5 of the Best Email List-Building Services

In today’s digital age, building and nurturing an email list is essential for businesses and individuals alike.

Whether you’re a marketer aiming to reach a wider audience, an entrepreneur looking to engage customers, or a content creator seeking to connect with loyal followers, everyone needs an audience to market to so their brand can stay profitable.

However, email list-building doesn’t have to be done by an individual; there is a whole swath of email list-building services available to save marketers, entrepreneurs, and content creators both time and money.

With countless options available, however, finding the best service that suits your specific needs can be overwhelming.

In this article, we will explore and compare some of the top email list-building services, highlighting their key features, benefits, and drawbacks, to help you make an informed decision and take your email marketing efforts to new heights.

First things first, however, I want to clarify…

What is an email list-building service, and why should you use one?

An email list-building service is a service that creates an online database of people interested in your products or services for you. Once created, that email list should be your primary market where you can expect the most success in selling products or services.

List-building services use automated tools to find (or scrape) valid emails and phone numbers which you can then export from Excel to your email marketing tool or CRM of choice.

Of course, there are also list-building tools that enable a user to build their own email list, whether it be through the same methods a list-building service would use or through things like pop-ups, discounts, lead magnets, and more. I will be including these in this article, so don’t be surprised if you see a handful.

Of course, a list-building service isn’t just going to build a list of whoever they can get their hands on; a list-building service will be selective and use whatever filters you want to comb through millions of people, leaving you with the best-suited contacts for your products or services.

As for why you should use one, it takes the time that you would have spent building your list and allows you to use that time to reach out to your contacts and potentially drive more sales.

You could’ve spent your time hand-building a list or hiring an agency to sift through data, but with an email list-building service you can not only save time but spend a more reasonable amount of money on your list-building.

Personally, I find list-building incredibly boring.

Overall, having access to list-building services makes my job so much easier, and they aren’t prohibitively expensive either. For those reasons, I’d recommend an email list-building service to pretty much anyone who wants an engaged audience to market to, and I’d also recommend you keep reading so I can tell you about some of the best email list-building services.

What are the best email list-building services?

UpLead is trusted by companies like Google, Dropbox, Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce. If that doesn’t inspire confidence in UpLead, then I’m not sure what else will.

UpLead is a cloud-based sales platform and list-building software that provides users access to a vast database of B2B contacts and company information.

Designed to help businesses and sales professionals identify and connect with their target audiences, UpLead offers a range of features to help users do so such as advanced search filters, contact verification, lead enrichment, and CRM integration.

Prospector

As compared to other email list-building tools, UpLead guarantees 95% precision to other tools’ 50% and, if UpLead doesn’t fulfill that 95% precision, you get the credits that you spent on those contacts back.

UpLead also has over 50 criteria that can be used to sift through the millions of contacts available to them and collect the email addresses of only the most qualified leads for your use case. I’ll list some of the criteria below:

• Industry
• Title
• Location
• Revenue
• Employees
• Company URL
• Technologies
• Funding

UpLead also verifies collected data in real time so users can be sure they’re communicating with real, qualified leads as opposed to inactive or spam email addresses.

Data Enrichment

If you already have an email list with basic information like name and company URL, you can use UpLead to enrich your simple list with 50+ additional data points, including verified emails, phone numbers, social links, and much more.

This feature in any email list-building software is vital, as having a list with minimal information gives you a minimal opportunity to filter that list and find the ripest candidates for your products or services.

Chrome Extension

You can take the power of UpLead to your browser with their Chrome extension, which allows you to find leads while browsing the web, wherever you might be.

You can click and immediately export your leads to your CRM ( in this case Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, etc.) or download them as a CSV file locally.

To interject with my personal experience using Waalaxy before I get into the overview, I want to say that, as email list-building software goes, I’ve never had a smoother and more user-friendly experience than I did using Waalaxy.

Waalaxy is one of the best email list-building tools simply because of how it tackles lead generation using LinkedIn.

