The Project Dashboard isn’t a single feature—it’s your new command center for overseeing all your projects.

Whether you’re deep in the trenches of outreach or overseeing the strategic direction of multiple campaigns, this tool is designed to streamline your workflow and make managing your projects a breeze.

Centralized Project Visibility

The most obvious immediate benefit of the Project Dashboard is centralized visibility into activities across all your clients and campaigns. The dashboard has tremendous flexibility to display the right information for you, but let’s quickly look at how the information is organized by default.

Accessing your Project Dashboard is super straightforward—just click the icon in your left navigation bar, and you’ll be there.

When you first access the Project Dashboard, you’ll see that the information there is organized into three distinct sections:

• Projects Overview
• Folders
• Projects

Let’s discuss the information in these sections in greater detail.

Projects Overview

The projects overview section exists at the top of your Project Dashboard and fittingly provides overall insights across all projects in your current view. It will display what project phase all contacts across all projects in your view  currently exist in. We’ll discuss project phases in more detail shortly – but the general concept is that they are groupings of relationship stages that reflect what stage in your project’s lifecycle each contact exists in.

Using this information, you can get a general idea of how much activity is happening at each stage in your overall dashboard view, whether work is getting done, and where things are progressing normally or potentially getting hung up across your account.

From the overview, you can also dive into projects that have contacts in a given phase or that have completed a certain outreach goal.

For example, if I want to see and manage all of the projects where we’ve gotten replies, all I have to do is click the “Connected” phase and I’ll see the full list of relevant projects with contacts in that state.

You can change the information displayed in your dashboard view in several ways.

If you have “manage projects” privileges in your account, you’ll be able to see all of the projects in your account, whether you’re assigned to them or not, by default, to get visibility into key activities across clients and campaigns.

If you’re not a manager for your outreach team but are concerned with the projects you are working on specifically, you’ll be able to see “My Projects” from the projects view dropdown.

You could also select “Starred Projects” to see only specific projects that you have defined as being particularly important.

Another way to change the view is by diving into a specific folder – which brings us neatly to our next section.

Folders

Folders, as you might expect, are based on your folder organization in your BuzzStream account. At a top level, you can review these folders to see the number of sub-folders and projects that exist within each.

When you click into a folder or sub-folder, you’ll notice that your view changes. Now, you are seeing a dashboard view specifically tied to that folder.

From here, you can get high level visibility into each folder. Often, that means understanding what is going on at the client level or campaign type level, giving you top-level insight targeted to where it matters.

Want to know how things are progressing for that new client you onboarded? Or how are your overall campaigns performing for a given initiative?

Your folder view makes getting that insight as easy as a click.

Projects

Your projects section is where the real granular insights and actionability happen in your campaign dashboard. You’ll see in this section that each of your projects in your view is broken into a project tile.

For each of those tiles, you can get a quick visual representation of where every contact in that project currently stands.

Looking more closely at the project tile, you can see that you have visibility into what campaign phase each contact is in, as well as top-level email metrics, notifications, and error messages.

Efficient Project Actionability

Your Project Dashboard doesn’t just provide insight. You can also take critical actions on many different aspects of your projects right from the project tile.

Many of these actions are phase-dependent, and you can view those actions very easily by just clicking on the outreach phase in your project tile of choice.

These contextual actions vary by phase, but you can use them to:

• View the list of all contacts that exist in that phase
• Launch into a BuzzMarker “Review on Web” workflow
• Search for contact info using our Hunter.io integration

In addition to phase-dependent actions, you can also directly respond to project notifications or errors.

Just click into the alerts section of your project tile to see all the actions you can take to resolve errors, stay on top of follow-up reminders, and complete other critical tasks.

Consolidated Project Phases to Unify Visibility

Now, let’s turn to those project phases we’ve been discussing to explore them in a little more detail. As discussed, project phases describe where each of your contacts exists in the general project lifecycle.

Those phases are:

• Qualify – Discover and vet prospects for your project.

• Prep – Get your contacts ready for outreach. This can include finding contact information and gathering info you’ll need to personalize or populate your sequences.

• Outbound – Manage your sent and scheduled outreach to contacts.

• Connected – Review contacts that you are currently in communication with.
• Complete – View contacts that have completed their outreach cycle.

Now, if you are familiar with BuzzStream, you are likely already asking yourself: How the heck do these phases get populated? And what happened to my relationship stages!?

No need to worry dear reader, your stages are all good and well and are in fact integral to how project phases get populated!

The first time you open the Project Dashboard, whenever you click “configure phases,” you’ll be taken to the “Edit Relationship Stage” screen. Here, you’ll see a list of all of your relationship stages to the right and all of the project phases on the left.

Populating your phases is simple. Just drag your relationship stage of choice into the most applicable project phase, and it will begin populating that phase with contacts that exist in that given relationship stage.

And by the way, we’ll make a best guess on how to organize your stages, but you’ll likely want to review and adjust those to make sure they fit your expectations.

