Growbots FAQs

My accounts

In this sectionyou may preview all the companies that you’ve already contacted through Growbots together with all the prospects available in our database for these particular companies. Thanks to that you may now easily go through the list of other employees working for the previously contacted companies, choose the most relevant ones and add them to your campaigns!

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Next to the company name you may see a handful of useful information - e.g. the total number of all prospects available in our database, the number of prospects that you’ve already contacted through Growbots and the number of prospects to whom campaigns are in progress. The reply status of the campaign shows whether there were any warm or cold replies to any of the prospects contacted for the particular campaign. You may use the search bar or the filters available above to preview only those companies that are relevant to you at the moment.

Once you click on any company name you will be redirected to Account details where you may see all the essential information about the company such as the number of employees, headquarter’s phone number, the list of technologies or direct links to the company’s website or its LinkedIn profile.

If you select more than one company at a time, after clicking see prospects you will have a chance to see all the prospects available in our database for all those selected accounts.

Right below the company’s description, you may see the list of prospects working for this company divided into two sections: All prospects and Contacted.

Under the All prospects tab you may see all the prospects working for the selected company which are available in our database together with a handful of details about them. In this section, you may easily add a prospect to one of your campaigns or create a brand new one for them by hitting the Contact button.

The Email column indicates whether we were able to verify the email address to the prospect or not - in case it is not verified (grey question mark sign) and you’d still like to contact such prospect, Growbots will try to find an email address. If it fails, you will have a chance to type in an email address on your own and you will not be charged for such a prospect.

The Contacted tab is the preview of only those prospects that you’ve already contacted/exported through Growbots.

Once you move your mouse over any of these prospects you will see the Actions drop-down menu which allows you to perform actions such as rescheduling, pausing or transferring selected prospects to another campaign. Clicking at any prospect on this list will move you to the Prospect details screen.

All accounts premium

NOTE: Please note that the All accounts section is a premium feature - if you want to gain access to it, please contact your dedicated Customer Success Manager or write us an email at [email protected].

If you want to explore all the companies available in Growbots database or find a specific account easily, this is the place to visit! By using the targeting criteria on the left-hand side panel of the screen, you may define which accounts you would like to display.

The list of accounts is sorted by the number of prospects available in our database.Next to each account name you may see how many of them you already contacted or exported and how many are currently in progress. Once you click on the account name you will see the company's details and the list of available prospects that you may add to a new or existing campaign on the go - just as in My accounts section.

Please bear in mind that the Accounts section was created in order to help you implement the Account-Based Sales strategy in your Growbots outbound experience - here you may read a bit more about what ABS actually is and why it’s currently believed to be one of the most successful sales strategies. We also highly recommend checking this about how you may actually use the ABS strategy at Growbots.

NOTE: Accounts section is still being developed so your feedback will be very valuable!

In outbound, we believe it best to keep the use of images to the minimum. The simpler the email, the better it will convey your message. However, if you want to use images in your templates, you can do that by linking to an image hosted on a server.

Follow this guide to see how to upload images to a server and use them in your Growbots template.

Using images in templates

Uploading images varies depending on the server and technology used. In this article, we’ll use PostImage a public image hosting service. It supports JPG and PNG image formats, allows direct linking and is a reliable service, so it fits our needs perfectly.

You need to upload the image onto the server.

Once it’s up, copy the direct link to the image.

sending a campaign to yourself as aprospect

Then, you need to:

Go back to Growbots, open the Templates view, choose a template and edit the message.

Click the image creator tool, which is a little image icon at the bottom of the Template creator.

In the image creator window, paste the direct link in the URL field.

Make sure to provide relevant alternative text.

You can further modify the visual appearance of the image:

by altering Width and Height. You can modify the two separately, but it’s best to keep the original image’s aspect ratio by keeping the padlock icon closed,

by altering the image’s border width and its Hspace and Vspace which are basically vertical and horizontal margins,

by choosing the horizontal alignment of the image.

You can also make the image a link in itself. If you do that, clicking the image will redirect to a given website.

To make the image a link, go to the Hyperlink tab of the image creator and provide the URL of the website you want the link to redirect to.

You can also choose whether you want the link to be opened in the same or in a new browser tab by choosing an appropriate option from the Target dropdown menu.

Attribute Values

_blank

Opens the linked document in a new window or tab

_self

Opens the linked document in the same frame as it was clicked (this is default)

_parent

Opens the linked document in the parent frame

_top

Opens the linked document in the full body of the window

Accept by clicking OK and Save changes done to the template.

Done! If everything is set up correctly, the image will be displayed in the message editor and in the template view.

Make sure to test the image by sending the template to yourself simply by .

Growbots Explainer

Getting started with Growbots

Targeting your customers

Following up with your prospects

Exporting prospects in Growbots

Writing your sequence

This article will walk you through the basics of Growbots -- at the end of it, you should be able to have all the information you need to start your first campaign and excel in outbound.

To get started, log in with your credentials under app.growbots.com.

Make sure you use Google Chrome for the best user experience.

FIRST STEP: Connecting your email channel

To be able to send emails through Growbots, you need to connect your email channel. Go to Settings -> Integrations and connect your email channel.

If you’re using Gmail, it’s super simple, just log into your Gmail account and allow for access.

If you use any other email provider, put in your credentials and use this document with SMTP/IMAP data to fill in the rest of the necessary fields.

Deliverability Best Practices

Then, you just have to fill in your personal data (that will be later used as custom fields) and the limit of a number of messages sent daily (the default is 150 and we encourage you to leave it at this level).

SECOND STEP: Integrating your CRM / Uploading a Do Not Contact list

The CRM is the number 1 tool in any sales team so syncing it with Growbots is a crucial step in automating the sales processes.

We offer two native integrations, with Salesforce and Hubspot CRM.

They allow you to automatically dedupe the individual prospects you have in your CRM and push generated prospects from GB to the CRM based on a variety of actions (prospect opened an email, prospect replied to an email, etc).

If you’re using any other CRM, you should check out our Zapier integration. It will allow you to push prospects to your CRM. If you wish to exclude companies from being generated, you need to upload a Do Not Contact List, a CSV file with a column named website and all the domains of the companies you wish to exclude. Thanks to Zapier you can also sync many more applications!

In case you have any trouble with connecting your CRM, let us know on the chat inside the app.

THIRD STEP: Creating your first campaign

After completing the two first steps, you’re ready to launch your first campaign. You can choose from 3 strategies:

Persona based campaign - using this strategy you’ll specify your target, generate prospects from our database and schedule a flow of communication to be sent from one or more of your email addresses;

Import strategy campaign - this strategy allows you to use our email automation system for the prospects that you already have from other sources;

Export strategy campaign - this strategy starts exactly the same as the first one, you choose the target and generate prospects, but the workflow ends with exporting a CSV file containing prospects’ details.

The most common choice here is the Persona-based campaign,go through the following steps:

Companies

Define your target, there is a possibility to do it by searching for Specific companies or defining Detailed criteria.

If you are looking for a specific company you can enter their domain and company location.

With detailed criteria, you have a few filters to choose from to narrow down your target.

You can start with the Industry filter, just pick the most relevant ones.

The next filter is Company keywords - it lets you target non-standard industries or a specialization that a company may have. We’re looking through companies’ Details, About us or Information sections.

The next filters are Location, Company size, Finances - which lets you define the annual revenue of the company. Other than that you can filter by Technology, Page Rank and Year founded. Check out this article for further info.

People

Go to the next step - People, where you’ll be able to define what type of prospects you’d like to contact.

The first filters are Seniority level and Department, the only thing you have to do is tick the right boxes!

Alternatively, you can use the Job positions filter, which allows you to pick search by a job title e.g. if you’d like to contact CEOs, type in “CEO” but use the full position name as well, “Chief Executive Officer”. Also, if you want to exclude some job positions you can write it with “ - “ before its name, e.g. “-assistant”.

The next filters are Prospects keywordsand Max prospects per company, which will let you limit the quantity of generated prospects per company.

Prospecting

After clicking the “next step” button, you’ll be transferred to the Prospecting step, where you’ll have 50 prospects generated by default. You can look through them (clicking on their name will let you see more details about them) and decide if they are close to who you’re after.

You can Accept (add to this campaign), Reject (do not contact in this campaign list, but might want to contact in the future) or Blacklist (you won’t be able to generate or contact this prospect in the future) these prospects. Also, there is a little white square with an arrow, which lets you move this prospect to another campaign.

Bear in mind, that the moment you accept prospects is when we take away your credits.

Sequences

The next step is Sequences, where you define how you want to contact the people you accepted in the previous step. A sequence consists of a set of Templates (individual emails) which you can edit at any time and also use in different sequences. You can see how to create them here.

When it comes to the content of your messages, check out our Top performing campaign, it’s a good example of how a successful campaign should look like.

Custom fields

In the Custom Fields step, you can check if the custom fields data is filled out correctly and fix any spelling mistakes you can notice. If the ”Empty” column says 0, you can go ahead to the next step.

Email accounts

Email accounts step allows you to choose an email channel from which you’d like to send out the campaign.

Preview & schedule

At last, the Preview & schedule step, here you can edit or personalize the emails to your prospects. The only thing left to do is to click Launch Campaign!

That’s it, you scheduled your first campaign! Now you can wait for the responses to come through. You can monitor the results of your campaign in the Summary view.

Here are a few additional articles that you might find useful in your journey:

Outbound Sales Handbook

In this article, you’ll find information about how your messages are scheduled in Growbots.

Before the app schedules a message it checks a few things:

Your sending limits

How many other messages are going to be sent on that day/period of time

The “flow” of the campaign, the app will try to find the best period of time where the campaign can be sent according to timing you’ve set up in your sequence.

If you are scheduling a campaign and you pick “send immediately” option, but the sequence requirements cannot be met, then the app won’t send them immediately. The sequence requirements and sending limits are more important than the “send immediately feature”.

Example campaign schedule

Let’s say that you have a campaign with 3 steps:

the initial message is going to be sent between Monday and Friday

the second step after 3 days(between Thursday and Friday)

the third step after 1 day from the second step(but the messages on this step can only be sent on Tuesdays)

Then the Timeline would look like this:

As you can see, the third step(which was going to be sent after 1 day) is actually going to be sent after 4 days.

You’ve got a reply from your prospect? Congrats! It means you’ve achieved the main goal of cold mailing: spark interest and get the attention of your leads and so that they want to talk to you. However, a reply is all you have at this point, even if it is positive. You haven’t closed a deal yet; this is where the real selling process starts.

Every reply (even if neutral or skeptical) is important. Since your prospect read your message and spent some time to write back, you should act on all of the replies (excluding really negative and aggressive ones as you don’t want to make them angrier).

The strategy should be different for each individual, but we prepared some common guidelines.

Once you receive a message, reply ASAP while the prospect is still fresh and interested. If you wait a few hours or days, they might forget about your original message, lose the interest or get distracted by other things going on.

Use multiple follow-ups and be persistent. Make them frequent at first, then less frequent over time. To save your time, use an email automation tool (for example vocus.io) to schedule follow-ups. After receiving an initial reply, you should follow up until you either convert your prospect or they say they are no longer interested. People often shift focus during their workday, so you might need to send several follow-up messages before scheduling a meeting, even after receiving an initially positive response. Remember that until your lead becomes a client you need to continue to build a relationship with them.

Address clearly and completely each of your prospects’ questions or concerns. Be honest with them, even if it means you’re not meeting some pain point of theirs. Some objections are not easy to answer, but omitting them will most likely result in losing your potential customer. The lead will assume that there is something you’re hiding from them and won’t want to move forward.

Every salesperson sometimes needs to handle some negative replies. If you send cold emails you can be sure that not every prospect that you contact will be interested in your offer.

I a prospect has spent time answering your message you should not leave it without a response - there is always a possibility that you can reforge it into a business opportunity and the prospect may become your customer in the future. As a professional, you can respond to these messages and thank people for their time or ask for more feedback based on their response. This shows you are an actual person and not an automated bot, and it will also build your company reputation.

