AI Email Prospecting for Better ROI From Cold Emails

AI email prospecting offers relief to email marketers by streamlining and optimizing the prospecting process. Whether you are a small business owner, a sales professional or a marketer, AI prospecting benefits you by not generating leads for marketers 24/7, but also providing a better experience for the target audience by helping deliver relevant results. In this guide, we will explore some reasons why and the ways in which you can use AI email prospecting for best results and also some tips to take away from it.

What is AI email prospecting?

AI email prospecting is the AI-powered process of identifying and researching the audience for your cold email outreach. It includes processes like analyzing the type of audience you want to target, searching for the target audience, the best way to approach them and so on. You may come across three different kinds of prospects.

1. Cold prospects - People who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) but do not know about your company.

2. Warm prospects - People who know about your company but haven’t shown any active interest in your services or products.

3. Qualified prospects - People who have shown interest in your offering by attending a meeting or signing up for a trial.

Why use AI for your cold email outreach

AI email prospecting can revolutionize your approach towards cold email outreach campaigns. AI tools offer better insights, reduced time consumption, better personalization and better response rates. Below we give you more reasons to consider AI for your next cold email outreach.

1. Advanced data analytics

AI’s edge over humans is that the increasing data size does not reduce its efficiency to analyze it. AI tools help marketers analyze their audience deeper and gain insights into customer preferences and trends which helps them to plan their connections accordingly for better results.

2. Advanced performance insights

AI tools have the ability to gather and deliver advanced insights on the performance of the emails sent. The comprehensive email data analytics report can provide data on metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversions and engagement levels which helps marketers identify the shortcomings of their email campaigns.

3. Better personalization

Personalized emails perform better than generic emails. AI tools leverage collected customer data to generate personalized email copies that resonate better with the audience which drastically affects the rate of engagement and open rates of cold outreach emails.

This customer data is also be used to personalize websites and even plan personalized eCommerce strategies.

“AI algorithms can analyze customer data, such as demographics, behavior, and purchase history, to create highly targeted and personalized email content.”
-Himanshu Sharma, CEO and Founder, Academy of Digital Marketing

4. Provision for warmed-up leads

Warming up leads is like a testing phase before the cold outreach emails begin. It allows marketers to prepare the audience for what’s about to come and measure their readiness for it. They help to spread awareness through a channel like social media ensuring that recipients are more receptive and familiar with the brand when they receive the cold emails.

5. Warm intros

A warm intro is a referral from someone you’re related to, such as family and friends. AI tools help you identify mutual connections and leverage them for warm introductions. These highly increase the credibility and effectiveness of your cold emails.

How can AI help in email prospecting

AI email prospecting is a novel idea and can be difficult to grasp for some. If you cannot wrap your head around the idea of using AI for email prospecting, below we talk about how you can do that.

1. Lead generation

One of the key challenges in email prospecting is identifying the right audience. There are a vast number of people out there who can be your potential clients, but how do you pick the right ones out of this many?

AI tools can help you comb through huge amounts of data and a high number of profiles from various channels to choose the right prospects. Clearbit, for instance, helps you define your ideal customer profile (ICP) and fetch more look-alike users from their database of 50M companies that match the profile thus helping you in lead generation.

2. Content generation

Coming up with catchy subject lines and writing engaging email copies requires a lot of creativity and thought put into it and consumes a lot of time. Conversely, AI can create highly engaging copies for emails and subject lines within minutes.

AI even uses data from customer profiles to make email copies highly personalized for a particular profile. These optimized email copies perform better than the traditional ones while also being lighter on the workforce. Phrasee , for instance, can generate highly engaging and highly personalized content for your emails.

“One of the most effective ways is to use AI to generate 15 - 20 alternative subjects for an email. You can create the most amazing offer for your clients, but if they aren't opening your email, it will not matter.
For a lot of our outreach, we'll test multiple subjects to see what resonates and then use that as the throughline in our subjects and body of the emails moving forward.”
-Matt Harrison, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives, The HOTH

3. Send time optimization

Timing is important for email marketing. Different send times can return different results depending on the recipient's behavior. Using the old trial-and-error method for identifying the right time to send emails is not feasible. AI tools like Seventh Sense, can analyze data like recipient’s behavior, historical data and engagement patterns to determine the best time to send emails for maximum impact and engagement.