By handling phases this way, you’ve got all the flexibility to define relationship stages however you like, while still giving you unified visibility into where your projects stand. These can be modified at any time if the nature of a stage changes, or if you add a new stage that applies to a given phase.

Using the Project Dashboard

Now that we’ve given you an overview of all the different components of the Project Dashboard, let’s see a few examples of how you might use it.

Scenario 1: Overview of your team’s recent activity

Let’s say you’re managing a team and want to get an idea of what they’ve been doing recently and where things might be falling through the cracks so you can take action.

This is a snap in the Project Dashboard. Just enter the “All Projects” dashboard view, then sort projects by last opened. You’re now presented with a list of projects that your team has been working in recently.

From here, you can look on a per project basis and determine whether you need to take action. For example, you might see that a project has a lot of contacts in the Qualify phase, but very little in Prep or Outbound.

That might tell you that your teammate has hit a snag in their prospect qualification, and you can engage with them to figure out what needs to happen to move the campaign forward.

Alternatively, you can take action directly by clicking on the qualify phase, then launching into a Review on Web workflow to qualify those prospects directly from the project tile.

Scenario 2: Managing replies across all your projects

In this scenario, you have several active campaigns and are starting to see replies coming in. You can manage all of those from the projects dashboard so you can make sure nothing is getting missed.

To do that, just make sure you’re in the “My Projects” view in the dashboard, then click on the “Connected” phase. You’ll now be presented with a view of all your projects that have replies.

From here, you can take action on those replies by clicking the “Replies” icon in the project tile.

This will prevent you with the ability to launch directly into your outreach module to follow up on those replies, working through your projects and replies systematically.

Scenario 3: Get visibility into client campaigns

If you have organized client campaigns into their own folders, then the Project Dashboard can make staying on top of campaigns for key clients easier than ever.

To review and take action on client campaigns, make sure you have all of the campaigns for a given client organized into a client folder. Then, just click on the corresponding client folder from the Project Dashboard.

From here, you can see all ongoing campaigns for your client, giving you the insight to take action as necessary to make sure you’re progressing in line with your client’s needs.

Video Overview

Want a video overview of how the Projects Dashboard works? Your wish is my command!

Wrapping Up

As you can see, we’ve barely scratched the surface of the powerful capabilities of the Project Dashboard in BuzzStream. There is tremendous flexibility here, and we’re excited to see the inventive ways that our users can leverage this tool to get greater insight and actionability into their campaigns.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback. Let us know what you think, and if you have any questions please let us know!

The post Introducing the BuzzStream Projects Dashboard appeared first on BuzzStream.

New Unsubscribe Options

Previously, unsubscribe was an all or nothing game. If someone unsubscribed from an email, they were unsubscribed from getting emails from anyone using that BuzzStream account.

This ensured that no one was sent emails they didn’t want, but there were a lot of cases where that option really didn’t make sense. For example, what if you’re working on behalf of totally different brands or product lines using the same BuzzStream account, using totally different email addresses for each? A contact who isn’t interested in hearing about one of those doesn’t necessarily want to opt out of hearing from all of them.

Given that, we’ve now added two additional options when you include your unsubscribe message in your emails. You can still opt contacts out of ever hearing from anyone in your account, but you can also modify the rule to only apply to opting out of senders using the email domain that the contact unsubscribed from, or even just from that specific email address that they unsubscribe from.

Accessibility

We also wanted to improve the ways people can access unsubscribe options when setting up their emails. You’ve already seen how unsubscribe settings work in the email composer, but you can also set your unsubscribe rules from the contact record

from bulk send

and from your unsubscribed contacts settings page

Visibility

In the unhappy case where a contact has unsubscribed from your emails, we will display that information as well as the specifics around the unsubscribe rule that has been set for the contact so you and your team are aware if there are other options available for reaching out.

Wrapping Up

We hope that these new unsubscribe features give you the flexibility to handle contacts in a way that makes sense for your business. We’d love to hear your feedback on the new features and of course if you have any questions don’t hesitate to reach out!

The post Update: More Flexibility For Your Unsubscribe Preferences in BuzzStream appeared first on BuzzStream.

As of today, BuzzStream accounts on Professional plans or higher have the ability to set backup recipients when they are sending outreach.

What are Backup Recipients?

Let’s say you want to reach out to a publisher and there’s more than one contact that might be the right person for your outreach. Until now, most people would either pick one contact and hope they responded or set up a manual system where they sent to one contact, set up reminders to to find all contacts that didn’t respond, manually pick backup recipients and then send a new round of outreach. This process is tedious, time-consuming and error prone. People often just give up on the process because it requires so much work, so they lost out on potential links.

BuzzStream can now handle that whole process for you automatically. Now you can pick a primary recipient for your outreach to a website and a set of backup recipients. If your primary recipient doesn’t respond, BuzzStream automatically moves on to the next recipient for that website. This saves you time and increases the likelihood of getting links and coverage.

How Backup Recipients Work in BuzzStream

The new Backup Recipient functionality has been engineered to be really straightforward while also being flexible enough to adapt to the wide range of workflows users have in BuzzStream.

The basics of the feature are simple.