Here are some examples of messages that you can receive and a guide on how to respond to them:

1.Not interested now reply

Sometimes you might get an answer that tells you the prospect could be interested, it’s just not a right time for them. What you have to remember is that you should not waste your time unless you are completely sure that some opportunity will appear in the future. What you can do in a case like this is to ask to specify what time would be good to reach back out.

Recommended reply:

Hi {{name}},

Thank you for the information! Could you tell me when the conference is taking place so I can contact you after it?

Best wishes

After you get a response with the exact date, remember to set up a task in your calendar reminder, or use an internal system like a customer relationship management tool, so you won’t forget to reach out.

2.Not responsible for that

There’s always a possibility that the person you have contacted is not the best fit for your campaign and is not the decision-maker in the company. That gives you a great opportunity to reach out and ask for the person that would be a better fit. We recommend doing some research before sending this email.

NOTE: The below response may happen, especially if you contacted middle- or low-level employees working in big companies - big structure may result in a worse flow of information.

Recommended reply:

Hi Jim,

Thank you for information! I’m trying to get in touch with a person responsible for web marketing in your company, could you maybe give me some clue on who that would be?

Thanks in advance!

What you can do instead of asking the prospect, is doing some research by yourself - check the company’s LinkedIn profile to find the right person and then ask to confirm if it is the right fit for you. In addition, be sure to ask for their email address.

NOTE: If you don't get the email address from the prospect, you can try using the same pattern as your previous contact had, e.g. [email protected] or [email protected]

3.Using your competitor

As the market is competitive, you can email people that already have a solution similar to yours and are not interested in changing it. The recommendation here would be asking them about what they like and dislike about their current service or product. You can collect some valuable feedback this way.

Recommended reply:

Hi {{name}},

Thank you for the information! Could you please answer me one quick question: what is the thing about the product XYZ that you value the most? Also, a quick info: in company Z we have just implemented a totally new, innovative tool that lets you do all your research without any human work. Maybe that would interest you?

4.Aggressive reply

This type of reply is the one that can destroy your day. A person that tells you to stop emailing them but uses negative expressions and often threatens you with different lawsuits. What can you do with it? The first thing you should remember is to not lose your temper. Even if the person uses inappropriate language, you should handle it professionally. Our recommendation here is answering them kindly that you are sorry and you won’t contact them again. Here’s an example of such case:

Recommended reply:

Hi {{name}}

Thanks for reaching out to me. I have already deleted you from my contact list, so you won’t see any new messages.

Sorry for the hassle!

IMPORTANT: Remember to really remove this person or even the whole company from your mailing list. You can do this by unqualifying the prospect or the company. Also, remember to always comply with Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation and GDPR regulations in Europe.

5.Just not interested

Unfortunately, most of the cold replies that you get might look like this one - not giving you much information about the reason the prospect is not interested in your offer. The best way to deal with them is to ask a simple question: why are they not interested. This would give you some important insight for improving your campaigns. It is also a great technique to use when building a relationship with your prospects as people, in general, like to be asked about their opinions.

Recommended reply:

Hi {{name}},

Thank you for information. Could you tell me what is the reason that you are not interested in our product? Are you maybe using some other product that provides you with this feature? Please let me know!

This response is great to AB test! Recommended reply:

Hi {{name}},

Thank you for information. Could you please spend a few seconds to answer my one question? Do you think that our offer:

Won’t give you any important advantages

Needless because you are already using some similar products

Is just not matching your business model?

Please do answer this question by simply writing a, b or c in the answer and that would give us a lot of insight

Thanks a lot!

You can also create the same answer with a simpler, YES/NO questions.

Having all that in mind - negative answer may be a great source of information about your competitors and about your own product. By using the suggestions above, you may work on your campaigns to create more business opportunities. Negative replies will always appear, so the best you can do is treat it as a feedback for your campaigns.

Also, if you see that the number of negative replies is definitely too high you can rethink your targeting: here you can find an article that explains it profoundly.

If you want to take your sales to the next level, think not as a seller but as a buyer. Have you ever heard about the seller script? It’s a set of behaviours of a salesperson which are quitepredictable for your prospects. So what to do? Use emotions!

It’s proven that people tend tomake choices due to emotions, so why not use that? And how should you do that? Flip the script!

Typical negative answers

Customers will probably send you three types of negative answers:

"Send me some info first to review."

"I’m busy."

"We already have a solution in place. Thank you!"

How to respond? Do something they don’t expect you to do!

1. I’m busycase:

Customer’s expectation: They’re going to send me a hundred emails at a different time and ask politely to find sometime.

Flip: Say, that this is exactly what you want to hear.

How: “Ah, that’s great, actually. We have a ton of meetings in the upcoming two weeks, so I know how do you feel. Maybe we can catch each other in 2 weeks from now on Wednesday?”

Why should you do this? The customer is going to feel that you have a lot of work and you value your time and at the same timeyou’d like the meeting to be securedin the future. Begging for an appointment can be seen badly, now you are seen as a professional and customer feel thatthey should act the same.

2. We already have a solution in place case:

Customer expectation: They’re going to pitch neverthelesstrying to convince me our solution is bad and their is awesome.

Flip: Don’t pitch, don’t throw shade on the competition.

How: “Oh, that’s great, you must be all set then. Could you please tell me a couple of things about your solution, that you like the most? It helps me understand what people find valuable and build a better product."

Again, why should you do this? Because your customer is going to feel that they made a good choice telling you how awesome their solution is. After some assets, they’ll eventually say thatsome things aren’t that awesome and that’s where you show that your solution is better, also, it’s a great opportunity to get feedback about features for your product! It may even happen that your customer is going to ask about your offer themselves!

3. Send me some info to review case:

Expectation: They will send me some info and follow up whether I like it.

Flip: Don’t send anything.

How: “I can’t send you anything. We don’t have a box for you to fit. We build the box around you. So tell me more about your business!”

Result: Customer is going to feel that you’re offering them a bespoke solution which is going to fulfill their needs perfectly. You had their attention, now you got their interest, time to sell!

If you want to improve your sales efficiency, try to always surprise your customer. It’s proven that 95\% of decisions are made with emotions, not logic, so this should be the first thing to remember while talking to customers.

When choosing your target criteria in the Persona-based or Export campaign, you can check the estimated number of prospects Growbots can generate within your preferences. In the campaign-creation process, you can notice two estimation views:

- The first one is pre-estimation number visible in the process of specifying your targeting criteria.

- The second estimate, in the Prospecting step, shows the exact number of prospects matching your targeting criteria, excluding the ones who were generated in other campaigns or excluded by your CRM or your exclusion lists.

1.The pre-estimation, shown in the Companies and People step, is just a rough figure. There is also a preview of companies/prospects which match your criteria:

NOTE: The actual number of pre-estimation may be off due to several reasons:

- It’s possible you’ve already generated prospects matching the project's target in other projects.

- It is calculated before verifying email addresses some of the emails might simply not pass the check.

- It’s possible some of the prospects are eliminated with a Do not contact list. The estimate doesn't take the limit of prospects per company into account.

To provide you with the actual number of estimated prospects the estimation tool in the Prospecting step will come in handy.

2.After specifying your target criteria, in the Prospecting step, you can check the actual number of estimated prospects within this campaign.

At the top of the page, there is a section with a number of generated prospects, estimates and exclusions:

The estimate is calculated per campaign, in detail:

Available - number of prospects left and available for this campaign, you’ll be able to generate this number of prospects in this campaign.

Excluded from:

All campaigns - number of prospects already generated in this or other campaigns

CRM - number of prospects excluded by CRM

Blacklists - number of prospects excluded from blacklists.

The Excluded part displays how many prospects can’t be generated with these target criteria. It correlates with the deduplication feature - we prevent you from contacting the same person again.

NOTE: Accurate estimates are available for targets below 50,000 potential prospects.

The email you use to send your campaigns is very important as we want to have a high deliverability rate and we want to have the best chances of getting replies from prospects.

We recommend using a business address, something like [email protected]. This format has an advantage over something like [email protected] since your prospects will see that the emails are coming from one person, not a sales or marketing team. When it comes from an individual, it looks more natural, less automated, as if you sat down and wrote this email yourself.

On the other hand, we do not want to send from something like [email protected] or [email protected], as they are not business addresses and your prospects are likely to not trust these emails, which means very low campaign results. Any email with @gmail, @yahoo, @aol etc. should only be used for personal use.

If you would like to set up a new email address or a whole new domain for your outbound sales, please read about best practices for those accounts here.

Sending from new email addresses is a great way to get more emails out to prospects. If you would like to create new accounts, we recommend mixing up versions of your name. For example, you can use:

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

and so on. We do not recommend using a format that indicates that there are other email addresses, such as using numbers: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] etc.

Improving deliverability (high-level overview)

Each email provider has policies in place to make sure you are not sending SPAM or malicious emails. Since Growbots sends emails from your servers, we want to be sure that your emails are not marked as suspicious.

Different email providers have different sending limits. We recommend sending no more than 150 emails per day, per email address. If you are just starting to use an email channel(as you've probably created it just for Growbots) then we recommend setting your limit for 30 emails per day. And then, gradually increasing it every week, so your domain will have time to build a reliable reputation. Take a look at this article about warming-up your account.

Using an established email address (older than 3 months old) with the correct DNS configuration is a great foundation for sending emails.

If your email is an alias, the 2 (or more) email addresses would share that daily email limit (for example 2 emails sharing an inbox would each be allowed to send 100 emails each if the limit was 200).

If your email is forwarding emails in any way, those forwarded emails would also count towards the daily limit and we would have to have a lower limit within Growbots.

Any newly created email address you connect to Growbots needs to be 'warmed up' before sending out bulk emails as it runs the risk of being suspended. If this is something you would like to do down the road please loop in the Customer Success Team or see here.

Increasing chance of replies

Sending from an individual’s email account is recommended ( [email protected] ). You should always have your “from” field be your name. You do not want your “from” field to be a general sales or marketing department. Using the sender custom fields (shown below) will give you the ability to share templates across your team so you never have to worry about updating the “from” field per team member.

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Replies from your campaigns

The replies your prospects send will go to the email address that sent the campaign out of Growbots. The replies will also stop your campaign so no other follow up messages will send.

Remember to reply to your prospects as soon as possible. Check out our for tips on replying.

Sometimes after scheduling a campaign, you may change your mind and want the campaign to be sent out from another email channel or you want to change the sender of the messages since the person responsible for a campaign is no longer working in your company. Here’s how you can solve this problem.

Changing the sender before the initial message is sent

If the initial message has not been sent yet and the prospects are still on 0 step of the campaign (it’s called Before initial) you can easily change the sender of these messages. Here’s what you need to do:

Click on the campaign you want to edit

Filter prospects by Step -> 0 - before initial, then select all

Click on Actions -> Transfer to another campaign

The pop-up window will ask you whether you’d like to transfer them to an existing campaign or a new one. What we recommend is choosing to transfer it to a new campaign - this will ensure that you don’t mix transferred prospects with the ones generated in this campaign.

After a minute that is needed for the transfer to process go to Prospecting tab in the campaign where you have transferred the prospects and mark all prospects:

The last thing you need to do is to move prospects back to the campaign that they’re from. Click on the white button and select campaign. This way you’ll be able to schedule messages to them from a different email channel.

That’s all!

Changing the sender of the messages when the initial message has been already sent

NOTE: We strongly recommend not using this option unless you are completely sure that it’s the only possible alternative. Once the prospect has already received the message from one email address it may seem very strange to get the rest of the campaign from a different email channel and in a new thread.

If you want to change the sender of the messages in a campaign where some of the messages have been already sent here is what you need to do. (Let’s name the original campaign - campaign A)

First, check on which step of the campaign A the prospects are now. Let’s assume that our campaign has 3 steps and some prospects have already received two emails (step 2) and some of them got only the initial message (step 1). This way we need to divide these prospects into two separate campaigns -> one for prospects that are on the first step and one for those that have already got the second message.

