Hopefully, your product or service is a passion project, something you love to refine, enhance, and improve while providing exceptional customer service and experience to make customers happy and put a little cash into your pocket at the same time.
But prospecting is the true lifeblood of your business. You probably didn’t start your business because you enjoy reaching out to strangers on a regular basis, but love it or hate it, you need to do it. Unfortunately, it can be a massive time-suck, and take you away from the tasks you actually enjoy doing for your business.
So what should you do? Stand on the shoulders of giants, and stick to a proven email prospecting guide to work smarter, not harder. Go with what works, hone your email skills, and then test and optimize to customize it for your target audience.
In addition, focus on the fact that buyers actually want to hear from you (and a surprising number of them want to hear from you early in their journey):
- 71% want to hear from reps about opportunities to improve their business, and 62% want to learn about solutions to problems
- Nearly 80% prefer to communicate via email
Prospecting at its core involves finding contact information, verifying that data, and sending out segmented and personalized communication, all while keeping track of who responded, following up where necessary, and shifting prospects who take a desired action to a warm lead list for further outreach.
That can be a lot of work. It’s necessary, but time-consuming – and, let’s face it, rather tedious.
Unless, of course, you streamline and automate that entire workflow using Voila Norbert and Mailshake to supercharge your prospecting.
Here’s how to do it.
Meet Voila Norbert
The first steps of successful prospecting involve finding and verifying contact details. An email address is no good unless it’s a verified email address.
As luck would have it, Voila Norbert excels at both. In fact, it’s your one-stop shop for finding leads, verifying emails, and enriching your data.
Have a name and company? Norbert can find the email address.
Have a few (hundred thousand) addresses? Norbert can verify email addresses for accuracy and remove the bad apples.
Need additional details? Norbert can locate and compile data on job titles, social media profiles, location, and more for each contact on your list.
With 58,897 happy customers, 1,456,234,098 emails found, and a deliverability rate up to 98%, it’s clear that Norbert is more than just a pretty face. In addition to this Ahrefs listed them as the most accurate email finder tool in a recent study.
In addition to its three pillars – find, verify, enrich – Norbert offers direct integration with Salesforce, Hubspot, Close.io, and Pipedrive, as well as indirect integration with others via Zapier. Chrome extension? Check. Gmail integration? Check. Norbert works with you wherever and however you work.
Get 50 leads for free and see for yourself how easy it is to use.
Meet Mailshake
Your prospect list made and verified, you next need to somehow reach out to those individuals with segmented and personalized communication while keeping track of all the back-and-forth.
And that’s where Mailshake shines.
It’s a simple solution for cold email, but don’t let the word ‘simple’ fool you: it’s a powerful and dynamic platform to take your cold emailing to the next level.
With Mailshake, you’ve got everything you need to squeeze every ounce of potential from your Norbert-verified list, including:
- Pre-made templates (or you can build and save your own)
- Real-time analysis and advice as you type
- Personal campaign reviews
- Complete personalization at scale and automatic follow-ups
- Powerful monitoring and analytics
- Lead Catcher™
- Third-party integrations via Zapier
- A/B testing
- Conversion tracking
20,367+ happy customers and 94,284,213+ emails sent can’t be wrong. Try it. You’ll love it.
Voila Norbert + Mailshake
Here’s where the total is greater than the sum of its parts. When combined, Voila Norbert and Mailshake create a potent prospecting machine at a fraction of the cost you’d pay for a comparable tool.
You’re going to use Norbert to find or verify addresses and enrich the contact details, and Mailshake to engage via cold email until you get your desired action.
Ready?
Step 1: Build Your List
You’ve got an ideal customer in mind. You’ve created detailed buyer personas to help you target them.
Now you just need to find them. Build and increase your list.
When it comes to generating leads, there’s no shortage of ways to find prospects:
- A dedicated tool like Dux-Soup
- Keyword searches on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social platforms
- Industry blogs, directories, or associations
- Your local Chamber of Commerce
- Referrals
- Your existing networks
- Company, business, or brand websites
If anything, you’re spoiled for choice and limited only by how many channels you want to try. Because of its value, building your email list should always be a top priority. It’s never big enough.
Step 2: Enter Norbert
Of course, it’s typically easier to find someone’s name and job title than it is to find their email address. We don’t – and shouldn’t – share that information so readily online.
Norbert to the rescue. Enter the information you do have – either manually or by bulk upload – and Norbert will track down the email address for you.
And don’t forget that Norbert can also confirm that any addresses you did stumble upon are still active and able to receive your email.
Here’s the kicker: you can automatically subscribe new contacts and accompanying data to a Mailshake email list with a simple Zapier connection.
Your prospecting just got a lot faster and more efficient. But we’re not done yet.
Step 3: Enter Mailshake
Your Norbert email lists will automatically port to Mailshake.
Once there, you can further segment those lists based on a wide variety of criteria. Segmented and personalized lists deliver better open and click-through rates, as well as higher revenue.
From the Mailshake dashboard, you can choose to use an existing template, or create and save one of your own.
Personalize those templates at scale with merge fields. These automatically add personal details such as names, company names, job titles, location, and whatever else you want to use. Thousands of messages sent out, but each one customized for the recipient.
That’s prospecting on jet fuel.
Set campaign parameters like an automatic follow-up schedule (campaigns with 4-7 emails outperformed those with only 1-3, generating 3x as many responses).
A separate study found 4 steps produced the highest conversion rate. Follow. Up.
Use Mailshake’s Lead Catcher to – once again – automatically collect on a separate list and notify you whenever you get a ‘response’ (whatever that is: two opens, a click, a reply, etc). These are your warm leads.
Finally, monitor, test, and manage everything for maximum impact and optimization. Mailshake makes it easy with native analytics, A/B testing, and conversion tracking.
Step 4: Personally Engage with Your Best Bets
With an integrated Voila Norbert > Mailshake workflow, your prospecting is essentially on autopilot.
You can remain hands-off until you’re notified via Lead Catcher that you have a warm lead. Step in, and personally engage with them at that point. Stop wasting time.
The prospecting part of prospecting – chasing down details, data entry, keeping track of who did or did not respond, remembering to follow up, and more – is not what you want to waste your valuable time and resources on. It’s tedious, boring, and better done via automation.
Voila Norbert and Mailshake can remove it from your plate, only involving you once a lead is verified, qualified, and warm.
Email is powerful. Email is a skill anyone can master. Use it.
Close more deals.
What’s your prospecting blueprint? Share in the comments below:
