The quality of your lead list determines the ceiling on your cold email results. A warm inbox and a brilliant sequence can't save you from a bad list. Here's how we build lists at Inboxrise, and the tools we actually use.
Step 1: Define your ICP with surgical precision
ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. Most people define it too broadly. "B2B SaaS companies with 10–200 employees" is a category, not an ICP.
A useful ICP looks like this: Series A SaaS companies in the HR tech or fintech space, founded in the last 4 years, currently hiring sales or marketing roles, US or UK-based, with a founder who is active on LinkedIn.
The more specific you are, the more personalised your outreach can be, and personalisation is the single biggest driver of reply rate.
Key ICP dimensions to define:
- Company size: by headcount and/or revenue
- Industry: be specific. "SaaS" isn't specific enough. "HR SaaS for enterprises" is.
- Growth signals: recently funded, actively hiring, launched a new product
- Geography: where are they based, where do they sell
- Title: exactly who do you need to talk to
Step 2: Build the list
Source 1: LinkedIn Sales Navigator
The most reliable B2B prospecting tool. Build a search with all your ICP filters, export to CSV using a tool like Phantombuster or Evaboot, then enrich with emails.
Source 2: Apollo.io
Combines prospecting and email finding in one tool. Good for volume. Like every data provider, some addresses will be wrong or out of date, so always verify before importing.
Source 3: Crunchbase / PitchBook
Excellent for finding recently-funded companies: funding is one of the strongest buying signals. You can filter by funding stage, date, industry, and geography.
Source 4: G2, Capterra reviews
People who leave reviews for competitor products are qualified buyers. Filter by reviews of direct competitors and you have a list of people who've already bought in your category.
Step 3: Find and verify emails
The tools we use:
- Hunter.io: best for finding emails by name + company domain
- Apollo.io: find and verify in one step
- NeverBounce or ZeroBounce: bulk verification before import. Always run your list through one of these
Acceptable bounce rate for a healthy campaign: under 2%. Above 5% will damage your sender reputation. Remove any email marked "invalid" or "catch-all" before importing.
Step 4: Structure your CSV for personalisation
The columns that matter:
The recent_news or trigger_event column is the most underused. If you know that {{company}} just raised a Series A or just launched a new product, you can reference it in your opening line, and that one line does more for reply rate than any other personalisation tactic.
Step 5: Segment before you upload
Don't import your entire list as one campaign. Segment it:
- By industry (different angle for each)
- By company size (messaging for a 5-person startup is different from a 50-person scaleup)
- By trigger event (recently funded vs. recently hiring vs. just launched)
A campaign to 50 highly segmented contacts will outperform a campaign to 500 generic ones. Every time.
The list quality test: Before you launch any campaign, ask yourself: if I received this email, would it feel relevant and specific to me? If you'd feel like it was a mass blast, so will your prospect. Fix the list first.