Having this in mind, go to the Messages tab in Growbots and find the sequence that you have been using in the original campaign. You need to clone messages that should be delivered next to the prospects and change them to be the Initial message category instead of the follow-up. It’s important because a sequence can begin only with a message with initial type and essentially, you want to start a new sequence that will contain only follow-ups. In our example, you should clone the 2nd and 3rd step in the sequence and change their type from a follow-up to initial email. Thanks to this action, you’ll be able to create two new sequences that will start with your follow-ups (now saved as initial emails).

As we have cloned and changed the types of the messages next step will be creating the sequences that will use them. You need to prepare two sequences:

- Sequence to prospects who received only initial message: Add cloned version of your 1st original follow-up as the initial email and the 2nd original follow-up as the 2nd step.

- Sequence to prospects who received 2 emails: Add the cloned version of the 2nd original follow-up as the initial message.

Next, go back to the original campaign and select prospects who have received the first step of the campaign (click on filter Step -> 1 Initial) and didn’t respond to your message (Status -> Contacted). Select all prospects on the list and click on Actions and Transfer to another campaign. Then you are finally able to create a new campaign! In our example, you would select the new sequence with two steps (both original follow-ups). Remember that in the Email accounts step of creating a campaign you need to choose a different email channel.

Repeat the process for prospects who received 2 emails from you (Step-> 2) and haven’t replied (Status-> Contacted). This time you should use the sequence with only one message.

That's the whole process. In case you need any help with it, please let us know!

How to pause your campaign

If your prospect responses via email, your campaign will automatically pause! No worries there.

If your prospect calls you or responds through another email address (not the one you emailed) the campaign will not automatically pause and you will need to search for your prospect and pause the campaign.

Qualifying or unqualifying will pause your campaign

When someone shows interest through a phone call or other avenue, you will want to mark them as qualified. Once you do this, the campaign will stop. You can mark just the individual as qualified or the whole company. See more details about qualifying and unqualifying here.

How to pause one prospect in a campaign

The best way to do this would to go to the Prospects screen, filter them by Step "In progress" and search for your prospect. Then under Actions, hit Pause.

Here

Here you can watch a video tutorial on how to do this.

How to pause a whole campaign

Click into the campaign and on the Summary screen, use the Step filter to find everything that is in progress.

youcan watch a video tutorial on how to do this.

Growbots allows you to easily control how many messages a day are sent from your email channel. This feature is crucial since most email providers set a limit of messages that can be sent out within a day. This aspect is also crucial to protect your domain reputation. Check this article for more details. We usually recommend to contact your provider's support before setting up your daily sending limit.

You can control the volume of daily messages for all your email channels separately.There are two ways to change/set up your sending limit. To do so:

Go to the 6th step of setting up a campaign (if you are not sure how to create a new campaign see this article) and enter the value under the email channel:

Or go to SettingsIntegrations click on Edit under your email channel and then Next step to save the changes:

NOTE: Bear in mind that when you set an email limit, it will set for all your campaigns and not just the one you’re setting up and if you'd like it to apply to already running campaigns you have to reschedule the messages from that campaigns.

There are also two situations when sending limits are not taken into account by the system:

Automatic reschedule of Out of Office messages - daily sending limits won't be taken into account when the system automatically reschedules ooo replies from your prospects. Let's say your prospect will be back in the office on July 8 and your daily sending limit is full this day - the system will schedule this message to be sent on July 8 anyway. Do not worry though - these changes are usually very slight.

Temporary sending errors - sometimes your email channel can experience undetected issues. As a result it's possible that your messages won't be send properly and will be marked as Temporary sending errorsinstead. It means that their status won't change to Sending errorand this issue will only be visible in prospects' details. EachTemporary sending errormessage will be automatically rescheduled by the system. It's possible that the issue will fix itself and messages will be sent without any action from your side. Please bear in mind thatTemporary sending errorsrescheduling doesn't take daily sending limits into account.

Wouldn't it be great to see your campaign before it reaches your prospect?

You can import both your and your colleagues email addresses and send the campaign using the Sequence you want to test. In order to do that:

Prepare a CSV file you will use to import your email addresses into Growbots. You can use this sample CSV file as a template. The only required information is an email address. You should provide other information as well, in order to make sure the custom fields are working correctly. (e.g. First name, Last name, Location)

NOTE: The system will automatically default Los Angeles timezone if there’s no timezone/location provided in the file.

To upload the file go to Campaigns, add new campaign and choose Try your own prospects strategy.

Step 1 - Intro. Click Upload file, choose the CSV you’ve created and confirm your choice.

Step 2 - Import preview. You can quickly take a look at the data to make sure that you've chosen the right file for the importing.

Step 3 - Import mapping. In this step, you can change your mapping. Growbots will automatically match some of the headers in your file to fields in Growbots, but make sure to check if the matching is correct and adjust the field if necessary.

Step 4 - Import summary. This screen will include the information about the status of your import - whether your prospects imported and if not, which ones didn't and why. Once the imported file is mapped, you will be given a summary of the import.

Step 5 - Sequences. You're prompted to choose the Sequence you want to test.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you don’t want to wait ages for all follow ups you can change Send after and Send at options in Sequences step. The fastest way to receive them all asap is to choose only Send after: 1 hour option in each follow up. There is no way to receive all emails at once other than clicking Send test message in each message template separately.

MORE IMPORTANT NOTE: Do not forget to change these settings before sending a campaign to actual prospects, since the changes are applied to this Sequence in general, not only for a test.

To avoid all this changing thing you can simply Clone the Sequence you’d like to use in an actual Campaign - this way the Sequence will look exactly the same while testing and you won’t have to worry about timing settings.

Step 6 - Prospects. Accept the prospect(s) you’ve imported.

Step 7 - Email Accounts. In this step you can choose an email account from which you’d like to send a test. Choose Send initial message immediately option to send the first message immediately.

Step 8 - Preview & Schedule. Finally the last one! In this step you’ll need to click Launch campaign.

Voila! The first message will be sent in about 5 minutes from now on. Congratulations!

You just started a campaign and can’t wait to track its performance? We know how important it is to keep your eye on reports and that’s why we created campaign summary.

Choose your Campaign from the campaigns list. You can see the summary only for fully-configured campaigns, not drafts.

The Summary is the first screen you’ll see. In this view you can see overall results of the campaign and list of all accepted prospects.

The top bar shows results and progress of your campaign, both as a number and percentage:

date and type of the last action taken with this prospect

Sent - number of prospects who received at least one email from this campaign

Opened - prospects who opened at least one of your emails in this campaign.

Clicked - prospects who clicked on at least one of your links in this campaign.

Replied - prospects who replied to any email from this campaign. We don’t count here automatic replies like out-of-office or bounce notifications.

Warm - prospects whose reply was marked by our algorithm as positive or neutral. Our system scans the message and marks all replies without negative keywords as warm leads.

Above, you can see email channels and all messages scheduled in this campaign displayed on a timeline.

Below, you can see the list of all prospects accepted in this campaign with details about their engagement in the campaign. All details are able to be sorted when you click on their names.

Step - number of emails sent to the prospect out of all in this campaign, eg. means that only the first email from the 3-step sequence was sent already.

Status - current status of the prospect.

Open & Click - blue icon notifies you if prospect opened any of your emails or clicked on a link.

Stage - you can define the stage of the prospect as qualified or unqualified to manage your prospects. Labeling them as such will stop the campaign.

Last activity -

Next activity - day when the next message from this campaign will be sent.

Source - for all prospects generated in Growbots you’ll see icon, all imported prospects will be marked with this icon

You can also use filters to create lists of prospects that fit into specific criteria.

Status - see prospects with selected statuses.

Events - filter out only prospects who opened your messages or clicked on links (or didn’t).

Activity - find prospects whose last activity happened on a specific date or have emails scheduled in the future.

Channel - find prospects who were or are to be contacted via selected email channel.

Step - filter out prospects who are on the selected step of the cadence.

Stage - see prospects who were qualified, unqualified or marked as wrong email.

Source - find prospects generated in Growbots or those imported from your database.

All campaigns summary

You can also check the summary of all the running campaigns on your main timeline. You can switch between campaigns, that are being sent from specifically your email channel or all channels and also you can set a period of time of your campaign's activity.

NOTE:You'll see the pagination if there are more than 5 channels in use.

You can also check which Campaign and Sequence is or was running for specific prospects when you click on the prospect's details in Prospects view:

Once your campaign is done, we want to check to see how well it performed. It is important to wait until the whole sequence has been sent before analyzing the results since there is a chance the data will change.

Benchmarks to aim for

On average, Growbots’ client have around a 33\% open rate, 9\% click rate, 6\% reply rate and a 2\% warm reply rate.

NOTE: These averages are for campaigns with at least 500 prospects in them.

Open rate

Your target audience, subject line, from field, and opening sentence of your email all directly impact your open rate. In order to achieve the 39\% open rate, we want to pinpoint what is working and where we can improve.

Action items for a lower open rate:

Take a look at your target audience and their responses (if any) to your sequence. Maybe they are letting you know that they are not the right person to contact, if this is the case then you should update your job position search. Check out our targeting article for more tips.

Analyze your subject line. Is it too long or overly salesy? Keep it casual and 4 or 5 words max.

Make sure your ‘from’ field is your name and not your company name or just your email address.

Check your opening line. Try to make it about the prospect. If not, maybe you can use something you have in common with your prospect.

Click rate

Your click rate all depends on your target audience (again) and what you are sending them. Your email should always include a “hook” as to why the prospect should click on the link you are providing. Basically, answer the question why should I stop what I am doing to look at what you sent me.

Action items for a click rate:

Are you enticing your prospect to click on the link? For example, ‘check out this case study to see how Growbots was able to provide 50 deals a quarter for HighFive’

Do you have too many links? Try to have only one link per email. This helps with deliverability and also helps makes it easy for your prospect to click.

Make sure the content you are linking is relevant to your audience.

The content should be quick to digest. A 24-minute long video will never be watched unless someone is extremely interested.

Reply rate

This metric is less important as these are prospect’s auto-replies or negative replies. Here are best practices on how to reply to negative responses.

Warm reply rate

Your target audience (very important), the body of your email, your call to action, and how many follow up emails you send all directly affect your warm reply rate. We want to be sure we are reaching out to the right people, with the right message, and being persistent without being annoying. The warm reply metric is the trickiest to improve since there are so many moving parts.

Do you need to go after another audience? Decision maker vs. end user.

Analyze your open rate, we want to be sure people are opening and seeing your message, if they are not they will not respond. Your open rate is your foot in the door.

How many templates do you have in your sequence? We recommend 4-6 emails, see our best performing sequence here.

Analyze the content of your emails, are they too long? Are there good nuggets of information in there that peaks your prospect’s interest? More info.

Is your call to action clear? What do you want the prospect to do with your email?

Overall campaign and strategy tips

Outbound sales is a creative field so what works for one company, might not work for another. The most important thing is to try different things e. g. using A/B test which you can read more about here, collect that data and then iterate!

This was a quick overview of how you can easily incorporate some tips into your outbound strategy. You can always reach out to our Customer Success team for help with your campaigns.

Creating a brand new email account is a great strategy when it comes to sending more outbound emails. But if you create a new email account and immediately start sending bulk emails, you will be in trouble. There are a few things to know to keep your email account safe before you hit send.

Building your email accounts’ reputation:

New email accounts do not have a reputation, meaning they have no history of sending emails good or bad. We want to prevent your email provider from suspending or blocking your account due to suspicious activity; the only way to do this is through time and setting your account up for success.

Note: “new” email address means a whole new account, as if you hired someone on your team. This is not an alias account.

Why does reputation matter?

Without one (or a bad one), your account is more likely to be suspended or blocked.

Email providers are cutting down on spam and malware and can suspend your account if your email looks even remotely like spam. Even with taking measures to prevent spam, your emails could still be rejected. There are 3 types of reputations: Good, Neutral, and Bad.

How do I build my email reputation?

Time

Send and receive quality emails

Configure your email correctly

Time

Just like a credit score, time is a factor here. How much time is dependant on your email provider, but if you ramp up slowly and work on sending great content, you will be in good shape. If you rush, you will be labeled as a bad sender and will be difficult to change to a good sender.

