Beginner’s Guide to Automate Lead Generation with Email Outreach

Here’s a step-by-step guide to automate your lead generation with email outreach.

BUILD TARGET LIST

Finding the right audience is critical.

1. Find relevant companies and contacts using tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, LeadCandy, etc. You can search for prospects using various criteria, and build your list of target companies with relevant contacts at those companies.
2. Reverse lookup via web technologies your target customers typically use. Tools like BuiltWith, WhatRuns, SimilarTech give you the list of companies using a given technology. Example, if your target companies use AWS Cloud, then you need a list of AWS Cloud users.
3. Find your competitors prospects using Smart Lead List. These people are already interested in the kind of solutions you provide, and they are engaging with your competitors in some or the other way. Moreover, they may be at various stages of their purchase decision-making.
4. Find people using complementary products using Smart Lead List. Example, if you have a referral hiring product, then ATS (applicant tracking systems) will be a complementary product, and you can get a list of customers using various ATS (like, Greenhouse, Lever, Jobvite, etc).
5. Find potential prospects on LinkedIn Groups relevant to your domain. You can use Dux-Soup to get list of followers on these groups, and then use an email finder tool to find their verified work email addresses.
6. Find people talking about topics related to your product / domain. These people can be your potential prospects — Twitter is an interest-based network, and people talk about and share stuff they are interested in. You can use tools like BuzzSumo to find topics relevant to you — pick the topics that have been shared the most, and BuzzSumo will tell you the Twitter usernames of the people who’ve shared that article. Then use LeadCandy to get the contacts (name, company, verified work email, location) of those Twitter usernames.
7. Growth List — it’s a curated list of 15,000 fast-growing tech companies, with 20,000+ validated work email addresses of decision makers (Founders, CEOs, CxOs). Contacts are updated and validated every 14 days, so the data is always fresh. Apart from Name, Company, Title, Work Email and Website, it also provides information like Industry, Employee Count and Location — this helps you in segmenting and picking the companies and contacts who match your target audience.

FIND EMAIL ADDRESSES

There are tons of email finders tools that provide work email addresses. Check if they provide verified work email, otherwise your emails will bounce and your email deliverability will be affected (which means, your emails will not reach the recipients).

Also, check their accuracy — most email finder tools provide 30–35% correct emails, and the rest are incorrect, and this again can impact your email deliverability.

If the email finder tool does not provide verified email, then use a tool like NeverBounce, ZeroBounce, EmailHippo to verify emails.

FIND MUTUAL CONTACTS

Introductions via mutual contacts increase your success rates by over 40%. So it is incredibly important that you leverage your and your team’s network to get as many introductions as possible, to your target customers.

You can do this manually using LinkedIn, or Team Network can do this instantly for your entire target list with thousands of contacts.

Personalized introductions by mutual contacts are clearly the best, the challenge is that you can only get so many introductions. So, you can mention about mutual contacts to warm your emails — this gives better open rates as compared to the mails without any mention of mutual contacts.

SEGMENT LIST

Segment your target list so you can personalize the emails for each segment. Segmented email campaigns have a 100.95% higher click-through rate (CTR) than non-segmented campaigns. You can segment on the basis of — Industry, Title, Location, Solution, Direct / Mutual Contacts.

DRAFT EMAILS

Based on the segments in your list, draft emails for each segment. Keep the email short (3–4 sentences max), with a clear value, a humble call to action, and only one link.

1. Drip email campaign—Drip campaigns are where you send an initial mail, and then based on response you keep sending relevant follow up mails at regular intervals. Most of the sales people do not follow up after 1–2 emails, but the maximum response comes after 5-6 follow ups.
2. Subject line — HubSpot has a great list of email subject lines that can get you best open rates. Unbounce personalized their subject line with the reader’s name and got an amazing 43% open rate and 15% click-through rate.
3. Content — Here’s a collection of some of the good sales emails.
4. Spamminess Check — Mailchimp has compiled a list of triggers that may get your email marked as spam. EmailAnalyzer is a nifty tool to test the spamminess of your emails and increase the chances of your emails getting delivered to recipients.
5. Sender name — HubSpot conducted an experiment where they found that mails sent by a real person are more likely to be clicked than emails sent from a company name.
6. Call to action — clear, catchy yet humble call-to-action
7. Time sent — A/B test (a) Day of week, (b) Time of day, (c)Time zone, to find out what’s working best for you.
8. Personalize — Use CrystalKnows to further personalize your emails.

EMAIL DOMAIN & DNS SETTINGS

Consider using a different domain (not your primary domain) for sending cold emails, so that the email deliverability of your primary domain does not get affected. For example, if your official domain is abcd.io, you can create an email address at getabcd.co or abcd.net instead, and use that domain name for cold emailing.

Make sure your emails have a reply-to header.

Setup SPF, DKIM, DMARC. If you’re using Google business emails, create these records in your DNS settings -

1. Create SPF record

Type: TXT

Value: v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all

2. Create DMARC record

Type: TXT

Name: _dmarc

Value: v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:postmaster@<yourdomain.com>; adkim=r; aspf=r; sp=none

3. Follow these steps for DKIM

SEND & TRACK EMAILS

Use an automated tool to send your emails, track open rates, and schedule follow up emails. Some of the tools we like — MailShake, Yesware, MixMax, Woodpecker.

1. Warm up your email domain — start with 25–50 emails a day, and gradually increase it to 150–175 a day over a 4–6 week period. Most email providers like Google have a daily limit of the number of emails you can send so that you send ‘like a human’, and this limit is anywhere between 200–500.
2. Avoid tracking clicks (till your email domain warms up) as it increases the chances of your emails landing in ‘promotions’ folder.
3. Initially have 2–3 stages in your drip campaign. Then slowly increase it to 5-6 follow ups spaced over a few weeks / months. Follow up schedule: day 1, 4, 11, then once every 30–45 days.
4. Respect Unsubscribes. If someone doesn’t want your emails, do not bother them. It’s not only a legal requirement (per CAN-SPAM), but also uncool to keep emailing someone who clearly told you not to.

LIMITED BUDGET?

If you’re on a limited budget, use Growth List + MailShake.

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