After you add a recipient for a website, just click into the Recipient field again and select the Add Backup Recipient option.

From here, select from email addresses or people you’ve added to a website that you think would be a good backup recipient. You can also add new people or email addresses right from here.

Now, send your outreach. You can send using backup recipients from anywhere in the app, but let’s just see how it works in Send Individually for now. You’ll notice that in addition to the Sequence stages you’re used to seeing in the new composer, you can also see the additional backup recipients you added.

If you’d like, you can also personalize each stage for your backup recipients to tailor the messaging to that recipient specifically.

Once you’re ready, you can send your outreach. Now, BuzzStream will automate the process. If you don’t receive a reply from your first recipient, BuzzStream will automatically try sending to the next after a period of time you define.

If you receive a reply from a recipient, then BuzzStream will stop sending any remaining stages of the sequence to that recipient and to any other backup recipients.

Importing Backup Recipients

In addition to adding backup recipients using the Recipient field, you can also import backup recipients directly. That way, you can quickly set up a whole campaign with backup recipients based on an existing CSV that you, your team, or outsourced partners have put together for you.

To do so, just make sure that you have a spreadsheet that includes multiple email addresses per website.

That can mean either having multiple rows with one recipient email in each (note: in order to import multiple people as recipients this is the way to do it)

Or a CSV with multiple email addresses per row

Either way, once you do so just associate your fields as normal, but make sure you select the option to add backup recipients on the preview and finish step and BuzzStream will take care of the rest!

Reordering Backup Recipients

BuzzStream gives you the ability to reorder your backup recipients as well. That way, if you decide at any point in time that one of your recipients for a website should be prioritized ahead of others when you’re sending outreach, it’s easy to take care of.

To reorder recipients, just click into the Recipient field and drag and drop your recipients in your preferred order.

You can even reorder recipients after you’ve started sending your sequence in the same way, as long as they aren’t the recipient that is actively being sent to.

Backup Recipients in Action

Want to see how backup recipients work in BuzzStream? We’ve put together a quick video to show you!

Wrapping Up

We’re extremely excited to bring Backup Recipient functionality to BuzzStream. We hope you’ll find this feature a powerful addition to your workflow to secure more links and coverage. If you have any questions, please let us know!

The post Introducing Backup Recipients in BuzzStream appeared first on BuzzStream.

Introducing the Revamped BuzzStream Email Composer

At the heart of this latest update is the improved BuzzStream email composer. The first thing you’ll notice is a change to where the composer appears if you’re opening it on a contact record. Previously, the composer opened just below the contact profile summary info. That was fine, but meant that occasionally you had to do a lot of scrolling if you wanted to review items in your history or elsewhere on a contact’s profile.

Now, the composer opens in its own pop-out window at the lower left of your screen. You can navigate around the rest of the profile and even minimize this window if you need it out of the way while reviewing other information.

Now this is handy, but the biggest improvement comes with our new inline sequence editor.

Previously, sequence steps were each accessed within their own tab in the composer. This meant that occasionally you could lose context when navigating between steps. Well, not anymore. Now, you can edit your sequence in one inline scrollable interface that means you’ll never lose that context.

We’ve also included the new composer experience in other key areas of the app, including our Send Individually workflows, so you can enjoy the new experience throughout BuzzStream.

Sequence Summary Information

With an improved sequence composing experience, we also wanted to add improved sequence insights. Now, when you review the History tab for a contact record, you’ll see a sequence summary section for any active sequences associated with your contact.

This summary section will make it much easier to understand what exactly is going on with your sequence so you can review and take action where needed.

Video Summary

To show you these updates live in action, we’ve also put together a quick video walkthrough.

Wrapping Up

I hope these updates provide a smoother and more efficient experience as you’re emailing your contacts. I’d love to hear from you what you think – please let me know any questions or feedback you have about these changes!

The post Introducing the Updated BuzzStream Email Composer appeared first on BuzzStream.

We’ve just added several new automated stages so BuzzStream can do even more work for you to enable you to easily get insight into relationships without any additional work on your part.

Those new stages are:

• Scheduled: when you schedule an email to send in the future, the contact will be moved to this stage so you know they’ve got emails coming up.
• Paused: when an email is paused, either by a user or by BuzzStream’s system, the contact will move to this stage 
• Bounce: if an email is sent but can’t be delivered to a recipients email address, the contact will move to this stage so you can modify or remove the email address
• Send Failure: if a known problem causes an email to fail to send, the contact will move to this stage so you can take corrective action
• Unsuccessful – No Reply: if a contact has been sent the last stage of their sequence and don’t reply within a certain period of time that you define, they will be moved to this stage

We’ve put together a quick video talking you through these stages as well:

We hope these new stages provide more actionable information you can use to manage and interact with your contacts. Please let us know any questions or feedback you’ve got!

The post Relationship Tracking Automation Improvements appeared first on BuzzStream.

Now you’ll have the flexibility to get greater insight into the contacts you’re emailing, have more actionable controls for interacting with them, and greater filtering capabilities to get right to the information you need.