Quality emails

Sending and receiving quality emails is like arriving to a party and introducing yourself to everyone there through a handshake. If a few people do not shake your hand back, you are now the weird person at the party. Don’t have your email be that weird person at the party.

You can start by sending your friends an email and having them all respond. (You can respond back as well). The responses let your email provider know that these are messages that the receiver wanted to see and are not spam or malware (handshake accepted). Avoid emailing no more than 4 people with the same domain or company as this looks suspicious to email providers.

If you can, try to email people with different email hosts, like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc. Be sure to send these one at time and not to use any automation at this point, slow and steady wins the email game.

Configuration

Setting up your email correctly will improve your deliverability. Thanks to that you can reduce the chance of getting into spam. It is like when you go in for a handshake; making eye contact and having a firm handshake are details most people pay attention to. Don't forget to make a good first impression as well as don’t forget the details of your email configuration.

There are two main records that you should configure:

SPF- Sender Policy Framework record is like an ID for your IP address. It is a part of the domain's DNS record.

Here you can find an instruction on how to set up the SPF and here how to check your DNS record!

CNAME-custom unsubscribe link implementation will specify which domain should be visible in your link. It is really helpful when you use our click and open tracking.

Here you can read more about it!

Where to start:

Follow the guide under Configuration to ensure your email is setup for success.

Then we will want to ramp up slowly, like really slowly. We want to send 10 emails a day, then 20, 30 etc. These should all be sent manually and should be personalized. 50 emails may seem low, but remember the follow up emails are also being sent out of this address so 50 is a good number to strive towards.

You’re sending should look like that kid back in 5th grade that never missed a day of school - consistent. You do not want to send 30 emails and then all of sudden send 80 the next day. So send a lower amount of custom emails, constantly, manually, for at least 4 weeks.

Create your first Growbots campaign

Select your target audience that you know would truly benefit from getting an email from you. If you email random people, they will likely mark your email as spam.

Remember the magic number of 50. No more than 50 prospects with 4-6 emails in your sequence, we are still not out of the woods.

Use the Personalization tool to update your first email to these prospects before you launch the campaign. Using the ‘Add variant’ option in your sequence will also help as this is built in AB testing. These tools will make your emails unique and look less like spam. (Remember you can send your emails to Mail Tester to see how spammy they look).

Let your campaign run. As it is ending you can adjust your sending limit and increase it slightly, like 60 or 70. Work on launching another campaign. Repeat.

As you ramp up, be mindful to stay under your sending limits. Each provider has a different limit, once you know your limit you can set it in your account to ensure you do not go over it.

NOTE:Do not use open or click tracking if you do not need to. This tracking adds tiny images to your message and if you have more images than text, your email could be flagged as spam. You can always add these trackers after a few campaigns. Once you enable this feature, check out adding a CNAME record to boost your deliverability.

Now what?

Email providers are constantly watching as if you are the waiter that is finally here with the food. You will have to monitor your email account as the

Quality of your messages

Target Audience

Consistency of sending

Volume of sending

will always be factors to your email health. If you notice your open rate dropping or an increase of bounced emails, these are good signs something is faulty. Start with using Mail Tester (see configuration section) to see your score and from there we can always help to improve your results.

Creating a brand new email account is a great strategy when it comes to sending more outbound emails. But if you create a new email account and immediately start sending bulk emails, you will be in trouble. There are a few things to know to keep your email account safe before you hit send messages button.

Building your email accounts’ reputation:

New email accounts do not have a reputation, meaning they have no history of sending emails good or bad. We want to prevent your email provider from suspending or blocking your account due to suspicious activity; the only way to do this is through time and setting your account up for success.

Note: “new” email address means a whole new account, as if you hired someone on your team. This is not an alias account.

Why does reputation matter?

Without one (or a bad one), your account is more likely to be suspended or blocked.

Email providers are cutting down on spam and malware and can suspend your account if your email looks even remotely like spam. Even with taking measures to prevent spam, your emails could still be rejected. There are 3 types of reputations: Good, Neutral, and Bad.

How do I build my email reputation?

Time

Send and receive quality emails

Configure your email correctly

Time

How much time is dependant on your email provider, but if you ramp up slowly and work on sending great content, you will be in good shape. If you rush, you will be labeled as a bad sender and will be difficult to change to a good sender.

Quality emails

Sending and receiving quality emails is like arriving to a party and introducing yourself to everyone there through a handshake. If a few people do not shake your hand back, you are now the weird person at the party. Don’t have your email be that weird person at the party.

You can start by sending your friends an email and having them all respond. (You can respond back as well). The responses let your email provider know that these are messages that the receiver wanted to see and are not spam or malware (handshake accepted). Avoid emailing no more than 4 people with the same domain or company as this looks suspicious to email providers.

If you can, try to email people with different email hosts, like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc. Be sure to send these one at time and not to use any automation at this point, slow and steady wins the email game.

Configuration

Setting up your email correctly will improve your deliverability. Thanks to that you can reduce the chance of getting into spam. It is like when you go in for a handshake; making eye contact and having a firm handshake are details most people pay attention to. Don't forget to make a good first impression as well as don’t forget the details of your email configuration.

There are two main records that you should configure:

SPF - Sender Policy Framework record is like an ID for your IP address. It is a part of the domain's DNS record.

Here you can find an instruction on how to set up the SPF and here how to check your DNS record!

CNAME -custom unsubscribe link implementation will specify which domain should be visible in your link. It is really helpful when you use our click and open tracking.

Here you can read more about it!

NOTE: Be sure to learn more about what your email provider offers, such as email limit per account per day. During the warm up period you will not get close to this limit, at all, but once you start sending more emails we do not want to exceed this limit.

Where to start:

Follow the guide under Configuration to ensure your email is setup for success.

Then we will want to ramp up slowly, like really slowly. We want to send 10 emails a day, then 20, 30 etc. These should all be sent manually and should be personalized. 50 emails may seem low, but remember the follow up emails are also being sent out of this address so 50 is a good number to strive towards.

You’re sending should look like that kid back in 5th grade that never missed a day of school - consistent. You do not want to send 30 emails and then all of sudden send 80 the next day.So send a lower amount of custom emails, constantly, manually, for at least 4 weeks.

Create your first Growbots campaign

Select your target audience that you know would truly benefit from getting an email from you. If you email random people, they will likely mark your email as spam.

Remember the magic number of 50. No more than 50 prospects with 4-6 emails in your sequence, we are still not out of the woods.

Use the Personalization tool to update your first email to these prospects before you launch the campaign. Using the ‘Add variant’ option in your sequence will also help as this is built in AB testing. These tools will make your emails unique and look less like spam. (Remember you can send your emails to Mail Tester to see how spammy they look).

Let your campaign run. As it is ending you can adjust your sending limit and increase it slightly, like 60 or 70. Work on launching another campaign. Repeat.

As you ramp up, be mindful to stay under your sending limits. Each provider has a different limit, once you know your limit you can set it in your account to ensure you do not go over it.

NOTE:Do not use open or click tracking if you do not need to. This tracking adds tiny images to your message and if you have more images than text, your email could be flagged as spam. You can always add these trackers after a few campaigns. Once you enable this feature, check out adding a CNAME record to boost your deliverability.

Now what?

Email providers are constantly watching as if you are the waiter that is finally here with the food. You will have to monitor your email account as the

Quality of your messages

Target Audience

Consistency of sending

Volume of sending

will always be factors to your email health. If you notice your open rate dropping or an increase of bounced emails, these are good signs something is faulty. Start with using Mail Tester (see configuration section) to see your score and from there we can always help to improve your results.

NEXT STEP

Zapier is a platform that helps integrate over 1000 applications. Zapier connects apps through 'Triggers' and 'Actions'. Triggers are activities that push data to Zapier and Actions are activities that should happen when Zapier receives the Trigger.

Let’s say that you want to get Slack notification for every reply from your Growbots prospects. In this case, your Trigger would be the prospect reply and Action will be Slack message.

Thanks to this ‘integration hub’, we don’t need to build hundreds of native integrations with different platforms to give you the same set of possibilities. Even if you change your CRM or scheduling platform, you can easily update your integration and don’t lose any data. You can check all apps connected to Zapier here.

First steps with Growbots + Zapier integration

To connect Zapier, log in to Growbots and go to Settings -> Integrations. Click on the Zapier button.

Qualify or Unqualify

You'll see the Zapier integration window below. Growbots connects with Zapier using an API key. It’s a popular way to give Zapier access to your account. Click on the API key and we will automatically copy it.

Here 's a link to register for Zapier if you don't have the account there. Also, if you haven’t used Growbots integration on your Zapier account yet, use this invitation link to enter the Growbots app in Zapier:

Now, you need toMake a New Zap!You need to paste the API key when you create the integration with Growbots for the first time. After you select Growbots as the Trigger/Action app and you select the right activity, the pop-up window will be displayed. Then, you need to paste the API key when you create the integration with Growbots for the first time.

Select the application with which you'd like to integrate Growbots. When you enter your Growbots account, go toSettings -> Integrations,you'll see our suggestions of Zapier integrations:

Growbots Triggers & Actions

Here are all available Growbots’ Triggers and Actions.

Growbots’ triggers:

New message: Triggers an action when a prospect replies.

First contact: Triggers an action when the first message is sent to a prospect.

Unsubscribed: Triggers an action when a prospect clicks the unsubscribe link.

Open: Triggers an action when a prospect opens an email.

Click: Triggers an action when a prospect clicks a link.

Growbots actions:

Qualify / Unqualify: a prospect or a company.

Pause Campaign: Pause a campaign for a prospect.

NOTE: Tracking opens is an organization-wide feature. You need to be an admin to change your organization’s settings.

This is how our click tracking works: we attach a small pixel to messages you send, which sends us a signal each time the message is being opened.

Thanks to open tracking you can see which of your prospects have opened your message. The aggregate data about clicks will be available in Statistics. You can also check the individual clicks just by looking at the small “eye” button next to the prospects’ name.

The accurate timestamps of the opens can be seen in the prospect’s logs. Tracking opens is turned on by default, however, since the tracking pixel we attach to messages may marginally affect the deliverability, you might want to turn it off. Here’s how:

Go toSettingsOrganizationand scroll down to Organization settings.

Click the Tracks opens of messages toggle to disable or reenable open tracking.

That’s all!

How do I start generating prospects?

To start generating new prospects, you need to either create a new campaign or edit an existing one. You can create a new campaign in three ways:

Go to the Dashboard, Prospects,Campaignsor Messages tabs and click on the green shortcut button in the top right of your screen.

here!

Go to the Campaigns tab and click + Add new campaign.

If you don’t have any prospects yet, go to Prospects and click on Create new campaign.

Companies

In the first step of creating a new campaign, you need to specify what kind of companies you're searching for. You can select a number of criteria in order to define them (described below).

On the bar on the right, you’ll be able to see the estimated number together with the preview of 10 companies meeting these criteria. This value will change in real-time as soon as you change the project's criteria. When you click on any of the companies on the list, you’ll be redirected to their website.

Select your preferred criteria mode

First, you need to decide whether you want to search for companies that meet the specified conditions (Detailed criteria) or if you want to search for specific companies (Specific companies).

If you choose Detailed criteria, you will be able to specify further:

Industry

Companies locations

Company size or revenue

Technologies

Page rank

Company keywords

If you want to search for specific companies, these 2 criteria will be available:

Specific companies

Companies locations

Below you can find descriptions of all available criteria.

Industry

Here you can choose industry branches that the prospect’s company operates in. You can include multiple industries to broaden the search. If you don’t want to target by industries, leave this field blank.

When creating a target in Growbots, you can not only use descriptive industry verticals, but also standardNAICS codes. We hope this will help customers who have a different approach to targeting or know specifically what NAICS describes best their persona.

Companies locations

Use this criterion to find prospects from a specific city, administrative area (e.g. state) or country.

