How To Build The Perfect Prospect List for Your Email Outreach Campaign

This article is going to break down everything you need to know about how to prospect for email outreach. When doing email outreach, it’s all about making the right connections.

 You can spend a lot of time hunting down email addresses and personalizing emails, but if you aren’t reaching out to the right people, all that effort is for nothing. 

Reaching out to a list of contacts who are either in the wrong department, no longer with a company, or at a company that has no relevance to yours, is a surefire way to get marked as spam. So, we’re going to show you exactly how to find the right people. 

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s talk real quick about the prospect list.

What Is a Prospect List?

Let’s say you want to reach out to more potential clients; a prospect list is the list of people that might be interested in your products and services. Building a qualified prospect list containing relevant leads of who might be interested in your products and services is essential to being able to find new customers for your business. 

The thing is that a prospect list depends on what type of prospecting you’re planning to execute. 

Cold prospecting is for people who never interacted with or heard of your product or services before. Warm prospecting is for existing customers who might want to upgrade their purchase service or product. 

Either way, remember that a good prospect list involves preparation and organization to ensure that each lead has the potential to become an engaged customer.

In the process of planning, it is important first to know what ideal prospects are. 

Defining Ideal Prospect for Your Email Outreach Campaign

There are two steps you can follow to create an Ideal Customer Profile: 

1. Define the characteristics that make an ideal customer for your business or company

Assess your current consumers to determine the best customer profile. You must examine them and identify the perfect customer profile for your business within the given data.

 To determine your best customers, try asking the following questions.

• Who is the fastest to close the deal?
• Who has the most potential for referrals?
• Who has the highest expansion potential?

2. Define a suitable target audience with characteristics similar to those of your existing customers

To have an accurate targeting, ask questions like: 

• What business/industry are they in?
• What other products, services, and technologies do they use in their business?
• What person in the company is the purchaser / decision maker?
• What pain point were they looking to solve for when they purchased your product?
• How much revenue do they generate annually?
• What does the purchasing process look like for them? 

Ways to build Prospect List for your Email Outreach Campaign 

Using the gathered profile data, you can now build the ideal prospect list for your business. You can either create it manually or use an automated tool. 

Building a Prospect List Manually

To do it, simply follow these four steps:

Step 1: Find companies that are a good fit by scouring online directories

Use a couple of different options to find companies that match your ideal customer profile. One tip is to scour directory-style websites that profile a variety of companies by different segments and audiences.

There are a lot of directory sites out there catering to different industries with huge lists of different types of businesses in a variety of categories.

For example, if you’re looking specifically for startup companies, sites like Angelist, Gust, or Crunchbase are great places to start.

With Angelist, you can search for startups based on their type and funding status. The website features a list of companies sorted by “date joined,” making it easy to find recently added leads.

On the other hand, If you sell to a service-based business, an example of a good directory would be Clutch. 

Clutch compiles a list of agencies in several areas such as software development, digital marketing, and web design. At present, it has over 7000 agencies listed in over 500 categories.

If you’re looking for software and SaaS companies, websites like GetApp or Capterra that aggregate different products and services are a good way to find them. You can filter listings based on product category, location/region of the company’s headquarters, which is very helpful when narrowing down results.

Well, these software review sites include consumer feedback from firms. One approach to utilizing these customer reviews is to seek competitors’ customers on these sites and target them with a more appealing offer.

Another option is to look for people who use products that are complementary to your solution. For instance, if your company makes a social media posting tool, a social media content creation tool will complement your product.

Step 2: Locate the decision-makers linked with these businesses

After finding the right companies for your product, it’s time to find the right decision-maker.

We don’t want to just reach out to anyone at the company. There is no point in us reaching out to people in different departments who might not be interested or relevant to what you are selling. Also, reaching out to a generic “info@” email address is going to be less likely for us to get a positive reply.

For manually finding contacts, the first stop on our list is LinkedIn. It is known as one of the most reliable sources to find accurate and up-to-date business contacts. 

You can use the ‘people search’ feature to find information on business contacts on LinkedIn. This tool allows users to create targeted lists of people associated with a particular organization and connect with them easily.

