Hi! Since you are reading this, you're most probably curious about how the Growbots app works and how to use it properly. This article will walk you through the basics of Growbots - at the end of it, you should be able to have all the information you need to start your first campaign and excel in outbound. Following these steps one-by-one will help you with that:
- Connect your email account
- Integrate your CRM / Upload a Do Not Contact list
- Create your first campaign
It's as simple as that! Once you do that, you're ready to reach your first prospects.
To get started, log in with your credentials under app.growbots.com.
Make sure you use Google Chrome for the best user experience.
FIRST STEP: Connecting your email account
To be able to send emails through Growbots, you need to connect your email account. Go to Settings -> Integrations and connect your email account.
If you’re using Gmail or Outlook, it’s super simple, just choose a dedicated option, log into your account and allow for access.
If you use any other email provider, put in your credentials and use this document with SMTP/IMAP data to fill in the rest of the necessary fields.
Then, you just have to fill in your personal data (that will be later used as custom fields) and the limit of a number of messages sent daily (the default is 30, and we encourage you not to increase it to more than 150 - this will help protecting your deliverability and prevent your emails from reaching SPAM folders).
If you need to send more messages, you can always add more email accounts to send out from. Please remember that if you have a new email account you have to warm it up first!
SECOND STEP: Integrating your CRM / Uploading a Do Not Contact list
The CRM is the number 1 tool in any sales team, so syncing it with Growbots is a crucial step in automating the sales processes.
We offer two native integrations, with Salesforce and HubSpot CRM.
They allow you to automatically deduplicate the individual prospects you have in your CRM and push generated prospects from GB to the CRM based on a variety of actions (prospect opened an email, prospect replied to an email, etc).
If you’re using any other CRM, you should check out our Zapier integration. It will allow you to push prospects to your CRM. Thanks to Zapier you can also sync many more applications!
If you wish to exclude companies from being generated, you need to upload a Do Not Contact List, a CSV file with a column named website, and all the domains of the companies you wish to exclude.
In case you have any trouble with connecting your CRM, check this article or let us know on the chat inside the app.
THIRD STEP: Creating your first campaign
After completing the two first steps, you’re ready to launch your first campaign. You can choose from 2 main options:
- Find new contacts - this way you'll create a persona-based campaign. Using this option you’ll specify your target, generate prospects from our database, and schedule a flow of communication to be sent from one or more of your email addresses or, alternatively, export those contacts to a CSV file;
- Use my own contacts - this way you'll create an import campaign, which allows you to use our email automation system for the prospects that you already have from other sources.
The most common choice here is the Persona-based campaign. Once you chose this option, you'll be able to go through the following steps:
Companies
Define your target companies by searching for Specific companies or defining Detailed criteria.
If you are looking for a specific company you can enter their domain and company's headquarters or office location.
With detailed criteria, you have a few filters to choose from to narrow down your target.
You can start with the Industry filter, just pick the most relevant ones.
The next filter is Company keywords - it lets you target non-standard industries or a specialization that a company may have. We’re looking through companies’ Details, About us or Information sections to look for those keywords. You can also exclude keywords in this section if you don't want certain types of prospects in your target group. To do that, you need to type the position name or any other keyword or a part of it with a minus, e.g. “-junior”.
The next filters are Location, Company size, Finances - the last one lets you define the annual revenue of the company. Other than that, you can filter by the companie's Funding, Company website and Year founded. Check out this article for further info.
People
Now you can go to the next step - People, where you’ll be able to define what type of prospects you’d like to contact.
The first filters are Seniority level and Department, the only thing you have to do is tick the right boxes!
Alternatively, you can use the Job positions filter, which allows you to pick search by a job title e.g. if you’d like to contact CEOs, type in “CEO” but use the full position name as well, “Chief Executive Officer”. Also, if you want to exclude some job positions you can write it with “ - “ before its name, e.g. “-assistant”.
The next filters are Prospects keywords (which works pretty much the same as company keywords) and Max prospects per company, which will let you limit the quantity of generated prospects per company. This feature may help you to avoid targeting too many people from a single company and making it look like SPAM for them.
Prospecting
After clicking the “next step” button, you’ll be transferred to the Prospecting step, where you’ll have 50 prospects generated by default. You can look through them (clicking on their name will let you see more details about them) and decide if they are close to who you’re after.
You can Accept (add to this campaign), Reject (do not contact in this campaign list, but might want to contact in the future), or Blacklist (you won’t be able to generate or contact this prospect in the future) these prospects. Also, there is a little white square with an arrow, which lets you move this prospect to another campaign.
If you want to look through more than 50 prospects at a time, you can always add more. To do that, you need to unfold Add prospects tab at the top of the table and choose to Generate option. Then, you will be able to choose a number of prospects that you want to generate in your table.
Sequences
The next step is Sequences, where you define how you want to contact the people you accepted in the previous step. A sequence consists of a set of Templates (individual emails) which you can edit at any time and also use in different sequences. You can see how to create them here.
When it comes to the content of your messages, check out our Top-performing sequence, it’s a good example of what a successful campaign should look like.
Custom fields
In the Custom Fields step, you can check if the custom field data is filled out correctly and fix any spelling mistakes you can notice. If the ”Empty” column says 0, you can go ahead to the next step.
Scheduling messages
The email accounts step allows you to choose an email account from which you’d like to send out the campaign. You can also select a date on which the campaign should be started. On the timeline, you can see when the messages are scheduled. Please bear in mind, that the scheduled messages have to stay under the sending limits (sometimes they share the limits with the other campaigns going out from the same email address) and follow the time criteria selected by creating the sequence. If you want to read more about scheduling messages, check this article.
Preview & schedule
At last, the Preview & schedule step! Here you can edit or personalize the emails to your prospects. The only thing left to do is to click Launch Campaign!
Bear in mind, that the moment you launch the campaign is when we take away your credits (each generated prospect costs 1 credit).
That’s it, you scheduled your first campaign! Now you can wait for the responses to come through. You can monitor the results of your campaign in the Summary view.
Here are a few additional articles that you might find useful in your journey:
Outbound Sales Handbook
Deliverability Best Practices
