Key Takeaways
- Qualitative SEO outreach is essential for a company’s success.
- There are a range of different tools available to help with email outreach such as Snov.io, Ahrefs, Hunter.io, Mailshake, Bouncer, ClearOut, SEMRush, FollowUpThen, and Pitchbox.
- Each tool offers different features and advantages, such as automated bulk email campaigns, lead generation, keyword research, email verification, backlink checking, and email list sampling.
- Integrations with other tools and CRMs can help streamline the workflow and maximize reach.
- These tools can help improve deliverability rates, protect sender reputation, and reduce the bounce rate.
Email Outreach Software at Husky Hamster
Qualitative SEO outreach plays a critical role in the success of a company’s overall SEO strategy. For this reason, we have a team of professional and creative outreach specialists at Husky Hamster. On a daily basis, they perform audits, keyword research, and even participate in content development by identifying the most engaging topics for our content writers to cover — all with the sole purpose of acquiring relevant, valuable links.
Fortunately, our outreachers are not alone on this quest — everyone has an array of tools at their disposal to facilitate and simplify their day-to-day tasks. Join us as we explore these SEO outreach tools in greater detail and, more importantly, get to know our outreachers’ honest opinions on how they perform in action.
Spoiler alert: we’ll be talking about the drawbacks, too!
#1 Snov.io
Source: snovio.io
Snov.io is the most advanced and flexible CRM platform for email marketing and cold outreach. It enables searching for email addresses by companies, domains, or business social profiles via the app, company website, or search results using their Chrome extension.
The platform also features several tools for efficient contact management, covering aspects like lead generation, email finding and verification, automated email sending, and email tracking. It allows us to enhance our link building efforts and close more deals by directly reaching out to relevant content publishers.
We can set up personalized email drip campaigns for each of our customers to engage and convert them on our own timetable. This feature helps streamline our workload and reduce the overall time spent on outreach.
In addition, Snov.io offers integrations with over 3,000 tools — from other CRMs to teamwork tools to social media apps — making our workflow even more manageable.
Working in outreach for so many years can be summed up into one short sentence: Always test new tools! I tried quite a few cold email platforms, and I can say that Snov.io is my team’s and my personal favorite for many reasons.
First and foremost, it is a great tool that provides solid leads and saves a lot of time by collecting high-quality contacts from the websites that we visit. Secondly, it’s user-friendly (you don’t need to spend hours online checking tutorials on how to do everything). Finally, it allows you to organize your projects and design beautiful email drip campaigns.
#2 Ahrefs
Source: ahrefs.com
Ahrefs barely needs an introduction. It’s a powerful all-in-one SEO toolkit that provides us with everything we need to help our clients rank higher in search engines and get more traffic.
The platform’s main features for link building and outreach include:
- Site Audit. It helps us find and fix on-site issues that may be holding a website back from ranking higher in search engines.
- Content Explorer. Helps discover the most popular content in a particular niche and pitch our own ideas to the right people.
- Keywords Explorer. Allows us to research relevant keywords and use them in our outreach emails to personalize our pitch.
- Backlink Checker. It allows for checking our prospects’ backlink profiles to see if they’re linking to similar sites, as well as helps keep track of our progress and monitor our backlink profile.
On top of that, the platform offers a range of helpful resources, such as guides, tutorials, webinars, and an extensive knowledge base, helping our specialists constantly improve their qualifications.
This is an essential SEO tool that everyone from the outreach team uses on a daily basis (our colleague, Aun, even says he can no longer imagine his life without it). Ahrefs gives us so many ways of finding new prospecting ideas and keeping an eye on our client’s competitors, provides us with information regarding the health of possible link placements, and even delivers valuable ideas for titles.
For anyone that loves to do an in-depth analysis and research, Ahrefs is the go-to tool. Its huge database and top features like keyword analysis, competitor analysis, and Content Explorer make it the best tool for SEO, among many others.
The most important tool in the link-building process. Crucial in generating new prospect lists, analyzing webs, performing a competitor analysis, coming up with new topic ideas, etc.
