SaaS Lead Generation - Referral Marketing Blog

Lead generation is the process (or set of processes) that a SaaS decides to implement in order to generate leads. Before we step into the world of lead generation, the different techniques and what works best when, let’s first define what a lead is.

What is a Lead?

A lead is a person who has shown some kind of interest in your SaaS in some way or another. A lead can show interest in various ways such as:

Signing up to get more information
Signing up for a trial of your SaaS
Scheduling a demo of your SaaS
Filling in a survey and agreeing to get more information about your SaaS
Claiming a discount coupon, longer trial period, free or discounted setup of your SaaS
Positively answer to a cold call or to a cold email about the services provided by your SaaS

A lead can either be a:

Cold Lead: A complete stranger who has never heard about your SaaS and does not know what kind of service it offers. This kind of lead is the hardest to convert and usually requires educating the lead prior to pitching your SaaS.
Warm Lead: Someone who has encountered or heard in one way or another about your SaaS. It might be they are already following you on social media, has subscribed to a newsletter in which your SaaS has been reviewed in, has visited your blog or read some of the content you published.

So, what is SaaS Lead Generation?

SaaS lead generation is the process of getting cold & warm leads to show some kind of interest in your SaaS. This can be done in various ways and through several techniques, most of which we will be cover in this book. Most of the SaaS marketing’s ultimate goal is to get leads to sign up either for a demo, which will trigger their onboarding sequence that will eventually convert them into paid customers.

Lead Generation can be either inbound or outbound and will happen over a channel such as social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Quora), messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Viber, Skype, SMS) or Email.

What is inbound lead generation?

Inbound lead generation involves waiting for a potential customer to get to know about your SaaS and to come asking for a solution to a problem they are facing. Inbound lead generation strategies involve providing upfront value, through content marketing, education material such as videos, free Q&As and free downloadable resources to get potential customers to get to know about the services you provide through your SaaS. This lead generation method is less annoying and disruptive as you are simply providing the bait and wait for your potential customers to bite.

What is outbound lead generation?

On the other hand, outbound lead generation involves reaching out to who you think are potential customers to your SaaS with the idea of informing them about your SaaS as a solution to a problem they are potentially facing. This lead generation activity can be frowned upon by some marketers in the industry as it might lead to spam. However, if properly executed, in a controlled fashion, with the right tools and techniques, outbound lead generation activity can prove to be very useful for your SaaS. The key to success is to focus your outbound lead generation efforts and narrowing down your scope, to keep your campaign as relevant as possible.

How can a SaaS generate leads?

There are various ways of how a SaaS can generate leads. A lead generation strategy is highly dependant on whether the lead generation activity is inbound or outbound and the channel it will target. Since lead generation activities have to be ongoing, tools are required to make the processes more efficient, personalised, tracked and effective. The following are hands-on, actionable lead generation strategies recommend by industry experts that you can implement straight away.

Inbound Lead Generation Strategies

We will start off from inbound lead generation strategies as some of the steps and strategies will be revisited in the outbound lead generation strategies. All Inbound lead generation activities involve waiting for a visitor to take action such as filling a form, interact with a chatbot, comment on a Facebook post, scheduling a call or signing up for a SaaS account.

Strategy #1: Creating high converting Landing Pages

All inbound strategies that you can come up with, will involve directing your visitors to a specific, fined tuned landing page. A landing page is designed with the intention to capture information about your leads by asking them:

for an email address
for a phone number
for a physical address
to sign-up to your SaaS

Designing high converting landing pages is a tricky business. It will require lots and lots of tweakings (I mean lots of tweaking) in order to get to a high converting with clear and compelling messaging. You can use Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress to create landing pages but to ace the job you will need a tool like DragDropr.

What is DragDropr and how it can help your SaaS?

DragDropr is the only universal visual page builder that can be used with any CMS system (WordPress, Magento, Shopify, Lightspeed, etc) to build or edit pages. You can build or edit a page, blog, or any other content quickly by dragging and dropping – no coding required.

It is also a powerful Landing Page builder, giving you the option to build and publish quickly and with zero coding. You can opt to use a professional Landing Page template that comes with DragDropr too.

Whilst DragDropr lets you visually design any content by just dragging and dropping your content, in the background, DragDropr will produce pure HTML code for you that you can copy and paste on any other platform. At any time you can also easily extract and paste in any RichText editor for further use (in your, e-mails, social posts or any other platform with RichText editor).

Strategy #2: Creating targeted & niche specific landing pages

As highlighted above, landing pages are designed and built with one specific goal: Conversion. Your landing pages should be narrowed down to target specific niches of your target audience in order to better address their problem, speak their terms and hence further improving conversion rate.
For instance, if you are selling a book that has different audiences (e.g. to SaaS businesses, E-commerce and Internet marketers), you can go ahead and use DragDropr to easily create similar landing pages that specifically target these different niches.

Strategy #3: A/B testing your landing pages

Getting to the right copy of your landing page, will require you to go through several revisions. The process is called A/B testing and with a DragDropr Chrome extension, you can make quick changes to any of your pages with few clicks! A/B testing involves:

Create two copies (very similar yet different) of a particular landing page
Send 50% of the traffic to variant A and 50% of the traffic to variant B
Monitor the performance of an individual variant.
Pick the most converting variant.
Repeat the process over and over again!

Strategy #4: Create content that is being shared

Content marketing is a strategy whereby you will generate and publish free content related to your SaaS niches that your potential customers will want to read about. The idea behind content marketing is to attract leads to your landing pages by addressing questions they have or by educating them about your SaaS.

Content marketing is a universe of its own. There are various tips that you have to watch out for when designing your content marketing strategies. But what if you can get a glimpse of what is trending in your niche? This can be done with a tool like Social Animal.

