Dear NPB,
We need 10,000 emails to be taken seriously by advertisers.
We only have about 5,000 right now, but do have a LinkedIn Sales Navigator account. I’ve heard it can be done, but not sure if we should try it.
Best regards,
Impatient audience manager
Dear Impatient,
The answer is yes, sometimes.
WIZA works best for job-title-based B2B audiences and for finding job-title-based contacts at scale. But it is also trickier than it looks.
It does not replace the ongoing hand-to-hand combat of registering website visitors, optimizing SEO, forming relationships with associations, and creating social media funnels. However, WIZA can fast-forward data acquisition in unprecedented ways.
As an extension on your LinkedIn browser, it will match email – scraped from the web and pinged for deliverability – to any search result and can download up to 2,500 emails at a time from a search on Sales Navigator. The process takes about 20 minutes.
A core benefit is the ability to target the audience by job title, industry, company size, and other sorts so that the personas can be very specific. But you will also need to pay attention to data hygiene.
So what about the cost
The cost is well worth it if speed to market is a key issue. A LinkedIn Sales Navigator account runs about $100 a month but gives full access to the most up-to-date database of self-reported job-based information.
The cost for WIZA credits is about $.15 each, or about $300 per 2,000 emails. Wiza purchasers are only charged for valid emails that are not duplicated from other downloads, and the credits do not expire if unused.
The purchaser also receives emails classified as “risky” at no charge. However, the latter only have a 50% deliverability so you want to avoid these.
To keep lists imported from WIZA as valuable as possible and avoid the risk of downgrading your score as a sender, keep these things in mind:
1. Create a persona by job title, location, industry first
The job title, company size, and location are on the left side of Sales Navigator, while the industry should be typed into the search bar at the top.
Keep in mind that the words you use to describe a persona may not match the words in LinkedIn. So test by performing multiple searches to see what results come up. Some searches produce almost no results, while others are overly broad. You want to get to an exact match if you can.
If this is not possible, see below how to match Google searches one-by-one. You can still create lists at scale over time using an overseas virtual assistant.
Note: If you get stuck, use the “live chat” on WIZA. It is not a bot. They are company employees, U.S.-based and compensated on sales so they want you to succeed and purchase more.
2. Company size
Unless your niche requires reaching a job title at a company with 100+ employees, it is better to exclude this group. But if you need to find a specific job title within this group for leads it can be well worthwhile.
The problem with using WIZA at scale for large companies is this: Expect IT managers at large companies to create bots that open every email link and evaluate the source. Your company will not be on the approved list, but the bot’s activity will show up as both opens and clicks, inflating the rate.
So you see a surge of 400% more clicks, including almost every link by multiple users, and 95 percent are presidents, CEOs, or IT directors of large companies; you may get excited, although a bot may be at work. You can also spot them on an ESPs as the ones that clicked, say, five URLs in a newsletter at the same second.
These ‘over-clickers’ then need to be removed. It is a frustrating and laborious process.
So select a company size with 1- 50 employees when you can, it is less work and a safer bet.
An exception would be a niche with a unique job title at larger companies that is otherwise difficult to find. The introduction letters should be very personalized and sent from a company email.
3. Stick to the U.S. until you go global and filter state by state.
If the market is primarily U.S., select U.S. or North American only first. You can add countries later. Whenever a search result is greater than 2500, you will need to add a filter. The easiest one in terms of geography is to filter by state.
4. Start with 1st contacts emails (1cp’s).
The deeper the relationship, the better the lead, so first contacts on LinkedIn are a great place to start. You can export and review for relevance, or filter and use WIZA to download.
If you have a few thousand contacts and a multiple industry career, it may be faster to use a filter. So go to Sales Navigator’s Advanced areas in the center, click on ‘Connections,’ select first and add the filters such as job title.
5. Select 2nd connections and add filters to limit the sample size
2nd connections, by nature, will be exponentially larger and typically require an additional filter to reduce the number under the 2500 WIZA limit.
In fact, anytime you see more than 2500 results for a Sales Navigator Search you need to deploy a filter strategy.
There are many ways to do this. For example, if you are searching for a job title in all states, plan to search state by state. Make a list of states first, and check each one off, naming the Wiza file with the state’s name and other search criteria.
On the other hand if you want a job title for different industries one city or state, map the filters with a list of industries.
6. Name your WIZA files with the search criteria while downloading
It is easy for the data to get out of hand without a rigorous naming protocol.
7. To find audiences that are not connections, watch for the relevance of the search results
Once you start on cold searches outside your connections, you’ll find that some words have double meanings.
A magazine can be a publication or ammunition. A publisher can be a magazine publisher, a book publisher, or an author. The closer you can get to an exact match with your person, the better the results will be. So when going outside your contacts, test a few theories and check the results. Then, apply your filter strategy, keeping results under 2500.
8. Clean the lists using Neverbounce
For about $100 this app will remove another 20% of the undeliverable data, regardless of what WIZA says.
9. Personalize an introductory send
I’m not a fan of using LinkedIn “in the mail” for mass communications or sales calls to strangers.
You can still personalize with a first email. It could be as simple as, “You are connected to some of the people I know on LinkedIn, and I want to introduce CDO weekly, the leading newsletter for CDOs,” or “Welcome Florida Pet Stores to Labradoodle Mag.”
I send the first personalized intro letters in small batches directly from my company email, so if I send a newsletter afterward, they at least know who I am.
It is a small thing, but it makes a big difference. It shows that you know who they are.
10. Be careful about broadening filters to add more names to get to your 10,000 goal
Can you add job titles or other ways to reach the goal? Of course, but whether you should is another story.
One theory, for example, when targeting a C-suite level title, is to target the job title most likely to move into that position over the next few years.
If the target is publishers, then the theory goes that adding editors and sales managers may be a way to expand the data set. But this may also add people who do not need or want the specific information delivered.
A deep understanding of content critical to the target audience will help to inform these decisions. Test the sends in even smaller batches when broadening beyond the initial persona.
11. Better yet, use Google searches and research one-by-one
Yes, this takes longer, but a couple of thousand really great contacts who exactly match your criteria may be better than a speedy approach that delivers 4000, of whom only a few are reading the content.
An overseas virtual assistant can conduct a series of Google searches for the target persona, use Sales Navigator to identify the contact by job title, use WIZA to find the email address and send a personalized email.
100 to 200 a month builds to 1200 to 2400 over a year of owned, verified, targeted contacts.
12. Keep an eye on the ratios pattern – are these companies smaller or more mature? Where is your content hitting and missing?
Keep an eye out for “over-clickers,” who may be one of those savvy IT managers scanning incoming emails and remove them when you find them. Any time a recipient clicks on every link you should check if that is realistic behavior.
Finally, if you are building quickly and unsure about your strategy, consider testing using a different domain name, ESP, and email. You can add openers and or clickers once any issues have been resolved.
WIZA has great customer support with a live chat staff by people who really know a lot about using WIZA. But keep in mind that these people are on the sales team, so stick to your plan.
Good luck on your journey!
All the best,
NPB
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