Avoid spam folders and generate B2B leads with this PhantomBuster and Intercom hack

One of the biggest struggles you face when cold emailing is getting lost in the dreaded death zone that is the SPAM FOLDER. Your tenderly crafted email never gets the chance to fulfil its destiny of being seen, opened, read, clicked… nothing. A wasted life in the depths of email purgatory along with all the other spam rejects.

We’ve struggled with this too and tried everything within our power to avoid getting spanked, which Gmail is notorious for. So when I saw that PhantomBuster had released a new Intercom Messenger Sender API, I dropped everything I was doing to test it out, and here’s what happened…

Not all growth hacks are equal, some take time and effort to understand and implement, not to mention cost… and then there are some that you can implement in an hour and see instant results… This is the latter…

It’s not you, its me…

This growth hack isn’t for everyone, but if your customer persona includes B2B, SaaS or digital businesses, then the likelihood is they’re gonna be using Intercom, and this personalization trend will be perfect for you.

As we reveal in the results, for an hours effort and $1 spend we generated 3 demos, 9 trials, 1 affiliate sign-up and 99 web visitors. Depending on your product or service 13 solid opportunities might not be exciting, but if that does float your boat, then keep reading 😉

I like to keep an eye on PhantomBuster’s API Store, the new APIs are usually pretty cool at revealing a fresh hack to try.

I was immediately excited about the prospect of using Intercom as a route to deliver messages, and judging by the initial feedback I wasn’t the only one.

SUMMARY

So before jumping into the details, let’s summarise the steps needed, so you know what you’re getting yourself into…

  1. Use BuiltWith.com to create your list of websites using Intercom.
  2. Whack your website data into a Google Sheet and make publicly available.
  3. Create a simple message with a link as your CTA.
  4. Use PhantomBuster Intercom API to post your messages.

That’s it, now check your inbox and watch your analytics 😀

STEP ONE: BuiltWith

Using BuiltWith.com I was able to find over 100k websites using Intercom, well done Intercom 👏 for amassing such a customer base.

Builtwith plans start at $295 per month, which allows discovery for two technologies, for this hack we just need one (Intercom).

If you want to try this hack first, without committing to a plan, then check-out the Intercom page on Builtwith:

https://trends.builtwith.com/widgets/Intercom

This is the Intercom summary page, it has further links to Intercom data, broken down by country, spend, traffic etc. Each of these sub-lists show the first 15 results, without a payment plan being active. This means you can get upto 1,650 websites using Intercom for FREE! 😉

STEP TWO: Google Sheets

I downloaded the lot and whacked it into a Google Sheet:

One of the great things with BuiltWith is the depth of data you get (when you have a subscription). I was able to further filter the data by business vertical, as well as approximated company size (based on spend and Alexa ranking).

STEP THREE: Get on Message

I devised a simple message with a link to a blog post that would add value to a Marketer who uses Intercom.

We added the prospects domain as a tracking tag on each link to dynamically personalise the article to the prospect.

Here’s an example of the article page, showing above the fold an image personalised with the prospects company name and logo.

STEP FOUR: Let the Phantom Magic Begin

PhantomBuster does have a paid plan, starting at $30 per month, which gets you one hour of processing per day, so we plumbed for that one.

However there is a free plan, if you want to dip your toe in first, which gives you ten minutes execution time free per day.

With the Google Sheet of websites using Intercom to hit, I shared the Sheet direct with the PhantomBuster Intercom API, and pasted in the message, with the dynamic tags, and let it go…

THE RESULTS:

After the one hour of processing we’d sent out 168 messages and got an initial 14 direct email responses, either asking questions, or providing another contact.

We responded to the emails with a nice personalised thank you 🙂 including the prospects first name and their company logo.

In addition to the direct responses, our traffic spiked to the article we’d shared in the message.

In the end we managed to send out 168 messages, generating 99 page visits and 14 email responses.

This generated 3 Calendly demo bookings and 9 trial signups and an affiliate sign-up (so far…)

For a pro-rata daily spend of $1 we generated 13 solid opportunities and much more potential.

Even better, now we’ve proven this, we can scale this out, with plenty of data and options to go at.

Hope you enjoyed this, happy hacking!