Janhavi Nagarhalli

Are you tired of unsolicited, spammy emails in your inbox? Well, all that will (to an extent) end in February 2024 as Google implements new guidelines for bulk email senders to make your inbox safer and spam-free.

Google will require bulk email senders (people who send over 5,000 emails per day to Gmail inboxes) to follow certain best practices requiring strong authentication, easy unsubscription, and lower spam rates.

“It’s clear that email has become an essential part of daily communication. And whether you’re submitting a job application or staying in touch with a loved one, your emails should be safe and secure.” –  Neil Kumaran Group Product Manager, Gmail Security & Trust

Let’s dive into understanding these best practices and what these new policies mean for your cold outreach strategy in 2024.

Summary of Bulk Email Sender Guidelines

Here is a quick gist of Google’s email sender guidelines and the best practices they recommend for bulk email senders: 

1. Requirements for Authentication

Ensure email authentication for each of your sending domains at your domain provider by settling up the following:

• SPF (Sender Policy Framework): This basic authentication method verifies if an email was sent from an authorized server. Bulk senders need to configure their domain to use SPF.
• DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail): This adds a digital signature to each email, allowing Gmail to verify the email's authenticity and integrity.
• DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance): This builds on SPF and DKIM by providing reporting and enforcement mechanisms. Bulk senders must publish a DMARC policy that states what Gmail should do with emails that fail authentication.

• ARC(Authenticated Received Chain): it shows the previous authentication status of forwarded messages and previously failed authentication. Senders must use ARC authentication if they forward emails regularly.

Google recommends always using the same domain for email authentication and hosting your public website. Senders must have valid forward and reverse DNS records for these sending domains and IP addresses.

2. Requirements for Easy Unsubscription

If you send over 5,000 marketing and sales emails daily, your marketing and subscribed messages must support one-click unsubscribe.

• Unsubscribe links: Every email must contain a clear and readily available unsubscribe link. This link should be placed in a prominent location, such as the footer of the email.
• Preference centers: Bulk senders can offer preference centers where users can manage their subscription preferences and easily unsubscribe from specific email lists.
• Confirmation process: Unsubscribe requests should be confirmed promptly, and users should not receive further emails after opting out.

Google suggests that you only send emails to people who want to get your messages, so they’re less likely to report messages from your domain as spam.

3. Spam Rate Monitoring

You can track your spam rate using Postmaster tools. Ensure it stays below 0.10%, and avoid reaching a spam rate of 0.30% or higher.

Here are a few tips to avoid having your emails land in your receiver’s spam: 

• Don't mix different types of content in the same message. 
• Don't impersonate other domains or senders without permission. 
• Don't purchase email addresses from other companies.
• Some countries and regions restrict automatic opt-in. Before you opt-in users automatically, check the laws in your region.

Bulk senders who fail to comply with the guidelines may face various consequences, including reduced deliverability rates, warnings, suspension of email-sending privileges, or even legal action. 

How Does This Affect Your Cold Email Strategy?

Even if your sales/marketing team has these parameters in place, Google's refreshed bulk email sender guidelines signal that mass mailing prospects may slowly be on the decline. While this may sound like not-so-good news for your outbound marketing efforts, here's why this may actually be a blessing in disguise.

Email marketing, if implemented correctly, can continue to be one of the best B2B sales channels in your GTM strategy. The key, however, will be to adopt a systematic, intent-based approach as opposed to spray-and-pray tactics.

Let’s say you’re selling software that streamlines candidate assessment, and your buyer personas are hiring managers and CHROs.

If your sales team sends out emails to thousands of CHROs at random — without any insight into whether or not they’re in-market for your product, you’re bound to receive replies, if any, such as: “Sorry, we’re not currently looking to buy” or worse still, “unsubscribe 😠.” 

Not only does this high-volume approach result in little result from lots of effort, but cold outreach may also leave a bad taste in the mouth of prospects who may be looking to buy down the road. 