Social Animal is a content research tool that will help you with your content marketing strategy. With Social Animal you can find top shared content, deep search for competitor mentions inside articles, and identify highly relevant influencers for your target keyword/domain. Apart from that, the tool also offers useful features like headline analyzer, sentiment analysis of content title and advanced content insights to help you make data-driven decisions.

In order to get to know the topics and articles that are currently trending and are being shared, enter your target keyword/domain in Social Animal.

The top-performing articles for your keyword/domain will be shown. This gives a clearer picture of the kind of content your audience is reading, sharing and engaging with. You will also know the best social media to promote on too.

Strategy #5: Spy on your competitor’s content strategy

Creating a perfect content marketing strategy for your business begins with understanding the audience. An article getting shared across various social media platforms implies that the content was well received. However, you will get a lot of clues by simply keeping an eye on how your competitors are handling their content strategy and to respond accordingly. You can use Social Animal to check out on your competitors by heading to the insights tab and enter your competitor domain.

Social Animal’s Insights lets you analyze any keyword or domain and helps create clever strategies based on what’s working for your competitors.

However, even if you have the perfect content written, the distribution part of your content is key to get you the reach that you are looking for. Think of your content as a portal to potential leads to visit one of your landing pages and convert. The more eyes you get on your content, the better are your chances of getting new leads.

Strategy #6: Identify potential influencers in your niche

If you want to dominate the content marketing game, you have to get some help from influencers. An influencer is a trusted authority in a particular niche. It can be a person or a publishing entity that has a lot of following. Getting an influencer’s attention is not easy but should be one of your goals. Social Animal will help you to identify such influencers in your SaaS niche by using the Influencers tab that will let you find influencers based on any keyword or search term and by sorting using followers, top authors and Influencer score.

One of the greatest benefits of using social media is the ability to increase brand awareness, attract potential customers with quality content, and acquire leads through advanced targeting. In order to make that happen, though, you need to take care of your social media presence first. This is when proper social media management tools get handy, and Kontentino definitely fits perfectly here.

What is Kontentino and how it can help your SaaS?

Kontentino is a social media management tool that is not just a simple calendar to schedule your posts across social networks – it lets you manage your content, as well as your tasks. You can easily keep an eye on task progression and information flow among team members, export posts directly to Facebook (which allows you to set boosting for all your scheduled post in advance), save inspirations and ideas for later in a separate calendar, reschedule and duplicate posts with a drag-drop feature, and take advantage of useful insights and reporting to check how well your content is performing.

Let’s face it – creating quality content takes time. You’ve already dedicated a significant amount of it to researching, writing and editing your content. It is important to make the most of it.

First, think of your content distribution network. It’s all about choosing the right channels for your needs, and the type of content you produce. At this stage, the idea to use social media for that purpose should come naturally – and it’s definitely a good one, provided that you have an actual social media strategy in place. It’s always a good practice to develop an omnichannel approach and use different social networks, but try not to copy-paste the same content everywhere. Instead, think of different formats you can use, and schedule them all in advance – even a few times.

How to do it with Kontentino? You can easily create, schedule, and edit posts, send them for approval to your clients and have an overview of all your planned content for a given social media channel. “Inspirations”, on the other hand, allow you to store post ideas in one place so that you and your team can easily get inspired and share their thoughts within the tool.

Strategy #8: Promote gated content to acquire more leads

Speaking of quality content – the demand for valuable publications is always on the rise. If you promote gated content on social media, you don’t only have a chance to attract new followers and increase their engagement, but also acquire leads at the same time.

Nonetheless, the most important step here is to create a relevant resource that will be appealing enough to share basic contact information in exchange for it. Once you’re certain it’s actually valuable – it’s time to promote your piece of content on social media.

The easiest (and the most reasonable) way to do so is to share a link to a dedicated landing page that will make it possible to download the resource after leaving an email address (or some other personal details, to be exact). Don’t forget to check (and edit, if necessary) your link preview and make sure there’s a catchy CTA included in your post.

When your post is scheduled in Kontentino, you can boost it in advance on Facebook right away. It would actually be an additional way to make your gated content more popular.

Strategy #9: Take advantage of carousel posts (Facebook & LinkedIn)

Carousels are a great way to fit more content into one post. After all, you can easily feature a few images with different headlines, descriptions and links. There’s also another, even greater advantage of such posts – they seem to be more engaging and perform much better than other types of social media content, especially when it comes to ads.

In the beginning, carousel ads were only available on Facebook, but nowadays it’s not the only social network that lets you take advantage of them. Technically, though, LinkedIn Carousels are reserved only for advertisers – unless you use Kontentino to create organic link carousels and even schedule them in advance, that is. Actually, it’s currently the only tool that offers this feature, allowing you to manage your LinkedIn profile entirely.

How to create LinkedIn Carousels, then? Once you sign in to Kontentino, you should connect your LinkedIn Company Page to your account. When you’re done, press “New post”, look for the “Carousel” button and start submitting your first link in the field. The first part of your carousel will be created automatically.

Then, you can continue adding images to your carousel, as well as changing each link and its preview title separately. The last step is to save and schedule your carousel post when you’re ready. That’s it!

Strategy #10: Organic search (Google, Yahoo, Bing & other search engines)

It is not the aim of this book to give you a full overview of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It is our intention to provide you with some quick actionable tips to help you get started or improve your inbound lead generation through search engines.

SEO is a very broad and complex topic and without the right tools in place you will get lost very easily. If you have ever tried doing SEO before you must have heard about Ahrefs.

What is Ahrefs and how it can help your SaaS?

