What would you do if I told you that you had to send 10 lead gen emails per day?

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How about 100 emails per day?

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In this post, I’ll help you get started with a few software tools that can make your life a LOT easier as you’re scaling up your email outreach.

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First things first…

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Finding Email Addresses

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First question: who are you trying to contact? Chances are, you’ll need some help generating email addresses of the leads you’re trying to reach. Luckily, there are many tools available to help you get started with your research.

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LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn is the world’s BEST source for professional/B2B leads. Sometimes an email address isn’t readily available, but with a bit of digging, you can generate a strong “hit-list” of contacts based on seniority, department, industry and more.

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Sales Navigator is (currently) $79.99/month, but if you need to do any kind of advanced searches for people outside of your network, but search tools in Sales Navigator are much more robust than the options that you’ll get with a free profile.

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Hunter.io

Hunter has several useful tools available. You can enter the domain name of a company to search for any public email addresses that share the same domain.

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After the first search, Hunter also tries to identify the pattern that each company uses to generate email addresses for their employees. For example, “{firstname}.{lastname}@nike.com,” or “{firstinitial}{lastname}@nike.com”.

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Using this pattern recognition, Hunter can help you find the email for a specific person, as long as you happen to know their first and last name, and their company.

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Hunter has a free plan that includes 50 searches per month, or paid plans that range from $49 – $399 per month.

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Snov.io

If you need to generate emails in bulk (like I often do), you’ll want to use a scraping software like Snov.io. There are several companies that offer similar services, but I chose Snov.io because of the volume pricing and the ease of use. Their plans offer a monthly allowance of credits that can be used to search for emails.

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Snov.io requires a LinkedIn Sales Navigator subscription to work properly. Simply use the LinkedIn search tools to find a list of people that you’d like to generate emails for. Then, use the Snov.io Chrome plugin to run a scrape of the search.

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These scrape tools all function using the same principles. They piggyback on your LinkedIn search tools to find the first and last names of your leads, and the company they work with. Then, they search ELSEWHERE on the web to try to find the person’s email (or at least enough information to guess the company’s email generation pattern).

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This method sometimes produces results that are inconclusive or inaccurate, so be aware of that as you’re generating names. The only way to be 100% confident of someone’s email is to get it from them directly, or to be referred by someone who knows them.

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Sending Emails

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One of the best practices for outreach emails is to send a text only message that looks like it was written directly to the prospect. The best way to accomplish this is by using a mail merge. You’ll need a software that can take a template, and customize the script to include variable data (first names or company names, for example).

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Smartreach.io

I use Smartreach for all my clients because it offers all the features that I need, plus a stellar customer service team and excellent agency management tools for multiple accounts. Some of the key features that you should look for in an email software are:

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• Automatic follow-ups
• Mail merge for customizing scripts
• Link click and message reply tracking
• Robust reporting tools (including CSV download)
• A/B testing of subject lines or message body copy

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If you’re interested in alternatives to Smartreach, try SalesHandy, Yesware, MailShake, or Gmass.

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Tracking Activity

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If you’re not tracking the messages that you send and the responses that you get, you’re wasting your time. It’s very rare to get a response from your first outreach that turns into a project after one round of contact. Check out the article about the Creative Firm Sales Cycle by Joel Pilger of RevThink for more info.

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Nonetheless, when we’re doing outreach, we need to TRACK our activities.

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Pipedrive

I recommend Pipedrive as a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) because it’s easy to set up, and it’s easy to get the information you need at-a-glance. The dashboard is built to show your pipeline, and how deals are doing at every stage. Pipedrive has a robust search feature and some awesome integrations through Zapier.

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Viable alternatives to Pipedrive include Hubspot CRM, Copper. or Capsule CRM.

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With these tools, you have everything you need to find email addresses, send outreach, and track responses. If you find yourself getting stuck, too busy to do regular prospecting, or if you have any questions, please reach out to our team!

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