Marketing Tool Review: Ninja Outreach
One of Growth Labs’ internal goals for several months has been to increase our website traffic. We aim to be a leader in the field of SaaS marketing and therefore want to grow our online presence to both grow our community and attract qualified customers to our services. We had the opportunity to try the new outreach platform, Ninja Outreach, and look forward to sharing our experience and some tips we learned with you!
Ninja Outreach seeks to connect businesses with relevant influencers and provide the tools to automate outreach to these new contacts. While using Ninja Outreach definitely made it easier to find relevant contacts, the system required some adjusting to in order to get the seamless, easy advertised experience. Overall, for finding related companies, bloggers, and influencers, Ninja Outreach is an awesome outreach and marketing tool to expand your network for a number of different goals and with some technical improvements, it will be easy to use to achieve expanded marketing and outreach goals.
Prospecting
One of the core activities Ninja Outreach does is prospecting, or searching, for contacts for outreach activities. This is done on two different pages: one that searches blog and other web content and one that searches through social media presence. The filters available on these pages were very helpful when it came to narrowing down the wide list of results to potential prospects that would be the best candidates for outreach. For example, in the past, we needed to use additional tools to check the Domain Authority or it took extra time to verify if a contact had a large following on social media. With Ninja Outreach, all this information is presented right in front of you and you can filter to only see contacts with certain properties or sort them by a particular property before making a decision to save them as a contact.
Tip: Use Ninja Outreach filters to find the best contact for your outreach goals.
With prospecting, it took us some time to find the correct strategy for searching and saving quality contacts that would be yield responses for our outreach. At first, we received a lot of automated responses when creating a list full of generic or support email accounts. Then after checking both for quality factors like DA/follower numbers and for contacts with personalized email addresses, our next campaign returned many more responses and connections.
Tip: Beware generic emails. Choose contacts with personalized email accounts.
Contact Lists
Ninja Outreach makes it very easy to create contact lists and save contacts to specific lists as you are prospecting. This aspect was very helpful for us as we worked to conduct outreach related to several different projects at one time. Even with multiple team members using the account, it was easy to click between lists while searching for new prospects. Contact lists also makes it easy to add new contacts when reviewing search results. By clicking the “Add (+)” button next to a contact, they are automatically added to the specified list and they disappear from the search results.
Tip: Segment contacts into separate lists for each campaign as you prospect.
Email Templates
Ninja Outreach makes email marketing easier by providing a number of easy to customize email templates for various scenarios. While they never quite matched our exact needs, they were a firm foundation when used for outreach about expert roundup articles, notifying about an offer, broaching the subject of partnerships, and necessary follow-up. The tone of the templates is a good reminder to be personable when conducting outreach. Naturally, there is a balance to strike between being professional and casual, however Ninja Outreach’s email copy reminds us that people best respond to people, not robots.
Tip: Check available email templates before drafting more copy.
One issue that we ran into when customizing was with automatic personalization properties. Because several contact records from our prospects were incomplete, it was difficult to use typical personalization tokens in a greeting, compared to when doing outreach from our internal contact database. In addition, some properties did not automatically merge and therefore stayed in their generic form– e.g. [Day of the Week]. Before sending out emails using these properties, be sure to send a test email to prevent any issues in your outreach activities.
Tip: Preview and test emails that use personalization properties.
Outreach Mode
When it came to actually conducting outreach and sending emails, the most amazing aspect of Ninja Outreach was its ability to sync with an external email account. While sending the emails then was set-up within the tool’s Outreach Mode, all responses populated as normal in our inbox. After trying to do some checking and sending email within the Ninja Outreach tool, it proved easier to nurture these new contacts through a more familiar email system.
The Outreach Mode within the platform was most useful for seeing bigger trends, like the percentage of responses and who was due for a follow up.
Tip: Schedule follow up when scheduling the first outreach email to fully automate a campaign.
With our first campaign, we hesitantly scheduled the initial outreach without a scheduled follow up, in order to better control the process from our inbox. However, it was significantly more difficult to schedule a bulk follow up email for a campaign after-the-fact than if we had done it when initially setting up the campaign. Instead, we ended up having to sort through the contacts that needed follow up to create a new campaign. If we had scheduled the follow up email initially, Ninja Outreach would have done this for us based on their tracking system for responses. With more use and trust in the tool, it was easy to see how Ninja Outreach could easily automate an entire campaign.
Results
During our trial of Ninja Outreach we conducted 4 outreach campaigns, reaching out to 110 new contacts. Here were our results:
| Emails Sent | Response Rate | New Contacts | |
| Expert Roundup Article 1 | 39 | 26% | 3 |
| Expert Roundup Article 2 | 29 | 7% | 1 |
| Cross-Promotion Proposal | 32 | 29% | 4 |
| Promotion of New Product | 10 | 0% | 0 |
Ninja Outreach has a great support team for users and is constantly providing emails and blog tutorials with tips for how to use the tool most effectively. Although we made the decision to mainly experiment with the tool on our own, we would recommend that other users schedule a free consultation with Ninja Outreach Founder, Dave Schneider and even enroll in their Academy when using the tool. The Ninja Outreach team is constantly reaching out to offer their guidance and support. Using Ninja Outreach did give us several meaningful connections and we are confident that if we had taken these steps, we would have had much higher response rates when using the tool.
Tip: Take advantage of the great Ninja Outreach customer support and tutorials to get the most of the tool.
Overall, our experience with Ninja Outreach was a great way to kickstart some of the outreach efforts that we had been procrastinating on and it also inspired several new efforts that provided us with new content and connections. As a platform, Ninja Outreach requires some adaptation, but after running several campaigns, it gains your trust and has the potential to remove a lot of the effort from conducting outreach and nurturing new connections. When it comes to more general goals, like growing a business, or more specific goals, like increasing website traffic, Ninja Outreach makes it much easier to build the community to get you there.