How to Simplify Doing Outreach - Workflow and Tooling Hacks for Marketers

There is a gazillion of tools that make life easier for us marketers. If you're in content marketing, you're probably writing a lot and reaching out to a bunch of people through email all the time and using a lot of tools to manage this process.

In this post, I'll share my email outreach workflow I've developed over the years that helps me speed things up. It's nothing too complex but helps me save up to 50% of my time. Within an hour I can email even 20+ people given I have all the details needed.

It's important to note that all of these tools can be used on a free plan, I'm not giving you any sales pitches here. I truly miss articles from the rest of the marketing community whose only aim is to help each other out.

Gmail

Hands down Gmail is the best email application I've had the chance to test out. It supports loads of integrations that make my life easier. I've tested about ~5 of other apps, but the lack of customization and automation put me off.

HubSpot CRM

Hubspot CRM is easy to set up & use. It can help you keep a track of people you've emailed, track email opens, schedule emails, and set up templates and snippets.. Integrate it with your Gmail and set up Templates. Instead of copy-pasting things all the time, you can just click on templates or snippets from the dashboard and HubSpot will paste the text accordingly.

Clickup

Clickup is another tool you can use. It enables you and your team to have a clear overview of all the tasks in progress which reduces unnecessary conversations within your team. Same as with Trello, you can set up boards, customize them, but you can also have a better overview of all the tasks assigned to you or your team members, and define and discover blocking tasks easier.

E.g. My colleague Lazar has to prepare something before I can reach out to a person X. Once Lazar finishes his task and marks it as done, I get a green light for completing my task.

In case several of you are doing outreach, with Clickup you'll know who emailed whom, when, why, etc...

What I also like about Clickup is that it enables me to zoom out at any time and see the big picture of all the tasks my colleagues and I have on our hands and helps us manage that team interconnectedness with ease. Imagine having Jira features on Trello, but with a much cleaner and intuitive interface. (Strong personal opinion here - I hold so much distaste for Jira's interface 🤮)

I have a different board for different groups of people. Here's my general workflow:

Open	Reached out	Accepted	Declined	No reply	Followed up	Closed
all the people I have to email	all the people I emailed	all the people who accepted the offer	all the people who declined the offer	all the people who didn't respond at all	all the people I followed up	all the people who agreed and did whatever we agreed on

Of course, depending on the type of your process, you can add or remove columns.

Ditto

This is a really nifty tool for Windows that helps you copy and paste things easier.

E.g. In a regular flow, you need to open 2 windows. The first one is email, the second one contains all the details you need for emailing a target person. You have to juggle between 2 or even more windows in order to find all the details you need and paste them in the email.

With Ditto, you just mass copy all the details one by one, and then go to your email tool, press Ctrl + ` and a small window containing all the details you've copied in the past will pop up. You just have to click on the one you need, and Ditto will paste it in your email.

Conclusion

That's it 😃 Hope this post helped you discover some interesting tools that can help you and your marketing team save a lot of time. Please leave your comments if you've developed a better system for managing the outreach process!

How to Simplify Doing Outreach - Workflow and Tooling Hacks for Marketers

Comments

More from this blog

Rage Against the Dying of Critical Thinking

How to find a safe and inclusive work environment

On Breaking Habits

Don't Offer Me a Job That Requires Me To Relocate

Taking Apart Top of the Marketing Funnel

Gmail

HubSpot CRM

Clickup

Ditto

Conclusion

Command Palette

Comments

More from this blog

Gmail

HubSpot CRM

Clickup

Ditto

Conclusion