Ahrefs, has 5 main tools:

Site Explorer: Get an in-depth look at the organic search traffic and backlink profile of any website or URL.
Content Explorer: Find all pages and their SEO metrics that mention your keyword(s) from our content index of over one billion pages.
Keywords Explorer: Generate thousands of keyword ideas, analyze their ranking difficulty, and calculate each topic’s full traffic potential fast.
Rank Tracker: Track and monitor your keyword rankings from any location within 170 countries.
Site Audit: Crawl, analyze, and monitor your website for over 100 on-site technical SEO issues.

With the data you find in Ahrefs, you can rank better in Google, YouTube, Amazon, Bing. and get more search traffic to your SaaS.

Strategy #11: Find low-hanging content opportunities by looking at your competitors’ high traffic pages

Wouldn’t it be great if you could find out which pages account for the majority of your competitors’ organic traffic? This way you will know exactly which pages you have to compete with and which keywords your competitors are ranking for.

Use Ahrefs Site Explorer and go to Top Pages.

Turns out, you can also find out which of these pages are easy to outperform. These are pages on your competitor’s site that generate a lot of organic traffic but have little to no referring domains. Simply skim through all the pages and make a note on which have few backlinks yet still receive a lot of organic search traffic. Just by doing this with a few other competitors, you can easily create pages that will generate you tons of search traffic with a little bit of work.

Strategy #12: Find out how your competitors are acquiring backlinks, then replicate their strategies

If you can find out how your competitors are acquiring links, then you can probably replicate their strategies to build links to your site. Enter your competitor’s domain into Ahrefs Site Explorer and click on either their Backlinks report or Referring Domains report.

By exploring these two reports, you can quickly get a sense of the link building strategies that are working for your competitors. You may even spot a few easily replicable links right off the bat. You can also learn about their link building strategies by finding their most linked-to pages. All you have to do is to simply navigate to the “Best by links” report.

This allows you to see what kind of content attracts links in your niche. You can then create similar link-worthy posts or resources, acquire links and rank well in Google! This will send you search traffic.

Strategy #13: Find critical SEO issues that are hurting your website’s performance and get solutions on how to fix them

Search engines feed on content! They are after fresh, high-quality content with plenty of backlinks pointing to it. So creating high-quality content (as per your content strategy) will give you a good bump in SEO. But, quality content is not the only check that search engines will do. To improve rankings you will need an SEO analysis tool such as Pulno.

What is Pulno and how it can help your SaaS?

Pulno performs a full SEO audit of your SaaS website. Pulno checks a target website, searching for over 100 common issues such as SEO problems, slow website speed, or poorly written, thin content – all of which prevent that particular website from performing at its best. Once the analysis is complete, Pulno offers a plethora of useful advice and actionable tips which, when implemented, help you to improve your SaaS search engine rankings.

Broken links are a serious threat to any website. Not only do they reduce the website’s usability, but also worsen user experience. Pulno finds broken links on your SaaS website, provides extensive solutions and tips on how to fix them.

Website speed is yet another crucial factor which directly impacts SEO. It is a well-known fact that unless a website loads in under 3 seconds, its owner should expect almost 50% abandonment rate. This means 50% of lead generation opportunities are gone because of a 2-3 second delay.

There are multiple ways to increase your SaaS website speed. Upon analyzing a website, Pulno can offer suggestions on how to speed it up.

Pulno is able to analyze your website from different angles, paying close attention to different aspects that can impact your SaaS website’s speed. Perhaps a website is loading slowly due to very long server response times?

Or, perhaps the problem lies in a website’s images being too large and hence taking too much time to download? Regardless of what causes the speed issues, Pulno will be able to identify it and help you fix them.

Thin content remains one of the most serious problems you have to deal with when it comes to optimizing your SaaS website. Usually completely irrelevant to the reader’s intent, often duplicated and of poor quality, thin content can easily destroy any lead generation efforts. After all, if users reach your website, but find no solutions to their problems or answers to their queries, why would they even consider doing business with you?

Fixing thin content and creating information-rich copies is, therefore, a great way to build trust with potential customers, and ensure that they find a website, stay there, and finally convert. This is exactly where Pulno shines.

Through its unique content analyzer, Pulno is able to verify which pages on a particular website are suffering from thin, poorly written or duplicated content.

Once the analysis is ready, Pulno provides you with suggestions and solutions to fixing the issues. By addressing those issues, you can quickly fix poor copies, duplicated entries, or broken images – all of which spoil the user experience and negatively impact your SEO efforts.

Strategy #14: Answers visitors’ queries 24/7 using chatbots

Trying as best as you could, it is almost impossible to answer all queries that a visitor to your landing page might have. We have already highlighted how much important it is to have high converting landing pages with enough content to get your visitors to act by clicking on your CTA. But what if they have a query that needs clarification? Enter chatbots and let Botsify help you.

What is Botsify and how it can help your SaaS?

Botsify enables businesses to optimize their customer support chat and helps them increase customer satisfaction by providing 24/7 automated Live Chat. Chatbots are a great way to communicate with your visitors. You can extract basic contact details of your users and gather them in CRM or Google spreadsheet to use it further in email marketing, broadcast messaging and much more.

Botsify help you by providing:

Timely response to your visitors

The biggest struggle most businesses face is losing a potential lead by keeping their questions on hold since customers do not like dropping a query and wait. They want an immediate response. When a chatbot provides a timely response to your visitors, it also gives you the benefit of generating leads by simulating the conversation with your customers.

Personalized experience to your customers

Your chatbot can keep track of your customer’s data; that way, whenever they interact with your chatbot, it immediately knows your customer’s status (likes, dislikes, information provided, etc.). So while your customers enjoy feeling special, your chatbot can potentially convert them to leads.

24/7 customer support

A chatbot is 24/7 online, responding to all kinds of customer queries at any time of the day. It will always respond faster than a human, as it can help filter a lot of frequently asked questions so that the number of cases that needs human intervention is notoriously lowered.