Let’s dive in and take a look at all the features in this new update.

Opportunities

In BuzzStream, you’ve always been able to see the emails tied to contacts you’re interacting with in your campaigns right in your mailboxes. However, it was previously tricky to get at a glance insight into all of the campaign data tied to those emails, including which specific projects they were tied to, the contacts associated with them, and the relationship stage they were in.

Now, you’ve got all of that information included right in your mailboxes (and elsewhere) with Opportunities.

In BuzzStream, an opportunity represents all of the project-specific information about a contact. With opportunities in your mailboxes, you can quickly see this critical information for all of the emails you’re interacting with.

These opportunity details are also included on the contact profiles in your projects, so you can organize and get insight into this information there as well.

Opportunity Tags

Along with opportunities, we’ve included a brand new tag type in BuzzStream: Opportunity Tags.

Using opportunity tags, you can tag contacts with project-specific information to help you keep track of key details throughout your outreach workflow. These will differ from the Website and People Tags that you are currently familiar with because these are only tied to the opportunity. This means that these tags will not be reflected across all of your projects, only the project associated with a given opportunity.

In essence, you won’t have to clutter up your account with tags that are irrelevant outside of a given project.

For example, let’s say that you are reaching out to a contact on behalf of a specific client, and they request payment for a link. Whether you actually want to pay or not, you can tag that opportunity so you know that for this campaign they are making a paid link request. This tag will only apply in this project, so if you outreach in another project and they don’t make a paid request you will not get confused by this previous (not relevant) tag.

Applying an opportunity tag is simple. Just select one or more contacts you’d like to apply the tag to, then click the tag icon

now, just apply or create the tags you want

To filter on opportunity tags, just select the Tag filters at the top of the Mailbox section. From here, you can filter on any of the tags you’ve added to only see emails tied to those tags.

Resume Sequences

If you use sequences in BuzzStream, then you know how frustrating it can be when you receive a reply that isn’t really a reply, such as an out of office message, that breaks your sequence. Now, with our resume sequence functionality, you can pick right back up where it left off when a sequence is broken prematurely.

To resume a broken sequence, just select the email that broke the sequence in your campaign and click the three dots menu. Then, click “Archive and resume”

This will archive the message that shouldn’t have broken the sequence, and resume the sequence at the next stage in the chain.

Bulk Operations on Relationship Stages

Sometimes, you want to change the relationship stages across a number of opportunities at once in your mailboxes and don’t need the full context of the email to do so. With our bulk relationship stage operations, we’ve made that a simple process.

Just select the emails you’d like to change the relationship stages for and select the relationship stage change icon

Finally, select the stage you’d like those contacts set to and they will be changed.

Wrapping up

We hope that you enjoy all of these updates to functionality in the BuzzStream mailboxes. If you have any questions or feedback please let us know! We’re always happy to hear it.

The post New Ways to Take Action in BuzzStream Mailboxes appeared first on BuzzStream.

The problem is, dealing with contact forms as part of your overall outreach workflow can be very clunky. You’ve got to manually find the right page, navigate to the site and away from your streamlined BuzzStream interface, copy your message into the field and then remember to actually update your contact once you’ve sent the dang thing.

Well, all that’s in the past, because I’m extremely pleased to announce that we’ve added a streamlined contact form workflow!

Adding Contact Forms as Recipients

The first part of this update includes the ability to add contact forms as recipients to your contacts. Previously, you could only add email addresses, but now you can define a contact form when that makes more sense to use for outreach. Doing so is easy.

First, just click into the recipient field. You’ll notice that there is now a “Contact Forms” section, making it easy to see when you’ve got a contact form available to use.

In this new section, you’ll see any forms that BuzzStream has discovered or that you or your team have added. You can also add a new contact form to a contact right from here.

Once you select a contact form, it will be added as the recipient for your contact.

Contact Form Outreach Workflow

Once you’ve added a contact form as a recipient, you can utilize that contact as part of your “Send Individually” workflow.

The great thing here is that you can select a mix of contacts that use outreach forms and email addresses as recipients. No need to conduct two different rounds of outreach! Just select the contacts you’d like to send to and choose the “Send Individually” option.

Now, you can see that you’ve got the workflow view you know and love, with all the contact details on the left and your email on the right. You can customize the messaging here just as you would normally. Once you do so, you can click the “Copy to Clipboard and Open Contact Form” option on the bottom. This will copy your message and take you right to the contact form so you can enter the details without manually copying and pasting.

Once that’s done, just navigate back to BuzzStream and click “Update History and Stage” to mark the contact with the “Attempting to Reach” stage and move to the next contact in your outreach list.

Now, when you view the history for your contact, you’ll see that the message you sent through the form has been captured automatically and the relationship stage has been set!

Wrap-up

We hope that this new way of managing and sending to contact forms speeds up your workflow and makes the whole process more efficient! If you’ve got any questions about using contact forms in your outreach, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

The post Improved Workflow for Sending to Contact Forms appeared first on BuzzStream.

Please (PLEASE) integrate Hunter.io into BuzzStream!

