Navigating the world of business-to-business (B2B) sales can be tough. Even with a lot of effort put into finding potential customers and reaching out to them, sometimes the results don't match the hard work.
Your customer data might be all over the place, and reaching out to leads might feel like guessing rather than being sure of what you're doing.
That's where a sales intelligence solution like Apollo.io comes in. It's meant to help you spend less money acquiring customers and make it easier to keep track of how your sales efforts are going.
I've been in the same boat, dealing with the struggles and confusion of B2B sales. Through my experience running a digital marketing agency, I've tried out different tools to help streamline the process.
I'll evaluate Apollo.io's features to see if it's a good fit for your business. Let's go over its functionalities and pricing, and I'll provide the information you need to decide if it's right for you and your team. Let's get started!
Apollo.io Review 2024: What is Apollo.io?
Apollo.io is a big name in B2B sales. It's a tool that helps marketing and sales teams reach out to other businesses more effectively. It started in 2015 and has grown a lot since then.
So, what does Apollo.io actually do? Well, it's like a giant phonebook for businesses. It has info on over 220 million people around the world, including their email addresses, phone numbers, and even social media profiles.
What's really cool is that the info is pretty accurate most of the time, around 85%.
How does it get all this info? It collects data from lots of places, like scraping websites (especially LinkedIn) and buying data from other companies.
Plus, its huge community of users helps keep things up-to-date by adding info from their own emails and contact lists.
One of the best things about Apollo.io is that you can use it to find exactly the kind of businesses or people you're looking for. You can filter your search by things like industry, company size, or job title.
Apollo.io has been growing really fast, with its revenue increasing by a whopping 900% since 2021. Now, more than three million sales and marketing folks use it to find leads, do research, automate tasks, and keep track of how well their outreach is working.
It's a handy tool for anyone trying to sell to other businesses.
For Whom is Apollo.io Most Suited?
Apollo.io is great for startups, small businesses, and small sales teams. It's made to help with B2B sales and marketing, so if that's what you do, it's perfect for you. With Apollo.io, you can easily find the right people to reach out to in other businesses.
It's especially useful if you need to target specific industries, company sizes, or types of people. This means you can find lots of good leads quickly and without spending too much money.
While Apollo.io could work for B2C businesses (those selling directly to consumers), there might be better tools out there for them.
Apollo.io Pricing
Apollo.io offers a range of pricing plans tailored to different business needs.
$0
Individuals or small businesses
- Basic sequence automation - LinkedIn and Gmail extensions - Limited API access
Basic Plan$49/user/month
Small to medium-sized businesses
- Advanced filtering - Email tracking - Integration with Outreach and SalesLoft
Professional Plan$79/user/month
Teams
- Uncapped sending limits - Advanced reports and dashboards - A/B testing - AI-assisted email writing with higher word limits
The Free Plan, priced at $0, is ideal for individuals or small businesses starting with sales and marketing automation. It includes essential features like basic sequence automation, LinkedIn and Gmail extensions, and limited API access.
The Basic Plan, at $49 per user per month billed annually, caters to small to medium-sized businesses seeking more advanced features such as advanced filtering, email tracking, and integration with other tools like Outreach and SalesLoft.
The Professional Plan, priced at $79 per user per month, is suitable for teams looking to scale their efforts, offering features like uncapped sending limits, advanced reports and dashboards, A/B testing, and AI-assisted email writing with higher word limits.
Finally, the Organization Plan, priced at $99 per user per month with a minimum of 5 users, is designed for larger enterprises with complex needs.
It provides advanced features such as advanced intent tracking, customizable reports, and enhanced security configurations.
Each plan comes with a free trial, allowing users to test features before committing to a subscription. It's essential for businesses to assess their requirements and budget to determine the most suitable plan for their goals.
Features of Apollo.io
As someone who's been in the world of CRM consulting for a while, I've seen a lot of tools out there. Apollo.io stands out among them, offering a lot of benefits for businesses.
Let's dive into some of its key features and how they can help you.
One of the toughest parts of finding leads is sifting through tons of profiles to find the right ones. Apollo.io makes this easier with its advanced search features:
Ever feel overwhelmed by a long list of leads? Apollo.io's lead scoring feature helps you prioritize the best ones:
Having accurate data is crucial for making good business decisions. Apollo.io helps keep your data fresh and accurate:
- Data Health Center: This tool helps spot areas where your data might be missing or inaccurate so you can keep your CRM up-to-date.
- Job Changes & Missing Emails: Apollo.io tracks changes like job moves and missing emails, updating your data in real time.
- Automatic Data Enrichment: Fresh data is added to your CRM automatically, ensuring your outreach efforts are always on point.
Crafting personalized emails can be time-consuming, but Apollo.io's AI Writing Assistant makes it easier:
- Precision-Personalized Emailing: Apollo uses buyer data to craft personalized emails for each prospect.