Strategy #15: Capture SaaS leads through conversational forms

Forms are usually used to capture information about your leads. Forms are static and a bit old fashioned and does not allow for two way communication between you and your potential customer. Visitors can submit information, such as their first name, last name and email and as a SaaS you will only receive that information.

Botsify provides another way how you can collect information about your leads. It’s called a conversational form. With conversational forms you can gather information about your leads, by progressively asking for information, depending on the answer to the previous question.

Strategy #16: Auto-message Facebook users who comment on a post

Chatbots can either reside on landing pages, available to visitors or else they can be deployed on Facebook to react to certain event that happens on one of your Facebook posts. Inbox auto response to Facebook comments is a feature provided by Botsify that allows you to automatically message those Facebook users who comment on your post asking for more information.

Creating such a chatbot is easy. Visit the following Acquire Users from Comments Page and once you are there, click on “Get Started” button.

You will first need to login with your Facebook account. After logging in you will see all the pages that are created/linked to your Facebook accounts. Go to Promotions menu item on the side menu and click on “Growth Tools”. When the side menu expands, select “Acquire users from Comments” under Messenger QR Code.

You will see this page with a “Create New” button because you haven’t yet set up an auto message for comments yet.

Once you click on Create New, you will be redirected to this window.

Enter keywords for which you want your chatbot to react to. When a Facebook user adds a comment containing one of these keywords, the chatbot will react. Select a post and type the message you want to send to users. Click Save and you are done.

Strategy #17: Detect which businesses are visiting your landing pages

Usually, an average business get leads from their website only when the visitor decides to opt-in – call, message or at least leave their contact info. But what about those people who get distracted by funny cat videos messaged by a friend and leave your website? That’s where Albacross comes into play.

What is Albacross and how it can help your SaaS?

Albacross is an innovative lead generation software that tracks the inbound traffic to your SaaS website and captures B2B leads. Via a tracking code that you put onto your website, Albacross detects the company that a visitor belongs to and this information will appear in your dashboard.

Along with this information, you will see the contact information of the decision makers of the companies who visited your SaaS. As a result, you can quickly reach out to them and ask if they are still interested in what you offer. Albacross integrates with Zapier allowing you to integrate it with more than 1,300 tools. That way Albacross may be easily included into the existing sales processes of almost any company.

Knowing who is visiting your website is very valuable. With Albacross you can set up reports and get a new list of leads every day, week or month. To do so, just head to Albacross Dashboard, open the main menu and go to the Email Reports tab.

To set up the report:

Choose to get the list of all new leads or just use the preset filter.
Enter the email address you want to receive notifications to.
Choose a frequency of the reports
Save the Report by pressing the Tick button

But there’s more – you can get real-time emails or notifications to your preferred channel like Slack about the new leads captured. To do this, you will need a Zapier account and another 5 minutes of time.

Outbound Lead Generation Strategies

Contrary to Inbound lead generation, outbound lead generation is more forward thinking. Outbound lead generation involves:

thinking who your potential buyer persona is
researching each buyer persona
deciding on a channel where to reach potential buyers
reaching out and follow up

Don’t be tricked! Outbound lead generation strategies are simple routines but very tricky to scale. They require careful planning, perfect execution and constant monitoring so as to be able to improve your on your previous numbers.

Just like Inbound lead generation methods, outbound strategies require you to semi-automate your processes by making use of several. It is only through semi-automatic you can truly get to a positive return on investment (ROI). The following section focuses on actionable outbound lead generation strategies that you can implement today. You will notice that outbound lead generation techniques highly depend on the target channel.

Email Outbound Lead Generation Strategies

The very first step to do outbound email marketing is to actually get a hold of a list of potential leads. There are services who specifically focus on providing you with filtered email lists according to various criteria which you want your leads to have. Make sure you shop around as different services offer different filtering techniques, have different data sources and perform better in certain niches. The following are three hand-picked lead generation that can get you a stream of leads.

What is Cloudlead and how it can help your SaaS?

Cloudlead is a B2B Contact Data and Sales Intelligence solution which provides custom, human verified leads for sales and marketing.

Cloudlead provides a single platform solution for sales prospecting at scale with personalized insights into our client’s target audience. In fact, Cloudlead takes it a step further with our cold outreach platform (currently in beta and available to enterprise users). This is integrated with services like custom insights and contact enrichment, making it easier than ever for Sales Development Representatives to reach out to leads at the right time and armed with the right information. In short, Cloudlead doesn’t just provide custom data, we guarantee data that is freshly mined by our internal tools and human researchers with under 5% bounce rates.

Specifically, our custom services include:

B2B Contact Mining
B2B Database Enrichment
B2B Data Cleansing
Inbound Lead Scoring

In simple terms, what this means is that Cloudlead provides an effective means for our clients to connect with their ideal customers. B2B sales is now about personalized outreach or demonstrating to potential customers how much business values them from the very first touch point. What this essentially translates into is that salespeople and marketers need to be armed with more in-depth information than basic contact info or social profiles. Businesses need to know their customers inside out. The problem arises when this requirement has to be applied to prospecting at scale – and this is exactly what makes Cloudlead different. Not only do we provide custom insights geared towards our customer’s niche, but we can do it at scale.

Strategy #18: Retarget old clients to generate more sales and reduce cost per acquisition with data enrichment and data cleansing

Using tools like Cloudlead you can turn basic contact information into data that reads like a story? Nope, it’s not magic, it’s just data enrichment and data cleansing which Cloudlead researchers specialize in. Imagine if you could retarget all of your old clients (even those who have changed jobs or moved to different states) armed with information that indicates their buying habits, intent to buy, audience fit etc.
Besides being a great opportunity to bring back old clients back, data cleansing and enrichment has the added benefit of increasing marketing ROI. According to SiriusDecisions, “It takes $1 to verify a record as it’s entered, $10 to cleanse and dedupe it, and $100 if nothing is done, as the ramifications of the mistakes are felt over and over again.”

