Today I’m super excited to do the Apollo.io review for you.
I came across this amazing computer software tool recently, and I love it to bits. It has significantly improved our sales prospecting workflows. Prospecting is the gateway to a profitable business. To do it effectively, you need the right software.
That’s where Apollo and other similar software come in.
In this article, I will go over the major features of Apollo.
Let’s dive in.
What Is Apollo.io
Apollo.io is a data-driven engagement platform that helps sales reps identify sales opportunities and boost the quality of conversations they are having with prospects.
The software helps the sales team or small business owners do deep outreach, target prospects with precision, reach out, and engage them at speed and scale.
LinkedIn Prospector
With a jaw-dropping 756 million users in over 200 countries globally, LinkedIn is the number one business networking platform.
From jobseekers to C-level executives, you can find whoever you want on the platform. In short, LinkedIn is the Outreach Manager’s paradise. Apollo.io merges seamlessly with LinkedIn. You can prospect from the platform right inside the Apollo.io dashboard. You can also access LinkedIn via Gmail.
Once you’ve locked in your targets, you can:
To file the contacts into your Appolo.io saved info.
To save the contact information straight into your existing list.
Save the contacts as company accounts.
While doing all this sounds straightforward on paper, it’s a huge time saver when prospecting without the right sales tool. It saves you hours you could have spent wading through thousands of LinkedIn profiles, hunting for contacts, organizing them, and manually exporting them one by one.
But with Apollo.io you can do it all in minutes with just a few clicks.
Plus, you don’t have to worry about double entries. If the software detects a contact you already have in your database, it skips it. That’s not all. Apollo enables you to take all verified emails and direct-dial phone numbers from LinkedIn and sync them with your CRM instantly.
You can also access LinkedIn via Gmail.
In Gmail, as soon as you put a prospect’s name, their LinkedIn details pop up on the right sidebar.
You can then add the target prospect to a list or a sequence. If a prospect opts out of your lead generation campaign, just input ‘do not contact’ and they’ll never receive any more messages from you. Another convenient functionality is that you can access your Apollo.io email templates right inside Gmail at the click of a button. As soon as you write the person’s email address, the system will automatically populate the email complete with personalization.
Now that’s super smart.
You can also set up follow-up notifications to get reminders after a period you chose. Say if your prospect doesn’t respond in 6 hours or 24 hours, you get a timely reminder to follow up on them. With Apollo.io, no prospect will fall through the cracks because you forgot to follow up. Pretty amazing.
To top it all up, Apollo tracks all your emails. It tells you:
Apollo.io Prospector
Apollo.io has a jam-packed prospect pool you can fish from. You can use the tool to find contact info for people and companies.
The database has over 200 people and 10 million companies.
You can search for:
A pretty cool feature that’ll save you a lot of time and help you land ideal prospects fast is personas.
You can identify them by industry, title, department, and more. With titles, you can pick the job title or seniority of your targets e.g. founder, VP, Manager, Intern, C suite, etc. This laser targeting helps you to land the exact prospects who are likely to turn into leads.
Job Change Alerts
A moldy list with stale contacts blunts the impact of your outreach campaigns.
But if you’re using Apollo, you don’t have to worry about stale contacts another day.
Keep your list fresh with the handy Apollo Refresh feature. This clever feature gives you live updates every time a contact changes jobs. Apollo Refresh even shows you when your contacts get promoted.
Smart reps on your team take advantage of this fresh info. They can use it to connect better with prospects and create new business opportunities.
Mailbox Settings
Email is the backbone of successful outreach campaigns.
Without an agile email tool, your campaigns will become a dud. How you set up your mailbox plays a crucial role in the success or failure of your campaigns. Apollo.io’s smart system helps you send emails that meet email marketing best practices.
You can determine:
Apollo.io allows you to limit the number of emails you can send per day. They recommend you set the sending limit to 100 or 400. Depending on the Google account apps you have, your limit may fall within the threshold or be lower.
You can also dictate how many emails you can send per 60 minutes. Apollo.io advocates that you should send only 100 emails per hour. The reason? Anything over 100 will trigger the notorious spam filters that block your emails.
Sending your emails at safe intervals boosts your deliverability figures.
Apollo.io puts up a 30-second interval between emails as a good sweet spot to start with. You can always change it later if you want to.
Note that these are just starting guidelines. You can do more later. For instance, you can warm up or gently increase your daily sending limit to 1000 emails per day if you are on Gmail. The good news is Apollo.io has plenty of best practices resources to show you exactly how to do that.
Like any leading mailbox, you can also put your email signature in Apollo.io. You can write a new one or pull it from your Gmail email. With email signatures, avoid inserting too many links as they set off spam spiders
Sequences
Email sequences are a proven way of engaging prospects and keeping them in your funnel.