See, LinkedIn limits its users to ~250 actions per day, including messages, connection requests, and more, even if your requests aren’t accepted. This makes it very difficult to collect email addresses in any meaningful amount.

Waalaxy has found a way around this problem while automating the whole process, from sending invitations and messages to scraping LinkedIn profiles for contact information.

Plus, all of that content gets fed straight into your CRM of choice without needing to do anything, which goes further to make Waalaxy one of the best email list-building tools for people with less technical expertise or time to do the little tasks, like migrating contact data.

LinkedIn Prospecting

Even if you have no technical experience, Waalaxy makes LinkedIn prospecting as easy as possible. With its intuitive user interface and detailed analytics, you can see exactly how your LinkedIn prospecting campaigns are going and make tweaks with no coding skills needed.

You can contact up to 500 people per week, each and every one of which are tailored to your market and are likely to interact with you once you reach out. From there, you can automate follow-ups with your contacts using the Waalaxy automation creator and utilize Waalaxy’s copywriting tips to boost your response rates from interested parties.

Once you’ve gotten a hang of Waalaxy’s LinkedIn prospecting automation, you can scale up your efforts and create more complex automation workflows. For example, you can trigger campaigns when people comment on a specific LinkedIn post or visit your profile.

Inbox Waalaxy

As an add-on to the standard Waalaxy feature suite, Inbox is meant to be the bridge between LinkedIn and your CRM. It can automate your LinkedIn prospecting conversations with pre-saved responses, the ability to tag leads, and schedule automated follow-ups for any situation.

You don’t get this feature with the standard Waalaxy plan, however; as I said earlier, it’s an add-on that you’ll have to pay extra for.

AI Prospect Finder (coming soon)

Waalaxy claims that their AI prospecting tool can get users 1,000 qualified LinkedIn prospects in under 2 minutes and that this automation will save users plenty of time in the process of LinkedIn prospecting.

The first version only takes into account LinkedIn titles and geographical locations when determining the likelihood of the prospect responding to your message, but Waalaxy plans on expanding this to include more data like years of experience, company size, school, previous experience, and history.

Plus, if you want to try this feature out before it’s officially released, you can join the waiting list for the private beta.

Boasting shockingly high conversion rates, Outgrow is a platform to create interactive content used to generate leads. This includes things like calculators, giveaways, and quizzes; things that include personalized responses to increase conversion rates as a byproduct.

While Outgrow doesn’t stick with standard pop-ups, their methods are incredibly effective at converting website visitors into qualified leads.

Features:

Templates

As they show on their website there are so many templates that Outgrow offers for all industries. From auto to beauty and legal, there is a template for nearly every use case.

To give an example, I’ll talk about their auto industry templates. These templates include several quizzes and calculators, such as “What kind of car should you buy?”, “how much can you make driving for Uber?”, “how much do you save by buying a Tesla?”, and more. This kind of interactive content warms customers up to your brand much more than other methods and helps you snag email addresses with ease.

On top of that, there is also a list of trending templates available to people who have purchased a plan, which helps users get an idea of what is performing well and what they could do with their own templates.

Smart Builder

If you don’t see a template you like or had something else in mind, you can create your own from scratch in Outgrow’s smart builder. In this builder, you can have a text input, single/multi-select, a numeric slider, an opinion scale, a date/time picker, file uploads, and much more.

In this form builder, you can also create complex formulas, like what you’d see in a math or statistics class. You can calculate mortgages, bonds, and interest; use if/else and nested if statements, upload math from Excel, and much more that is only limited by your imagination.

Embeds

Once you’ve created whatever quiz or calculator you want, you can embed it on your website in a host of different ways. Here is a list of all kinds of embeds you can do:

• Full page
• In-page
• Pop-up
• Chat
• Greet bar
• Floater
• Sidenote

You can also customize your embeds however you want, and they sky is the limit.

Pricing: While they do offer a 7-day free trial, Outgrow doesn’t have a free plan, but their paid plans start at an affordable $22/mo. They do offer custom plans for more tailored use cases and they offer to create a calculator, quiz, chatbot, and more for you starting at $250/piece of content.