Strategy #19: Optimize sales through lead scoring

Marketing Sherpa reports that Chief Marketing Officers (CMO’s) witnessed a 138% increase in return on investment (ROI) after implementing lead scoring.

If you provide your sales team with pre-scored leads, they would and do manage to engage leads faster thereby saving your time, their time and making more sales. As opposed to sorting through leads they have lying in their CRM, they can jump right onto reaching priority accounts.

So what does it take? Lead scoring for faster engagement and identifying high quality accounts that are more likely to buy from you.

What is Uplead and how it can help your SaaS?

UpLead is a lead generation platform that connects you to the right contacts. This platform caters to two groups of users — B2B marketers who are looking to build their pipeline and generate high-quality leads, and B2B sales reps who want to do their homework and understand their prospects’ backgrounds before making a cold call.

How does UpLead work? Once you sign up for an account and gain access to the UpLead dashboard, you’ll be able to search for contacts using 50+ different criteria. This includes:

Industry
- Industry Category
- Industry Name
- SIC Code
- NAICS Code
Title
- Job Title
- Job Function
- Management Level
Location
- Country
- State
- County
- Metro Area
- City
- Zip Code
Sales Revenue
Number of Employees
Type of Company
- Public, Private, Education, Government or Non-Profit
- Fortune Ranking
- Alexa Ranking
By Company URL
Technologies Used
Presence of Social Links
Year Founded

You can refine your list using as many criteria as you’d like. UpLead will sift through its database, and populate your search results with all the B2B contacts who fit within your criteria.

From the search results, you’ll be able to see each prospect’s phone number. From here, you can choose to “unlock” your prospects’ email addresses, or you might click into individual listings to learn more about each prospect.

What sets UpLead apart from other B2B databases and contact providers? In a nutshell: while most databases and contact providers update their email list databases once every 30, 60 or 90 days, UpLead verifies its leads in real-time, every time a user downloads a lead’s information.

Before we dive into UpLead’s built-in real time email verification, let’s talk about why companies shouldn’t rely on databases which are verified only periodically. Obviously, procuring contact information from these databases isn’t ideal — you might end up emailing someone who looks like a great prospect, without realizing that they’ve actually left their job 3 months ago.

If you see a “Valid” status, this means that the lead’s email server allows verification, and the email is 97%+ verified at the moment of download or export. You’re good to go, and UpLead will display the email address without any additional prompts from you.

Strategy #20: Get a list of leads by inputting a search criteria

To conduct a search on UpLead, log into your dashboard, navigate to the left-hand panel, and input your search criteria.

From here, refine your search criteria until you’ve got a suitably targeted list that fits perfectly with your target buyer persona. If you’re selling a premium tool, for instance, you might want to narrow down your search to target only leads from companies that make upwards of $1M in revenue per year.

If you’re a regular user of UpLead, there’s a nifty feature that allows you to exclude the leads whose contact information you’ve already downloaded from your subsequent searches. This becomes handy later on in the game.

From the left-hand panel, click on “Exclusions”, and then “Exclude from previous downloads”.

If you’ve got your own B2B email lists, you can also upload these, and use UpLead to exclude the contacts from your lists. To do this, you’d simply click on “Upload a List” instead of “Exclude From Previous Downloads”.

What is LeadFuze and how it can help your SaaS?

LeadFuze is a fully automated, well-integrated lead generation tool offering unlimited lead data. Perhaps the biggest differentiator is our automated list building feature. Just set a few key criteria (things like industry, target role, company size, etc.) and our Fuzebot will continuously choose a number of leads each and every day. For instance, you want to target the founders of small to mid-sized financial institutions across the U.S.. Punch those details into LeadFuze and you find several thousand potential leads. You can then save that list to drip 25, 50, 100+ leads every day you choose.

This leads to the next big difference…integrations. You have dozens (or hundreds) of fresh leads for outreach every business day. With other tools, you’d have to download the list and upload the .csv to your CRM or email tool.

LeadFuze acts as a sales hub for many common tools.

Integrate with great email tools like MailShake and Woodpecker.
CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive are directly connected right in the LeadFuze app.
Other tools like Orca and Bidsketch help you connect and pitch all of the awesome leads found in our application.

Strategy #21: Find direct & indirect Influencers

Once you have a target market and the person likely to hold the money, you may want to find a few other people close to your decision maker. When you’re looking for more than one contact in a particular brand, you’re venturing into something called “Account-Based Marketing”.

Note: If you’re looking for small businesses (under 50 employees), this tip may not work so well for you. It’s for those targeting larger brands who may have departments of people making decisions.

So, if you do a lead search and find a dozen or so big brands, you can click over to the LeadFuze account-based search and find others in the same company.

You can also use this feature to find the contact data for individuals. If you know the first/last name of someone at the company — you can find their details!

Strategy #22: Find leads who are spending money

If you’re looking for someone to buy what you sell — find someone who’s using something similar.

You may think that selling to companies that don’t use a tool like yours makes more sense, but it really doesn’t help convert. Why?

Too much education is needed to close.

If the company is using a tool like yours, they understand the benefit. All you have to do is point out how you’re different/better than the competition. Leads who are looking for another solution (or dissatisfied with their current tool) will pay attention.

One of the coolest features of LeadFuze is the ability to search for tech being used (or not used by leads. You can choose to include or exclude different tech or even whether or not a company is hiring for a similar role!

This kind of data can be huge in finding prospects and getting them to respond to your outreach.

Cloudlead, Uplead and LeadFuze are great services that can help you research your leads from pre-mined data. But there is another way of doing it. Soleadify stresses the point of product-market-fit and thinks that lead mining should be custom for each and every SaaS.

What is Soleadify and how it can help your SaaS?

