Indie Hackers doing cold outreach, what tools do you swear by?
Hello community,
I'd be interested to know what tools you are using to generate your leads, to generate their emails, phone numbers?
Most often I've seen people using Linkedin Sales Navigator, a scraping tool like Phantombuster, additional tools to generate emails like Hunter, Snov and the likes, and finally Linkedin to send messages or email outreach tools like Lemlist, woodpecker to send emails.
We are building a Lead generation tool that will simplify the process of building a personalized, accurate prospect list from real-time data, easily generate emails for them, and a few other features to "break the ice" with them. All in one tool with as few steps as possible.
Your input would help us greatly in identifying what features we may be missing
Early on cold outreach via email wasn't super successful for me since I had a hard time engaging someone I didn't know. Similar to @oconn mentioned, I found early success via DMs in Discord/Reddit/other communities and providing my expertise and gauging if my product would be the right fit in that situation.
As we are growing and getting more users, its been easier to define the right type of folks to go after with the right messaging since I know their pain. From there, I've also started using my own product to embed interactive demos in the email (usually after the first email, so the 2nd email in the sequence) to show what we offer. Then all I do is track the link clicks and activity on the demo links I've sent out for a targeted follow up (since I know if they completed the demo, how long they spent, what they clicked on, etc...)
Usually, after that 2nd or 3rd follow-up, I'll get some sort of reply. It's not always a prospect looking to buy but the odds of success are good enough for this to be a viable channel for us.
We had the opposite experience. The audience and message must be aligned. This is they key. We had a 44% open rate.
That’s a really nice approach. Thanks for sharing. How does your product allow embedding in the email? Would you mind sharing the link?
Yea we create a preview link with an image that gets copied into the email, which links to a Lancey hosted interactive demo.
Shoot me your email, I'll send you an example of one of our interactive demos.
Ah, very nice. It seems like you iterated successfully your approach. Well done!
Are you using UTM to track the link clicks for your email campaigns?
Nope, I'm measuring the performance from Lancey's dashboard itself for all the demo links generated. This way I don't need to add any tracking codes to the email itself.
I get to see how many views the demos has gotten and the engagement rates so I can follow up appropriately. Let me know if you're interested, always open to having more IHers on our beta!
Soo as bad as it sounds, I created a list of interesting looking companies from Product Hunt during December, and then hired someone on Upwork to find out the best contact for each of those products. (You can also use hunter.io for emails if you want emails and want to do it yourself.) I wasn’t selling product just wanted to run ideas by founders, and got a lot of help that way.
(Btw if you want this list, feel free to DM.)
Interesting approach!
How big is the list, how many companies are inside and what kind of companies is it? I would imagine that the companies inside that list are following your ideal customer profile's attributes.
Not sure it would apply to me honestly. What kind of service are you offering?
How were the results?
We're innovating in the QA space, and wanted to talk to other SaaS teams. Mostly to those who iterate fast, have a weekly/fortnightly release schedule, maybe a few employees as well. Product Hunt seemed to be a good place to find those companies with relative ease, and it turned out that those founders were super open to talk to us too -- out of ~100 companies we talked to over 10.
(I know, it doesn't translate to classic marketing/sales figures, but still, if you don't believe the conversion figures, it's still an "open rate" over 80%)
Also this is a solid idea!
Scrapegram and MailMeteor are amazing for cold outreach
I'll definitely consider MailMeteor for my own campaigns. Quite cheap tool compared to their competitors! Amazing free plan as well
I've had success by joining private / public communities (slack, discord, IH :) , etc...) where I know my customers hang out.
Great strategy. From there you simply private message them ?
So I never DM anyone with the intention of generating a lead. I engage in the open and if the opportunity presents itself I say...
"Oh hey you should check out this thing i'm working on Alignr that I think could help with that."
or similar. My strategy is to try and be helpful first and then follow up with an ask or suggestion if the conversation goes there.
Of course. I would even say that is the only correct approach.
Coming across as "salesy" is not going to work
I have been using:
Slintel's Lead Finder Chrome Extension -- for finding emails, phone numbers, firmographics, and technographics of an organization (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/slintel-b2b-contact-data/mkpoonlmiaknmcdcmdhbnehhglndcolf)
Outplay -- for sending emails -- i don't cold call (https://outplayhq.com/)
Lavender -- for improving the quality of an email (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/lavender/necbalcggglceeioaehdbkpbldmoabii?hl=en)
Hemingway App -- For writing crisp emails (https://hemingwayapp.com/)
I'm doing outreach in the Enterprise sector (retailers - supermarkets, drugstores, pharmacies), and my tools are:
Additionally, a good way to get emails + sometimes phone numbers are events offline/online during which your prospects are presenting something. Usually, the last slide in their presentation is contacts details.
Appointment setter outsourcing is $2700 for 1000 phone calls.