Also, you don't have to describe a location - you can simply put the zip code:

Company size or revenue

You can decide to filter by the company size or its revenue.

Define the size of the company by moving the slider.

Companies are divided into 4 categories:

Small - 1 - 50 employees

Medium - 50 - 249 employees

Large - 250 - 999 employees

Enterprise - 1000+ employees

You can also specify the company headcount using range.

Technologies

Technologies refer to the specific technologies or their versions that the prospect’s company website is built with. To include it in your search, start typing and choose the desired technology from the drop-down menu. If you can’t see it in the drop-down menu, it means we don’t support this technology. If you’d like to include all versions of the specific technology, e.g. "Magento", you should put only "Magento" and there’s no need to type "Magento 1.2", "Magento 1.3" and so on.

You can also use AND conjunction when searching for technologies:

Page rank

The page rank is based on Alexa rank, which is a ranking that lists websites from the most to least popular. If you set this criterium to 11000, it will search for people from companies whose websites are among the 1000 most popular websites. If you use other criteria describing company characteristics, it may narrow your search too much.

Company keywords

Company Keywords are secondary terms that describe the company that you are targeting. It’s particularly useful for very specific searches and niche industries. If you want to narrow down your search to only SaaS companies, using "SaaS" and "software as a service" in the company’s keywords will result in generating companies from this specific industry.

Specific companies

Use this criterion if you want to find prospects from specific companies.

To get the most accurate results, type in the domain names of the companies. They should not contain http, www, or slashes /.

Correct example: growbots.com.

Incorrect example: https://www.growbots.com/customers.

You can also type in the names of the companies. To get proper results, skip type of business entity such as "Ltd.", "Inc." or "Corp.".

Remember that when you use this field, you shouldn’t determine industry, location or any other criteria describing this company’s characteristics.

Search logic

Note that choosing different options within one criterion results in a search covering companies qualified based on one OR the other option. (e.g. When putting "London" and "Paris" in Companies location criterion, the system will search for companies located in one of these cities).

The logic changes to AND in the case of different criteria. Choosing Technology in Industry criterion and London in Companies location will result in a list of companies that are located in London and position themselves in the Technology industry.

Remember that choosing too many different criteria might narrow your results too much.

People

At this step, you decide whom you’d like to contact from the companies matching the criteria of Step 1. Analogically to the previous step, on the bar on the right, you’ll be able to see the estimated number together with the preview of 10 prospects meeting these criteria.

Job titles

Within this criterion, you can choose to filter by prospects’ Job positions or a combination of Seniority level & Department.

Job position

Make sure you use job positions common for the location you’re searching for.

Type in ALL the variations of the job positions. For CEO, type in: CEOand Chief Executive Officer. Think about all the other variations that might apply, such asDirector, VP, Vice President, SVP, Senior Vice Presidentand Head.

Avoid thepreposition as our system will limit the search for these kinds of phrases. Instead of Head of Marketing, use Head Marketing.

Based on the job positions you type in, Growbots will suggest similar ones. Just click on those you find suitable to broaden your search.

You can also exclude positions you don't want to generate, such as Intern or Assistant. Just add "-" before the position's name you'd like to exclude:

You can also type positions in quotation marks or brackets. It means that it will look exactly the same as you put it, e.g. type "Customer Success Manager" or (Customer Success Manager) to find all the positions that look exactly like this instead of finding another Customer Success people.

Seniority level & Department

You can decide to choose your prospects’ seniority levels and departments from the list, instead of providing specific job positions. Within these criteria, you are able to choose multiple seniority levels and multiple departments.

Prospects keywords

This criterion works analogically to the "Company keywords" criterion from the previous step. Use it to find people working in a specific field when job positions usually don’t say that but the information can be found in their job descriptions.

Max prospect per company

You can decide not to generate more than the selected number of prospects within one campaign by checking the box. Remember that this criterion works only within the campaign and you can find more contacts from selected companies in similar campaigns.

All Accounts

This feature allows you to create a campaign based on companies/prospects from specific companies or add these prospects to already running campaign, you can read more about it

Account-based strategy is a method of contacting prospects based on the company-approach. When searching for prospects, what you are really looking for is not the way to reach out to an individual prospect, but to the whole company itself. It’s essential to realize that the company approach is a way more effective way of closing a deal, but it also requires more work than traditional methods of contact.

The best way is to choose a group of companies that are the most important for you. This multi-channel strategy will enhance the chances of closing a deal with them, but will require more effort than regular cold-mailing. We believe that calling your prospects or inviting them on Linkedin in the middle of the campaign will bring you way better results than only sending emails.

How can it be achieved in Growbots?

You should consider the following actions when contacting whole companies:

qualifying/unqualifying contacts - check this article

article

choosing the maximum number of prospects from one company to be contacted at one time

integrating with your CRM

using the multichannel strategy thanks to the tasks feature

and most importantly...

using the Accounts section allowing you to:

display all the companies already contacted or exported on your account and explore new prospects working for them

display the full list of companies available in the Growbots database and easily find the specific accounts that you're interested in.

Please check this in order to read more about how you may use the Accounts section at Growbots.

How to use the multichannel strategy?

Each time you use a multichannel strategy and add a task step to your sequence you'll see it in the Activity tab. It will require your action and a sequence will proceed to the next step only if you Mark it as done or Skip it. Thanks to the feature you can mix automated email outreach with some more manual steps like connecting on LinkedIn or phone calling the prospect.

If you choose the Call as a step, you’ll be able to request prospects' direct phone numbers in their logs. If there is no direct phone number provided in the prospects logs, you can try calling the headquarters office and ask to redirect your call to the prospect.

Based on our knowledge, one way of using the tasks efficiently would be by using the following sequence:

Step 1 - Initial email - lead on with an email to briefly outline the value proposition and warm it up:

Hi X,

Just wanted to congratulate you on being listed as “One of the best companies to work with” by Forbes magazine! As a fellow CEO, I wanted to ask how do you automate the lead generation in your company?

Step 2 - The same day send a LinkedIn invite, with a short description of why a person should add you to their Network

Step 3 - Next day or two days after a cold call saying "I'm following up on the email" (better than just "reaching out"). Remember that the purpose of the call is not to immediately sell the product but to schedule a meeting.

Step 4 - Day after cold calling, send a follow-up email

Step 5 - The same day cold call a person (try another time of the day)

Step 6 - After a week send a follow-up email (add some social proof)

Step 7 - Cold call the next day (try another time of the day)

Step 8 - Send the last follow-up email (no "break up email" - instead try to add so much value in your last email, the prospect will be reluctant to ever delete it from their inbox -- you'll be top of mind then)

While using this approach remember to keep your social profiles strong. All SDRs and sales reps should have up to date profiles since they will be in direct contact with the prospects.

Checking your results and monitoring how they change in time is an important part of cold emailing. The industry is very dynamic and you need to analyze your performance on a regular basis.

You can see the charts of your global results in theDashboardsection. It can be displayed as the alternative for Timeline:

We sorted the results by week. All actions (opens, clicks and replies) will be assigned to the time when the message was sent, not the actual time when they happened. To see results for earlier weeks, please scroll left.

It is possible to display the results for all the email channels used by all the users within your Growbots organization or filter only those used on your account. Additionally, you may choose the time period for which you would like to preview your statistics. Once filtered, you may also export your statistics by clicking at the download icon right next to the filtering options.

You can also see the statistics for each campaign separately.

We're still working on developing better and more actionable reports so if you have any ideas, contact our support team. We love your feedback!

Check your email provider:

Type the domain name of the email address you will use for outbound sales into this tool. The domain name is the shortened version of your website.

Example website: https://www.growbots.com/

Example domain: growbots.com

CNAME

You can see we used the domain ‘growbots.com’ and the results show in the table. We are looking for the MX records for this domain.

Look to the right of the MX records and you can see who is the email provider. In this example, it is Gmail.

For Gmail users:

Please type your domain name into this tool here and click Run Checks.

This will show you a list of your DNS (domain name system) records. Anything in red, is required to be updated. Anything in yellow, is recommended to be updated.

If you are not sure how to update these records, there are help guides to the right of each line item.

If you would like more information about these records, see our help guide.

For All Other Domains (non-GMAIL users):

Type your domain name into MXtoolbox then click MX Lookup.

On the next screen, click Find Problems:

The system will run and your results will show below.

Anything in red is required to be updated.

Anything in yellow is recommended to be updated.

If you would like more information about these records, see our help guide.

Records on your DNS that Growbots’ recommends to prevent SPAM:

SPF

Each provider has a slightly different way of adding these records. It is best to reference your email provider’s help articles to add these records correctly. The only record that needs to be configured for Growbots in any special way is the CNAME record. That extra step is connecting your subdomain to Growbots through the Growbots’ interface.

Tasks are different types of steps in your sequences. Thanks to adding more options than just automated email outreach, you'll be able tobuild more engaging and effective campaigns.

You can create and add tasks in theSequenceview. When you build the step of your sequence, you can decide if you'd like to send and email, make a call, connect on LinkedIn or create the custom action.

Types of steps

You can choose 5 different step types when you add the next step to your sequence:

Email

Manual email

Call

LinkedIn

Custom to-do

Email and Manual email

There are two types of emails that you can add to your campaigns. You can pick the type of the email when you select the type of task.

The Email (automaticmessage) is a regular Growbots email which will be sent automatically at the selected time.

Themanual message is an email which needs to be approved before we will schedule it. What does it mean? When you schedule a manual message, we'll create a task for you. You'll need to enter the email and mark the task as done. This type of emails may be useful if you'd like to personalize your follow-ups for prospects who already opened your emails. You can simply approve emails for less engaged prospects and personalize the ones for the ones who clicked on links or just opened earlier messages.

The manual message can be sent only after your approval. We will still take into consideration the sending time criteria and your limits.

Calls

The next type of step is thecall. The template for this task can include a call script with prospect's data - you can use custom fields here and we'll add correct data for each person.

When you enter your scheduled calls in theTasks section, you'll see the special view for this task with headquarters phone number, personal phone number, notes and defining the result of the call.

If you don't see the personal number to the prospect, you can click on Request button. We will try to find a number for you and you should be able to see it in no more than 20 seconds! If you'd like to request the number for imported prospect, we will need their first name and last name (not only email address).

You can mark the call as done only after you define what's the result of the call. First, pick if you were able to connect with the prospect. Here are all available results:

Connected

Interested

Not interested

Gave a demo

Not connected

Wrong number

Left voicemail

Not connected

LinkedIn outreach

When you selectconnect on LinkedIn, you can write the template of your message and later you can just copy it and paste in your LinkedIn invite.

When you open the task in theTasks section, we'll display the template and link to prospect's LinkedIn. To make the process easier, you can click onCopy message to automatically copy the content of the message.

To-Dos

To-do is a custom task that can be anything you want. You need to simply mark it as done to trigger the next steps of your sequence.

NOTE: Right now you can create and browse call, LinkedIn and to-do templates in the sequence view.

You can find all tasks in theTasks section underActivity(previously called Outbox). This is the only section in our app where you can see the list of your tasks or check if a specific prospect has a task assigned.

On the task list, you'll see all tasks with their dues dates from the most urgent, to the one with the most time left to complete. All overdue tasks will be highlighted in red. You can enter the task (to close it) by clicking on prospect's name. When you close one task, you'll be automatically moved to the next one. We're displaying only tasks which are the next step in the campaign. If you schedule a campaign with 2 different tasks, we'll show only the first one in this section. Of course, if you complete it, the next one will show up.

If you work in a bigger team, you can easily switch the task list to show only your activities.

Overdue tasks

Each task is scheduled for a specific time, which is its due date. To help you manage your tasks on daily basis, all tasks arekept active until midnight of the day they're scheduled for. If you have scheduled the next step for the same day (eg. 2 hours later), the task will become overdue, when the next step is due.

When the task becomes overdue, we will pause the entire sequence and change prospect's status toOverdue. All overdue tasks are displayed at the top of the list and are highlighted in red.When you mark the task as done, we will automatically reschedule the rest of the sequence.

