Before building a bulk email campaign, you should find people to whom you will send it. That’s a pretty tough task demanding time, effort, and money to find leads. Even if you find any, there’s a problem of getting their email addresses. Well, we all have to go through the ordeal of searching for new leads. But how and where to find potential clients for email marketing?
In this article, you will find some good resources rich in leads and learn how to choose the tool to find emails of leads quickly.
Detect a potential client
A potential client, namely, lead is the contact data of a person who fits your targeting. Before finding leads, you should first define your target audience. It’s easy if you already have existing clients. Just analyze the profiles of the most active users or buyers and pay attention not only to the basic info (like position or geographical location) but also to the unique parameters (company size, income, buying motivation and concerns, etc). This is called a buyer persona creation.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve just started and have no clients or you just want to improve your outreach, you need to create a buyer persona. So a buyer persona is an image of your ideal customer. To create it, you can add as many parameters as you wish. The more, the better. The basic ones are:
- Geographical location
- Demographics
- Business type and size
- Name of the position
- Buying motivation
- Concerns
If you think that one buyer persona isn’t enough, create a few of them. For example, create 3 personas. This way you can divide them by niche, by size, and the product you offer and test 3 different target marketing campaigns.
Leads resources
Once the target audience is defined, the search begins. And how should I find them? you may ask. Well, we’ve prepared a few resources where you can find leads that fit your targeting.
Open and web directories
One of the most popular and basic resources where you can build a prospects list is the open directory. Open directories and catalogs are available online. There’re a lot of them, for instance, YellowPages, Yelp, CitySquares, and many more. There you can find thousands of companies filtered by geographical location, business type, and niche. Most of these directories will give you access to email addresses and phone numbers of the company. But remember, no personal data is available there, only business ones.
As for web directories, they are sources of links. More of that, they provide you not just with websites (which are already great) but also with phone numbers and local addresses which you can use for cold email campaigns.
Databases
This is one of the oldest and most proven resources. It is used by all bigger and Enterprise-level companies. You just buy access to a database of potential clients. These databases already contain a number of pre-generated, pre-verified, and enriched leads. Such databases are quite expensive but that is the fastest way of finding potential clients for online businesses.
Websites
The next resource is the most popular and accurate, companies websites. Visit relevant websites or build a list of them, and then find emails of potential clients associated with that website (company employees).
This way you can use different targeting approaches, from basic niche or interest related websites to finding websites that use certain technologies (if you are a competitive tech company).
Social networks
This is the storehouse that provides you with individuals and gives access to pretty accurate and detailed targeting. You can use lead generation tools like a Facebook Messenger chatbot that can request emails or do a manual search.. That means to search for a relevant group to contact its members. But this is quite time-consuming. Modern email finder tools automate this process – from finding people by keywords or any other parameter to extracting their contact details right from the social network.
However, not all the social networks provide their users’ email addresses or any other private information. For example, Twitter and Facebook are not the best places to find leads for email marketing purposes. Twitter has an endless source of prospects but, at the same time, they aren’t easy to get as people prefer to hide their email addresses. Facebook can be a valuable lead source but you must find leads manually. Go to a personal profile and search for any links.
The best prospect source is LinkedIn. It’s a business platform for job and headhunting. It provides a lot of details and you can set a very precise target campaign. You don’t have to do much: simply find the necessary person or people (if you perform search) and activate an email finder.
Choose the email finder tool
Browsing through all the above-mentioned places takes much time. To make the work flow, use automation lead generation tools. You can spend some time and search for an email finder or you can simply use the one provided by Snov.io. The email finder tool is completely automated and has both a web app and Chrome extension.
The Chrome extension is good if you want to find leads on websites and social networks.
Just go to any site, click the extension icon, and save the email addresses of potential clients to a list of prospects. The email finder tool helps get names and email addresses of people on the page.
With the web app, it’s possible to go far and beyond in searching prospects. Once you have a list of websites (which you’ve got from web directories), build an email list using Bulk Domain Search or use the extension for each website individually. You can take advantage of one of the search approaches provided by the platform:
- Company profile search. Use Snov.io to find companies you need by industry, company size, location, name, and some other search filters.
- Emails from names search. This option plays a vital role if you have a CSV file that contains leads’ and companies’ names only. The tool will generate email addresses and you will only have to verify them then.
- This search filter is quite handy when you work as a recruiter or an HR manager and want to find the right candidates. Just type in the job title, skills, and locations to get links to places where you can find the most suitable candidates with the required skills. You can add or exclude some skills and jobs if you need.
Go and search
The lead sources described in this article can become the perfect sources of qualified interested leads for your business. Start with basics, find potential clients in open directories, or buy access to databases.
Professionals prefer and advice youngsters to reach only targeted leads. Thus, you need an email finder tool to find contacts of potential clients on websites and social networks.
Anyway, it’s all up to you how to find emails of leads to reach out to them.
Good luck to you!