Well, today I am extremely excited to announce that, yes, if you’ve got a BuzzStream group plan or above and a Hunter.io account you will now be able to use all of their contact info data in BuzzStream to help you find emails and people even faster.

Oh, and by the way, we’ve also added contact information filters and updated our “Add Contact” functionality. More on those below!

Hunter.io Integration

To get started all you need to do is add your Hunter API key to BuzzStream through our third party integrations page. 

Now, you can add Hunter’s discovered contact information to your contacts while maintaining full control of your Hunter account so you don’t accidentally go over any limits. 

To enrich contacts with Hunter.io data, simply navigate to the project you’d like to add those contact details for. From that project, go to either your Research List or Outreach List, highlight the contacts you’d like to enrich, then click Research, then Search Hunter.io for contact info.

Now you’ll be able to choose whether you’d like to use any of Hunter’s deliverability filters to help narrow down the contact info they discover. For full information on these filters, I recommend you check out the documentation available on Hunter’s site.

Once you’ve done that, just click continue and Hunter will begin adding their contact details to your contacts! Now you can access that information in a variety of different ways.

First, you can use Hunter contact information and bylines to populate recipients for your campaign so you know you’re sending emails to the right people. Just click in the recipient field and you’ll see all of the discovered information there, including general website emails as well as a list of the specific people Hunter has discovered belonging to a site, including their roles and email addresses.

You can also access Hunter information when adding contacts individually. Just enter the domain information and in seconds you can access any people and contact info that Hunter discovers and add it to the BuzzStream contact record.

Finally, BuzzStream will send you a CSV download of any contact information found for records in your account. You can then open and review that information in the program of your choice.

New Contact Info Filters

Given all the new ways to gather contact information with the Hunter.io integration, we wanted to give you the flexibility to find and review that as well as other campaign details such as associated people and campaign recipients. That way, you’ll be able to see at a glance where you’ve already got details and assigned recipients and where you need to spend more time researching.

Enter our new contact info filters.

At a high level, these filters will let you filter contacts, discovered contact info, or recipients on email address, name, or role fields. If that sounds a bit dry, let me make it real for you.

For one example, what if you want to just quickly see which of the contacts in your account has a discovered email address so you can quickly approve and assign those? Just set the filter criteria to “Discovered contacts”, the field to “Email address” and the filter to “has any value”. Now, you’ve just got a list of contacts with emails you can send to right away!

What if instead you wanted to send to a list of people working at the websites in your list, but aren’t sure where you still need to find the right info? Just set the criteria to “Project recipient”, the field to “Name” and the filter to “is empty”. Now, you know exactly where you or your team need to spend some time researching and adding the right person to be the recipient for your outreach emails.

Ok, one more that’s just a little more out there! Let’s say you’ve got a huge list of website contacts and you remember you wanted to send a tailored message to one of the people associated with them, but can’t remember the full name. Was it…Kelly something? We’ve got your back. Set the criteria to “Contacts” the field to “Name” and the filter criteria to “contains: Kelly”. Now you’ll see the list of contacts in your account with and associated person named Kelly! 

There’s a ton more flexibility here and we’re just scratching the surface, but suffice to say there’s a lot you can do with these new filters.

Updated “Add/Edit Contact” Functionality

We’ve also updated our “Add/Edit contact” forms to better support the Hunter.io data integration, and in the process made some significant updates that offer much more functionality that will save you time and give more granular control over your contact database.

First, we know that sometimes when adding people to reach out to across a variety of projects, sometimes duplicates and creep in. To support managing those better, you now have the ability to merge People contacts. To do that, just click on a Person record that you know has a duplicate, then click the Edit button in the top right corner.

Now, look at the bottom of the field list and you’ll see a yellow button stating how many duplicate contacts exist.

Click that button, and you’ll see the specific duplicate records. From there, just select the duplicates you’d like to merge into the same record, then click Merge and the duplicates will merge into one record.

Related to our quest to eliminate duplicate contacts from the world, we’ve now included much better auto-suggest functionality when adding people to your account. Previously, we only showed the names of people when you entered a contact with the same name. Now, we will show you their name, email address, and any role info you’ve added so you can make a much better decision on the fly.

Previously, it was impossible to associate people to a website directly from the “Add Website” form. This was frustrating and could lead to multiple steps to accommodate that goal. Now, you can add associated people directly from the form (and, as mentioned above, you can populate the People section using discovered Hunter.io data).

Finally, we’ve made it possible to add and edit any data from the edit section of person or website records. Previously the list of fields you could access there was constrained, resulting in extra steps and wasted time. Now you can enter all of the details so there’s no extra clicks or searching for the right place to add info.

Wrap-up

We hope that all of these new improvements give you even more tools to find contact info, manage contacts, and send effective outreach! We covered a lot here, but it’s only touching on the power of these new tools and our Hunter.io integration. As you try them out we’d love to hear from you! Please get in touch with any questions or feedback you have.

The post Hunter.io Integration and Updated Contact Management appeared first on BuzzStream.

