How can I generate an email list of a targeted niche?

The exact answer depends on the goals you’re pursuing and the lead generation approach you’re sticking with. In case your company is heavily inbound-reliant you’ll need to implement a bunch of targeting activities that will allow you to capture the leads within the niche you’re going after. For that, you’ll need to:

• Market your company on resources like G2 / Capterra / Clutch / DesignRush, etc. The exact resource will depend on the specifics of your company;
• Invest in ads on the most relevant resources while pushing for the necessary demographics. LinkedIn would work best if you’re mostly interested in B2B leads; Facebook/Twitter if it’s something more consumer-oriented; Google Ads if you would like to increase the general awareness of your company and/or target people who are searching for your competitors;
• Capturing website visitors with tools like Jotforms, Dealfront, Yieldify, etc.

This will allow you to get a steady flow of incoming leads with their work emails that you’ll be able to utilize for various marketing activities including newsletters; promos; drip campaigns; etc.

In case you’re looking for a list that will allow you to run some outbound activities with cold emails, there are a bunch of ways to get such a list, but first of all, you’ll need to decide on the exact niche you’re going after and create a bunch of segments based on the following points:

1. Preferred industry and how many verticals it can be split into;
2. Geography, which is relevant for both - the global market (i.e. countries) and the local market (i.e. cities/states/provinces);
3. Decision makers that are the most relevant to reach out to (can be identified based on the POCs you were speaking with when signing clients previously);
4. Company size - if you have a broad profile here it’s also preferable to split it into small/medium/big and further create personalized campaigns for each of those;
5. Priority level - outline which verticals and geos you’d like to target in the first place, in the second place, …, and which ones it’s better to exclude from the outreach at all.

The details mentioned above are called Ideal Customer Profile, or, simply put, ICP, and as soon as you have it in place you can stick with three following approaches to getting the list with emails:

• Generate on your own. This one is relevant if you have enough internal resources and time for lead research. The framework will include creating ICP-based filters on ZoomInfo/Apollo (more accessible ZoomInfo alternative) -> scraping emails along with the rest of the data -> validating the received list of emails using tools like NeverBounce/MailCheck/ZeroBounce -> contacting leads with verified emails. This approach will allow you to get ~70% data relevancy and ~80% email accuracy if not further validated manually (which is time-consuming).
• Purchase a bulk list from the data provider. The main drawback here is that such lists are commonly outdated and contain a lot of invalid data, which results in ~50% data relevancy and ~40% email accuracy.
• Utilize lead generation outsourcing agency. All you need to do in this case is share your ICP and further control the quality. For example, SalesNash assigns a full-time dedicated researcher to find leads along with their contact info, validate those, and reach 99% data accuracy, while making weekly lead review deliveries to ensure our clients are satisfied with the list relevancy (also, anything that was rejected by the client is replaced with the next delivery).

In case you would like to evaluate the third option - feel free to use the link in the comments section to get a one-day worth of research at no charge. Our team will prepare a list of 30-70 leads that will exactly fit your ICP, so you can run a brief outreach campaign. And when it comes to campaigns - no matter what approach you choose for getting emails, always remember to reach your leads with relevant, problem-solution messaging and appealing value propositions.