12 Best Outreach Tools For Link Building & Sales (Pros + Cons) (original) (raw)

Outreach can either grow your business fast or waste a ton of your time.

The difference comes down to the tools you use and how you use them.

In this post, I’m breaking down the best outreach tools on the market right now. This includes a bunch of the tools I actually use to find the right contacts, reach out at scale, and manage conversations without losing my mind.

These tools are incredibly useful for link building, influencer outreach, affiliate recruitment, and PR.

If you want better replies, stronger relationships, and more results from your outreach efforts, you’re in the right place.

#1 – BuzzStream

BuzzStream is my favorite outreach tool because it has everything you need in one place. It’s a one-stop solution that can manage the entire outreach process end-to-end, including building outreach lists, emailing prospects, managing relationships, and reporting.

You can use BuzzStream for all sorts of outreach campaigns, but I’ve found it’s particularly good for link building. Here’s why:

Often, when you’re trying to build links, you start by searching various platforms (e.g. Google) to find relevant, authoritative websites in your niche. Then, you analyze them to see if they’re worth targeting. After that, you grab their contact details. And finally, you send them an outreach message.

That whole process can take days or weeks if you do it manually. But BuzzStream automates the whole thing so it takes just minutes.

All you have to do is create a new research list and enter some relevant keywords. BuzzStream will then generate a list of websites pulled from the search engine results pages, alongside contact information and metrics for each site.

You can then quickly cycle through each site/prospect to either reject or approve them to convert them into outreach opportunities.

From there, you can compose, schedule, and send out personalized outreach emails using BuzzStream’s email templates and delivery tool. Plus track replies and manage all your leads in the built-in CRM.

Key features

• Prospect discovery. Find prospects, collect their contact info and metrics, and add them to your lead database.
• Automatic outreach list building. Let BuzzStream build an outreach list for you by automatically finding prospects from across the web, based on your keywords.
• Email outreach. Compose, schedule, and send personalized emails at scale, with automated follow-ups.
• Outreach templates. Make sure you nail your outreach messages by starting from a pre-made, customizable template.
• Relationship management. Manage relationships with the prospects you reach out to in the built-in CRM. Share notes and progress with your team, and track all activity, conversations, and responses in one app.
• Analytics & reports. See what’s working and what’s not by tracking all the important metrics and building comprehensive reports.

Pros and cons

• All the features you need for end-to-end outreach campaigns
• Ideal for both link-building and PR outreach.
• Find, analyze, contact, and manage prospects in one app
• Great value for money
• Takes some time to get used to the UI/UX
• Plans get expensive if you need lots of contacts/users/prospect searches

Pricing

Plans start from $24/month, save one month when you pay yearly. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

#2 – Snov.io

Snov.io is one of the best tools for sending outreach emails and sourcing contact information. I particularly like its drip campaigns feature, which lets you automate outreach by building sophisticated email sequences and workflows.

You can use Snov.io to find prospects on LinkedIn. Plus, find email addresses for all your prospects by searching for any domain, company, name, etc.

Once you have your list of contacts, you can use the drip campaign feature to reach out to them. With drip campaigns, you set up automated sequences of pre-written follow-up emails, and tell Snov.io when to send them. For example, after a set amount of time or based on specific recipient actions.

A lot of other outreach tools offer a basic version of this in that they let you send an initial email and schedule a follow-up. But Snov.io is one of the only tools that gives you complete control and lets you build out sophisticated workflows.

Another thing I like about Snov.io is that it comes with an A/B testing tool. So, you can compare multiple versions of your outreach emails to see which gets the best open rate, reply rate, etc. and use that data to continually optimize your campaigns.

Key features

• Contact information discovery. Find contact details for any prospect you plan to reach out to with the Email Finder, LI Prospect Finder, and Chrome Extension.
• Email Verifier. Check all the email addresses in your prospect list before you send outreach messages to improve deliverability and reduce bounce rate.
• Drip Campaigns. Automate the sales process by building personalized email outreach sequences and setting up workflows to ensure Snov.io sends them at the perfect time.
• Sales CRM. Stay on top of your outreach campaigns, manage leads, create pipelines, delegate tasks, and communicate with your sales team in the built-in customer relationship management tool.

Pros and cons

• Best for finding contact information & sending outreach emails
• One of the best outreach campaign workflow builders
• Provides tools for optimizing your campaigns (like A/B testing)
• Optimize your sales outreach efforts
• Geared more toward sales teams than link builders
• Not as feature-rich as BuzzStream

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start from $39/month, save 25% with yearly billing.