Skip & Reschedule

To help you manage your task list we added to options: skipping and rescheduling.

Thanks to theSkip option, you can easily move your sequence to the next step. It's particularly useful when you don't have the time for calls and would like to send the follow-up instead or if the needed LinkedIn link is blank for the selected prospect. To skip a task you need to enter it and selectSkip. The sequence will move to the next step.

If you see too many tasks scheduled for one day, you can easily reschedule them in the task view.

Sending limits vs tasks

Sending limits aren't applied to tasks other than email. This means that you can have a lot of different tasks piled up for the same day. We're aware that you can't make 100 calls a day or send 1000 LinkedIn invites a day and we're working on building a limiting system for tasks as well.

List 3

Have you ever wondered, what makes you open emails you didn’t expect? Especially when you receive a message out of the blue. What was it? The complexity? The capitalization of each word? Let's try to break it down.

Personalize

The perception of a subject line, that seems like it was meant for me is much better than the one that could be sent to anyone. Including the name of the prospect, as well as a subtle hint about their difficulty are great ways to improve their judgment.

What do {{company_name}} clients say?

Make it concise

The cleaner, the better! Short subject lines work the best. Long ones are missing in a mess and those written briefly can steal the spotlight.

{{first_name}}, checking in

Stay sincere

Misleading information may boost your open rates, though it might cause a feeling of being tricked - that results in:

prospect getting mad

being reported as a spammer

receiving bad press

{{first_name}} - news you might like

Say no to "salesy" words

The world is full of offers, just like your prospects inboxes. To stand out of them, you need to use different language. Using terms like "buy" or "offer" may trigger spam filters, and they may cause your email to look uninteresting.

Check out the lists of phrases worth avoiding:

List 1

List 2

Keep it casual

Try to make your tone friendly and understandable, nonetheless - get creative! To make your subject line unique try writing it completely in lowercase. Refrain from using marketing slogans like: ‘lower your costs by 60\%’ or ‘Sell three times more!’.

{{first_name}} - got a minute?

Adjust it to the prospect

It matters! Bear in mind that a good fit target-wise can be extremely helpful. People working in different positions, as well as different branches, may have various preferences when it comes to focusing their interest. The best part is - we strive to make it easier - in the final stage of setting up a campaign you can add a personalized content, different for every prospect!

New tool to acquire talent

(for a recruiting software developer)

With these tips in the back of your mind, you’re good to go!

What is CNAME?

It is a type of record in the Domain Name System (DNS), that specifies that one domain name is an alias of another domain name.

Why should you use that?

When you use our native click and open tracking, our system automatically changes your links a bit to see the prospect’s activity. As we don’t have direct access to your DNS records, these links by default are not associated with your domain. The CNAME record will allow you to customize them and is crucial if you want to keep your email deliverability perfect.

How will it work?

The feature will allow you to set up a custom domain that will be used in all links so that they look more like this: “track.yourdomain.com/xxxx”. Thanks to the feature, you’ll be able to customize your emails a bit more and increase deliverability.

How to set it up?

In order to customize the tracking domain, we require that you update your DNS records. Let’s say you have a domain “example.com”. For your domain, you can define a subdomain. The subdomain is the part before the domain itself, for example: “subdomain.yourdomain.com”. It enables us to reroute traffic that’s trying to reach this address somewhere else. In this case, we want to reroute this traffic to our own servers, so we can track the clicks made by prospects.

First of all, you need to add a CNAME record in your DNS settings (you can ask your IT administrator for help) which will specify which domain should be visible in your links and point to our tracking domain. It should look like this:

track.yourdomain.com CNAME trackgb.com. 7200

Where:

track.yourdomain.com is the domain displayed in links,

trackgb.com is our tracking domain to which your subdomain should point,

7200 is Time To Live.

Which subdomain do we recommend?

It’s up to you and can vary on a case by case basis (because you may already be using a subdomain we suggest), but subdomains we recommend are"track", "images", "img", "resources", "gb".

Here’s how you can set up a CNAME record for most popular providers:

Google

Office 365

1&1

Bluehost

Cloud Flare

Digital Ocean

DreamHost

Dynadot

GoDaddy

InMotion Hosting

Name.com

Namecheap

How to enable CNAME record in Growbots

Once you create a customized CNAME record and configure this in your domain’s DNS records, you’ll need to go to Settings -> Organization and type the CNAME record so we can verify and connect it to Growbots.

The system will automatically check if the CNAME is set up correctly and show the confirmation status. If something went wrong, contact our support team and they’ll investigate the issue. This setting works for the entire organization.

NOTE: Bear in mind that connecting your CNAME record to Growbots may take up to 24 hours.

For a seamless user experience we recommend using Growbots with Google Chrome only.

Using other browsers may result in errors in the interface which can disrupt your work. Some elements of the interface may not work at all, so using the right browser is essential.

You can download Google Chrome here.

NOTE:If you have any questions, you can always contact us using the in-app chat or leaving a message on [email protected].

NEXT STEP

Thanks to the Google Sheets integration, you can track the data in an automatically updated external report.

In this article, we'll show you how to create a spreadsheet with information about your prospects who clicked on your links (and which links they clicked!). Why is it useful? This will help you find out which links are the most frequently chosen by recipients of your emails and analyze your messages to find the best space and text to add the link. If there’s a specific page you’d like to redirect them to, you can check if your call-to-action works and adjust the hyperlinked text or place the link in a different part of the email if it does not perform well.

You can connect your Google Sheet with Growbots using Zapier. If you haven't used Zapier before, check out our article for the first-time users.

Growbots click trigger

Start from adding the Trigger from Growbots.

Pick Growbots as the Trigger App.

here

Select the trigger Link Clicked.

If you haven't connected Growbots to Zapier yet, after this step you'll be asked to add the API key to your account. You can check out what the API key is and how to copy it .

Next, select Save and Continue. Zapier will run a test to check if data is sent correctly. We’re sending our test data here so don’t worry if you see a campaign name or prospect that never showed up on your account. When you see the screen with the Sample hit Continue and your Trigger will be successfully added.

Now you need to decide where you would like to see the information about the link.

Google Sheets

To connect Google Sheets, you need to create a dedicated spreadsheet and worksheet with column names reflecting the data you’d like to sync. In this example, we added columns Email, URL and Text to track who clicked on the link, what the URL was and what was hyperlinked.

Add Google Sheets as the Action App. Google Apps does not require the API key, you can simply use your Google login to add this app.

Select the Action Create Spreadsheet Row. This action will add a row to your spreadsheet whenever the Growbots click happens.

Select Save and Continue. Zapier will run a test for Google Sheets as well.

Select the spreadsheet and data you’d like to send. Let’s see our example. We created the spreadsheet named Zapier for this integration and worksheet named click to track clicks. The plus button in each field allows you to add data from Growbots to the message.

Data mapped to our columns:

- Email = Prospect’s Email

- URL = URL

- Text = Value (hyperlinked text)

Next, Zapier will send the sample data to your spreadsheet to test the entire integration. You can double check it by entering the sheet.

That's it! You just need to name this Zap and turn it on.

If you'd like to monitor any other data (like replies or unsubscribes), you can change the trigger for the integration and create your customized report.

This was just one example of many integrations that are possible with Zapier. There are many other integrations you can accomplish! We would love to hear what works for you! Please feel free to give us any feedback or ask for assistance.

We know your main goal with Growbots is to get as many positive replies from your prospects as possible. To ensure your campaigns are performing well, you should analyze your results on a daily basis and draw conclusions in order to improve your content. Remember that cold mailing is best when you utilize testing, so the more you test, the better!

How to read our metrics

In Growbots you will find four basic metrics:

Open rate(OR) - number of prospects who opened the message (in Templates) or at least one of the messages (inSequences or Campaigns) divided by the number of sent messages.

Reply rate(RR)- number of prospects who replied to your message (in Templates) or at least one of the messages (in Sequences or Campaigns) divided by the number of sent messages.

Click rate(CR) - number of prospects who clicked a link in a message (in Templates) or at least one of the messages (in Sequences or Campaigns) divided by the number of sent messages.

Warm leads rate(WLR) - number of prospects who replied to your the message (in Templates) or at least one of the messages (in Sequences or Campaigns) in a positive or neutral way divided by the number of sent messages. The sentiment of the message is assessed by algorithms designed by our Data Science team with over 90\% accuracy.

It’s super important to understand what can impact each metric:

Open rate- deliverability, timing, subject line and opening line can all have an influence. That’s why you should care about your email reputation and follow best practices for sending limits. You will find all the tips on timing, subject and opening line here.

Reply rate- the number of replies you get depends on the quality of your content and your call to action. Remember to focus your content on how prospects will benefit from working with you and use a strong, direct CTA to make their next step easier.

Click rate- depends on the relevance of the link you include e.g. case study, interesting article. To help keep this rate high, make sure to include valuable and relevant content. You should use no more than 1-2 links in one message.

Warm leads rate- making sure you target the right prospects and show them how you can solve their problems will increase the likelihood of a positive reply rate. Remember to focus on their needs, not your company.

Where you can check your results

Templates - here you can see the results of each template. The stats here present overall rates for anytime this template was used in any sequence or campaign. Remember that individual messages will have lower results (RR and WLR) than entire sequences or campaigns which consist of multiple messages. Follow-ups always increase the chances that you will get replies from your prospects!

By having results for each template, it’s easy to see how the separate messages are performing and build a master sequence which includes only the best initial message and top-performing follow-ups.

here

Sequences - show you the overall results of all the messages in this flow. Remember that they can be used with different targets so sometimes you can improve your results not only by adjusting content but by changing your targeted prospects.

Campaigns - show you the global results of each campaign: a combination of a sequence and targets. You can see here how different sequences work for different target groups and verify which prospects are most responsive to your campaigns.

Also you can check your best performing Template, Sequence and Campaign on your Dashboard, just scroll down and you will see it below the timeline!

Best practices

On average our customers achieve 33\% open rate, 6\% replyrate and 2\% warm leads rate. Treat it as your first benchmark and try to achieve such results.

Work on your content, run an A/B tests(you can read about it ), add personalisation and join the group of top performers (OR>60\%, RR> 20\%, WLR>8\%).

If you don’t know what timing, subject line or CTA will work best, set up different variations of the messages and compare the results of your A/B tests. Remember to test one factor at a time.

Don’t get discouraged if your results don’t satisfy you after sending the first message in the campaign. Remember that follow-ups increase results and chances that you will get a positive reply from your prospects. Outbound is a marathon, not a sprint.

Upcoming

The great news is that’s not all! In the near future we’re going to further develop reports and add the following features:

Timespan which will let you see results for a specific period of time.

Performance reports which will give you a better overview of results achieved by different target groups, campaigns and users in your organization.

The Outbox displays all messages scheduled for the future. Thanks to this feature you can quickly check which emails will be sent on a specific day and personalize the content of all messages.

To open this tab you need to clickActivityicon on the side menu and switch the tab from Tasks to Outobox. When you enter the Outbox you'll see two sections: the timeline and list of messages.

In the timeline, you can see how many emails are scheduled for the specific day. It's useful for planning your outreach and checking how busy your email channels are.

personalize follow-ups

The second section is the outbox, where all your scheduled messages are stored. We sorted them by sending time to help you manage the next scheduled messages first.

You can filter out messages with our filters like events, step or campaign, personalization and sending time. So for example, if you wanted to see emails scheduled for next days and targeted to people who previously opened your emails you can selectSending time andPast events: Opened.It's very useful if you'd like to personalize emails to prospects who already showed interest in your emails. Since they checked out your messages, it would be a waste not to add something extra for them!

Do you want to personalize a specific message? No problem! Just select the name of the templateor select the specificcampaign and mark whichstep you'd like to adjust.

To personalizeemails put your cursor on the email and click on the bluePersonalize button. When you enter thepersonalization mode, you'll see all prospect and company details and prospect logs. Thanks to this information you can make the email more relevant to the prospect. Enter their Linkedin and mention their responsibility or check updates on the company website to congratulate them on the newest client.

