An online community is a group of like-minded people that can boost brand visibility, foster relationships, and drive constant engagement. Having a thriving community helps you position your brand as an industry leader and translates into valuable feedback.
While there are numerous strategies to gather relevant people under one virtual roof, one method remains effective yet underrated: cold outreach.
Beyond its traditional use in sales and marketing, cold outreach can be a strategic tool to find and engage with potential community members!
In this article, we'll show you how Tal , the sales lead at lemlist, used cold outreach to grow his Outbound Hub community from 0 to 500+ members in just a few days. Follow his actionable steps and replicate his strategies to grow your own online community and accelerate your business growth like never before!
4-step outreach framework to growing your online community
1. Find your leads in Sales Navigator
One of the ways to find a relevant target audience is to scrape the people whose LinkedIn profile you visited.
Because Tal was researching his Ideal Customer Profile on LinkedIn, the users whose profiles he visited might be considered valuable community members.
Targeting these people will make your outreach more “warmed up”. LinkedIn users usually get notifications about who viewed their profile. So if someone sees that you've viewed their profile and then receives argentina phone number list a message from you shortly afterward, it makes you more familiar and fosters engagement.
Here's how you can scrap leads whose LinkedIn profile you visited in Sales Navigator:
Sign into your Sales Navigator LinkedIn account or start a 14-day free trial
Once you're logged in, navigate to the Lead section
Add filter in the section “People you interacted with” → “Viewed profile”
PS You can go another way around and target people who visited your profile. In this case, you're targeting individuals who have shown some level of interest already, which can lead to a higher conversion rate.
2. Scrape your leads with lemlist Chrome extension
Once you have a list of leads whose profile you visited in Sales Navigator, you can use the lemlist Chrome extension to export your new leads to lemlist's multichannel campaigns.
This is how Tal saved hours of manual work and distributed his resources on more revenue-driven tasks.
Here's how to scrape your leads from Sales Navigator with the lemlist Chrome extension:
In case you don't have a lemlist Chrome extension yet,
Get the extension from the Google Chrome Store
Ensure you're logged into your lemlist & LinkedIn account. If you still don't have your lemlist account, you can start a 14-day free trial here
Access the extension on the right hand side of your app
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When visiting an individual lead's profile, click on the extension to:
get leads email (or available phone number – coming soon!)
push that lead to your outreach campaign (or CRM's contacts list – coming soon!)
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Find or edit your leads information before importing them to a campaign from one spot.
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Add your lead to an existing campaign or create an entirely new campaign. No more back and forth between the lemlist app and the extension!
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3. Find your leads' verified data with lemlist's Email Finder and Verifier
To ensure you find the right outreach contacts without the technical skills or tons of manual work, you can use lemlist's Email Finder and Verifier .
Thanks to the waterfall enrichment method, Email Finder and Verifier combines the best third-party data sources to give you 80%+ valid emails. This is the equivalent of asking multiple different providers for up-to-date leads' information without navigating and subscribing to multiple apps.
Here's how Tal enriched his leads with lemlist's Email Finder and Verifier and got 93% of deliverable emails:
Once you have your new leads imported into your lemlist campaign, select them by bulk (or one by one) and choose the “Verify email” option :
For each lead, the app will:
Clean the first name and last name
Extract and save relevant available information from the lead's LinkedIn profile
Retain the best email we found from multiple providers
If available, save additional information such as phone number, civilization, job title, and other relevant details
PS If you're exporting up to 300 leads, you can enrich them directly through the lemlist Chrome extension!
4. Create engaging outreach campaigns for different segments
To reach out to his freshly imported and enriched leads, Tal decided to create 3 different campaigns for 3 different segments.
By targeting different segments with distinct campaigns, you can address each group's unique needs and challenges, resulting in more relevant and impactful messaging.
This tailored approach boosts relationship building, builds solid ground for future campaigns, and prevents message fatigue.
Here's a full breakdown of Tal's campaigns and segments that aim to grow a community:
Campaign #1 targeting super engagers
With this campaign, Tal targeted people who had already engaged with another outbound community. Targeting these leads can lead to higher CTR as these people have proven their interest already by engaging with family activities.
Step 1: Automatic email
