How to email 90% of your website visitors (legally)

Helloooo content connoisseurs.

It’s Perrin from Content Bites.

Content marketing is usually just getting tons of people to look at something you made & crossing your fingers that a tiny % will reach out to you somehow. But what if you could reach out to THEM? Well, you can, nerds. Today, I’m going to show you how.

• Appetizers: Links from HubSpot, Moz, Ahrefs, and more…

• Main Course: How to email 90% of the people who visit your site (legally)

Let’s dig in.

Appetizers: Content about content 🤯

• How to Do A/B Testing: 15 Steps for the Perfect Split Test (link)

• What Is Google Discover, and How Can You Boost Your Traffic? (link)

• Influencer Marketing Campaigns Taking Over Our Feeds (link)

• How To Find and Include More Underrepresented Voices in Your Content (link)

• Website Traffic Down? Maybe It’s Not Your Fault (link)

Main Course: How to email 90% of the people who visit your site (legally)

This has always been problem with content marketing: you do a bunch of work to get people to your website, and you only hear from a very, very small percentage of them.

Content marketing is inherently inefficient. 

And that’s usually not even because the people who end up landing on your content aren’t good fits for what you sell.

Often it’s because they just don’t know you well enough yet, and it takes more effort and more time to get them to view more content. 

The limiting factor is not the content. And most of the time time, it’s not even the visitor.

The limiting factor is that website visitors are anonymous. And if you want to keep talking to them, you have to get them on an email list or have a live chat or otherwise rely on them taking action to keep the conversation going.

But lemme give you a big fat “what if”... 

…what if you could email literally 90% of the people who even landed on that page? And beyond even that, what if 90% of the people who viewed your content got an awesome, personalized email sequence without joining your newsletter or whatever. 

What if, in a content campaign where you generated 10,000 eyeballs, you could immediately email 9,000 of those people (or even just the 1,000 most engaged).

How much better would your content campaigns be? 

How much would that shorten the typical 8 touches it takes to get someone to take action?

Sound awesome? Sound profitable? But maybe (probably) even sound a little illegal? 

Trust me, I’m with you.

But there’s a way to do it legally & in a chill enough way that everyone benefits. 

Quick confession

I have not done this very much in practice. I’ve dabbled. But not at scale.

So when you read the following, please keep in mind that I very much have my journalist hat on more than my marketing-guy-who’s-been-there-done-that hat. 

That said, I have seen these systems in practice up close. These tools have also evolved a great deal from a technological standpoint since I last played with them myself, which is partly what got me so pumped to write this. 

And if I were launching a brand new content campaign – especially for a B2B company – I would 11/10 deploy this on Day 1. 

Please note: This is also NOT sponsored, and there are no affiliate links. I AM going to be talking about one specific tool, and if you want to deploy this tactic, you probably need that tool, but I’m not associated with them in any way. 

Enough rambling. Let’s actually get into it. 

10,000-ft view of what I’m actually talking about

I’m talking about visitor intelligence software (but a very specific one) + automation systems to clean data & send emails. 

Visitor intelligence software = software that uses data matching technology to guess who website visitors are.

Most of them are bad. 

They can sometimes find emails and locations of website visitors, but generally not more than that. It rarely finds names. 

One of them is good. 

The good one is called PearlDiver (this is not an affiliate link, but you’ve probably heard me mention it a couple time before). 

The reason PearlDiver is so good is that it does a much better job of finding real information from website visitors. 

It frequently finds stuff like:

• Names

• Emails

• Company

• LinkedIn profiles

• Etc. 

How does it do this legally? 

It’s legal because it doesn’t extract the data above from the user. PearlDiver has a massive database of existing public user information.

When a user visitors your site, it takes data websites normally extract from a run-of-the-mill website visit (IP, location, device, that kind of thing) and runs an algorithm to match it to its larger database of user data. 

And if it finds a match, it spits out the data. It looks like this in spreadsheet form (blurred out a bunch, but you get the idea). 

And with that data… you can run email campaigns (please read the info about the legalities of cold email campaigns below before you do this, though). 

Here are what the steps would look like (there are only like 3 steps)… 

Step #1: Run a content campaign to get eyeballs.

Everything we’ve talked about in this community works to get eyeballs (e.g. my post on how to promote content on Reddit for free & without getting banned). 

But anything works. 

Whatever you do to get traffic – instagram, ads, YouTube – whatever it is, create some content and do yo thang. 