#3 – Hunter

Hunter offers a similar feature set to Snov. It’s great for finding contact information for all your prospects, and it also comes with a useful Campaigns feature for automating email outreach.

What I like most about Hunter is how easy its email finder is to use. Just load it up and search for any email domain, company, or prospect to get a list of email addresses that will put you in touch with the right people. There’s even a Chrome extension so you can find email addresses for any website as you browse the web.

Its email verifier works great too. Use it to make sure all the email addresses in your outreach list are real and free of typos before you start sending emails—this will help maintain good deliverability so more of your emails reach the recipient’s inbox.

Its Campaigns feature is a good way to automate your outreach campaigns, so you can send personalized messages out at scale. It’s much quicker and more effective than sending them manually one by one through your email service. Plus, you also get access to Hunter’s battle-tested outreach templates.

Key features

• Contact discovery. Get contact emails, email addresses, and insights into any domain, company, or individual prospect.
• Email verifier. Verify every email address to make sure it’s authentic and eliminate typos before you send outreach messages.
• Campaigns. Automate cold email outreach by connecting Hunter to your email account. Compose, personalize, and send out targeted outreach messages at scale.
• Templates. Improve your response rate by starting from one of many battle-tested templates that are proven to get results.
• Analytics. Track emails and quickly identify warm leads. Plus, compile data into easy-to-understand reports.
• Signals. Use intent data to curate a stream of relevant prospects who need your products/services, and reach out to them at the perfect time.

Pros and cons

• Great for finding contact information for your outreach prospects
• Excellent selection of outreach templates
• The Signals feature is a useful sales outreach tool
• Huge database to search through
• Integrates with Chrome and other apps
• Not a complete outreach solution like BuzzStream
• Limited relationship management features

Pricing

Free plan available. Plans start from $49/month, save 30% when you pay yearly.

#4 – ZeroBounce

ZeroBounce is an industry leading email verification tool. I’d recommend running your list of email addresses through it before starting your outreach campaigns. And here’s why…

By verifying email addresses with ZeroBounce, you’ll filter out things like spam traps, duplicate emails, full mailboxes, typos and errors, etc. That’ll ensure that as many of the emails you send out as possible will reach the inbox.

That’s important because if you send out a ton of emails that bounce, it can hurt your sender reputation and cause email providers to route emails you send in the future to the spam box.

ZeroBounce also comes with a lot of other features to help you optimize for deliverability. This includes an email address finder, email warm up feature, and inbox placement tests.

My favorite? That’d be the email scoring system they offer to help figure out whether catch-all emails are active/valid. That’s pretty damn useful for outreach.

Key features

• Email verification. Check your list of outreach email addresses to filter out spam trams, fake/duplicate emails, typos, and more.
• API verification. Verify emails at the source as soon as you get them through the API.
• Inbox placement. Predict whether your outreach emails will pass the spam filters of all the major ISPs and reach your recipients’ inboxes before you launch your campaigns.
• Monitoring. Utilize DMARC and blocklist monitoring to protect domain reputation and maintain optimal deliverability.

Pros and cons

• Verifies email addresses before you start your outreach campaigns
• Ensures more of your outreach emails hit the inbox
• Easy to use
• Straightforward, scalable pricing
• Limited free plan available
• Doesn’t help with finding opportunities
• Only useful for email verification & deliverability optimization

Pricing

Monthly plans and pay-as-you-go options available. Freemium plan available. Paid plans start from 99/monthfor25,000monthlycredits.Pay−as−you−goisavailablefrom99/month for 25,000 monthly credits. Pay-as-you-go is available from 99/monthfor25,000monthlycredits.Pay−as−you−goisavailablefrom20 for 2,000 credits. The more credits you buy, the cheaper they are.

#5 – Brand24

Brand24 can help you to discover outreach opportunities that your competitors aren’t looking for. Instant competitive edge.

It’s different from the other outreach tools in this list in that it doesn’t start with search engine-based research.

Instead, it monitors social media and the wider web for mentions of your brand, competitors, or any target keywords you choose, and provides data to help you analyze those mentions.

The idea is to use this as a jumping-off point to find link and co-marketing opportunities.

For example, it can help you to find websites that have already mentioned your brand name or domain name in their blog posts. Then, you can reach out to those websites and ask them to add a link to those mentions that points back to your website.

Or you might use it to find popular influencers who talk about topics that are relevant to your industry. Then, reach out to them to explore influencer marketing opportunities.

