By Since launch in April, showing emails and contact information inside the SparkToro app has been our most requested feature. Today, it’s here. Billions of email addresses and social contact URLs now pull directly into the Lists feature. If you’ve used SparkToro Lists in the past (and have a Standard or higher tier account), your Lists have already been updated to include it. If you haven’t, it’s a great day to give it a spin.
Here’s the process, visualized, in four easy steps:
Anytime you add a social account, website, podcast, or YouTube channel to a List, we automatically fetch any associated email accounts via a partnership with the fine folks at Hunter.io. It happens in seconds, and the contact data is constantly being updated and added-to by Hunter’s systems. For some sources, dozens of email addresses and social accounts will be available. For others, you’ll only see one or two.
In testing, we’ve found that emails are available for between 50-80% of the sources we’ve added to lists (depending on the niche and source type). And even when they’re missing, we still provide contact information through social profiles so you can send an Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn message.
The feature connects up emails to social accounts, podcasts, and YouTube channels whenever we can build (and verify) associations between a website and these sources, which saves a lot of searching, clicking, copying, and pasting. You don’t need to have a Hunter.io account to use this integration, either. A SparkToro subscription at the Standard (or higher) tier will enable access (at lower tiers, we still provide the social contact info, but not the emails).
Outreach with SparkToro just got much easier and we implore you to use this power responsibly. Don’t try to “scale” your emails by sending hundreds more. Use these outreach tips and aim for quality > quantity. Once you send one bad email, the “report spam” button means future messages are unlikely to ever make it through. In any given niche, there’s only a few dozen to few hundred sources of influence that truly matter. Burn your reputation with them, and the long tail of low-reach targets can’t make up the lost ground, so use it wisely!
Here’s an example of a great outreach email I received.
Why did it work (nudging me to amplify SiteKite… and now, apparently, link to them, too)?
- The target was relevant (according to SparkToro’s own data, a lot of folks in this field follow me on one or more social channel)
- The message was authentic, personal, kind, and obviously written from one person to another
- The product they built was a good match for my audience. In fact, the tweet I sent about it did quite well (which helps boost my reach inside Twitter’s picky algorithm)
- They had an authentic reason for the pitch—their product’s new, just launching, and they match the kind of startup I love to support and see more of in the world (small, focused, non-venture-backed, built on passion)
- The excited photo of them didn’t hurt either
I delete no less than twenty crappy pitches with similar goals each day, but this one broke through.
Hopefully this new feature and some stories of what works can inspire you to pitch those podcasts, yammer with those YouTubers, source that social amplification, work with those websites, and… actually, don’t ask for a dofollow link. There’s really no good way to do that 🙂
If you’ve got feedback, questions, or suggestions for us, please leave them in the comments below or email me direct: rand at sparktoro.com.
p.s. We’ve got several more new SparkToro features and upgrades launching in the weeks ahead, saved up from a summer of hard work. Stay tuned! I’ll be announcing another here next week.