In my last post, I talked about why personalizing your email outreach efforts is crucial to the success of your campaigns. Connecting with your most relevant prospects on different levels is key to creating and building working relationships with them. The goal is to reach those who are most interested in and can benefit the most from what you offer. If you begin your outreach with building relevant quality contact lists rather than blanket and static lists, your efforts will then produce not only more response but more interested prospects. Here are some approaches to building quality contact lists for your cold email outreach.
Move away from static lists to building dynamic lists.
At any time, only 3% of your market is actively interested in buying. This means if you send 1000 emails to prospects, only approximately 30 of those people are already looking for a solution. This is why it is more effective to spend more time building more contextual and personalized contact lists.
Use LinkedIn.
This is the simplest approach to refine your search and narrow the results to specifically who you think can really benefit from your product or service. Refine by job titles, company type and size, or buyer personas, for example. Then you can use a tool like Get Prospect or FindThatLead in order to find more details for the contacts.
Scrape structured data from websites.
Use a tool like Crunchbase to scrape specific data points from public websites. For example, if you’re looking for small size companies who are expanding into the international market, you can quickly extract and build this list of companies by using a web scraping tool.
Capitalize on event details.
Many industry events will post or list out event attendees and exhibitors. Utilize this information to make relevant connections. Most of the time if a person or company is attending or exhibiting at an event, they are much more open and interested to meet new vendors or potential business partners. Also, very frequently, event coordinators will encourage attendees and exhibitors to use event-specified hashtags to promote the event online. You can follow hashtags of events related to what you do to find others who are interested in similar products, services, or industries. Awario is a tool you can use to monitor these hashtags.
Identify thought leaders and industry influencers.
People who like, comment, or share related industry content from these leaders and influencers are more likely to be interested in products and services related to that content. You can then use a tool like Phantombuster to pull contacts who have engaged with their content and even send them more personalized messaging based on this.
See who is looking at your website.
If a company is viewing your website, they are likely interested in products or services you offer or related. Use a tool like Albacross to identify which companies are viewing your content. From there, you can use LinkedIn or seamless.ai to identify the contacts at those companies who fit your buyer persona.
Use new technology alerts.
If, for example, you’re a company which specializes in a specific software implementation and optimization, you can use a platform like Datanyze or SimilarTech to track and save alerts for key technology installs. So you can receive alerts for when companies start using your software or a related one, research to find your buyer persona within that company, find contact details, and reach out to offer your support and services.
Identify interested people using an intent data platform.
You can use an intent data platform like LeadSift to identify individuals who engage with your competitors or complementary services who have signalled intent to buy or at least interest. You are able to start conversations with interested prospects at a much more relevant time.
Identify your audience’s pain points in their own words.
Review sites like GetApp and Capterra are useful for finding prospect’s pain points. You can identify the reviewer on Google or LinkedIn for contact details. Then you’ll be able to reach out to them based on their review to explain how your product or service can solve their pain point. You can even include something like “Your review on X website” in the subject line; this usually gets a very high open rate.
These are just a few approaches and different tools for identifying the most interested prospects at the most relevant times for your cold email outreach. This level of research will yield higher engagement and more quality conversations with people who are interested in what you’re offering. Don’t skip this step. Building high quality, relevant, dynamic contact lists is one of the most important components to the success of your efforts.
