What tools to use to scale outbound campaigns

As we have explained in previous installments, marketing strategies based on cold emails have established themselves as the kings in terms of performance. However simple as it may seem to send emails to profiles of interest, this practice requires solid foundations to achieve a successful campaign.

Sending a cold email is the perfect channel for lead acquisition and if combined with the right choice of technology tools can achieve great results.

What is a tech stack? How can I choose the right one for me?

A technology stack is a set of specialized software capable of increasing your efficiency, productivity, and profitability thanks to its tools. Although there are currently more than 9,900 tools on the market capable of supporting sales and marketing teams, not all of them can adapt to your needs and many may even hinder your productivity.

Strategy first, technology second

To choose your tech stack correctly you should look at them as pieces of a puzzle, based from the start on what areas you want to complete. Your main guide should always be your objectives and the integration with the tools you have at hand.

In the case of sending cold emails, a chain of tools (or a couple of them that cover all the necessary steps) is required due to the complexity of the process, such tools will bring out the best of you or your sales team; the tech stack you build has to manage to help you in the acquisition of Data, email warm-up and correct management of your emails plus the monitoring for the generation of reports.

Skief Labs team, you should base your choice on two main categories: data acquisition and cold emailing automation.

Which technology should I choose for data collection?

In most marketing strategies and teams, data acquisition and management are one of the most underestimated needs, even though it is practically the basis of lead acquisition.

For your data to function optimally, it needs to go through 4 important processes: aggregation, enrichment, cleansing, and verification. Although this can be achieved through the use of various tools, keep in mind that lack of integration can cause you worse problems.

Which data provider should I choose?

Most data providers include in their services the delivery of qualitative data, tailored to your ideal customer profiles (some include support to establish your target audience), data hygiene, and even CRM management.

Scrappers: these are tools that obtain data from websites or social platforms in an automated way, such data can help you get closer to your ideal customers through different methods.

The choice of a scraping tool depends on where you need to extract data: Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google Maps, Google Maps, Web Site, or databases such as Yellowpages and Tripadvisor, among others.

Currently, there are different providers such as Octoparse, Phantombuster, PhantobbusterCaptainData, and TexAu.

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Data enrichment tools: many of these tools base their service on the acquisition of emails, mostly useful in B2B businesses.

These tools allow you to reach your potential customers using base data such as a domain or names.

There are different alternatives on the market, some free and some not. The most important thing is to analyze if the additional tools can be useful to you and if they integrate with your other software.‍

• ‍Snov.io: This tool allows you to enter up to 20,000 domains at a time, providing you with an extensive email database and other contact information.‍
• VoilaNorbert: Like other programs in its market, ViolaNorbert helps you with email acquisition. This platform also has a verification tool, which lets you know if some data is obsolete, focusing your time on truly useful contact data. In addition, it also offers you massive data enrichment, giving you additional information about your potential customers.‍
• Hunter: This tool allows you to search for your potential customers with data such as company name or specific people, or conversely, by entering an email address to obtain data that will allow you greater personalization. Hunter also has a section that allows you to check if the emails you have are still valid.‍
• Dropcontact: One of the most famous data enrichment tools due to its integration with CRMs such as Salesforce, Pipedrive, Hubspot, and Zoho. Dropcontact also integrates B2B data verification, duplicate checking and spell checking services.‍
• Datagma: This service allows you to obtain data and verification as well as integrate with CRMs. One of its most outstanding features is that it offers more than 50 topics within the information, such as locations, important dates, financial data, and technology used, among others.

This platform announces that its integration with CRMs is free of charge.

How can I verify my emails?

Data, especially in the B2B sector, loses validity very quickly, and added to the fact that many data collection tools have a margin of error, it can generate many delays or loss of time in your prospecting.

In the case of cold email, time is not the only concern, as high bounce rates can be detrimental to your strategy.

Fortunately, several tools (in addition to some of those mentioned above) offer support in validating your data.

