Builtwith is a technology profiling SaaS focused on providing interesting statistical data about who, what, when, and why websites use specific technologies.
Builtwith is by far most known for their free search tool that allows you to find out what technology a website is using. The other popularly raved about the extension that Builtwith offers for Chrome, allows you to see what technologies the sites you browse are using.
Essentially, Builtwith is the ultimate technology knowledge base, full of rich information about millions of websites that can be used for hundreds of use cases. Builtwith talks about being a Sales Intelligence and Market Research team, yet is hardly ever mentioned by sales, marketing, or actionable analytics sites.
Therefore, our purpose today is to shed light on why Builtwith is probably one of the most important sales, marketing, and demand generation tools on the market.
B2B Company Lead Lists Using Builtwith
If you sign up for a free trial with Builtwith, you will find a completely different experience than the raved about free tools. You will find yourself in a dashboard that is useful for generating specific types of reports.
Their reports are as follows:
Web Technology Usage List, which is a report based on web technologies in use, examples: WordPress, Shopify, Salesforce.
Uploaded Lists, this consist of a report on a list of domains you specifically upload into the system to be analysed.
Competitor Comparison, this report offers a report based on web technology with a comparison to competing technologies such as Magento vs. Shopify.
Curated Lists, this unique feature actually provides some pre-vetted lists such as recent YComibnator Companies, Expiring SLL Domains, Quantcast 10k, and Alexa 10k.
Keyword List, this is a list of domains with metadata mentioning specific keywords. This is my personal favorite!
eCommerce Categorised Lists is an option that allows you to literally pull ecommerce technology profiles in a specific niche such as adult, baby clothes, or outdoors.
Technology Alerts is another report that gives alerts when websites in your list start using specific technologies or a category of technologies.
Technology Report Builder is a customised DIY report builder that allows you to combine several factors together to generate a new report.
So, for those of you have no clue or very little understand of what technology profiling is, let us enlighten you.
Technology profiles include data such as Domains, Social Network Data, Alexa Ranking, Quantcast Ranking, Technologies in use data, Meta Data, industry classifications, phone numbers, emails, and much more.
It’s essentially sourcing you a list of data that helps you narrow down your target audience based on several relevant factors but even more importantly it is empowering you to identify new potential companies that fit your criteria.
At this point, I am sure some of you see that values asking questions to yourself like, so what? Is the data accurate? How can I use this to actually build a solid prospect list?
Well, let me show you! Here is a list that I pulled using the Keyword List report function for the term “Credit Unions”, using builtwith you can also filter report results before generating it by selecting things such as estimated technology spend, domain extensions (ex: .coms, .orgs, .nets, and etc.), alexa ranking, quantcast ranking, and more. So for this example, I pulled a list of websites mentioning credit union with a .org extension.
That’s right, basic keyword search generated 1,851 domains that I more than likely would have never known if it wasn’t for Builtwith. So, this is pretty awesome to start but it actually gets better. For this example, I am going to say that I want to target a specific state, let us say Virginia. I selection the locations tab at the top to get a breakdown of states or countries where the domains are geographically identified.
Now I can easily break down the list into specific geographical areas. Therefore, I am going to select my target area, Virginia.
So now, I can go through and start prospecting these domains manually but nobody really wants to do that, especially in 2017, there are so many better ways. So, here’s what I am going to do. I am going to copy this list into Google Sheets, like so.
So this is a basic list, just domain, state, city, and postal code. If you export with Builtwith you can obtain much more data but we will cover that in a future article. This article is about how to perform scalable demand generation using Builtwith. Now I know I want to build relationships with these companies, therefore I will need to know ahead of time what medium of communication I plan on using for starting communications with these credits unions.
Right now, I am planning on reaching out through cold email. Reason being, it is faster, scalable, and most importantly can be personalised and automated at scale.
Using Builtwith With Hunter.io For Cold Email Prospects
Now that I know specifically how I want to reach out, it’s time start finding the emails for these credit unions. Normally this can be a daunting process, but thankfully in 2016 and 2017, sourcing information has become a simple process. Therefore, I will be using Email Hunter, now known as Hunter.io.
When using Hunter.io to find email addresses, it’s literally idiot-proof and by far the most accurate scalable email sourcing method at an affordable cost. How much would you pay per email? Companies like Datanyze.com charge 75 cents per email sourced, which in my opinion is obnoxious. Using Hunter.io you will be paying per domain. Sourcing 10 emails per domain will cost you .04 cent to .007 cents. That is literally .004 to .000798 per email. But a number of emails isn’t whats important, it’s the quality of emails and the specific contacts within a niche that you have identified as a decision maker.
