreach?
NinjaOutreach is a collection of outreach tools for sourcing and securing prime backlinking opportunities. The service’s directory grants you instant access to over 6,000,000 bloggers and 25,000,000 influencers, and then (and this is the clever bit) their respective email addresses. Once you have their all-important contact details, NinjaOutreach can also take care of the outreach part with personalised emails, auto follow-ups, and reply tracking. Where an email doesn’t exist, it can autofill contact forms for you.
Whilst it positions itself firmly in the blogger backlink space, NinjaOutreach can be creatively power your lead generation, promoting your crowdfunding campaigns, running an influencer marketing agency, PR outreach, and much, much more.
Meet the Maker:
Dinesh Agarwal
We originally spoke to Dinesh back in 2019. Read about his background in trading his development skills for equity in startups, finding product/market fit with Recurpost and where he hopes to take the service next.
The Product
How we tested NinjaOutreach for this review
NinjaOutreach offers full access on a 7 day free trial – plenty of time for a review. The service has pivoted somewhat from then to focus on influencer marketing, however the features remain the same.
We used it to find potential backlinks and cross-posting openings for our agency blog. After searching and filtering for popular articles on similar subjects, emailing from within the system achieved results in line with my expectations.
Of 116 leads, we got a 61.36% open rate, 2.27% click rate and 14% reply rate, however a good number of these were out of office or another form of automated replies. Ultimately, it got us 3 additional links to the website of 20-35 domain authority. Not bad.
Getting started with NinjaOutreach
Make sure you take advantage of the free trial. You’ll need to enter your card details, however you will not be charged as long as you remember to cancel it before the 7 days are up.
Once you’re in, everything is pretty intuitive. The onboard assistant presents step-by-step guides of how to get started and search leads, add them into a list, create templates, schedule a campaign and so on. Stick to the basics and your campaign can be ready to go in 20-30 minutes max.
However, invest some time mastering the advance filters (e.g. show only targets with high social influence and engagement) and you’ll get a lot more out of your autopilot outreach. Far better than doing all that manual work yourself!
NinjaOutreach features you’ll love
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On-tap backlink opportunities
🚰Get instant access to millions of potential business leads and backlink targets, in any niche and location. Just type your keywords to access their profiles, including validated email addresses. Results are incredibly quick.
Also, it might be you’re only interested in academics, public sector professionals or bloggers in a specific part of the world. No problem. NinjaOutreach allows you to specify a domain type for your business leads. Choose by authority, such as .org, .edu, and .gov sites, or by location, such as .ca, co.uk, .au, and more.
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Build influencer campaigns
😇It’s no stretch to say someone could run an influencer marketing agency off NinjaOutreach alone.
NinjaOutreach’s search results include rich data about an influencer’s engagement levels and their usual cost per sponsored post. Its AI assistant will also make sure you don’t miss any low-hanging fruit with proactive suggestions.
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Campaign management
🎯You’ve found your targets, now the outreach begins. You can then manage your influencer campaign with the built-in CRM – add notes and track conversation histories, email opens, clicks, and replies.
A single campaign inbox also keeps everything in one place. Syncing NinjaOutreach with your preferred email client lets you to send emails from your organisation’s domain.
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Messaging templates
💌There’s also a solid selection of templates to stop you needing to rewrite the same message again and again. I customised the link building one, added a few custom fields, assigned the follow-up message and it was good to go. This part of the process was way easier than I expected.
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A killer Chrome extension
🕵️If being able import leads directly from Google and autofill contact forms wasn’t already enough, NinjaOutreach’s Chrome extension enables advanced data mining on any website you’re visiting.
Spy on competitors and swat up on leads, by learning: Page links; Domain Authority; Social shares and follower counts; Backlinks, and much, much more. You can also view key demographic information, such as: Bounce Rate; Daily Pageviews Per Visitor; Gender of Visitor; Visitor Location.
Things to consider
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Saves lots of manual work
Outreach of any kind is time-consuming. Hours invested in networking events or compiling emails. With NinjaOutreach’s search tools, templates and auto follow-up features, the time and money spent setting it all up should pay for itself many times over. One thing’s for sure: you’ll never want to manually do it yourself again.
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The Skyscraper Technique
Perform this much-hailed SEO hack, as originally championed by Backlinko’s Brian Dean. Here’s how it works: You start by researching popular pre-existing content across the topic areas your business typically covers. The demand is already there and proven. Then you improve the content with an article of your own, significantly higher in quality and in greater depth. The aim being to outrank them and pick up valuable traffic and backlinks. NinjaOutreach can help to build a list of potential distribution partners and automatically find their email addresses.
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No email address? No problem
In addition to assigning email addresses to the leads you add to your list NinjaOutreach can also find the individual email address of a particular person at a company. Simply put the company’s domain name in the domain form field and hit ‘Search’ and it’ll appear. Not sure where this stands on a GDPR front but it’s extremely clever.
NinjaOutreach Pricing & Offers
from $119 per month
Pricing is tiered dependent on number of team members, monthly email limits and connected email accounts. All features stay the same.
Plans may be cancelled at any time during the 7-day trial period and plans start at $119 per month (was $99 at the time of review) after that.
NinjaOutreach Alternatives
The obvious starting point for sales is manual outreach. NinjaOutreach promises to put that numbers game on steriods.
When it comes to other sales SaaS, the closest we’ve encountered to a NinjaOutreach competitor is Autopilot, Woodpecker, HubSpot and SEMrush. Opting for NinjaOutreach is a vote for finding the email addresses of people you’ve never met - something only SEMrush only offers in that pack.
Sure, SEMrush does an awful lot more with its full SEO/SEM stack but they both SEMrush and NinjaOutreach deliver high-quality records backlink leads and can be trusted with email outreach and auto follow-ups.
SEMrush and NinjaOutreach have similar daily sent limits too so choosing who to go with comes down to how much you value the extra features you get with SEMrush.
NinjaOutreach Support 👍 or 👎
I didn’t have cause to contact NinjaOutreach - the service was that straightforward. Generally they aim to respond to everything within the hour, which is incredibly fast!
The Verdict
Surges score
81%As somebody whose previous link building strategy was to rely on ad hoc press coverage, I’m really impressed with how effortless NinjaOutreach makes it all. I can see the powerful possibilities, not just in link building, but for guest posting, influencer marketing and content promotion.
Finding highly targeted leads with NinjaOutreach was a breeze, with search results producing hundreds of results and their email addresses in a matter of seconds. There’s lots of other tools that promise to do the same, however none of them come close in terms of quantity and ease of use in my opinion. One small caveat: not all of the returned results will be relevant. This is where advanced targeting comes in. Some articles would also turn out to be 404s and others many years old. NinjaOutreach could quickly resolve this by allowing you to filter by page publish date.
Its strongest feature is the ease of emailing and setting-up auto follow-ups. This eliminates a mountain of manual work and actually produces results. I only sent emails to 100 highly targeted leads in total and managed to secure three, however I did get many more offers of links – for a price. I wasn’t willing to pay people to link to my content, however I’m well aware others would be happy to. By targeting resource pages with more compelling content or a tool of my own, I’m sure it would have performed even better.
NinjaOutreach isn’t ‘cheap’ but it knows its worth. The 7-day free trial only permits the launch of a single outreach campaign but this should be more than enough to know if it’s right for you.
Last but not least, the responsive support from Tarek and the team is worthy of mention. They were on hand to answer questions all hours of the day, every day of the week.
Claim your free 7-day NinjaOutreach trial below.
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