Added to this, you can try Link port: a free solution that allows you to integrate LinkedIn contacts directly into your CRM with a single click. You may also use Pipedrive, Zoho, Hubspot, or Salesforce. These applications will save you hours each week searching for LinkedIn contacts.

Other than LinkedIn, well, no one could ever forget Google. This search engine can definitely help you look for a contact list. 

You must know the firm’s name and the role connected with the person you are attempting to sell to. For reference, you might look for “Company name and Title.”

If you ever find it hard to use LinkedIn and Google, you can just look up a contact list on the company’s “About Us” or “Team” page. 

These pages serve as a director of the company’s personnel. It generally provides you with the work position connected with the personnel and a brief bio about them.

Not every company has a Team or About Us page, but if they do, you can more easily find the right contact person at a company.

Step 3: Determine the email addresses of these decision-makers

With a list of ideal companies and decision-makers, it’s now time to find their email addresses.

Most data sources on the internet do not provide work emails, and it is challenging to locate them online. Fortunately, you can use several efficient tools to find a company’s email address in seconds for free.

Suppose you need the email addresses of several people at a firm. In that case, you may use a program like Hunter, which has a ‘domain search’ option to discover relevant contacts’ emails. 

Simply enter the corporate domain, and the program will display all of the email addresses of that firm’s workers, along with their names and job titles. 

You can also utilize their email finder function. To get the email address, enter the contact’s full name and corporate domain.

For more comprehensive and complex data gathering, you might also consider using a web scraping service. This involves automatically extracting information from websites, which can be particularly useful when dealing with large datasets or multiple sources. The major benefit being that as well as gaining contact details, you’re also likely to unearth all sorts of additional information that you can use to your advantage. However, the practice does require a little more technical expertise than the likes of Hunter, so we’d recommend checking out Scrapingbee’s guide to web scraping if you’re unfamiliar with the process.

Step 4: Validate your email address.

Once you have the decision makers’ email addresses, you must check to see if the collected email is a valid email address or not. Validating email addresses is important because, if you reach out to a bunch of bad email addresses, your emails will bounce. And if enough of your emails bounce, it will increase the likelihood that your emails end up in spam folders. 

The more emails that bounce, the fewer responses you receive and the poorer your sender  reputation gets. Verify all of your email data with a program like ZeroBounce, NeverBounce, or Hunter. 

If you can’t validate the email address for a contact, just delete them from your list. Better to have a smaller list of valid email addresses than a larger list, but more of your emails bounce.

Building a Prospect List Using Automated Tools

This is the quickest and simplest approach to develop your prospect list. With this technique, locating firms, contacts, and authenticated contact information is simplified to a single step, and can be done in a fraction of the time as with manual prospecting.

Simply putting your target prospect profile through these prospecting tools produces relevant prospects. In other words, by providing the characteristics of your ideal consumers, you will receive a list of prospects that have those characteristics.

One tool that can help you prospect, find contacts, and build emails is Postaga 

Postaga is an email outreach tool that can locate relevant websites, find the proper contact person, and acquire and verify their email address. 

Not only that, but it can also construct and send a personalized outreach email sequence in only a few minutes. Postaga reduces workload from your team by automating and streamlining your prospecting and outreach process.

With a prospecting tool like Postaga, you can run a Sales Lead Generation campaign to find potential customers, break down you prospecting by city, and search for businesses.

Then, Postaga will automatically try and determine the right contact person at each of those companies (so you don’t have to manually scour LinkedIn).

After that, Postaga finds and verifies their emails, and then you can build and send the contacts a personalized email sequence to pitch them.

You can also prospect from larger directory sites, by analyzing their pages, retrieving the prospects they have already provided, and automatically analyzing their domains, finding their contacts, and building email sequences for them.

Conclusion

Building a prospect list can help you better grow your business, by finding the right potential customers for your business.

If you have never done prospecting before, it can take some time to get into a rhythm and have the right process to find the right people. Just make sure that you are prospecting smart, by using tools that can help you work smarter, not harder.