#3 Hunter.io
Source: hunter.io
Hunter.io is a simple and user-friendly email finder tool which enables us to find email addresses by domain name or company name. It also comes with a number of features for efficient email outreach, such as composing simple cold email campaigns and scheduling follow-ups.
Some of its most valuable features include:
- Domain Search. Allows you to search for email addresses of a particular company or find email addresses in bulk, as well as directly through Hunter.io’s API. The tool lists publicly available email addresses with confidence scores and department filters.
- Email Finder. Helps you find a verified email address of any professional — also available for searching for professionals in bulk.
- Email Verifier. Checks for email address validity.
The platform allows us to find the email addresses of our target contacts in seconds, which is extremely valuable for large-scale link building and outreach campaigns.
The best email finder out there. It is well suited for outreachers who are building a list of contacts to pitch every day. I’ve been using this for years, and Hunter.io never disappoints. Fast, accurate, and reliable.
#4 Mailshake
Source: mailshake.com
Mailshake is an email outreach automation tool that enables contacting thousands of prospects all at once with email outreach campaigns and automated follow-ups. It offers several benefits essential for effective email outreach, such as:
- Customizing a sending schedule around prospects to improve response rates.
- Inserting text and links personalized to each recipient with a powerful mail merge.
- Using proven email templates to save time on building email sequences.
- Monitoring opens, clicks, and replies for every email sent.
- A/B testing for emails, follow-ups, or whole campaigns.
- Integrations with CRMs, Gmail, and Google Calendar.
Mailshake helps gain visibility of what’s working (and what’s not) in our outreach campaigns, as well as automate repetitive tasks to streamline our email outreach efforts and improve our deliverability rates.
A cold drip email marketing tool with an excellent deliverability rate that also provides helpful insights into how many people not only opened my email but also clicked the links, unsubscribed, etc. Mail merge, list cleaning, and auto-follow-ups scheduled at specific times are all fantastic features.
#5 Bouncer
Bouncer is among the most comprehensive email verification systems we use. It concentrates on protecting the sender’s reputation, decreasing the bounce rate, and ensuring that the sender won’t get blacklisted. Besides, it catches typos in email addresses and offers free email list sampling. Thanks to the latter, you can analyze the quality of email lists and instantly get an estimated bounce rate.
Here are some handy features that Bouncer provides:
- Email Verification API. It offers real-time email verification results in batches of up to 500 000 emails.
- Toxicity Check. This feature helps you identify if your email list contains any toxic email addresses, such as breached or widely circulated ones. Toxicity is represented by a scale from 1-5, making cleaning an email list a breeze.
- Deliverability Kit. This set of tools enables you to monitor and test your email deliverability. For instance, you can check how many of your emails actually find their way to your recipient’s inbox and how many end up in a spam folder.
Bouncer comes in handy in decreasing our bounce rates and maximizing our reach to publishers and partners instead.
Although I am not doing email marketing as much as the other guys in this post, I still occasionally send out cold outreach emails.
When I do, I always use Bouncer to make sure the deliverability rates are top-tier.
Bouncer provides email validation and verification service that integrates with anything that can use its API. Therefore, even if I source the email incorrectly, Bouncer verifies it before sending an email, so I rarely ever get bounce messages.
On top of everything, Bouncer is software created in Poland, so it makes me proud, being a Pole myself :)
#6 ClearOut
Source: clearout.io
ClearOut is a powerful bulk email verification and validation service that helps clean up email lists and improve deliverability. It uses a real-time API to verify email addresses and can process large volumes of data quickly and easily.
The tool offers several features that are essential for efficient email outreach, such as:
- Bulk email verification and an email verification add-on for Google sheets.
- Greylisting and blocklist verification.
- Spam trap detection.
- Auto suggestions to eliminate spelling errors and typos in email addresses.
- High accuracy rates and fast processing times.
ClearOut is integral to our outreach process as it helps us safeguard our sender reputation. Using it ensures that our email lists are clean and up-to-date and that our messages are delivered to the right people.
Quick and precise email verification — I just need to upload my potential prospects list, and it will start segmenting the email addresses into verified, catchall, disposable, unverified, etc.