Key features

• Mention monitoring. Find out who’s talking about your brand online to discover potential link and co-marketing opportunities.
• Sentiment analysis. Analyze the sentiment of your brand mentions automatically to find out who’s talking positively and negatively about your brand, then use this to inform your outreach strategy.
• Analytics. View metrics that measure reach, awareness, sentiment, and more, which can help you evaluate the impact of your outreach campaigns over time.

Pros and cons

• Find opportunities your competitors have missed
• Offers a different way to approach outreach
• Score ‘easy-win’ backlinks
• No SEO-based research
• Doesn’t help with contacting prospects or managing relationships

Pricing

Plans start from $99/month, save 2 months when you pay yearly. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

Read our Brand24 review.

#6 – LinkHunter

LinkHunter is a simple but powerful tool for sourcing link opportunities and sending outreach emails. It’s more basic than other tools but it’s very easy to use by comparison.

It works like this. First, you select the goal of your outreach campaign. There are three options: guest post on other sites, have bloggers review your products, or pay bloggers to write about you.

Then, you enter some topics/keywords that describe the kind of website niches you want to score links from.

Link Hunter will curate a running list of prospects (i.e. websites) for you. Next to each one, it’ll show you that site’s domain authority—the most important metric when qualifying backlink opportunities.

If you want to reach out to a website, click it to instantly open up an email pre-populated with the contact email address for that site.

From here, you can insert an email template and customize it, or just type your outreach message from scratch, and hit send. If the site has a contact form, you can also fill it out and submit it from inside Link Hunter, which saves a ton of time.

I also like the fact that Link Hunter keeps track of all the sites you’ve contacted and lets you know what stage each site is at in the outreach process. For example, it’ll tell when you’ve contacted them when you’ve followed up, when they’ve responded, and when you’ve acquired a link.

Key features

• Link prospect discovery. Quickly find hundreds of relevant websites in your niche for guest blogging/link-building opportunities.
• SEO metrics. See the DA (Domain Authority) and other SEO metrics of each website to prioritize backlink opportunities that will have the biggest impact.
• Email outreach & contact form submission. Instantly discover contact email addresses for each website, and reach out through customizable email templates and contact forms.
• Personalization. Personalize your outreach messages using dynamic fields to send personalized emails at scale.
• Tracking. Keep track of all the websites you’ve reached out to, with status updates to tell you when you’ve followed up, when they’ve responded, and when you’ve acquired a link.

Pros and cons

• Fantastic for link-building campaigns
• Simple and straightforward outreach workflow
• Great user interface
• Super easy to use
• Only suitable for link building (not as good for sales outreach)
• Not as feature-rich as other outreach tools

Pricing

Plans start from $49/month. Get started with a 7-day free trial.

#7 – Semrush

Semrush is one of the most expensive outreach tools on this list, but the cost could be worth it depending on the features you need. It offers a full suite of SEO tools to assist with finding websites to reach out to.

One way I like to use Semrush is to reverse-engineer my competitor’s outreach strategies.

For example, if I load up the backlink analytics tool and search for a competitor’s domain, I can see all the sites that have linked to them, along with metrics like their authority score, anchor text, link power, etc.

I might then target some of these same sites in my own link-building campaigns.

There’s also a link building tool that you can use to find, manage, and reach out to all your prospects.

It links up to your gmail account to make it easy to contact domain owners that you want to get a backlink from. Plus, it comes with customizable outreach email templates designed to get replies.

And that’s not even scratched the surface of what Semrush can do. There are 40+ other SEO & marketing tools that can help not just with outreach, but all other areas of your digital marketing strategy.

Key features

• Domain overview. View traffic, keyword, and SEO data for any website to help you find good guest posting and link-building opportunities.
• Competitor analysis. Find new outreach opportunities based on your competitor’s backlink profiles.
• Web monitoring. Track online mentions of your brand, competitors, or keywords to discover influencers that you might want to reach out to.
• Link building tool. Plan, execute, and automate outreach campaigns to build backlinks. Send emails and monitor responses at scale.
• Backlink analytics. Discover and track the links that point to your domain (or your competitors) to see if your outreach campaigns are working.

Pros and cons

• More features than any other outreach tool
• Excellent link building tools
• Find outreach opportunities by analyzing your competitors
• Provides detailed insights and metrics for any website
• Very expensive
• Might be overkill if you just want outreach tools (and don’t need other SEO/marketing tools)

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start from $139.95/month, and save up to 17% with yearly billing. Get started with a 7-day free trial.

Read our Semrush review.

#8 – FollowUpThen

Scheduling follow-ups is important for any outreach campaign. If the email tool you’re using doesn’t have this feature, you can schedule them easily with FollowUpThen.

