How To Automate Cold Email Outreach (2024)

Updated October 2024

The best cold email campaigns are automated.

In this article, I show you my four step process for automating campaigns so that new leads are added each day, on autopilot:

1. Identify your ideal leads (ICP)
2. Extract these leads
3. Find their email addresses
4. Add leads to a campaign

1. Identify your ideal leads (ICP)

Sending thousands of cold emails to generic business owners doesn’t work; this "spray and pray" strategy results in a very low response rate, which causes your email accounts to get blacklisted by ESPs.

An ideal lead (ICP - Ideal Customer Profile) is someone that has performed an action that implies that they need your product or service.

Instead of contacting random leads and hoping that they need your product or service, you should contact leads that already show signs of needing your product or service.

Below are some examples:

If you are a recruitment agency that helps other companies hire talent, then any company that posts a job ad is an ideal lead, since posting a job ad implies that they need to hire someone immediately.
If I’m launching a cold email campaign for Emailchaser, then an ideal lead would be someone who signed up for one of our competitor products. If someone has signed up for a competitor product, then it means that they already need cold email software, meaning that they likely need Emailchaser.

I share six examples of leads that perform an action that imply that they need your product or service in my article How To Create An Evergreen Cold Email Campaign.

2. Extract these leads

Next, you need to extract the leads that perform these actions.

In the above mentioned recruitment agency example, I would build a low-cost custom scraper to automatically extract/scrape each company that posts a job ad on LinkedIn Jobs.

Since there are new companies posting job ads everyday, I would have a never-ending flow of new leads (companies) to reach out to.

In this episode of Cold Email Breakdown, I discuss how to build a custom scraper to extract leads from LinkedIn Jobs as described above.

Most people who send cold emails default to B2B database tools like Apollo, but these are not great, since emailing leads based on generic attributes like “industry” or “job title” leads to a very low response rate (and blacklisted email accounts). In order to have long term success, you often need to build a custom scraper that can extract leads that have already performed an action that implies that they need your product or service.

If you are still wondering how to apply this to your business, then the below LinkedIn post might give you some ideas:

3. Find their email addresses

Once you’ve extracted the leads, you need to find their email addresses.

I usually add the extracted leads to a Google spreadsheet, and then share the Google spreadsheet with a virtual assistant who then finds the email address of each lead using Emailchaser’s free Email Finder tool.

screenshot showing google spreadsheet

I’ll also ask the VA to add other relevant information to the spreadsheet, such as the LinkedIn profile of each lead.

If you don’t want to manually find each email address, then you can use Emailchaser’s Bulk Email Finder feature to speed up the process by uploading a .csv file of leads.

4. Add leads to a campaign

Once you’ve found the email addresses of your leads, you can add them to a campaign in Emailchaser.

Emailchaser allows you to send email sequences to leads, with automatic follow-ups.

You can connect a Google spreadsheet to a campaign in Emailchaser, so whenever a new lead is added to the Google spreadsheet, it’s automatically added to your campaign.

If you build a system that automatically adds leads to your Google spreadsheet, or hire a VA to do this manually, then you’ve automated your cold email campaign, as new leads will be added on a daily basis. You won’t need to constantly find new leads to contact.

screenshot showing Google Sheets option when creating a campaign in Emailchaser