Therefore, we are going to give this a shot and see what happens using Hunter.io. Using the bulk function in hunter.io, you can upload your CSV and start finding emails. Even better about hunter.io, it gives you advance features under the bulk setting such as “Would you like to convert company names to domain names”, “Maximum amount of emails per domain”, “Get Generic, Personal, or both types of emails”. In this case, I am going to go with 10 emails per domain, personal emails only. Personal email selection makes it so that you don’t get things like [email protected].
We used 44 requests, therefore a whole three cents for 263 email addresses. Now I am going to go ahead and download this list and upload it into Google Sheets.
Not only do you get the email address, you also get a plethora of information include, Email, Domain, Confidence (Confidence of email validity), type (personal / generic), Sources (where the email was found), Pattern (First name / Last name email patterns for domains), first name, last name, position, Twitter, Linkedin, and phone number. Not every contact will have all fields but that’s okay, we get a ton of data for 3 cents.
Now, what you could do is filter this data by position and first name / last name availability and start emailing. Although, let us go the extra mile to see how legit these emails are and if there is more available data about our leads.
Enriched Data for Sales Outreach Using Clearbit
Clearbit is an API but we won’t really dive into that today. The thing that’s important for the everyday sales person is that they have an available plugin for Google Sheets. If you have never used plugins for Google Sheets, start adopting them ASAP. Using clearbit, we are going to perform a process called “Data Enrichment”, which essentially takes an email or domain and sources additional data about them. In this specific use case, we are going to say emails found through clearbit data enrichment, will be highly valid leads, whereas the previous list of email hunter leads are medium valid leads.
You can enrich emails for as cheap as .008 per row and I am sure they have even cheaper plans for larger volume. Clearbit gives you access to over 100 hundred data points where can be found here.
Here’s what the results look like:
At this point, I think you are getting the idea of how powerful this is. We just generated 231 profiles on emails from credit unions. Approximately 191 of them were located in Virginia, an additional 23 in Washington D.C. which is right outside of Virginia. Simply amazing, plus you will notice that most of these are executives, we now know the leads exact position, area, and type of employment, as well as much more. Filter and delete columns as needed. The cost was a mere $1.85. Doesn’t this make something like Datanyze seem completely overpriced? I think so, I hope you will as well.
Cold Emailing Using Enriched Data
Now, let us start taking action. Who you use for your cold emails is completely up to you and will depend on whether your email servers are on Gsuite (Google Business Apps) or something like Outlook or SMPT.
If you are using Google Suites, you pretty much have a full range of available tools, however, I highly recommend Mixmax. Mixmax is a SaaS web app and chrome extension that allows you to do tons of things, which I am sure we will cover in the future. Most importantly, though, it allows you to send highly personalised sequences. It also gives beautifully presented tracking metrics.
If you are using outlook, I recommend using PersistIQ, which was my favorite platform before Mixmax was released. It’s an amazing minimalism and easy to understand platform that provides just as much value but is limited when it comes to inbox management and widgets. Its also more expensive, although absolutely an awesome choice.
If your team is using something custom like SMPT/POP3, I recommend using Reply.io. Reply is relatively new to the game of email management but has tons of benefits. I feel like that will be a major contender for all platforms in the future, we will also be covering this in the future, therefore the decision is settled for this use case.
We’re using Mixmax. Now Mixmax does a ton, it is very robust. Plans range from $9.00 — $69.00/month per email account using Google.
Getting started, write your template. We will be expanding on writing cold emails in the future, as it is one of our favorite acquisition channels, its by the highest momentum and ROI among all channels, at least for B2B. It also depends on the use case but there are very few where we haven’t be able to acquire using cold email in one way or another.
Here is Mixmax Template Management:
This lets you check out how your templates are performing, or perhaps sequences which I highly recommend for cold emailing, sequences are absolutely required. You should plan on schedule cold emails in series of 3 to 5 depending on the potential client, we will expand on this in the near future.
Here is the template building user interface for Mixmax:
They by far have the most robust variable system which lets you dial in personalization on a whole different level. The coolest part about it, you can add custom variables based on your Google Sheets header names, therefore you can literally at anything into the template, it takes email personalisation to a whole different level.
Cold Email Sequences Overview With Mixmax
Using sequences allows you to add stages, and if you aren’t familiar with sequences then I will slightly expand. A sequence consists of a series of emails, Mixmax calls this “Stages”. You can trigger additional emails when no reply was conducted to emails that did not bounce, therefore you can schedule sequences to go out after seven days if a prospect doesn’t reply.
This helps automate the process, I recommend not sending more than 300 emails per day per email address. This will help to prevent you getting blacklisted, it’s just a word of caution, though. Above you will notice you get performance metrics beautifully displayed in the sequences tab. It helps you break down what’s performing, what isn’t and how to improve.
At this point, you should be sending emails and enjoy the rewards of scaled demand generation using a collection of tools that simply aren’t being talked about together.
[The author of this post is Daniel Snell, a savvy hustler focused on growth.]
