Below I’ve included a short, actionable list of my Top Ten Outreach Tools. These are the tools that have helped me achieve great success in my outreach campaigns over the past 18+ months — and I share them with you today, along with notes on how they can help you.
I’ve broken this short list into sections, depending on your greatest need. Let’s take a look:
Finding Email Addresses
When you’re searching for an email address, it can feel like you’re barking up a tree.
- “Where do I look?”
- “How do I find the right email address?”
- “All I can find are these dumb
info@…andsupport@…addresses… that can’t be good!”
There’s one tool and one tactic that — above all others — I’ve found to be the best at tracking down email addresses.
Email Hunter
Email Hunter is a Software as a Service app that lets you enter a domain name and gives you back two things:
- A list of all email addresses that it has found associated with that domain name
- Email Hunter’s best guess at the format of the email address
Now, #1 is great. Emails!
#2 is also great. Because sometimes you have a person’s name — like Kai Davis — and their domain name, but you’re not sure what format their email addresses use. FirstName.LastName@...? FirstName@…? Something else?
Email Hunter, based on the email addresses it finds, gives you their best guess on the format of the email address. So you’re able to take the name of the person you’re trying to contact and Email Hunter’s best guess at the format of the email address and mash them together for a high-probability at getting your target’s email address.
Tactic: Email Newsletters!
If you’re trying to connect with someone at an organization — or even a solo podcast or blog — and struggling to find an email address, one tactic that works well is to sign up for their newsletter.
Often, the newsletter inbox will be monitored by someone with the ability to refer you to the right person. Once you sign up for their newsletter and get an email address, you can use that as a lead for your initial outreach.
Identifying and Qualifying Sites
When it comes to identifying and qualifying sites to reach out to, there are a few separate tools that I recommend:
- Majestic, a backlink tracker. By looking at a ‘hub’ site (like a directory or an event), you can see all of the sites linking to that ‘hub’ site. So if you’re trying to reach, say, dentists, you can look at a past event for dentists and see who is linking to that page. Looking at backlinks can provide a number of opportunities for identifying sites for outreach.
- The iTunes Podcast Directory is another great resource for tracking down relevant podcasts to outreach to.
- listennotes.com is a wonderful tool for finding podcasts to outreach to. If you’re looking to identify podcasts that have guests on them, I highly recommend loading up cast.market and then doing a search like “{TOPIC} Guest” and see what comes back. (Replacing {TOPIC} with the topic you’re searching on, of course).
Outreach
For the outreach itself, I highly recommend QuickMail.io, an automated outreach tool. Quickmail is great at letting you:
- Import qualified prospects
- Build an automated email sequence to send to prospects
- Automatically have prospects receive your email sequence
I love and highly recommend QuickMail. It saves me hundreds of hours of time.
Following Up
For managing the follow up process once people start to respond, there are a pair of tools that I love and recommend:
- Streak, a CRM for Gmail, lets you add prospects to ‘boxes’ to track opportunities and have those opportunities as part of unique, individual pipelines. I use Streak to track all opportunities that are generated through my outreach process.
- Yesware is another add-on for Gmail that gives you email open tracking, email click tracking, and email template management capabilities. These are all features that are included in Streak, but Yesware’s implementation is absolutely amazing and I happily pay for both tools.
Managing The Process
For managing the process and keeping track of your meetings, I recommend Trello or Notion. I use Trello and Notion to manage my different outreach pipelines — placements, reviews, podcasts, interviews, articles — once I’ve confirmed them with the person I’m working with.
Scheduling Meetings
I recommend you use a calendar booking tool like savvycal.com/
Why use a calendar booking tool? Three reasons:
First, it lets the person you’re emailing with easily pick the best time to meet.
When you send someone a link to your calendar booking tool, you’re giving them the ability to pick the best time that works for them. They can review your available times and pick a meeting time that works best for them.
Second, it saves you time
How many times have you done the song-and-dance with a prospect about when to meet? The ‘Here are some times, let me know if any work’ shuffle?
By using a calendar booking tool, you avoid needing to send meeting times back and forth with a prospect, playing ‘battleship’ with your calendars. Instead, you’re able to say “Here, my friend, look at my calendar and pick the time that works best for you.”
Third, it makes you look like a professional
Tools like Calendly or SavvyCal make it easy for you to define the exact times that you’re available to meet with people. For my meetings, I have the hours of 1pm – 5pm PST, Wednesday and Thursday, available.
People are able to pick from a limited amount of available times. This has the dual benefits of making me look like a busy professional (I only have a few meeting times available. You better pick soon or else risk missing out) and protecting my time (I’m clustering all of my meetings together, preserving the rest of my week to focus on work).
While I swear by SavvyCal for booking meeting times, friends, colleagues, and clients use ScheduleOnce and other tools. If there’s one you already like and use, keep using it.
Recommended Books
- The Outreach Blueprint, a succinct guide to the complete outreach process, including detailed instructions, sample emails, and a 60-minute video Q&A about outreach.