ClearOut, by far, gives you the most valuable and detailed email verification data. Sure, they don’t have the prettiest interface, but you’re here for the data.
#7 SEMRush
Source: semrush.com
SEMRush is a comprehensive marketing toolkit that helps businesses grow online. It offers a suite of tools for SEO, content, advertising, market research, as well as SMM and SERM.
The platform’s SEO capabilities, in general, and link building, in particular, are based on the following backlink analysis tools and features:
- Backlink Analytics. Helps find link outreach opportunities based on your competitors’ backlink profiles. Bulk backlink analysis is also available.
- Backlink Audit Tool. Allows for monitoring backlink profiles to quickly clean them up, avoid Google penalties, and ensure their quality.
- Domain vs. Domain. It enables us to compare a website’s link profile with that of its competitors and find opportunities to improve our link building efforts.
- Backlink Gap. Provides actionable insights on link prospecting and outreach, tracking up to five competing backlink profiles.
- Link Building Tool. Helps acquire high-quality backlinks with consistent outreach campaigns by automating them entirely.
This toolkit allows us to effectively collect data, monitor backlink profiles, and find new, reliable link building opportunities. As a result, it is an essential part of our outreach workflow.
When it comes to technical SEO, you simply cannot find an alternative to SEMRush. It is great for backlink data concerning your competitors and has a perfect audit system any technical SEO consultant would love to use. With SEMRush, keyword and competitor research for my clients is always up to the mark, including keyword density and volume.
#8 FollowUpThen
Source: followupthen.com
FollowUpThen is an email tool that helps schedule follow-ups and reminders for email outreach. It offers a variety of features and integrations that make it an essential part of our outreach workflow, such as:
- scheduling one-time or recurring reminders,
- setting reminders for specific days and times.
- the ability to cc or bcc reminders to other people,
- integrations with Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Sheets.
FollowUpThen helps us ensure that we follow up with our prospects promptly and always stay on top of any critical tasks related to our outreach efforts. It’s like providing each of our team members with a personal assistant — but for free.
A free, simple, and straightforward in-email tool that requires no extra applications or software installation. It is ideal for one-time or recurring email updates and assists me with clearing my inbox of distractions.
#9 Pitchbox
Source: pitchbox.com
Pitchbox is an end-to-end link buildingproductivity solution explicitly created for SEO specialists. It provides next-level prospecting suitable for the most popular and commonly used link building strategies and tactics, such as blogger outreach, guest posting, and even product descriptions.
Some of the most valuable tools and features for personalized outreach and follow-ups include:
- smart templates,
- email sequencing,
- scheduling & time zones,
- Chasebox feature.
Pitchbox also allows for the integration of our most commonly used tools, including but not limited to Ahrefs and SEMRush, simplifying our workflow.
For instance, by combining our favorite SEO metrics during the data collection process, we can easily filter out low-quality domains and focus on high-value opportunities. Furthermore, all main screens in the platform — campaign creation, outreach workflow, Inbox, CRM, and Pipeline — feature these SEO metrics, allowing us to keep the most relevant data at our fingertips.
From prospecting based on keywords or a page category to scraping the contact details and sending the cold email campaign – yes, Pitchbox does that all for you!
Wow… Great memories when I think about Pitchbox! I learned using this tool while learning what is outreaching in general. It was useful, especially if I had to send bulk emails, track the performance of the campaigns created, or get new leads by adding main keywords for a specific campaign.
Overall the tool is valuable, but I believe that Pitchbox is a few steps behind compared to other outreaching tools. Often, the contacts for the domains provided are inaccurate, and the UI itself isn’t very user-friendly.
The Bottom Line
SEO outreach rarely is a problem-free affair. Usually, it’s full of unexpected issues that, in the worst-case scenario, might even bring the campaign to a screeching halt. Thankfully, the tools mentioned above can help you remove the roadblocks on your way to success.
If you want to see what effect these tools may have on your link building efforts, take a look at our case studies. Or, if you would instead like to leave your link building in the hands of professionals, contact us to learn what we can do for you!
