No matter your business type, learning how to build a targeted email list of leads is essential to a successful marketing strategy. With this list, you can build brand awareness, trust, and relationships and promote your products and services.
The Big Question
The big question is, how do you build a list of targeted leads from scratch? This article will focus on building a list of targeted contacts for cold email outreach. We will not discuss organic growth or using ads, opt-in forms, social media, blogs, or other subscription opportunities to gather leads.
We are getting down and dirty with a simple two-step process to gather a list of leads and verify emails you can immediately use to engage in cold email marketing outreach.
Everybody Sends Cold Emails
I am sure a few of you are saying, “sending cold emails is bad.” Let’s be real, everybody sends cold emails. The average person gets over 100 emails daily, and I’m sure you didn’t opt-in to receive emails from all those companies. When done right, cold email outreach is one of the best ways to promote and grow your business.
Don’t Buy An Email List
Before we jump into this, there is something I have to say, and most email marketers will agree, don’t buy an email list. With it, you usually get the following:
- Outdated Contacts
- Bad Emails
- Higher Bounce Rates
- Higher Unsubscribe Rates
- A Decrease in Engagement Rates
Building An Email List
To start with, you’ve got a choice. You can scrape and comb the internet for leads. You can grow your list organically and take months to build it, or we can keep this simple and make your life a lot easier with an easy two-step process.
Step 1: Use Lead Generation Software
Using lead generation software might cost you a few bucks monthly, but it will save you time, money, and effort. After all, time is money, and you want to avoid going from website to website to find your leads.
There is tons of software out there that you can use to find targeted leads. With software like LinkedIn Sales Navigator or Seamless.ai, you can drill down and build lists of targeted, segmented leads based on the following:
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- Company Name
- Job Titles
- Location
- Departments
- Seniority
- Industries
- Technologies
- Websites
- Revenue
- Employee Size
- Names
- Keywords
- and more
Once you hone in on your ideal clients and hit the search button, you will get all the necessary information to build your list. I’m talking about:
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- First & Last Name
- Job Tile
- Company name
- Website URL
- Email Address
- Contact & Company Address
- Contact & Company Phone
- Numbers
- Contact & Company LinkedIn Profiles
- and so much more
Step 2: Clean & Verify Your Emails
Before entering these new contacts into a CRM or starting your outreach, you must verify the emails on your list. You can easily do this with email verification software like Debounce, Hunter, or Zero Bounce. There are many email verification tools to choose from, so find one that fits your budget.
When you run your emails through whatever email verification software you use, emails come back as Safe to Send, Risky, Invalid, or unknown. All these services will have a certain percentage of emails they mark as safe or risky that will still bounce when you send them (nobody’s perfect). If you want to keep your bounce rates low, I suggest sending emails only to contacts marked as valid or safe to send.
Well, that’s about it. You now know how to build a targeted email list and verify emails. Your next steps involve messaging and building an outreach strategy that delivers results. There are articles and videos all over this site on how to do both.
Good Luck.
