Earlier this year, we released a complete overhaul of BuzzStream, introducing a new UI as well as brand new features all geared towards making your outreach faster, more efficient, and more scaleable across teams. Since then, we’ve been listening to your feedback and honing in on those areas of the product that are most critical to the overall success of your campaigns.
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:
- Finding the right contact and contact information for the site or publication
- 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!
Check out the BuzzStream Podcast