Let’s review tools to find the email addresses of your highly targeted prospects and decision-makers.
Email is becoming more and more important in appointment setting land. “Cold Calling” should really be called “Cold Outreach” today because reaching a high-level prospect involves more than just phone calls. Many of the sales meetings being set today by companies are set completely by email. In some industries I am dealing with, think it is fair to say, all the meetings are being set by email.
“Cold Emailing” is more and more prevalent for prospecting. Particularly for that large group of targets that you can’t afford to reach using the efforts of an inside sales rep or appointment setter.
You might use email as part of a multi-touch interaction including phone calls, voicemail, email and maybe even drop-offs or (ghastly!) snail mail. Or part of your outreach effort might be a 100% pure sequenced multi-touch email campaign.
Whatever your process is, where do you get the email addresses?
Here is my personal list of tools used to find email addresses and my personal two cents about them.
Do your own research and make your own decisions. DISCLAIMER. The following is my opinion based upon my experiences only.
You are going to start with a list. That list may come from a database such as salesgenie, infofree, insideview or a multitude of others. You will select targets by industry, revenue range, employee size and other criteria. I personally would not rely on these sources for email addresses. Too few and the email addresses churn quickly.
Do you have a good idea of the titles you are looking for?
If you have a good idea of the title you are looking for within your target companies you can go to LinkedIn Sales Navigator to ID the name within the company to call. You can grab the name so you know who to ask for and get their title right.
Still working in Sales Navigator, the first step to getting the email would be getprospect.io. This nifty little tool connects to Sales navigator. There will be a button on your targets LinkedIn profile that says, “Get Email,” and guess what? When you press it, you get their verified email address about 30% – 45% of the time (my guess.) Plop that puppy into your crm contact manager and before you even call many times you have identified the decision makers and have their email address.
How to find someone’s email address
Sales Navigator is also a great tool to use to find target companies and decision-makers. You might use it to supplement your list of targets or as the sole tool you use to identify targets. When you do the first stop is to use getprospect.io to get the email address. At the free level, you get 50 email addresses a month and for 29 a month you get 1,000.
There is another way to use getprospect.io which is very very helpful. Let’s say you are using Sales Navigator advanced search capability to slice and dice and zero in on top targets. For example, let’s say you find a list of very high probability targets. LinkedIn will return search results with 25 profiles on a page. You can use getprospect.io to generate emails from all 25 on a page. It will generate emails and other data and create a nice little list for you to download. You don’t have to find email addresses on a one record at a time basis. This is particularly helpful if you are engaged in pure cold emailing.
Cold Emailing? Really?
Let me digress a bit. Yours truly has been doing cold emailing for the past year with significant success (I am frankly shocked) and the process used was like what I just described above. Do advanced searches using sales navigator to zero in on my highest probability highest worth targets, and then extract the email address (or all that could be found) page by page using a tool called Hunter.io. I would take the file created by hunter.io, clean it up a bit and then load them into a cold emailing tool. (More about those tools in a bit.) Now a short while ago the connection between Hunter.io and LinkedIn ended, but from what I can see getprospect.io seems very similar. I have helped a few clients launch cold emailing campaigns.
It makes a lot of sense to me to use getprospect.io first as it integrates within sales navigator and you will probably use LinkedIn anyway get the name of the decision-maker within a targeted company and get their title right, while you are there get the email.
But what if you can’t find someone’s email address
But what do you do if your initial email search comes up as not found. Or, what if you don’t have a subscription to sales navigator?
You can use these tools to try to find what getprospect can’t or you can use these tools in place of getprospect.io.
Hunter.io: They look for all email addresses for a domain. Works great.
Findthat.email: Supposed to find 90% of emails searched for and have a high delivery rate.
VoilaNorbert.com: Claim to fame is that it is very quick and easy to find a specific person’s email address within a company. You search by name and domain.
The tools I mentioned above are the tools I look to first based upon all my research. You may reach different conclusions. You might also look at anymailfinder.com and rapportive. There are many others.
Cold Emailing Tools
Now let’s talk about that situation where you might do pure cold emailing. Cold emailing involves sending a sequence of emails to a group of high probability targets that have not asked to hear from you.
If you get squeamish at the thought of bulk emailing or can’t handle unsubscribes and the occasional nasty reply, stop reading. But if you have a lot of great targets you can’t afford to call and like the idea of responding to their requests for a call rather than chasing them, read on.
Before I tell you about the tools you can use to cold email let’s talk about two very important DO Nots’ if you think about cold emailing. There are a good number of things to know about writing cold emails, ducking the spam filters, not being labeled spam by ISP’s, increasing your delivery rate and avoiding seo penalties on your company website before you even think of cold emailing. There are two big DO Nots’. Never ever use an autoresponder for cold emailing. Never ever use an email address from your domain. Never. If your domain is domain.com you might cold email using me@domain.co or me@domain.email or me@domainemail.com. There are more rules but you risk being blacklisted if you break these.
These are the tools you might consider if you do cold emailing. There may be others but based upon my very extensive research these I consider to be the top.
Outreach.io
Persistiq.com
Quickmail.io
Essentially you would create sequences of emails. You write the emails. how many there are in a sequence, when they will go out and can even split test emails as you go along. You then dump the emails you collect using the above tools into the appropriate sequence and then sit back and wait for the replies. Monthly cost can range from $39 to $120 a month
When I first starting flirting with the idea of doing a cold email campaign (I had tried it years ago and it was a complete flop) I tested very slowly over several months. Before I discovered the above tools, I was obtaining email addresses using advanced google searches (yikes) and sending out emails using gmail canned responses. What a knucklehead. But people were responding.
So, I continued to test my control email and look for ways to systemize the process and find emails for my targets in bulk that were verified. that’s when I found the email finder tools above. When it was time to start sending them out in bulk, I started with one of the three cold emailing tools above and got response but decided to switch to outreach.io and have not regretted it. I send 6,000 to 10,000 cold emails a month, response is great, ROI is ridiculous and it has changed my business.
If your sales scripts are not in tip top shape now, don’t even think about cold emailing. I think one of the keys to my success with cold emailing was having long history of response so that I knew what worked, and my script writing ability gave me the ability to craft a good email. There is a lot of strategy packed into a short email.
On top of the messaging is knowing what tools to use to identify targets and get their emails efficiently. Then you need a tool to send them out and keep you within the rules. And oh ya, you need to know where the landmines are so that your email gets delivered and you don’t get blacklisted.
So, hope this list of tools to find email addresses help you out.