Lead generation should be custom-tailored for each company. Especially for cold emailing. It should feel personal. It should convert. For example, let’s say you’ve built a tool that helps freelance copywriters.

Imagine finding only those copywriters that do freelance work, knowing which companies they’ve worked for in the past, the kind of content they usually write about and where they publish it.

Soleadify will help you mine all this content and enables you to write a beautiful custom email to each and every one of them. Such personalisation and customisation is what makes the difference and what sets Soleadify from other services. Aside from custom data mining, they’ll even help you with your segmentation, strategy, and handle the infrastructure for you, so you can carpet bomb your whole niche in a short period of time.

Strategy #23: Be extremely specific with the niche you’re targeting

Use personas and make sure you define your target audience to the very last tiny detail. You should know what technologies they use, in which cities they live, in what type of companies they work and any other relevant and valuable information you can think of.

That’s how you know where to find them. That’s how you know how to talk to them.

Strategy #24: Protect your main domain. Use a separate domain.

When cold emailing, never do it from your main domain. Buy a similar one. Ideally, several similar ones. For example, if your main domain is maindomain.com, buy maindomain.net, main-domain.com, maindomains.com etc. Use those for sending cold emails. If you’re doing it right, the chances that you end up in spam are quite slim. But better safe than sorry. It is the experience of Soleadify that will help to design and execute your campaign in such a way you won’t end up in the spam folder.

If you have a big list, your best chances are to send the emails from different addresses to different batches of your users.

Always be ‘warming up’ the email addresses first. This means you should be sending several tens of emails each day a few weeks prior to your campaign. Ideally, to people you know, so they open & don’t mark as spam. Don’t be perceived as a ‘stranger’ by the email servers when starting to send emails at scale.

Don’t use too much html. Use plain text.

Don’t use more than one link.

Don’t use link shorteners.

Clean the lists before sending emails. You should have a bounce rate of <1%.

Strategy #25: Email is 1-to-1 communication. Keep it that way.

Write super tailored emails. They shouldn’t be able to tell that you’re doing this at scale. Email is 1-on-1 communication. It should feel like 1-on-1 communication. You should send emails that you’d like to see as a recipient. It doesn’t have to be a massive list. The carpet bombing is not necessary and should be avoided at all costs as it can get you banned. Start by writing one email per day to your target audience. But make it worth reading.

Strategy #26: Keep your bounce rate as low as possible

Email is one of the highest earning channels for a positive return on investment (ROI), with a potential ROI of 4400% where every single dollar invested brings back an average return of $44. But there’s a problem many email marketers run into. Over time, their engagement slowly starts to decrease for a number of reasons. The major one is usually email deliverability. Typically, email lists degrade at a rate of 22.5% each year. This means that a huge amount of your mailing list subscribers’ emails won’t be valid after a year.

So what happens when you send an email campaign to a lot of addresses that aren’t valid anymore?

Your bounce rate increases. This sends a signal to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Gmail that your sender reputation shouldn’t be high.
If your sender reputation isn’t high, your emails may not reach the inboxes of your customers with valid email addresses.
You get poor email deliverability and open rates because you’ve been sent straight to the Junk folder.

All in all, you’re not making it to the inboxes of your subscribers, and that directly translates to lower ROI. Bye bye $44.
Email verification can solve the email deliverability problem and has a crazy ROI, so it’s usually a no-brainer to do except it’s a pain to do, which is why a lot of businesses don’t do it. It’s either too expensive or too time-consuming or both. And that’s the problem mailfloss aims to solve.

What is mailfloss and how it can help your SaaS?

mailfloss is a bulk email verification service for busy businesses. It takes a different approach from other email verification services because it’s done for you automatically after a quick initial setup. You’re up and running in a few minutes tops versus other solutions that take weeks of expensive and limited developer resources or worse yet, manually uploading and downloading spreadsheets.

If you’re a busy business with limited resources and budgets but rely on email marketing to drum up business and leads, chances are you’ll benefit from email verification. It helps your emails reach real people – you’ll almost always get higher deliverability, engagement, and conversions with a clean and healthy email list versus one that isn’t. With mailfloss, email verification is handled automatically. This lets you focus on your marketing, generating leads, and growing your business rather than worrying about deliverability issues. Simply connect your Email Sender Provider (ESP), set your preferences, and let mailfloss handle the rest from beginning to end. It’s the only true set-it and forget-it email verification solution out there.

Strategy #27: Use a reputable Email Sender Provider (ESP)

For these providers to stay in business, they must keep a good email reputation or their customers will take their business elsewhere, so these ESPs are fiercely protective of their email reputation in order to maintain maximum email deliverability. Simply choosing a good ESP can take care of many of the best email practices for you such as unsubscribe links, stopping hard bounce sends, feedback loops, and they also have excellent features for stats, analytics, open and click tracking, as well as email automation.

Some of the best in class ESPs are: ActiveCampaign, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, ConvertKit, HubSpot, Infusionsoft, Klaviyo, MailChimp, Ontraport, and Sendlane.

Strategy #28: Integrate email verification with your ESP

Connect mailfloss with your email service provider. Select the ESP you use from our list. Once selected, you’ll need to grant mailfloss permission to import your emails and perform other actions, such as unsubscribe invalid email addresses. This process is very quick, and instructions for each ESP are documented step by step via articles, pictures, gifs, and videos. Here’s the process for MailChimp.

Step 1. Visit the integrations page

Visit the integrations page by clicking on “Integrations” in the left sidebar.

Step 2. Click the Add Integration button and a popup will appear

Step 3. Click the Connect button

You will be taken to MailChimp where you’ll authorize mailfloss in the next step.

Step 4. Login to your MailChimp account and select which Account you want mailfloss to connect to

Once authorized, you’ll be taken back to mailfloss.