• ‍Neverbounce: within its market is one of the best known. It offers integration with platforms such as iContact, MailChimp, Marketo, etc. It promises to analyze more than 10 thousand addresses in less than 10 minutes, checking domains, syntax errors, spam traps, and duplicates as well as having API functionality.
• Zerobounce: This platform stands out for its payment methodology, as companies only pay for the verifications they need. It has more than 30 functions, where in addition to basic verification and filtering, it also adds email tracking, segmentation, lead management, and reporting.‍
• Mailtester: promises up to 99% verification efficiency. Among its services are spam blocking, domain checks, syntax corrections, fraud detection, and even delivery tracking.‍
• DeBounce: This tool allows you to analyze your database to find emails that are no longer valid or spam traps. Along with bulk email verification, the platform also filters emails with invalid syntax and duplicates.
• Clearout: This platform allows you a complete verification along with the optimization of your database. One of the most outstanding features of this service is the capacity for multiple forms of integration with other services and software such as CRMs, WordPress, and Google Sheets, among others.‍
• Mailfloss: this tool integrates automation within its features, making optimizations every day to your mailing list. This program integrates with service providers such as Mailchimp or HubSpot.

How can I supplement my lead and email data?

Once you have the contact information, you can generate your message, but for your message to become an effective cold email, you will need more than just the company name. To help you create an effective personalized message there are several tools available.

• ‍Datanyze: is one of the leading technology solutions. This tool provides valuable information for B2B sales teams, providing an objective overview of what is happening in the potential customer's environment, from news, posts in their own and nearby networks, and even data on the technology used.‍
• Clearbit: this tool is also focused on the B2B sector. In addition to contact data such as phone numbers, this tool allows sales teams to able to customize aspects of interest such as names, network profiles, and organizational structure such as founders or investors. The platform gives you more than 100 customization attributes.‍
• ZoomInfo: it is estimated that this platform allows you to access information from more than 100 million companies and B2B contacts. Teams can obtain business numbers, academic information, revenue, and technology usage.

What tools can I use to send my e-mails?

It is important to differentiate between the types of sales emails that your company can generate: cold emails (B2B) and promotional emails or newsletters, part of B2C communication.

What tool do I need to send my cold email campaigns?

Before you start sending cold emails you must take certain aspects into account to avoid your messages going directly to your spam folder.

Consider that you must protect yours as much as possible your company's domain, for this reason, the most advisable thing is always to have an alternative domain that continues to be identifiable. For example, contact@yourcompany.com (original domain) for contact@yourcompanyapp.com.

Once you have generated an email that protects your domain, you cannot venture to send hundreds of emails to strangers, because service providers would quickly notice, passing your address to the dreaded spam list.

One aspect you should also consider is which email provider can help you the most. Although there are hundreds of options, the market is dominated by two giants: Google Workspace and Microsoft.

Consider to whom you are going to direct your messages before choosing one, Microsoft can be your platform if you intend to reach large companies or Google if your target audience is concentrated in small and medium companies.

This requires you to warm up your mail for at least a month, gradually increasing the sending capacity of your mail.

Another challenge is the sending capacity that a person can have during the day to be able to send emails to your database (understanding that it is wide, thanks to the tools to obtain emails), for this several tools include mail automation. Next, we will tell you about some tools that can help you in this degree.

• ‍Outreach: this tool helps you increase the number of cold emails that sales teams can send, without losing the personalized character. Thanks to its automation features you can insert the data of each of your prospects in templates. It also can create meetings automatically.‍
• Lemlist: With this platform, you can make use of templates to generate customized presentation lines and automate your mailings along with other sales methods. One of its services, lemwarm, will help you with the process of warming up your email domain. Increasing the sending capacity automatically.‍
• Quickmail: with this technology, you will be able to reach all your emails by importing your list using CVS even from Google Drive. By using attributes you can still maintain personalization and thanks to A/B Testing you will know which of your messages is the most effective. Quickmail also features a domain warming tool, which will keep you from falling into spam.
• Woodpecker: with this platform you will be able to run your cold email campaigns, converting huge email lists into sales. Together with its automated functions, you can make full use of your generated lists. In addition to this, Woodpecker allows you to monitor your emails to make your campaigns more and more effective.

These are just a few of the many tools available to make outbound campaigns work. Our recommendation is to always be clear about your needs so you don't saturate yourself or your sales team.

At Skief Labs we are experts in cold email campaigns, complementing them with integral solutions so that your customer generation is constant and effective.

Are you interested in testing or increasing your results with cold email campaigns? Let's work together to identify and reach your target audience.

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