Who Is Greg d’Aboville
Greg d’Aboville is the Head of Marketing at Hunter.io, where he ensures the implementation of effective marketing strategies. He holds a master's degree in marketing and has over 15 years of experience in the industry. Before Hunter.io, Greg worked at Doctolib (a French unicorn), Rakuten, and Wisepops where he held growth and marketing positions.
A recent survey shows that 70% of US consumers prefer to be contacted by brands via email which encourages businesses to increasingly rely on email marketing initiatives to reach and convert their prospects.
However, just like every marketing strategy, email outreach comes with challenges. And it’s no secret that most organizations struggle to find the right email addresses and verify them before sending their marketing message.
Luckily, they don’t have to do this manually. Email finding tools like Hunter.io come to the rescue not only in ensuring the accuracy of the information and more effective outreach but also in saving time and effort.
In this interview, we have the opportunity to explore the benefits of using Hunter.io with Greg d’Aboville, the company's Head of Marketing. We also delve into the key components of a successful cold email that businesses should consider for successful outreach.
Spotlight: Sales Insights Lab research suggests that 61% of salespeople consider prospecting as more challenging than it was five years ago. Hence, it's not surprising that one of the latest email marketing misconceptions is that cold calling is dead. But is this really the case?
Greg d’Aboville: Cold emailing has indeed become more challenging in the last few years.
Spam filters make it increasingly difficult to land in the prospects’ inboxes. At the same time, most professionals started to become immune to basic cold emails. It’s become harder to stand out.
But it doesn’t mean cold emailing is dead. Far from it. We see it every day with our clients. From world-leading organizations to SMBs (small-to-medium businesses), cold email is a key component for many businesses. It’s still one of the best and most affordable ways to establish business relationships.
There’s just a push to improve quality, which is positive for everyone. Our leads deserve better cold emails.
Despite the popularity of social media, a huge number of buyers still prefer to be contacted through email. What makes traditional email more appealing to buyers than social media?
Email is deeply rooted inside work organizations. Its open protocol has allowed a whole ecosystem to flourish and made it the default communication channel at work.
It is also a form of content that’s usually pretty quick to digest (less distracting than social media) and less overwhelming.
Top managers and busy professionals might not have 30 minutes to spend every day on social networks to check the latest trends and products.
How important do you think email finding platforms are in helping businesses and professionals find the right email addresses to reach out to potential customers? How has this improved the success of email outreach?
Email has become one of the best options to establish relationships with prospects.
But going from one prospect to an email address is still incredibly difficult.
First, because finding emails is not an easy process. You have to buy data through a third-party (we don’t do this at Hunter.io), which has become increasingly difficult because of privacy regulations, or you need a solid crawling infrastructure to source your own data on the web. Also, because with 18% of companies’ workforces renewing every year, updating the data is also a challenge in itself.
In this context, email finding tools like Hunter.io play an essential role in the success of cold email campaigns. They’re instrumental in helping find the right people to contact, the right email addresses, and protecting your email domain reputation.
Hunter.io is one of the many tools helping sales teams and marketers connect with relevant prospects and is trusted by over three million professionals and notable brands, including Google, Microsoft, and Adobe. How does the platform stand out from other competitors in the market?
The first element that makes Hunter.io different is our data. First, we find more emails than any other tool on the market thanks to a unique web crawling infrastructure.
Second, our data is sourced from the open web, and our sources are transparent. That second specificity makes it easier to comply with data privacy laws.
We also offer a full email outreach suite. You can use Hunter.io to find email addresses, verify them, and send cold emails.
Finally, we choose to focus on small teams who don’t necessarily have a big budget or a huge team. So for us, it’s important to have a product that is easy to use and based on fair pricing.
How does the platform find, verify, and organize the data before it is made available to its users? How often do you update this data, and how do you ensure it is accurate?
It’s important to note that we have our own database and that it’s based on data found on the open web. Every day, we crawl millions of web pages to find new emails, update existing ones, and delete outdated contact details.
We’re also one of the few tools that verify every email we provide to maximize the deliverability of our clients and minimize their risks. To do so, we have developed our own algorithm that relies on AI and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) calls to verify that the emails we provide are safe to contact.
Cold email outreach can be time-consuming and difficult to manage. How does Hunter.io's free campaign feature help businesses and professionals streamline their outreach efforts?
Our cold email tool helps marketers and salespeople save time by automating all the time-intensive tasks like scheduling the emails, sending follow-ups to the leads who haven’t replied, personalizing all the emails, or understanding your results. What could take hours is now doable in just a few clicks.
We also recently added new features to help them identify their warm leads more quickly and centralize all the replies to their cold emails in a unique inbox to save even more time.
Finally, we help you get started with content that is easy to read and actionable.
You offer plenty of free cold email templates across various categories that businesses and professionals can use to find inspiration. In your opinion, what are the key components of a successful cold email?
First, we have to keep in mind that professionals can receive dozens of cold emails per week.
So, the key challenge when it comes to a cold email is relevancy and originality. You want to send messages that catch your prospects’ attention and speak to them.
To achieve that, we recommend focusing first on creating a list of people who are very likely to be interested in your offering. This means finding people who closely match your ICP (ideal customer profile) or who recently demonstrated an interest in the kind of product or service you offer.
Second, we recommend you work hard on the personalization of your email. This will help your message stand out.
Lastly, make sure that your email is written from your prospect’s perspective: keep it short (you don’t want to waste their time), personal, and to the point.
Lastly, what are Hunter.io’s plans to stay ahead of the curve and continue innovating? Do you have any new features or developments in the pipeline?
Our Email Finder and Email Verifier are core to our offering. We’re working hard to keep increasing the number of emails that we’re able to find. On this topic, we’re about to release a few updates that should make the product significantly better.
We’re also doubling down on our cold email tool, Campaigns. Since the beginning of the year, we released four major improvements, and we’re going to keep pushing in this direction. Our objective is to provide a tool that is easy to use, free for most users, and powerful.
Finally, we will release a new product towards the end of this year to help salespeople source more relevant leads to fill in their pipeline.
Thank you for your time, Greg d’Aboville. Best of luck to you and Hunter.io!
Keep up with Hunter.io on LinkedIn and read about other successful businesses here.