Here’s a screenshot of the four options you have with MailChimp:

The first option “Manually decide action on bad emails” will display emails deemed invalid so you can decide an action on them, like so:

With manual mode set, you can later decide to delete, unsubscribe, ignore, or report the status as incorrect for all contacts mailfloss determined as invalid.

The second option “Unsubscribe bad emails” will unsubscribe the contact from MailChimp. This action is irreversible. You’ll see the contact in MailChimp in the “Unsubscribed” list.

The third option “Delete bad emails” is also irreversible. Once deleted, the contact is gone for good and you won’t find it inside of MailChimp anymore.

Strategy #29: Find the email address of your competitors’ clients

Imagine you can find out who is using your competitor. How about you reach out to them explaining how are you better addressing their pain points? This is where Snov.io gets handy amongst other things.

Using Snov.io Technology Checker you can find companies that use your competitor’s technologies (like GA, Hotjar, Intercom).

Step 1: Go to your Snov.io account and choose the Technology Checker tool.

Step 2: Type in your competitor’s technologyand receive a list of companies who use them

Step 3: Collect their email with Snov.io Email Finder

Contact their sales department offering your superior service using Snov.io Drip Campaigns. Use your knowledge of the pain points of your prospects and the needs that your competitors can not fulfil to pitch your SaaS.

What is Snov.io and how it can help your SaaS?

Snov.io aims to replace 3-4 tools in your toolbox to eliminate the frustration of switching between tools for tasks that could potentially be performed as one connected process. It would be more efficient time-wise and more affordable for smaller companies to do all of their outreach in one window.

Before, you would have to purchase a lead generation solution to build your prospect list. Then you would have to sign up for another service to verify it. Then, choose a campaign sending tool to help you actually reach out to your leads. And then follow-ups to both interested leads and those who have not replied. This is a tedious process that could stretch over 3-4 tools and multiple days, but it can now be linked and automated through Snov.io.

Strategy #30: Stay protected as you scale your 1-to-1 outbound lead generation

Many give up on email outreach prematurely. They get into deliverability troubles that they could easily avoid with some planning and tracking. The following are some of the things that you have to keep in mind when scaling your 1-to-1 cold email outreach:

Take a look at your email provider sending limits. How many emails can you send per hour/day? That’s important. A proper cold emailing tool is there for you to automate personalized outreach at scale.
Put a few personalization snippets to make each email slightly different from the rest. As an extra, you make it very personal to each recipient, so they can see you’ve done your homework.
Don’t bulk send all your emails as one chunk. Sends emails one by one at random frequencies.
Cold emailing stats are there for a reason. No, not for bragging how many responses you acquired. They are there to monitor the health of your email address. Look at the stats below. Too low open rate? Are you sure your email aren’t going to the SPAM folder? Too many bounces? Are your delivery records all good? Too few responses? Run some A/B tests.

It is very demanding to get and maintain a high quality domain reputation, whilst getting good open rate and response rate. For this reason and more Woodpecker is a must have tool in your toolbox. It will help you offload a lot of otherwise manual tasks to send cold emails through your ESP.

What is Woodpecker and how it can help your SaaS?

Woo d pecker is designed for acquiring leads via email. Build a list of leads, upload them to Woodpecker and write an email sequence, personalized with snippets. Woodpecker doesn’t limit the number of emails you can send per plan. But schedule your email sending in a way to stay within your email provider sending limits and follow up effectively. We found out that 2-3 follow-up emails is perfectly enough to convert leads.

Strategy #31: Personalize the whole outbound process

Email is a perfect medium for scaling 1-to-1 outreach. Can you spot a keyword there? Here it is, “1-to-1” is our keyword. Due to the level of directness an email has, we cannot drop leaflets with our offering. We need real data. The following are some tips on how you can personalize your message.

Brainstorm a generic email copy in a “just reaching out” kind of fashion. Don’t mention anything about your product yet, but try to maintain a caring, friendly tone. You can do that before you start looking for the contacts, while you’re looking for them or after you compiled a list of contacts. It doesn’t matter. The point is you’re putting your brain into work mode.
When you know who you’re going to target, rewrite the copy to include a common denominator, a feature that is shared by all the leads in your campaign. Make some room for personalization.
Decide on the snippets you’re going to put in there. Those may be basic ones like {{First name}} or {{Company}} but also some custom snippets like {{Snippet1}} up to {{Snippet15}}. Here is the screenshot from Woodpecker to show you how should it more or less look like at this point

4. Make some snippets a sentence long. It will show that you care about your relationship with your contacts and that you took the time to research them.

Strategy #32: Generate and send personalisation videos

Your potential customers receive hundreds of emails in their inboxes every day. But most of these mailers sound like bots and lack that personal connection between the sender and recipients. If you’re not getting the desired response, it means your emails require personalization even further personalisation. How about sending personalized videos via email? Yes it is the new wave and Hippo Video will help you ride this wave.

What is Hippo Video and how it can help your SaaS?

Hippo Video is a video communication and engagement platform for savvy marketers from small and medium businesses and mid-sized enterprises which allows you to:

Create a relevant, thoughtful customer experience
Increase conversion rates
Empower personalized video email marketing
Build a passionate audience
Improve lead nurturing
Drive better sales calls
Increase customer retention
Improve ROI

At Hippo Video, we make personalization seem so easy. Select a video you’d like to personalize. Then edit your video to perfection. To customize your video, type ‘$’ in the text box and choose the merge fields you want to add in your video. You can choose to add merge fields at any time, for any frame, and you can also set the display time, as per your requirements.

To set an email campaign, import contacts to your Hippo Video account and then select a spreadsheet from your GDrive. Once you’ve imported your contacts, enter a subject line. To personalize your subject line, type ‘$’ and select a merge field. Then you can add your email content along with a video link which is already present.

