When it comes to actually reaching out to people via email, generic pitches don’t do the trick. Let’s check out some tricks to personalize but not compromise on efficiency.

Ideally, lead generation has already been outsourced to your virtual assistant. In the case it hasn’t yet, or you do not wish to outsource lead gen, there are a couple of tools that can help you out.

1) Clearbit

Clearbit is an add-on which plants itself on top of your Gmail Inbox. You simply write in the domain (e.g. tesla.com) into the search field, and Clearbit will spit out any verified emails it has from that domain.

From the Gmail “Compose” screen, you click the Connect button and a new window appears. Here, you type in the company domain – which helpfully auto-suggests matching companies as you type. You then enter in a person’s name or title. In the list of matches that appears, you click the name of the person you want to email and – boom! – there’s their email address.

Even if you do not find the contact you are looking for, you’ll likely find the correct email address structure of your target (for example firstname.lastname@domain.com), which already helps a lot.

Be aware though: Clearbit requests access to your contacts as well.

2) Hunter.io

While Clearbit finds you contacts they have verified, hunter.io instead takes the email addresses you provide and verifies whether they exist or not.

Hunter has a beautiful, easy-to-navigate interface, but it also stands out with a variety of features, including:

• An email verification tool
• Bulk email management
• Lead management
• Campaign optimizer
• Free cold email templates

Let’s say you have a contact “John Doe” at working at company.com. You can provide different variations of email addresses to hunter.io (john.doe@company.com, jdoe@company.com, jd@company.com) and hunter.io will find out which ones work so that you can reach your prospect at the correct email. And you’ll then get a screen saying if that specific address is receiving emails or not:

 

It also offers some other helpful details, like whether or not the address is publicly available on the web, the type of email address, and the server status of said website email addresses.

“Why can’t I just send out emails to all of those email addresses? One of them will surely stick, right?”

Yes, but the mail clients will start noticing that most of the emails you send out bounce and do not reach their recipient. That is a huge signal for spam, which can get your domain and/or your email address blacklisted. You do not want to go down that road, there is no coming back from being blacklisted.

Pro Tip: some words have been used by spammers so often, that they automatically flag your email as suspicious. Make sure you do not use them in your emails. Take a look at this list to see which words and phrases are forbidden.

However, there are a few problems with this email processing feature. For starters, you can’t verify webmail addresses (the regular ones, that end in @gmail or @yahoo).

Which makes sense for their focus on professional emails belonging to a specific web domain, but won’t be that helpful if you want to verify an entire database.

3) GMass

GMass is another chrome extension which builds on top of your Gmail inbox. It’s not that well known, but undeservedly so! GMass sets up your Gmail account in a way that allows you to send out mass emails directly from your normal inbox.

Gmail actually has quite high limits on how many emails you can send per day, GMass lets you take advantage of that.

It comes with some kick-ass features:

• Scheduling multiple follow-up emails to pitches you send out – if a prospect does not answer, the repitches will keep on coming automatically!
• Mail Merge – you can connect GMass to Google Spreadsheets in order to personalize the emails better using variables for names or other data.
• Scheduling emails to be sent out at a certain time – if you know your prospects open emails in the early morning, just set the time correctly, and the emails will be sent out then.

 

The best thing about GMass is that you can automatically send follow-ups. The solution continues doing that until you receive a reply. Additionally, you can send messages en masse as replies. This creates the impression that you personalized the content for each individual, giving you a higher chance of receiving a reply.