4. Email testing

Testing the emails before you send them out to your prospects is very important. It gives you an estimation of how they would perform. While marketers can see how emails look on different browsers, devices and ESPs, they can't predict how they will perform.

AI tools like Phrasee can allow marketers to conduct automated A/B testing and even compare different variations of subject lines and email copies while giving each of them a score on how well they would perform with the audience. This helps marketers make well-informed decisions on choosing the right email copies and subject lines for their outreach emails.

5. Automated follow-ups

Marketers must do follow-ups with prospects they feel might convert. But performing regular follow-ups can be a tedious and time-consuming task. Autopest, for instance, is an AI-powered chrome extension that allows marketers to perform regular follow-ups by automating email sequences. This can also lead to a warming up of leads and the consistency may result in a better ROI.

5 best AI email prospecting tools

So you know why AI email prospecting is something you should seriously consider and how AI can help you in your email prospecting efforts. Now, let’s look at some AI tools you can use for the same.

Name	Functions	Pricing
Clearbit	Prospect discovery Dynamic form shortening	Free plan available. Paid plans have custom pricing
Phrasee	Subject lines and email copies generation A/B tesing	Paid plan starts at $500/month
Seventh Sense	Send time optimization	Starts from $80/month
Instantly	Smart scheduling Performance monitoring	Starts from $37/month
Zeta ESP	Automated follow-up emails	Custom pricing

1. Clearbit

Clearbit is an AI-powered tool that can help you generate high-quality leads. The platform provides a prospector tool that allows you to define your ICP and search for prospects with advanced filters like company size, industry, location and job title.

Clearbit also has other offerings like their extensive database that includes details like company information, job titles, social media profiles and more. Another noteworthy tool is the forms tool that dynamically shortens your form without cutting down the information collected.

Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans have custom pricing.

2. Phrasee

Phrasee is an AI-powered platform that generates creating and highly engaging subject lines and email copies for you. Their AI even optimizes the tone and language for specific target audiences. The result is a copy that resonates with your audience and converts better. It also allows you to perform A/B testing too.

Pricing: Paid plan starts at $500/month

3. Seventh Sense

Seventh Sense is an AI-powered Chrome extension that chooses ideal delivery times for your emails specific to each prospect. It integrates with HubSpot and allows you to choose the window within which you want the email to be sent. This increases the engagement rate and open rate of your emails.

Pricing: Starts from $80/month

4. Instantly

Instantly is an AI-powered marketing platform that helps marketers scale their outreach campaigns. It allows you to add unlimited email accounts and even offers a warm-up tool that helps warm up your leads.

It offers other features like a campaign builder, smart scheduling, inbox rotation which allows you to send emails to your prospects with different accounts and a Unibox where you can check and respond to messages from your leads. It even allows you to check the performance of your campaign on an analytics dashboard and optimize them.

Pricing: Starts from $37/month

5. Zeta ESP

Zeta is an AI-powered email service provider that provides end-to-end solutions for email marketing. It allows you to automate campaigns and deliver personalized emails to your prospects based on a real-time understanding of customer needs. It also allows you to view insights on various metrics on its powerful dashboard.

Pricing: Custom pricing

AI email prospecting tips

There is a lot of competition in the field and marketers look for prospects from the same pool of people. The use of AI tools for this has also caught on. Here are a few tips for an edge over the competition.

• Outline the benefits of first when writing a cold outreach email. Honestly, people do not really care to know who you are and what you have achieved. What concerns them is how you are useful to them or how your product or service will benefit them.

• Test out your tools before you decide on scaling with them. Using tools has some sort of a learning curve, and not every tool will suit your business need. Look for a tool that suits your needs best, learn to use the tool's full potential and stick with it.

• Offer free demos. Audiences are often more inclined towards free products. A free demo will allow you to boast about your products and services and increase your chances of conversion.

• Consider referral programs. Referral programs are a great way to gather new leads and they have more chances of engagement because of being referred by an acquaintance.

• Warm up your leads. Build a rapport and make your prospect aware of your presence before approaching them. This builds a sense of familiarity and your prospects are more inclined towards taking your emails seriously.

Takeaways

AI email prospecting is an absolute game changer when it comes to working on scoring leads and collecting information on them nonstop. The benefits of AI in old email outreach programs also cannot be overlooked. Streamlining and automating the processes help free up marketers' time to focus on decision-making and scaling their efforts. That is what makes the difference. It benefits you by doing things for you and raising the ROI of your efforts and it helps the audience by providing a better experience overall.