- Attention-Grabbing Openers: Personalized openers help your emails stand out from the crowd.
- Minimized Research, Maximized Engagement: The AI Assistant saves you time by generating opener options tailored for each contact.
Apollo Conversations helps you keep track of important details from your calls and meetings:
Apollo Plays automates your workflow and connects you with ideal customers at scale:
- Perfect Lead Detection: Apollo auto-sequences ideal leads based on signals like buying intent or growth.
- Timely Engagement: Engage leads right when it matters most, based on their actions.
- Lead Signal Alerts: Get customized alerts based on specific lead signals.
Apollo Analytics offers actionable insights to refine your outreach methods:
- Reports: Customize reports to track metrics and dimensions relevant to your sales operations.
- Metrics & Dimensions: Dive deep into sales data with metrics and dimensions that offer context.
- Filters & Visualization: Use filters to target specific data subsets and visualize your data in various ways.
The Apollo Chrome Extension brings valuable data to your browsing experience:
Each of these features is designed to streamline your sales and marketing efforts, making Apollo.io a valuable tool for businesses looking to grow.
Integrating Apollo with other platforms and tools can streamline your workflow and enhance productivity. Here's a breakdown of some key integrations available:
- Apollo REST API: This allows developers to build custom integrations between Apollo and other software systems.
- HubSpot: Integration with HubSpot enables seamless synchronization of leads, contacts, and activities between the two platforms.
- Salesforce: Integration with Salesforce ensures smooth data exchange, allowing you to manage leads, opportunities, and accounts efficiently.
- Marketo: Integration with Marketo facilitates automated marketing campaigns and lead nurturing, syncing data seamlessly between the two systems.
- Outreach: Integration with Outreach streamlines sales communication and automation, enabling better engagement with prospects.
- Salesloft: Integration with Salesloft enhances sales engagement and workflow automation, ensuring efficient communication with leads and prospects.
- SendGrid: Integration with SendGrid enables seamless email delivery and tracking, enhancing email marketing campaigns.
- Mailgun: Integration with Mailgun facilitates reliable email delivery and tracking, ensuring emails reach recipients' inboxes.
- Vidyard: Integration with Vidyard allows for easy embedding and tracking of video content within Apollo, enhancing sales outreach and engagement.
- Zapier: Integration with Zapier provides access to over 2,000 apps, enabling automation and data synchronization between Apollo and other tools without requiring coding knowledge.
- Greenhouse: Integration with Greenhouse streamlines the recruitment process by syncing candidate data and communication between Apollo and Greenhouse, ensuring a seamless experience for recruiters and hiring managers.
These integrations enable Apollo users to leverage the power of their existing tech stack while enhancing the capabilities of the platform, ultimately driving efficiency and productivity across sales and marketing operations.
How to Write Customized Emails with Apollo.io?
Emails can help you connect with your customers and build stronger relationships. But writing emails can take up a lot of time.
With the Apollo AI writing assistant, you can quickly create and send effective messages to your contacts. It generates subject lines, email content, and personalized openers for the emails you send through Apollo.
This means you can save time and reach out to more people without sacrificing the quality of your messages.
Use Personalized Openers in Apollo Sequences
Personalization is important when you send emails. It means making each message special for the person receiving it. When you use personalized openers in your emails, you can make each message fit the person you're sending it to.
This makes them more likely to pay attention to your email, like you more, and maybe even write back to you.
Apollo helps with this by adding a special spot at the beginning of your email where you can put something personalized. When you add someone to your email list, Apollo gives you a few options for what to put in that spot.
You can also change these options to make them even more personal. This makes it easier to send personalized emails without spending a lot of time researching each person.
Apollo suggests up to 5 different types of personalized openers for each person you're emailing:
Company Mission: This opener talks about the main goals and values of the person's company so you can connect with them better.
Current Role: This opener relates to what the person is doing in their job right now. It helps you start the conversation on the right foot.
Work Anniversary: This opener mentions the recent work anniversary of the person you're emailing. It shows that you've done some research and care about their milestones.
Upcoming Anniversary: This opener mentions an upcoming milestone in the person's job. It's a way to build a friendly connection by showing you're aware of important events.
Job Focus: This opener is tailored to what the person cares about most in their job. It helps you start the conversation by addressing their specific interests or responsibilities.
These personalized openers make your emails more relevant and engaging for each individual recipient, increasing the chances of a positive response.
Write Individual Emails with AI
It is also possible to write engaging, personalized emails for individual prospects using Apollo's AI.
Click Email on a contact's page to write an email using AI.
Apollo's AI writing assistant can only understand and write in English right now.
In the future, Apollo aims to make it work with different languages, too. Learning new languages takes time, so for now, you'll have to use the English version of the assistant.
The Write option helps you create content for your emails using AI. You give Apollo information about your company and product, and it generates content for you.
To add a subject line or the main message of your email, just click the box for it, and Apollo will fill in some options for you.