Almost universally, we heard that the most painful part of the outreach process comes in building a highly qualified outreach list and managing the contact info gathering, research, and eventual email responsibilities across multiple teams or campaigns.

So, I’m excited to announce that we’ve just released a major overhaul of our prospecting web research features that will dramatically reduce the time you spend on tedious aspects of list-building while also giving you the tools to conduct research and better manage outreach responsibilities across your team.

We’ll be rolling these features out to all users over the next few days, so if you don’t see them in your account just yet don’t worry, they’ll be available soon!

We’ll go over all the details in this post, but if you’d rather get a quick overview you can just check out this video:

Conduct Better Research with Outreach Fields

Generally speaking, within the context of any given campaign, there is a fairly discrete list of things you need to properly research a prospect. The two major ones are:

1. Finding the right contact and contact information for the site or publication
2. Making sure that all of the fields you use in your template are properly filled out

Now, BuzzStream provides Recipient and Outreach Fields while you are prospecting so that you can gather relevant information right as you move through your web research process. This means that you or your team won’t have to do nearly as much work gathering information in spreadsheets or having to click through all of your campaign fields in the BuzzMarker so you can stay focused on the research that matters

Even better, if you do break up research responsibilities across team members (for example, if you have a VA or Intern who does the initial list gathering, another who qualifies and researches the sites, and a final, and a specialist sending outreach) then our new research flow will make that process much more organized. Now the person conducting research can prepopulate template fields with relevant data so when the person actually sending outreach is ready all of the information they need is right there for them.

Accessing and using outreach fields is easy.

First, you’ll just need to enter a web research flow from your BuzzStream research list.

Now, once you approve a site, you’ll see the fields change in the BuzzMarker. Initially, you’ll see that there is a Recipient field, which you can immediately populate with the contact details of the person you’d like to email in your campaign.

Once you’re ready, you can then select the template you’re going to be using in your campaign by selecting it from the convenient dropdown in the BuzzMarker.

Once that’s done, you’ll see all of the merge fields from that template, so you’ll know immediately what to populate or modify.

The best part is that you can immediately see how the template will look by selecting the Outreach option and viewing it right in the research flow.

And of course, if you or your team member is the only one conducting outreach, you can actually send your message right then and there without ever leaving the research flow!

Get Insight Into Contact History and Never Make a Mistake

One of the most common complaints that we hear all the time is that team members working in related verticals will occasionally email the same person from the same client in different campaigns, or even reach out to someone who has previously expressed a negative sentiment towards their outreach. Needless to say, this can be very bad for building the relationship, and can often result in lost coverage opportunities and emails that get marked as spam.

Fortunately, BuzzStream has your back. You can now see your full contact history with prospects while you’re researching them so that you will always know if someone shouldn’t be included in your campaign because of previous engagements with you or your team.

To access the history, just click the Activity icon at the top of the BuzzMarker when you are on a particular prospect.

From here you can see all of your past campaign activity with that prospect if there is any. Most critically, you can see if that contact is in an active sequence or has an email scheduled for them from you or other team members so you aren’t overmessaging them.

Lightning Fast Research Gets Lightning Faster(er) with Keyboard Shortcuts

Finally, as we were building out these improvements, we couldn’t help saying to ourselves, 

“Y’know, this research is pretty quick. But what if it was….even faster!?”

And so it was that we decided to implement keyboard shortcuts for all of the common activities in our research flow. 

Now, when you’re conducting research, you don’t even have to click your screen in order to approve, reject, blacklist, or close and move to the next prospect in your list. Just use the proper key command and sure enough you’ll be absolutely flying through your qualification.

Wrapping Up

We hope that all of these prospect research improvements make what can admittedly be a rather tedious process much simpler. Whether you’re building a laser-targeted list of thought leaders or a large database of qualified journalists, we believe that these research features will give you the tools you need to send outreach that gets attention, links and coverage.

We’ve got quite a bit more up our sleeves, so stay tuned. And if you have any thoughts, questions, feedback, or suggestions for this or future improvements, please let us know!

The post Faster and More Flexible Prospect Research appeared first on BuzzStream.

Here’s what some of our customers had to say:

“Prospecting is the most important and time consuming step in Fractl’s outreach process. BuzzStream’s new prospecting capabilities make it easy to quickly collate and vet a list of sites by integrating our favorite list building tools. What’s great is that all of this functions within the BuzzStream dashboard, which cleans up a multi-step process and is a massive time saver. I’m very eager to get this rollout in the hands of my media relations team!”

      Kelsey Libert, co-founder at Fractl

“We couldn’t do our outreach without BuzzStream. They’re a core component of what makes our team efficient and successful. Additionally, their software is frequently updating to meet our needs and requests and their new update is just another example of that. They listen to their customers and it’s what keeps them ahead of any other service we’ve tried.”

     Ross Hudgens, founder and CEO of Siege Media

“BuzzStream’s new multi-tab research capability is exactly what I’ve waited years for. It solves the last piece of efficiency for manually vetting prospects. It might only save a few seconds for each site, but when you have multiple team members vetting 1000s of prospects per week, that adds up quickly. This instantly allows us to vet 15-20% more prospects in the same amount of time.”