What’s cool about FollowUpThen is that it isn’t a tool that you have to log into, and there’s nothing to install. It’s just an email reminder service that you can use without ever having to leave your email client.

It works like this. Let’s say you’ve just sent an outreach email and you want to follow up on it in 3 days. In that case, all you have to do is add 3days@followupthen.com in the CC field, and it’ll send your follow-up message to everyone in the ‘to’ field in exactly 3 days’ time.

3 days not specific enough? No worries—you can add pretty much any time format or interval before the @ sign and it’ll work the same way.

For example, Friday9am@followupthen.com will if you want to follow up on Friday at 9 AM. Or ‘1minute@FollowUpThen.com’ if you want to follow up in 60 seconds. You get the idea.

Seriously though. 60 seconds is just an example. Never send someone a followup that quick. That’d be crazy. And while we’re on the subject – don’t send someone a followup the same day either. Be considerate when timing your follow ups.

I also like the fact that you don’t even have to remember the correct address formats because most email clients will autosuggest them as you type. It literally couldn’t be simpler.

Key features

• Schedule outreach follow-ups. Follow up on outreach emails automatically at any time/day by simply adding a specialized @followupthen email address in the CC field.
• Email reminders. Snooze or hide emails that you receive/send until you need them to keep your inbox clean.
• Autocomplete. Save time with autocompleted @followupthen email addresses for common time/day formats.

Pros and cons

• Easy way to follow up on outreach emails
• Works inside your email inbox
• Good free plan and cheap paid plans
• Unlimited follow-ups on all paid plans
• Most email marketing/outreach tools already offer automated followups natively
• Can’t help you to find outreach opportunities or contacts

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start from $4 per user, per month.

#9 – Lemlist

Lemlist is a powerful B2B, multi-channel cold outreach tool. It comes with everything you need to find contacts, reach out to them, and make sure your messages reach the target.

What I like most about Lemlist is that, unlike most other outreach tools, it doesn’t just focus on email.

It also helps you reach out on other channels, including on LinkedIn and over the phone. This is particularly useful when you need to put more effort into building rapport with clients over time across multiple touchpoints to land those high-value sales.

Another thing I like about Lemlist is that it allows for more personalized outreach than a lot of other tools.

You’re not limited to surface-level personalization like adding the recipient’s name to the subject line. You can go way beyond that and do things like add their LinkedIn profile picture to your email.

Aside from helping you to write, personalize, and send outreach messages, Lemlist also comes with tools to help you find and verify email addresses, optimization tools to help ensure your outreach messages land in the inbox and get read, and more.

Key features

• Email finder & verification. Find contacts for your outreach campaigns and verify all your email addresses before you reach out.
• Multi-channel outreach. Reach out to contacts by email, LinkedIn, and over the phone. Personalize your messages with custom variables.
• Automation. Build multi-day outreach workflows with both automated and manual steps. For example, automatically send out connection requests on LinkedIn and contact those who accept with pre-set conditions.
• Templates. Lemlist offers outreach templates for LinkedIn DMs and emails, as well as scripts for cold calls.
• AI writing. Lemlist’s AI is trained on 400+ million emails – use it to write better outreach messages that are more likely to get a response.
• Lemwarm. Warm up your email address, boost domain credibility, and improve overall deliverability. Plus, send outreach emails in a staggered arrangement to mimic human sending and avoid spam filters.

Pros and cons

• Run multi-channel outreach campaigns
• One of the best B2B sales outreach tools
• Includes a huge database of over 450m+ contacts
• Fantastic deliverability thanks to warm-up, delivery optimization, and email verifierd
• Great automation features
• Includes some features you might not need (like cold calling)
• Designed more for sales than link-building

Pricing

Plans start from $69/month. Discounts available with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

#10 – Mailshake

Mailshake is another useful outreach tool for B2B sales leaders and reps. Like Lemlist, it’s designed for multichannel outreach and comes with a dialer as well as tools for outreach on email and LinkedIn.

You can use Mailshake’s data finder to discover prospects and add them to your outreach list. Then, connect with them via LinkedIn messages and profile views, emails, automated follow-ups, cold calls, and more.

There’s a deliverability tool that helps ensure your messages land in the inbox, not the spam folder. And an AI writer to help you write copy that gets replies.

My favorite feature, though, is the Lead Catcher. It pulls all the leads that reply to your outreach messages into one sales engagement platform and lets you build automation workflows to manage them. You can work through leads sequentially, assigning them to different team members and marking them as ‘won’, ‘lost’, or ‘ignored’.