In Apollo, you can create an email sequence in three ways:
Create an entirely new sequence from the beginning.
Use Apollo’s suggested templates that suit your context.
Reproduce an existing sequence and customize it.
A vital aspect of sequences is the rules engine. If you don’t master sequence rules and targets, you’ll send emails to the wrong people and irk your prospects.
Rules Engine
Automation rules and triggers are the backbones of email sequence automation.
Apollo.io lets you make cross-object rules to govern your sequences. Cross-object rules help you integrate your sales process. Set rules based on custom fields, stages, triggers. Or activities at the Lead or Account level.
You can also set filters based on persona, industry, last funding, or account stage.
Calls
Nothing beats a phone call to close a sale or convince prospects to move to another stage in your sales funnel.
Apollo has powerful click-to-call features in its dialer which include:
Calling prospects in Apollo is a breeze. Just click on the phone icon anywhere you see a phone number to make a call.
People distrust unfamiliar phone numbers. Apollo lets you use local area codes so people are more likely to answer your call.
Apollo boosts your connection rate by using integrated direct-dial phone numbers.
These days every brand is a local-global brand with customers all over the world. Easily call customers who live outside the US with the international dialing function
Review your prospecting and sales calls. See what went well or what didn’t and know what to do next time.
CRM Integration
Your CRM is the heartbeat of your customer data management system.
With Apollo, you can push your list directly into Salesforce or HubSpot. Or you can download your contacts list as a CSV file.
The Apollo system keeps your CRM as fresh as ever.
You get in-depth 65+ data points about your contacts, leads, and account profiles. With such rich data informing your sales strategy, you will crush it.
Support
In SaaS, customer support is key.
Inevitably, you will get stuck or need help on how best to maximize the tool’s capabilities. You don’t want a service provider that will take forever to respond to your pleas for help. In this regard. Apollo.io doesn’t disappoint.
They have four support channels you can reach out to for help.
Customer Success Manager
Apollo.io gives each customer a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM).
This person helps with onboarding and other issues. You and your team can hop on a call with your CSM for personalized step-by-step guidance on how to use the tool.
Your Customer Success Manager supports you by:
Customer Support Team
The next support channel is the customer support team.
You can always rely on the support team for:
To get in touch with the team simply email support@apollo.io or click on the ‘Support’ in the Apollo.io dashboard.
The best part? You can even cc your CSM to follow up on your ticket and ensure you get served in time. You can approach your CSM first and ask them to escalate it to support. Your choice.
Online Help Center
To get help, you don’t always need to be served directly by a human. A self-help portal can also work as well and give you all the help you need fast.
Apollo.io has an extensive Knowledge Base. It’s packed with step-by-step guides, how-to articles, videos, and best practices, and recipes for success.
Live Chat
Finally, you can get help via live chat around the clock.
It’s safe to say Apollo.io gives remarkable support to their customers.
Integrations
No tool does it all.
While Apollo is remarkable, it’s not enough to run your entire business. Power up your workflows by integrating Apollo with the tools that are already in your tech stack. Easily connect Apollo with:
find verified email addresses and phone numbers and push them into your CRM effortlessly.
upgrade and update all your Salesforce contacts’ data.
sync Apollo’s 210+ million business contacts to turn HubSpot into an outbound marketing engine.
merge Apollo with Microsoft Outlook or exchange email.
give Gmail wings by syncing emails with your CRM, pulling in templates from Apollo, and tracking opens and clicks.
send SendGrid transactional emails using Apollo.
supercharge with 65+fields to enhance your lead scoring and routing.
Need more integrations besides these?
No worries.
Work all other integrations into the Apollo system using the open APIs.
Analytics
Apollo analytics helps you run your campaigns with data-based insights, not instinct.
They have customizable dashboards and reports that combine behavioral and demographic data. By syncing with Salesforce, they cover the entire funnel. Reports tell you about:
There are myriad other factors you can measure, learn, and improve your strategy.
They have four plans.
Apollo.io is cheaper than competitors like Uplead or Lead411.
Apollo.io Pros And Cons
Like any tool sales engagement tool, Apollo.io has its strengths and weaknesses. Here’s a quick overview of the tool’s pros and cons.
PROS
CONS
The overall rating is positive because the pros outweigh the cons. Apollo is a great product for outbound sales prospecting. Its ease of use and Chrome extension email finder deserve special mention.
Apollo.io Review Verdict
Apollo is a fabulous reasonably priced tool.
It does what it’s supposed to do superbly and then some. For getting prospects’ contact details and engaging them at speed and scale Apollo.io is up there with the best. So if you’ve been looking for a unified data-driven outreach and engagement tool, try Apollo today.
If you're interested in reading more about business tools that can help you scale your outreach efforts, check out this article on the best bulk email service providers right now.
Last Updated on June 12, 2023 by Hanson Cheng