You can easily jump to the next prospect by using arrows on your keyboard. Click onSave and go to the next prospect to save changes and continue personalization for next leads. All prospects, for whom emails have been personalized will be marked on the list.

NOTE:Check our know-how articles to see how to use prospectdata in emails and .

Sending cold campaigns to people while they enjoy the Thanksgiving dinner or when you're away on vacation doesn't sound like the best idea. Luckily, you can easily exclude selected dates from your sending schedule.

NOTE:All sending exclusions are connected to the user account. This means that if you add a date range when emails shouldn't be sent, it will be applied to all email channels connected to your Growbots account.

If you have a running campaign and the messages are scheduled in the dates you'd like to exclude, then all you have to do is:

Go to Settings, then scroll down to the last segment called Outbox Settings and you’ll see Exclude Custom Dates.

Then pick the dates you want to exclude.

After clicking Add, the dates will be excluded!

If you’ve scheduled a campaign before excluding these dates then you’ll have to reschedule the messages that were supposed to be sent in that period of time.

To do so:

Go to Prospects and filter them by Activity

NOTE:You have to pick the Next tab.

Then pick the dates that you’ve excluded in the previous steps.

You’ll see a list of all the prospects that are going to receive a message from you, during that period of time. Select All of them by clicking on the little square on the left side of the list.

After that, pick Reschedule from the Actions tab on the right side of the list.

You’ll be transferred to the Rescheduling page, pick a start date for your messages by clicking on a little calendar image or pick Send Immediately.

All done!

How to set up SPF?

The owner of the domain publishes the SPF policy as a part of the domain’s DNS record. Modern hosting providers offer wizards that will allow you to generate an SPF record and publish it in a few simple steps.

You can also use one of the publicly available generators, like the SPF Wizard. It will generate an SPF record for you as well as suggest the recommended settings. Once you have the record ready, publish it using the administration panel of your hosting provider.

You can validate your SPF records automatically using a tool like MXToolbox or manually using the command line command: dig mx domain.name

Remember that DNS records may take up to 24 hours to propagate after an update.

How to set up the custom domain?

CNAME record will specify which domain should be visible in your links and point to our tracking domain:

track.yourdomain.com CNAME trackgb.com. 7200

Where:

track.yourdomain.com is the domain displayed in links,

trackgb.com is our tracking domain to which your subdomain should point,

7200 is Time To Live.

You’ll probably need some help from your IT administrator who has access to your domain settings.

Here’s how you can set up CNAME record for most popular providers:

1&1

Bluehost

Cloud Flare

Digital Ocean

DreamHost

Dynadot

GoDaddy

InMotion Hosting

Name.com

Namecheap

GoDaddy NOTE: GoDaddy treats CNAMEs and subdomains as 2 separate things. If you use GoDaddy, please use this article to set up CNAME correctly.

After accepting your prospects, you still have full flexibility with what happens next. You can pause the campaign, reschedule next email, transfer prospects to another campaign and much more.

Go to Campaigns and select one of your campaigns to see your list of prospects. Right there you can manage prospects one-by-one or work on groups. To select a group of prospects you can simply mark boxes next to their names or you click on the box at the top of the list. Choose all featured prospects or define the number and hit Confirm.

all about transferring prospects

NOTE: Bear in mind that you can also choose the first prospect and holding Shift select the last one - this way all the prospects between the first and the last selected will be marked as selected as well.

Pause

If you want to pause a running campaign, go to Actions and select Pause. No new messages will be sent to selected prospects until you decide otherwise.

NOTE: Remember that this action can be applied only to prospects with statuses Scheduled and Contacted, so if you’re planning to pause the campaign for more than one prospect, it’s a good idea to filter out only these two statuses.

Reschedule (resume)

If you want to reschedule the campaign for a specific day, go to Actions and select Reschedule. Select the desired day of sending the next email in the calendar or choose an option to send messages immediately and confirm.

Transfer to another campaign

If you decide that the selected prospect should belong in another campaign, you can transfer them pretty easily. Go to Actions and select Transfer to another campaign. Choose one of your existing campaigns from the list or create a new one. If you decide to use one of your previous campaigns, remember that the sequence used in this cadence will be scheduled to your prospect. Next, accept prospect and schedule the campaign.

For the new campaign, you need to select the sequence, accept the prospect and schedule your campaign. Along the way, you can even generate more prospects and add them to this campaign.

We prepared a separate article where you can read .

Delete

You can delete any prospect accepted on your account. Go to Actions and select Delete. Note that when you delete prospects, they can be generated or imported in the future and all history of your outreach will be deleted.

Wrong email

If you notice that the email address of your prospects doesn’t exist or that someone stopped working in the company, you can mark them as Wrong email. Go to Actions and selectWrong email. Thanks to that you’ll keep track of all the companies that you contacted and the ones that you can find more people you can reach out to.

Qualify and Unqualify

To help you keep track of the success of your campaigns we prepared two buttons: green thumbs up to qualify prospects and red thumbs down to unqualify them. After clicking on thumbs up or thumbs down you can decide if you want to mark only this prospect or the entire company. If you select to qualify/unqualify only the prospect, we will change their status and pause the current sequence. If you select the entire company, we will change the status of all prospects from this company on your account and we’ll pause sequences to all of them.

You can use it to mark all prospects that became your customers or positively replied to your campaign as qualified to note this success. To help you track the overall success, each campaign has the Qualified rate in its summary. Of course, sometimes you may get negative replies. That’s when unqualifying may be useful. Mark all prospects who weren’t interested in receiving any other campaigns or companies that don’t need your product.

If you're not sure when you qualified/unqualified the prospect, see the communication history:

Clear stage

If you'd like to undo qualifying/unqualifying or marking a prospect as Wrong email, choose Actions and Clear stageoption:

Unsubscribe

There are some replies in which prospects ask to remove them from the mailing list, but do not click on the unsubscribe link. Don’t worry though, you can change their status to Unsubscribe in the app. This way you can make sure that you won’t resume a sequence for them, as the system won’t allow you to resume a sequence for a prospect with Unsubscribe status. It’s also impossible to transfer such prospects to another campaign by accident. You can find this option when clicking on Actions and choose Unsubscribe option:

NOTE: If you have a CRM connected to Growbots, be mindful that importing prospects into Growbots could trigger that integration and update your current records. For example, if you exported your Salesforce leads and imported them to Growbots, the running campaign will update the leads in your Salesforce based on the configuration you have set up in Growbots.

In addition to the prospects that we provide, you might want to use prospects from sources other than Growbots. No issues there - you can import your own list and facilitate our email automation on prospects from outside of Growbots. Here’s how:

Create a CSV file. The only required field it needs to have is email, but we recommend including other fields, such as location, first_name, company. Location is used for determining prospects’ time zone. You can use this sample CSV file as a template or just look below to see an example of how the file can look like.

ClickCreate new campaignbutton in the top right corner, name your campaign and choose the option to import your own prospects:

ClickUpload file, choose the CSV you’ve created and confirm your choice.

Step 2 - Import preview. You can quickly take a look at the data to make sure that you've chosen the right file for the importing.

Step 3 - Import mapping. In this step, you can change your mapping. Growbots will automatically match some of the headers in your file to fields in Growbots, but make sure to check if the matching's correct and adjust the field if necessary, like so:

NOTE: Make sure to import location data (preferably in a format "Europe/London", "America/New York") and choose locationin Time zone field;if the field is empty the messages will be sent in PST.

Step 4 - Import summary. This screen will include the information about the status of your import - whether your prospects imported and if not, which ones didn't and why. Here are the messages that you may encounter on this screen:

Successfully loaded to Growbots

Once the imported file is mapped, you will be given a summary of the import. Here are the possible messages about your import:

Everything is a-ok - your prospects have been imported!

Already loaded to Growbots

The prospects have either been imported before in some other campaign or you’ve generated them via Growbots in another campaign. You can decide not to upload them or choose an option to Transfer them directly to this campaign:

Then, you will need to confirm which prospects from the file you'd like to transfer:

Required field missing

That means that some (or all) of your prospectsare lackingemaildata in the file. If your file has email addresses, then review which header is mapped with email field when reimporting the file.

Prospects are missing time zone

When you import prospects to Growbots and include information about their location, we'll send messages in prospect's time zone. We're showing some extra information about missing time zones for prospects in the import summary. Thanks to that you'll be able to react quickly and add proper time zones before sending emails.

Step 5 - Sequences. You're prompted to choose the Sequences you want to use for this campaign. If you're unsure how to proceed in this step, refer to this article !

Step 6 - Prospecting. If you plan to use all the prospects included in the file, all you need to do is to click Accept all prospects and schedule:

If you'd like to review the list before scheduling the campaign, make sure to read this article (Section: Selecting your prospects) to learn more about how to do that!

Step 7 - Schedule.You can choose which email the messages will be sent from and how many per day you want to send. Read more. (Section: Schedule).

Step 8 - Preview and schedule.At this stage, you can check if the timing and content of the messages look alright. Now that everything is set you can clickLaunch campaign.

That's it! Your campaignis ready to go!

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you want to upload email addresses with gmail.com/yahoo.com or any not customized domain and use Company name custom field, please check this instruction first:

If you don't have a column with a domain name, we deduct it from the prospects' email address. If it'sgmail.com, yahoo.com or any other uncustomized domain, you've probably imported someone with such "domain" before or now and assigned a company name XYZ to them. Now, this company name will be assigned to everyone with this "domain", as we need company domain to group prospects from the same company. It's necessary for (un)qualifying companies.

Here's the solution:

1. Please go to Templates and in creating new template view add a custom field e.g. "Company" or "Company name" in Prospect's custom fields here:

2. When mapping, pleasemap column Company name from your CSV file with the new Prospect's custom field (the one you've created).

3. Don't forget to use this field (the one you've created instead of Company name custom field that is added to Growbots by default) in a sequence you're using for these prospects.

Prospects

Selecting best prospects is one of the most vital steps in your outbound campaign. In the Prospects step you will find 50 contacts generated based on the criteria you’ve chosen in the Companies and People sections ( first steps of Creating a campaign ). You can always add more with theGenerate moreoption:

here.

NOTE: You can generate no more than 1000 prospects at once - the limit is set up to prevent the app from freezing.

In the Prospects section you can use two views (you can switch between them using the button on the view's right side):

Prospects - here you can find all generated contacts.

Companies - in this section, you will see all generated contacts grouped by their companies.

If you want to learn more about the generated prospects, you can click on an individual name and you'll be directed to theInfoview. This will give you a full perspective of this person and their company. You can also edit all the information about the contact here, like personal and company custom fields. You can also check the previous communications with this prospect (Logs view). You can also go through prospects one by one, without going back to the list view.

Selecting your prospects

When you’re ready to select who you want to contact, you can either:

Accept all the prospects and schedule messages to send;

Go through the whole list and decide about contacts one by one.

If you select individuals, you can:

Accept- add this prospect to the group of contact who will receive a message from you.

Reject- delete this contact from the current campaign. It’ll be possible to generate this person in a different campaign. Once you delete them from Rejected - it'll be possible to generate them once again in this campaign.

Blacklist- remove this prospect permanently from all the future campaigns you will create.You can delete the person from Blacklist - it will be possible to generate them again.

NOTE: Remember that you can always do bulk actions by selecting a few prospects or companies. This can make your job easier!

You can check the lists of prospects and companies which were accepted, rejected and blacklisted.

Before you schedule a campaign, go to theAcceptedsection and ensure all the custom fields included in your campaign are filled out correctly. If you see anything you’d like to update, just change the value and it will be saved. Remember that full email addresses will be visible only after accepting contacts.

If you changed your mind or noticed that you've accepted a prospect you don't want to contact, you can easily take them back to New:

Sometimes when you generate prospects in Growbots you find some prospects that would be a great fit for a different campaign but not so much for this one. You can easily move them fromProspectingview toProspectingview in another campaign, so no charging yet. You can simply move, finish working on the current campaign, then go back to those moved prospects in other campaign and decide if you really want to accept them.