Get the eyeballs by any means necessary. 

As a quick note, this whole strategy will work a helluva lot better if you’re promoting bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) content. 

Remember: the whole idea is to get people to the website & immediately contact them 1:1. If you’re pulling people into your content through the top of the funnel, you’re going to end up wasting tons and tons of time reaching out to folks who may have just had a passing interest in the information. 

But if, say, you post the ultimate comparison guide on cybersecurity tools (or whatever), which would be much closer to the bottom of the funnel…

…those folks are much, much more likely to be receptive to an additional conversation, especially if you add more value (more on this below). 

Step #2: Gather and segment data with PearlDiver

The real power of PearlDiver is its ability to segment. 

You can do all kinds of segmentation in PearlDiver. 

But two that seem particularly powerful are:

• Visitors with a business email address (for B2B stuff, because they were likely browsing from work, and they’re more likely to be actively looking for solutions). 

• Visitors who have returned to your site multiple times times

Looks like this inside of PearlDiver (screenshot). 

This is very different than just emailing 90% of people who land on your site. 

But this is what I recommend. It’s 100x more energy efficient, and you’re a lot more likely to have productive conversations. 

If you don’t yet have a ton of traffic, don’t segment anyone, and just email everyone. But if you have reasonable amounts of traffic, you’ll probably get better results from segmenting. 

You can play around with segments (PearlDiver calls them “audiences) to dial this up or down, but in general, segments will make it easier to reach out to the most engaged people.

It’s also worth noting that PearlDiver includes its own segment called “pearls,” which is essentially just a group with the highest engagement.

So you can always just use that. 

Step #3: Automate & send email 

By now, you’ve gotten some eyeballs on your stuff, and you’ve gathered and segmented data with PearlDiver. 

Next step is to reach out to them. 

Before you do that please read this sh*t: 

This is cold email. It’s very different than an opted-in newsletter. There are different laws, and you should be extremely careful following them. Cold email is perfectly legal, and lots and lots of companies do it all the time, but if you do it wrong, the penalties are steep. The 3 most important rules are:

• You need to give people an easy way to unsubscribe

• You can’t be deceptive in any way

• You need to have your physical address at the bottom of the email

And most importantly, DO NOT add these people to your newsletter (or anything else) without their permission. 

After you make sure you’re following the rules, all you gotta do is email folks.

Of course, it would take a crazy amount of time to do that manually, so I recommend cold email software. 

The easiest/cheapest one I’ve used is Saleshandy (not affiliated). This is good if you’re using only one account and sending less than 20 emails/day. 

For more sending volume, you can use Instantly.ai (not affiliated with them either). They have loads of bells and whistles for big sending, and (if you buy a bunch of domains) you can send virtually unlimited emails. 

Then, you would follow a process like:

• Write an email sequence 

• Export data from PearlDiver periodically

• Upload the leads to Saleshandy or Instantly

• Run the sequence automatically

• Engage with people 1:1 and nudge toward action

Now, let’s talk quickly about the email sequence. 

What should you send? 

I don’t know with any kind of certainty because I don’t have much experience; the technology just wasn’t there last time I tried it. 

But I DO have a lot of experience with cold email. And this is what usually works with cold email:

• Being transparent

• Being genuine

• Relating to people

• Being casual & not salesy

• A low-stakes CTA

So, if it were me, I’d probably test something like this first:

“Hey [TheirName] – I have some software that tells me who’s browsing my site and saw you were looking at the guide I wrote: Ultimate Guide for Expense Tracking Software.

Really appreciate you reading. 

Are you in the accounting space?

If so I actually compiled more data on expense tracking software in a private spreadsheet. Happy to give you access if you want.” 

Basically, I’d try to make it the most casual lead magnet offer of all time. 

If they say yes, I’d send them the lead magnet & ask for something else (probably to add to an email list or something).

If I was selling something very high-ticket (think: enterprise software or consulting or something), I’d offer free help or free services or anything else that would start a super no-brainer engagement. 

You can really go ham, but the whole idea is just to be able to use content to start real-life conversations we might have never had otherwise. 

Super powerful stuff.

Summary of how I’d do this: 

• Run a content campaign to get eyeballs

• Gather data & segment with PearlDiver

• Use cold email software to automatically reach out to people

• Ultra-soft pitch lead magnets (or anything else)

That’s the issue. If you missed last week’s issue, you can read it here.

Go forth & conquer.

—Perrin