Key features

• AI Email Writer. Generate email copy in a few clicks to write the perfect outreach email.
• Automated email sequences. Set up automated workflows to deliver targeted outreach email campaigns at scale.
• Email deliverability. Tools to help you optimize deliverability and ensure your outreach emails land in the inbox.
• LinkedIn outreach. Automate outreach on LinkedIn through connection requests, messages, and profile views.
• Follow-ups. Increase the average response rate of your outreach campaigns through automated follow-ups.

Pros and cons

• Great for multi-channel outreach campaigns
• Very feature-rich
• Lots of time-saving automations
• One of the best sales outreach tools
• No free plan or free trial
• Support could be better

Pricing

Plans start from $29/month, and save up to 20% when yearly billing.

#11 – Crystal

Crystal is a great tool for personalizing your outreach emails. It provides DISC personality profiles for anyone and everyone, which comes in super useful for outreach.

If you’re sending highly personalized outreach emails on an individual basis, you’ll get better results if you understand the personality of the recipient. That’s what Crystal is for—it tells you whether a given contact is risk-averse or risk-tolerant, trusting or skeptical, etc.

Plus, it’ll also offer action steps to help you write better emails. For example, it might tell you to use clear, concise language. Or to avoid getting bogged down in technical details. You get the idea.

It bases all these insights on publicly available traits, using predictive analysis to determine a contact’s personality based on factors like their job title, skills, interests, seniority, etc.

Key features

• Personality insights. Predictively analyze publicly available traits to determine the personality of each contact you reach out to.
• Outreach tips. Get concrete advice on the best ways to engage with each contact based on their personality.
• Writing assistant. Receive tips in real-time as you write to help you personalize each outreach message you send for the recipient’s personality.
• Chrome Extension. Get personality data & outreach guidance for any contact as you browse the web.

Pros and cons

• Deliver more personalized outreach emails
• Increase your open and reply rate
• Easy to use
• Seamlessly integrates with your web browser and email client
• You can run out of profile credits quickly
• Narrow use case

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start from $59/month billed annually.

#12 – HubSpot

HubSpot is best known as an all-in-one marketing platform but it does have a few tools within its arsenal that are useful for blogger outreach.

HubSpot’s CRM is a versatile tool built to streamline sales processes and enhance customer relationships.

It gives you a user-friendly interface for managing contacts, tracking interactions, and monitoring sales pipelines. Integrated with marketing automation and customer service tools, it provides a holistic view of customer interactions across channels.

With customizable dashboards and reporting features you can analyze and review performance metrics and make data-driven decisions most likely to push your business forward.

An integral part of any CRM is its email tracking capabilities and in this area HubSpot’s free Email Tracking Software doesn’t disappoint.

This free email tracking software allows you to stop guessing and start taking calcu

Key features

• Email notifications. Get notified as soon as your prospect opens your email.
• Interaction overviews. Get a full overview of your prospect’s interactions with your emails so you can plan your next step accordingly.
• Email tracking. Send tracked emails from Gmail, Outlook or any other popular email client given that HubSpot easily integrates with all of them.
• Push notifications. Set up push notifications to launch the instant your prospect does the desired action (email open, document download…).
• And much more.

Pros and cons

• Intuitive dashboard
• Great automation features
• Easily run multi-channel, personalized outreach campaigns
• Reliable email tracking
• Includes a lot of features you won’t need
• Basic features are free but advanced features are very expensive
• There are so many tools that it’s difficult to understand what you get and what you don’t

Pricing

HubSpot’s CRM as a whole is not a cheap service. The basic pricing starts from $1,170/mo and it only goes up from there.

But the good news is that you can start using their email tracking software for free and you don’t need a premium HubSpot CRM subscription.

Final thoughts

That wraps up our roundup of awesome outreach tools to help with link building, sales, and more.

Some of these tools, like BuzzStream, are comprehensive solutions that can help you manage your entire outreach campaigns from start to finish.

Whereas, others only help with specific parts of the process, like prospect discovery, finding contact information, or sending emails.

The best choice for you will depend on what specific features you need, what your intended use case is, and your budget. And you might want to consider using a few different tools in tandem.

If you plan on using your outreach tool to build links, you might be interested in these link-building statistics and SEO stats.

Plus, check out these competitor analysis tools that can help with other areas of your marketing and sales outreach campaigns.

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Adam is one of the top 50 content marketers in the world, according to BuzzSumo and Semrush. He has more than a decade of experience in the marketing space and previously managed marketing campaigns for 8 figure brands. Now he's sharing everything he knows to help you turn your passion into profit. Subscribe to Adam's YouTube channel.