Schedule

At this point, you will decide which email channel you want to use to send your campaign and when you want to start it. You can either use the email address(es) already connected or you can integrate a brand new one. A great feature is the ability to select as many email channels as you wish and set up daily limits for them ( here's a separate article about it ).

Your prospects will be split up among all the addresses you choose. It means that if you schedule 1000 prospects and select 5 email channels, 200 messages will be sent from each of them.

You will never exceed your daily limits and avoid being marked as spam. If you set a maximum of 200 messages for a channel a day and you schedule more, some of those emails will be scheduled on the next possible day, in accordance with your sequence timing.

Both of these features let you control your email channels and the number of messages sent from each of them on the daily basis which has a positive impact on your email health.

The next step is to decide when you want to start your campaign. You can:

Check the box and start it immediately, which means that the initial message will be sent within a few minutes regardless the timing in your sequence.

Choose a start date so that you can plan your campaigns for the future. This day (in this case Thursday)the system will check initial message's timing conditions and schedule initial message to be sent on the first possible day (including Thursday). You can read more about how timing works

When you’re ready to schedule your campaign, clicknext stepand enjoy the positive replies coming from your prospects!

The leads from Growbots can easily be exported to a CSV file. There are several ways of exporting your prospects.

Generating to export

If you only wish to generate the prospects and export them to a CSV file, without scheduling a campaign for them, click on the green button in the right top corner of the screen to Create a new campaign. You can also do that in Campaigns view (Add new campaign).

After naming the campaign, choose the Export CSVstrategy:

here

Define the companies and people search criteria and afterwards accept the prospects that you wish to export. You can read a great article on that .

Exporting from a campaign

You might have already accepted your prospects and even contacted them with a sequence, but still want to get their data out of Growbots. It’s as simple as that. Just go to a specific campaign, mark the prospects you wish to export and click on Export button. The CSV file will be delivered to your e-mail.

Exporting from Dashboard

The third way to export your prospects is going to Prospects section, choosing the prospects you wish to export (you can mark them all with one click) and then clicking on Export. The CSV will be sent to your e-mail as well.

Have fun with exporting!

How do I choose the strategy?

After choosing one of the above, you’ll be asked to choose the strategy you’d like to use. In this context, we understand strategy as the purpose of the project. You can choose from the 3 following by clicking on one of the 3 buttons:

Import CSV

Persona based - using this strategy you’ll specify your target, generate prospects from our database and schedule a flow of communication to be sent from one or more of your email addresses. After scheduling, you’ll monitor the results of the campaign (eg. how many messages have been sent out and who opened which message or replied).

- this strategy allows you to use our email automation system for the prospects that you already have from other sources.

Export CSV- this strategy starts exactly the same like the first one, you choose the target and generate prospects, but the workflow ends with exporting a CSV file containing prospects’ details.

Now you can check detailed estimates of your target in the Prospecting section of New campaign screen

Generated prospects - these are the prospects that you have already generated - you can also switch between New, Accepted and Rejected tabs

Available - this is a number of prospects that will be possible to generate when we consider all exclusions and prospects being in the Generated prospects tab

Excluded from - here you’ll see prospects who are either excluded from your different campaigns, CRM or blacklists

Here comes a huge update! We have created a whole new part of the application where you can browse all of the companies that you have already generated and add new contacts from the same company

You can also check the reply status of all contacted prospects from the company at once:

By browsing the company’s employees you can easily decide who will be the best person to contact next and raise your chances of closing a deal:

When you use our click and open tracking, we automatically change your links a bit to monitor recipients actions. This is a standard way of tracking activity and our default link looks something like this “123.123.123.123.bc.googleusercontent.com/11231231231232132131232132”, which is not the most friendly looking link.

To help you customize all data added to your email content, we created a feature,that allows you to set up a custom domain which will be used in all links, so that links look more like this: “track.growbots.com/12312312321323”. Thanks to the feature, you’ll be able to customize your emails a bit more, distinguish yourself from other clients that use Growbots and naturally increase deliverability. All you need to do is to add a CNAME record in your domain’s DNS settings that will forward traffic from the subdomain specified by you to our tracking service.

In order to customize the tracking domain, we require that you update your DNS records. Let’s say you have a domain “example.com” For every domain you can define a subdomain and the subdomain is the part before the domain itself, for example: “subdomain.example.com”. It enables to reroute traffic trying to reach this address somewhere else. In this case, we want to reroute this traffic to our own servers.

How to set up the custom domain

First of all, you need to add a CNAME record which will specify which domain should be visible in your links and point to our tracking domain:

track.yourdomain.com CNAME trackgb.com. 7200

where:

track.yourdomain.com is the domain displayed in links,

trackgb.com is our tracking domain to which your subdomain should point,

7200 is Time To Live.

You’ll probably need some help from your IT administrator who has the access to your domain settings.

Here’s how you can set up CNAME record for most popular providers:

1&1

Bluehost

Cloud Flare

Digital Ocean

DreamHost

Dynadot

GoDaddy

InMotion Hosting

Name.com

Namecheap

GoDaddy NOTE:GoDaddy treats CNAMEs and subdomains as 2 separate things. If you use GoDaddy, please use this article to set up CNAME correctly.

Which subdomain do we recommend?

It’s up to you and can vary on a case by case basis (because you may already be using a subdomain we suggest), but subdomains we recommend are "track", "images", "img", "resources", "gb".

How to enable CNAME record

Once you create customized CNAME record and configure this in your domain’s DNS records, you’ll need to go to Settings -> Organization and type the CNAME record so we can verify and connect it to Growbots. The system will automatically check if the CNAME is set up correctly and show the confirmation status. If something went wrong, contact our support team and they’ll investigate the issue.

This setting works for the entire Organization.

NOTE: Bear in mind that connecting your CNAME record to Growbots may take up to 24 hours.

Yes, you can clone it! Cloning the campaign means copying the target criteria so you can clone campaigns with prospects generated in Growbots. Find the campaign in the Campaigns tab and choose Actions -> Clone. It is impossible to clone the campaign based on imported prospects, but you can copy the sequence and use it in a new campaign.

You can add a Gmail alias only when the parent account has2 Factor Authentication turned on.

How to turn 2FA on

1. Open Sign-in & Security section for your account.

2. Go to Signing in to Google section and choose 2-Step Verification:

https://myaccount.google.com/apppasswords

3. Choose GET STARTED button and follow Gmail's instructions.

How to connect Gmail alias

Let’s take a look at this example: you have a Gmail account [email protected] and an alias [email protected]

Your main account [email protected] and it has2FA turned on.

Go to the Settings, choose Integrations tab and click on OTHER

Enter your alias ( [email protected] in our case) in the Email field.

Enter your main (parent) email ( [email protected] in our case) in the IMAP Usernamefield (please remember that SMTP uses same username and password as IMAP should be checked- just like in the screenshot).

Enter your app password generated by Gmail into the IMAP Passwordfield (if 2 Factor Authentication is enabled then you need to generate special app password, we'll describe how to do it in the section below).

Fill out all other fields as normal:

How to generate the special 16-character Gmail password

When you have enabled 2 Factor Authentication, then a special 16 characters app password is required. This password is generated by Gmail, please see details below:

In Gmail, click on your avatar in the top right corner and head over to My Account, it will redirect you here: https://myaccount.google.com/

You should see 3 tabs (could be more if you’re Gmail Suite admin), you need to find Sign in & Securitytab, click on Signing in to Google which should redirect you here: https://myaccount.google.com/security

You’ll see a Password & sign-in methodsection, there should be a list of methods along with App Passwordssection, click on it and you should get redirected here:(please note that you won’t see it when 2FA is turned off)

You’ll be prompted to enter your password.

In the App Passwords section you’ll see: Select the app and device you want to generate the app password for. There will be a Select app drop-down, you need to select Other (Custom name)and type Growbots

Click on Generateand you should see something like this, just take the 16 characters password (it’s displayed as 4 sets of 4 characters separated by spaces, but they’re not part of the password) and enter it when connecting the new channel (alias)

This is our newest guide on Outbound Sales. It will help you craft perfect messages which you can use in our app!

Download here: http://assets.growbots.com/ebook/Outbound-Sales-Handbook.pdf

To avoid landing in SPAM, you need to take care of your domain by making the communication user-friendly and personalized. Don’t send more than 200 emails a day, add the unsubscribe link to your template and read more here..

If the campaign has not been already launched, you can delete step by clicking on trash bin button next to it.

There's no direct way to delete a step in a campaign that has been already launched (you can only delete a step in a draft sequence) - however, you can de-activate the step so that it doesn't get sent to anyone. Just click this Switch off variantbutton.

Then, you can click toAdd message variantbutton in order to add a new version of this step.

Thanks to the integration with Salesforce you can export prospects from Growbots to Salesforce and track both in & out email activity on the created contact/lead profiles. Also, to avoid duplicating your existing contacts Growbots can exclude your organization’s contacts/leads in Salesforce from being generated in Growbots. The synchronization works both ways, it means that some actions in your Salesforce can change the prospects’ status in Growbots.

NOTE: Salesforce connects to Growbots through the REST API (available in Salesforce Enterprise and Unlimited plans and available on request in Professional plan). It means thatAPI access must be enabled on your Salesforce account.

Enable API access in Salesforce

Enable APIaccess in Salesforce by profile

Click onSetup.

Go toManage Usersand clickProfiles.

ClickEditon the specific profile you're updating.

Scroll down toAdministrative Permissionsand check theAPI Enabledbox.

ClickSave.

Enable API access in Salesforce byPermission Set

Click onSetup.

Go toManage Usersand clickPermission Sets.

Select thePermission Setyou're updating.

Go toSystemand clickSystem Permissions.

ClickEdit.

Check theAPI Enabledbox.

ClickSave.

Connecting Salesforce

To connect your Salesforce, go to the Settings tab; and then click on Integrations.

I choose not to import the prospects from Growbots to my Salesforce.

Then click on the Salesforce icon, log into Salesforce and grant the necessary privileges by clicking Allow. After that, you’ll be moved to the settings of the integration (which can be edited later). The settings consist of several steps (the number of steps may vary depending on the options you choose) and it allows you to suit the integration to your needs.

Step 1 - Deduplication

Decide whether Growbots should exclude the leads/contacts from your campaigns. The exclusion takes into account prospects’ email addresses. After choosing this option, the leads/contacts that are already in your Salesforce won’t be generated in the Growbots app.

In this step, you can also upload a Do Not Contact list. It should be a CSV file with a list of domains of the companies you don’t want to generate in Growbots. Check this article to see more details.

Step 2 - Upload prospects

In this step, you can choose whether the prospects accepted in Growbots should be created in your Salesforce as new leads or contacts or if you don’t want to import them to Salesforce at all.

If you choose contacts, click yesbelow if you’d like Growbots to create new accounts and assign the new contacts to the accounts that already exist in your Salesforce.

Choose noif you want to create new contacts that will not be assigned to any account and no new accounts will be created.

NOTE: the settings of the Salesforce integration vary depend on the choice you made in the 2nd step. Click on the option you choose to see the next part of the article which will lead you, step-by-step, through the next parts of Salesforce integration.

I choose the Leads table.

I choose the Contacts table with assigning the new contacts to existing accounts or creating new ones (the ‘yes’ option)

I choose the Contacts table without assigning the new contacts to existing accounts or creating new ones (the ‘no’ option)

To do so, you need to go to Templates/Sequences/Campaigns view. You can check your open rate, click rate, reply rate and warm leads rate for each template, sequence and campaign. You can also check warm reply rate of your best template and best campaign on your Dashboard. Read more

Please find this prospect on your account and check whether in theOpencolumn you see the blue eye symbol. It means that your mail has been opened.

Also, you can check which mail has been opened in the sequence. After clicking on the prospect name you'll see the Prospect details and in the Logs tab there is the sending history with the results of open tracking at every message. Remember that open rate is a vanity metric and tells you only how good your subject and opening line are. Read more

You need to open an adequate campaign or go to Prospects view and check the Status. If you see Cold reply or Warm reply status - it means that there’s new reply from the prospect in your inbox.

Read more