OptinMonster isn’t a service that builds an email list for you, rather it is an email list-building tool that utilizes opt-in forms to convert website visitors into email subscribers as efficiently as possible.

With a variety of tools to grow your email lists like exit-intent popups, lightbox pop-ups, gamified wheels, and more, OptinMonster has an incredible variety of tools to collect contact details and improve your email list-building efforts.

Drag-and-Drop Builder

As list-building software goes, while OptinMonster doesn’t do the work for you, it makes creating your opt-in forms and collecting contact details incredibly simple with their drag-and-drop editor.

OptinMonster has a variety of customizable templates you can choose from for any use case, from standard pop-ups to gamification and more. You can also create custom forms if you don’t particularly like any of the templates presented to you, and the user interface to create interactive forms is very easy to wrap your head around.

To go further beyond what other marketing tools can do, OptinMonster has MonsterEffects, a library of 26+ animations and sound effects to help grab customer attention even more than a simple pop-up can.

Advanced Targeting

In order to get your contact forms filled out, you want to be as personalized as you can with your messaging. Luckily, with email list-building tools like OptinMonster, you can get incredibly granular with your messaging, from geo-location to device-based targeting.

You can get as specific as individual landing pages for specific pop-ups, ensuring that you’re showing the right pop-up to the perfect demographic at the right time.

For returning visitors who haven’t given you their contact information yet, you can create special offers and promotions to patch up any possible funnel leaks and make sure that the second opportunity you have to get their contact information is all you’ll need.

Plus, you can avoid AdBlock with your lead magnets, ensuring that your opt-in form will be shown to all of your website visitors.

WordPress Plugin

On top of all of its features, you can access them through OptinMonster’s WordPress plugin, A.K.A. their popup builder for opt-ins, email newsletters, and lead generation.

You can create basic pop-ups, floating bars, fullscreen pop-ups, inline forms, slide-ins, and gamified pop-ups without paying a dime, which is great value for a free tool.

On top of that, you have access to integrations with 33 tools to grow your email list, from email marketing software like Sendinblue and ActiveCampaign to CRMs (Customer Relationship Management) like Salesforce and Customer.io.

Out of all list-building strategies and services, Saleshive is likely the closest to what you imagined when you first heard “list-building services” in this article.

Saleshive is a more traditional list-building service, where a group of people find high-quality contact and account data to build updated lists from scratch without you having to do any of the work.

The benefit of a service like this is that, compared to a database license where you could have access to the contact info directly, it is less expensive in both time and money to have a service like Saleshive do your lead generation for you.

Custom List Building

Because Saleshive has access to some of the best databases on the planet and some of the best tools to comb through them with, they can create a list for pretty much any use case at reasonable pricing relative to their competitors.

Plus, Saleshive offers free onboarding, which other email list-building tools might charge for. This includes a dedicated sales playbook so you can see what copy Saleshive will use, where the scripts will be, who they’ll be targeting, and more.

Month-to-Month Contracts

Another major benefit of Saleshive is the flexibility they give their clients. Instead of locking you into year-long contracts even if you don’t want to be in one, Saleshive operates on a month-to-month model where clients can cancel any time for any reason.

Of course, it’ll take time for Saleshive to perfect its list-building strategy, but with time, you can expect high-quality leads for you to profit from using your email marketing.

Email List-Building Checklist

Saleshive follows a multi-step checklist for their email list-building, whereas other companies might stop at what is step 1 for Saleshive.

The process starts with finding an existing phone number and email list in Saleshive’s database providers. From there, Saleshive figures out what job title and position is missing, then the same for missing emails and phone numbers.

From there, all the information gathered is validated using a suite of software tools to make sure you aren’t paying for false emails.

Pricing: You may want to book a call to get pricing for your specific use case, but their Starter plan starts at $5,000/mo, including 20 – 30 meetings quarterly, email & LinkedIn campaigns, risk-free onboarding, and a custom sales playbook.