      Jon Cooper, founder of Hyperlynx Media

The New BuzzStream has been designed from the ground up to directly enhance our customers’ workflows. We know that each team has their own unique approach when it comes to prospecting, researching, emailing, and managing relationships with contacts in their campaigns. Our goal here has been to introduce features that let those teams get their work done in the most efficient, most accurate way possible; all without shoehorning them into one constricting process.

We’ll cover all of the updates to BuzzStream in this post, but I’d like to showcase our Prospecting Research workflow right off the bat. More than anything, this showcases the sheer speed, efficiency, and customizability available to BuzzStream customers in this new release.

Now that you’ve got a good sense of the power of the New BuzzStream, let’s dive in and dissect all of the improvements. If you’d rather watch a full video overview instead, just scroll down and watch the one we’ve included at the bottom of this post.

Navigate Easier With A More Modern, Intuitive User Interface 

BuzzStream now has a brand new navigation layout that makes it much more convenient to orient yourself in the app and access all of its features.

We’ve moved the major elements of BuzzStream to the left in our global navigation bar. Here, you’ll be able to access your Projects, Mailboxes and Tasks, Contacts, Links, and Reporting sections. This is also where you’ll be able to access notifications, settings, and go to your home project.

Get More Info To Qualify Prospects With Brand New Research Metrics 

When you add or edit a project, you’ll now notice a brand new section within that screen titled “Research Metrics”.

The Research Metrics section is where you’ll determine which metrics you’d like to include in your campaign to help you research and vet your contacts. Some of these, such as DA, post frequency, and post date will be familiar to you if you’ve used BuzzStream before. However, you’ll notice that we now have a “BuzzStream URL Metrics Section.”

In this section, you’ll find a brand new set of metrics that BuzzStream will automatically collect for you when you add a page. These metrics include:

• Linked Domains – The number of unique domains linked to from a page, so you know if they a propensity to link out to a variety of sites
• Outbound Links – The total number of links on a page
• Dofollowed Outbound Links – The total number of dofollowed links on a page
• Http Status – The status of a page (Obviously)

Using these metrics, you can get more on-page information than ever without any additional work or tools to quickly qualify and vet prospects. Just add your page, BuzzStream will grab the metrics, and you can use them immediately.

If you happen to have a premium BuzzStream plan (Group level or above), as well as an Ahrefs account, you now have the ability to tie the two products together to leverage the research information from Ahrefs with the outreach power of BuzzStream.

Once you integrate with Ahrefs, we will automatically collect the metrics you designate within your project. These include:

• Domain/URL Rating
• Position Metrics
• Backlinks and Referring Domains

Using Ahrefs metrics like DR, you’ll now have even more insight into site quality as well as other metrics to help determine what targets to include in your list. 

But speaking of research…

Find and Vet Prospects Lightning Fast in Research Lists

Though there have been numerous changes in the New BuzzStream, the most substantial enhancement has come in the form of Research Lists.

In short, a Research List is a place to vet and research a list of prospects to determine which you should include in your campaign. 

Despite the simple explanation, there is a ton of power behind Research Lists. 

You’ve got several options for adding to a research list. 

First, you can add prospects to Research Lists from any list of websites on the web, including Google Searches, “best of blog lists”, list generated from prominent tools, etc. If you’ve got a list of URLs, you’ve got a list of prospects. Just BuzzMark the page to create a prospecting list, then check the box next to “Add as a Research List”, then click “Add to Project”. Now, BuzzStream will pull in all of these sites as prospects and start gathering metrics and contact info for them.

Second, you can “Add from Web Search”. From here you can just add the searches that you’d normally use to find prospects, including any variations or advanced operators you’d normally include, and BuzzStream will gather all the info you need to make fast, intelligent decisions about which prospects to include in your campaign including metrics, contact details, and other info, and include them in your “Research List”. 

The third option, “Add from News Search”, works exactly the same except it will be looking specifically at News searches. This makes it a great asset if you’re specifically targeting news publications for your campaign. 

Finally, you’ve got the option to “Add Prospects Manually”. This option allows you to include any unvetted lists that you, your team, or outside sources have put together for you. This might include competitor backlink lists from Ahrefs or Moz, targeted content from BuzzSumo, or lists you’ve gathered from search engine research. Once they’re included you can vet them in the same way as those that BuzzStream discovers for you.

However you choose to get your prospects into a Research List, once you do you’ll find that BuzzStream has done a ton of work for you to give you all the information and tools you need to quickly determine which prospects are a good fit for your campaign.

Looking at each prospect, you’ll see that BuzzStream has included the title tag, page snippet, and the specific search term that returned the prospect in your list. You’ll also see that BuzzStream will automatically detect author bylines and contact information when they are present, and give you the ability to add them to a sites record right from your Research list.

Looking at the columns for each prospect, you’ll see the metrics and other project information you’ve added, including third-party metrics from Moz and Ahrefs. You can sort and configure any of these columns to display the information and research fields you need when prospecting.