If you want Apollo to suggest a different option, click the refresh icon. This way, you can quickly create emails without having to come up with everything yourself.
Write
Click Edit your company/product info to customize the email for the recipient. You should also include information specific to the contact, such as pain points and value propositions.
With the Personalize option, you can choose up to 3 things that are special about the person or their company. Apollo's AI then uses these chosen traits to create email content that's just for them.
Here's how to use it: Look through the choices in the Company and Contact sections.
Choose up to 3 traits that you think are important for personalizing the email. This way, you can make each email unique to the person you're sending it to.
Check the boxes for each trait Apollo's AI should use. Click Next.
Personalize
Personalized Openers or Whole Emails can be generated in two ways.
An opener is a paragraph that introduces your email. Additionally, you must include information about your company and product that is targeted to the recipient of your email.Click Generate after that.
With Apollo's AI, you will have multiple options available based on your selections in the previous step. Your draft email should now contain the text you copied from the generated opener.
Apollo's artificial intelligence rewrites sections of your email based on your guidance, such as making text shorter, breaking it up into bullet points, and making it sound more professional.
Rephrase by following these steps:
- In your email draft, highlight the text you want Apollo's AI to edit.
- You can rephrase the text by selecting the instructions Apollo's AI should use.
- Take a look at the newly generated text. You can replace your selected text directly in the email draft by clicking Insert text if you like the changes. If you want to consider another option, you can regenerate the text.
Watch Your AI Word Count
Your Apollo plan decides how many words you can create using the AI writing assistant. You can find the exact word limits for each plan on Apollo's pricing page.
Every word created by Apollo AI for each user counts towards your monthly limit. This includes all the words in the email text and personalized opener suggestions.
Unused AI words don't carry over to the next month's billing cycle. So, it's important to use Apollo AI from the beginning of each billing cycle to make the most of your allowance.
Track AI Usage
To see how many AI words you and your team have used, open Apollo and go to Settings, then click on AI Word Usage. Here, you can check the number of AI words generated by your team during the current billing cycle.
Rephrase
You'll also find the date when the word count will reset for the next billing cycle. This helps you keep track of your usage and plan accordingly.
Team members' AI word usage history contains both the number of AI words they generated and the date they generated them. By using the filters, you can review AI usage by a specific date range and user.
Pros and Cons: Apollo.io
- Apollo's extensive database provides accurate and enriched data, including email addresses, phone numbers, company details, and social media profiles, enabling personalized outreach efforts.
- Users save significant time by directly adding leads to outreach sequences from the search interface.
- Users consistently praise Apollo's comprehensiveness compared to competitors.
- Powerful search and filtering options allow users to find leads based on criteria like job title, company size, and funding stage.
- Apollo offers a user-friendly interface and seamless navigation.
- The Apollo Chrome extension facilitates finding contact information on LinkedIn.
- Integration with various sales and marketing tools streamlines workflows, including CRMs, email platforms, and calendars.
- Additional costs for personal phone numbers can accumulate, especially for businesses focused on cold calling.
- Occasional outdated information is reported by some users, particularly for smaller companies.
- Apollo AI writing assistant only speaks English.
- Limits on the number of leads you can search for, export, or contact per month can be restrictive for high-volume prospecting.
- Becoming part of Apollo's Data Contributor Network means data uploaded by you is shared, which can be a challenge for heavily regulated businesses.
FAQs
Conclusion: Apollo.io Review 2024
After years of utilizing Apollo.io, I can confidently affirm its status as one of the top sales engagement tools available.
Its robust capabilities have significantly bolstered my sales strategies and kept my team aligned with our goals. As a result of its assistance, we have generated high-quality leads and gained valuable insights into converting them into customers.
What sets Apollo.io apart is its continuous evolution, with regular updates introducing new features and refining existing ones based on user feedback and market demands.
In conclusion, is Apollo.io worth it? Absolutely. For those seeking to amplify their sales efforts and lacking the proper tools to do so, Apollo.io is an invaluable asset.
If you're still uncertain, you can start a free trial to experience its benefits firsthand.
Jitendra Vaswani is a Digital Marketing Practitioner and renowned international keynote speaker who has embraced the digital nomad lifestyle as he travels around the world. He founded two successful websites, BloggersIdeas.com & Digital Marketing Agency DigiExe of which his success stories have expanded to authoring "Inside A Hustler's Brain : In Pursuit of Financial Freedom" (20,000 copies sold worldwide) and contributing to "International Best Selling Author of Growth Hacking Book 2". Jitendra designed workshops for over 10000+ professionals in Digital marketing across continents; with intentions ultimately anchored towards creating an impactable difference by helping people build their dream business online. Jitendra Vaswani is a high-powered investor with an impressive portfolio that includes Imagestation. To learn more about his investments, Find him on Linkedin, Twitter, & Facebook.
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