A personalized video thumbnail works similar to a book cover, and people are more likely to click through your video. It sells your video to potential customers. With Hippo Video, you can customize your video thumbnail to improve email open rates. You can either add text or personalize your thumbnail by adding merge fields and a business logo. You can further mass personalize your thumbnail by inserting the lead’s details from your spreadsheet.

Customize Hippo Video HTML5 player’s look and feel to match your brand. Experience the best playback for any environment and connection speed and make sure your videos look amazing everywhere.

You can also embed your videos anywhere, add a clickable call to action in the player, and move prospects through the buying process faster with videos.

Strategy #33: Improve on your competitors’ messaging

Finding the right messaging for your outbound email marketing and keeping it up to date and relevant to your audience might be tricky and difficult. Most get inspiration by looking at what competitors are doing, how they are evolving and improve their messaging. Competitors.app lets you monitor your competitors’ website and email sequence, notifying you with any chances, improvements in the messaging done by your competitors. This can help you stay up to date on what is happening in the industry you operate without having to employ Virtual Assistants (VAs) to manually do it this research for you.

When Competitors.app detects a change, it will bring this to your attention by sending you an email summarising all the changes in a manageable and meaningful way.

What is Competitors.app and how it can help your SaaS?

Competitors.app was designed to help marketers be aware of their competitors’ strategy, just by reading simple weekly reports and only a few minutes. This allows marketers to focus on actually working and implementing what they have in mind, and still know or get inspiration from their competitors.

Up until now we have only dealt with email outbound lead generation techniques. Whilst email is a very strong channel to acquire new leads, it is by far not the only channel that you have to focus on. Social media has been growing in popularity and hence any SaaS should spend a good chunk of its marketing time and budget on acquiring leads from it.

LinkedIn Outbound Lead Generation

LinkedIn is by far the largest professional social media network. Through LinkedIn, you can grow your professional network by:

reaching out to potential customers by adding them to your network
messaging them through LinkedIn, telling them more about your SaaS
create and distribute content on LinkedIn

However, through a tool called salesql you can extend your reach out of LinkedIn, even with individuals who are not within your professional network.

What is Salesql and how it can help your SaaS?

Leads tend to respond to targeted emails 5x times more than to social messaging (Linkedin messages). SalesQL allows you to find personal and business emails on Linkedin profiles. It’s the only Chrome Extension which offers 100 credits per month and also reveal personal emails.

Strategy #34: Build targeted email lists from LinkedIn groups

Find Linkedin groups of your target audience. Let’s say you are targeting SaaS founders who will be attending a specific event. Some big events have Linkedin groups of 10,000+ profiles. After joining the group, you can use salesql chrome plugin to see all the profiles and grab their corresponding email. There you go. You have a list of leads to start sending an email sequence to.

Strategy #35: Reach out to influencers in your niche

Find the Linkedin profile of influencers in your niche. Influencers could be blog writers, Facebook group leaders, or anyone respected in your industry. Use SalesQL to retrieve their emails and invite them to try your SaaS. Their opinion matters a LOT to your target audience.

Strategy #36: Retargeting, Retargeting, Retargeting….

It is estimated that only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit. Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is a form of online advertising that can help you to reach out to bounced traffic after they leave your website. Retargeted can be fine tuned according to your needs. For instance, you can retarget visitors who:

Visited a page on your website
Filled in a form on your website
Started a trial and did not convert

For retargatting purposes RocketLink will do the job nicely.

What is RocketLink and how it can help your SaaS?

RocketLink is a tool that maximises the benefits gained from sharing links. It allows for link shortening and customising, as well as the addition of targeting pixels. This allows you to target campaigns directly to people who have clicked shared links, even if you’re not the owner of that website. That way you can create a custom audience based on people strictly interested in the subject, thus increasing your chances of generating valuable leads.

Additionally, you can embellish your link with embedded video, CTA, pop-ups and widgets. It’s a great way of acquiring newsletter or web push notifications subscribers.

Add a pop-up to the link that you share and add a newsletter subscription form. That way you not only create a subscribers list but also convert people who clicked your link into a custom audience, which is useful for targeting ads on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Ads, etc.

Step 1. Create a RocketLink promotion with the MailerLite pop-up script.

Add CTA name and brand name for easier recognition in the future. In the script code place the JavaScript code from the mailing tool. You can design a pop-up in your e-mail software.

Step 2. After creating the code, save the new CTA and create a link

Paste the destination link and add a link name. Next, choose pixels which you want to add for tracking the link (previously added in the Pixel section). You can also add a customised domain and use UTM link builder. Finally, choose a CTA, in this case, “Newsletter signup”.

Step 3. Run a campaign and monitor your increasing number of newsletter subscribers.

Strategy #37: Retarget your influencer’s audience

While cooperating with influencers or sponsored content, use your link created via RocketLink to target an influencer’s or publisher’s audience (people who clicked on the link) in your campaigns. What’s truly valuable is that you can reach your target group directly in your ads, without further cooperation with an influencer or publisher.

Once you create a link (as explained above) and have it shared in your sponsored content, you can set up a custom audience on Facebook. The screenshots presented below will guide you step by step through the whole process.

Add your link created in RocketLink to target dynamic creative Facebook ads to groups that are highly interested in the subject. In the next campaigns you can create Lookalike campaigns to reach more people with similar interests.

Strategy #38: Retarget those who click on your Bio link signature

Use a shortened and customised link in your bio on social media to get a transparent and professional look. Internet users might then be more willing to click it because they’ll be sure where it’s going to take them — a similar effect is achievable by placing such a link in your email footer.

After creating a link via RocketLink, you can customise it (if you used your own domain) to add more information, such as a specific social media name etc.

Below you can see the final effects of a customised link in use. Looks much better than a random link, doesn’t it?

Get Leads On AUTOPILOT through Word-of-Mouth