Automation, bulk action, and cost-effective solutions
During my career, I’ve faced situations where either the company had limited resources, or I needed to complete a task that wasn’t feasible to do it manually. So even though I’m not an expert in growth hacking, I’d like to share some of the tools that I found very useful:
Mailshake
Cold emailing can be tricky but very useful in certain situations like working on outreach campaigns. Mailshake allows us to do low/mid-volume blasts from our own Gmail account. Import a contact list, create templates, schedule follow-ups and track open, starting from just 29$ per month. Also worth checking: Bananatag.
Zapier
Zapier allows you to connect different apps to automate workflows. For example, imagine we are using an advertising platform to generate leads (i.e. Facebook Ads). And instead of logging into the tool every time, we want those leads to go straight into our email inbox, Google Sheets, or CRM. We can easily do that with Zapier. Also worth checking: IFTTT.
Lumen5
Video marketing is a must for our social media campaigns and with Lumen5 we can create good-looking image slideshows with text and music. Especially useful if we don’t have a graphic designer in-house and we need speed of execution. Ideal for Facebook and Instagram. Also worth checking: Animoto.
Linked Helper
We all know that Linkedin is a nice platform for lead prospecting. With Linked Helper we can easily automate tasks like searching and export contact lists, extracting companies information, collecting & invite 2nd level contacts, email automation, and more. Everything for just 15$ per month. Also worth checking: Linkedin Prospector.
Find That Lead
Find That Lead allows you to get the email from a list of names-surnames, website domains, or social media profiles. Very interesting to use it together with a contact extraction tool. For just 50$ per month for up to 5,000 contacts in bulk. Also worth checking: Full Contact.
Octoparse
I remember back in the days when we used to code our own PHP scripts to extract data from websites. Nowadays there are nice tools like Octoparse for visual data-scrapping that everyone can use without programming skills. Ideal to extract raw data and have it well structured for analysis. Also worth checking: Mozenda.
Fiverr
There are other freelance marketplaces but Fiverr never failed me, so I have to strongly recommend it. It works perfectly to outsource any non-critical task that you need done well, fast, and pretty cheap: Sound & video editing, data typing, graphic design, translations, and much more. Also worth checking: Upwork.
Bonus tip
Is not just about which tools to use but how to combine them to fulfill your objective. Let’s say that you identify your target audience on Linkedin: You could use Linked Helper to extract the information on a CSV, plug that to Find That Lead to get the actual email, and finally use Mailshake to engage with them. The whole process for a pretty low cost in money and time 😉