Using all of this information, it is often quick to make a determination for any one prospect as to whether or not you should add them to the project, reject them or blacklist them. Once you decide on any one of these courses of action, you can take it right on the prospect by clicking the corresponding option.

However, you’ll often want to narrow down your list and reject or approve en masse. This is where our prospecting filters come into play.

Dig Into Your Data and Quickly Qualify Using Prospecting Filters

Prospecting Filters make it simple to filter down your list based on the information and metrics you care about so you can quickly eliminate sites that aren’t a good fit for your campaign based on thresholds you set.

First, you’ll see our Research Pages filters. These include the following options:

• Source: this filter will let you filter by the specific keyword phrase(s) you entered in your research list so you can identify the most effective sources for your campaign
• Research Page URL: this will let you filter by URLs to narrow your targets down (for example, by only looking for pages that have “review” in their URL)
• Research Page Title: this filter will let you narrow searches by title, so you can remove irrelevant content or focus on specific title keywords that are most relevant

You’ll also find our Metrics filters here. These filters will let you set relevant ranges for any metrics you’ve enabled in your campaign, including the new Ahrefs and BuzzStream metrics.

Once you’ve set these filters, you’ll find that you have a much more manageable list. At this point, you just need to finalize your list and gather the relevant information for them. This brings us to the major improvement we’ve made to the BuzzMarker’s web research capabilities.

Vet Prospects Right At The Source With BuzzMarker Research

No matter how many metrics and other pieces of information we give in-app, there is no more definitive way of determining a prospects quality than by viewing their website. With BuzzStream’s latest update to the BuzzMarker, you can now do this dramatically more quickly than ever before, and in a way that is completely tailored to your workflow.

Once you’ve determined the list of prospects you’d like to research, just select them and click the “Research” icon, then select “Review on the Web”. From here, you’ll see that you have two options: Review Prospects in Multiple Tabs and Review Prospects in a Single Tab. We’re going to focus on the first of those options, our BuzzMarker multi-tab workflow. 

Selecting this option will launch the first five prospects in your list into their own separate tabs (although you can specify more or less than five if you’d prefer). On each of those tabs, you’ll see the full site as well as the open BuzzMarker with the ability to Approve, Reject, or Blacklist the site. When you take your action and click “Close and Go To Next”, the BuzzMarker will then close your current tab, move you to the next site, and open a tab with another prospect from the list.

To put it more simply: you’ll be able to move through your entire list using the full context of their sites with essentially zero page load times.

Oh, is that not fast enough for you? No worries, we’ve got you covered.

In your BuzzMarker prospecting preferences, you’ve got the ability to set automatic behaviors when you take a certain action. For example, you can set the BuzzMarker to automatically close and move to the next whenever you reject or blacklist a site. Now, you won’t even have to manually click the button when you reject a site to move to the next in your list. 

Depending on your workflow, you might decide to just reject and approve sites then go back and find contact details, or assign someone else on my team that activity. Alternatively, if you’re ready to send outreach using the details you’ve gathered, you can actually go ahead and do that right from the BuzzMarker. No matter how you like to prospect and send outreach, BuzzStream has an option that you can customize just for you.

Overview

There’s a ton of info to digest in this release. If you’d rather watch than read, here’s a full video going over the end-to-end changes included in the New BuzzStream

Wrapping Up

Without any doubt, this is the largest BuzzStream update we’ve ever made. More than ever, we want you to play with it, use it in your campaigns, and really get a sense of how it works. We want to hear about your successes, and we want to hear where you run into trouble. If you think something is great, we want to know about it. If you think something sucks, we want to know about that too.

The important thing to know is this: we’re just getting started and have tons more improvements coming to the new BuzzStream very soon. We hope you’re excited, because we certainly are.

Special Thanks

This release wouldn’t have been possible without the help and support of many customers, experts, and teams who have given us their feedback and advice. I’d like to give a particular shoutout to a few individuals who have gone above and beyond in helping us with this release.

Amanda Milligan, Kelsey Libert, and Dan Tynski from Fractl

Ross Hudgens, Caroline Gilbert, and Vince Nero from Siege Media

Jon Cooper from Hyperlynx Media

Mike King from iPullRank

Matt Diggity from Diggity Marketing

Lisa Myers, Laura D’Amato and Jack Bamfield from Verve Search

Adam Connell from Blogging Wizard

The Outreach Team at Page One Power

Carrie Rose and Will Hobson from Rise At Seven

Bibi Raven of BibiBuzz

Mitchell Ndlovu and Anouk Knuffman at Ameliorate SEO

Thom Watson at Flaunt Digital

Joe Robison at Green Flag Digital

Andy Newhall at Turn5

Christina Coons at Northcutt

Thaylise Nakamoto at Canva

Darren Dematas at EcommerceCEO

Curtis Del Principe at Aeroflow

Ryon Flack and Christian Galvez at Newegg

Isaac Hammelburger of searchpros.co

The post The New BuzzStream Is Here appeared first on BuzzStream.