What’s the alternative to this? Intent-based, account-level outreach, of course! 😎

On average, only 4% of website visitors convert via sign-ups, but what if you could identify, qualify, and target the remaining 96% of anonymous website traffic with outreach based on intent? What if you could carefully research engagement amongst high-intent buyers and send them personalized cold emails highlighting exactly how your tool can meet their requirements?

Our experience working with hundreds of B2B teams finds that this results in far more conversions with far fewer emails.

Factors is an IP-based account intelligence and activation platform that:

• Identifies anonymous accounts visiting your website, viewing your LinkedIn, or interacting with your G2 pages 
• Qualifies high-intent ICP accounts based on firmographics and cross-channel engagement 
• Enriches sales-ready accounts with Apollo-fuelled contact data before activating outreach by integrating with your marketing automation platform. 

Here’s a little about how it works:

First, our account intelligence feature allows you to uncover anonymous traffic with IP-based intelligence & enrichment. 

Next, you can qualify ICP buyers based on their firmographics and score accounts based on their engagement across the website, G2, and LinkedIn intent signals. 

Finally, create a list of accounts ready to buy and send emails with a compelling pitch to win sales-ready accounts over in no time. Want to learn the basics of account scoring? 

▶️Check out our guide: An Introduction To B2B Account Scoring

‍

Wrapping Up

Google has taken a much-needed step to establish these bulk email sender guidelines. Whether you’re executing cold outreach or email marketing campaigns, you must monitor your bulk emails and ensure basic email hygiene to create a secure email ecosystem. 

If you want to ditch the cookie-cutter bulk email strategy and want to restructure your cold outreach efforts by focusing on high-intent buyers, book a demo with us today!

LinkedIn is truly the place to B2B, isn’t it?

80% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is part of their advertising strategy because 4 out of 5 of its 900 million members drive business decisions, making it a key platform for lead generation. Marketers can launch ad campaigns to target decision-makers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies worldwide. 

LinkedIn’s robust campaign manager platform allows companies to set their targeting criteria based on 20 different attribute categories, such as company, job experience, education, demographics, interests, and traits.

However, while LinkedIn campaign manager is a boon for running B2B ads, there's room for refinement when it comes to the ad platform's industry tag categorization and audience targeting mechanism.

The LinkedIn industry list currently consists of 24 main categories and 148 subcategories as applicable industries for company profiles. These categories are presently visible for company pages but are yet to be updated on Campaign Manager.

While these categories cover a wide range of industries, this article explores why they may still be insufficient — and how we can overcome the hurdle of vague industry tags to optimize ad performance ⬇️

How Does LinkedIn Campaign Manager Define Industries? 

LinkedIn defines industry as the company's primary industry, which is where the member is employed, as stated by the company. Additional industries may be inferred about the company and included for targeting.

Individuals can’t choose the industry but rather get assigned the company's industry to which they are attached. 

The problem arises when there is limited clarity on which industry a particular company belongs to. When selecting the industry option of a LinkedIn company page, the creator or page admin determines the industry. Since these are subjective, irregularities can occur especially when a company can come under two different industries. 

For instance, a health tech company can come under “health, wellness and fitness,” “hospital and health care” or “software development”

Let’s look at this with a detailed example 🔽

Suppose you want to showcase your ad to decision-makers working in fintechs specifically. Here are examples of 3 fintech companies and how LinkedIn identifies their industries: 

1. RazorpayXPayroll is placed under “IT services and consulting,” whereas it’s payroll software. 

2. PayPal & Payoneer are similar platforms that facilitate international bank transfers but are under different industry tags.

As you can see, all 3 companies are virtually the same but are categorized differently on Linkedin. Seems confusing, right?

You risk losing out on ICP companies or worse you spend on irrelevant companies that are not your ICP because LinkedIn's categorization is different from your expectations

For instance, if you want to target fintechs and pick “financial services” in campaign manager, you’d also end up advertising to banks and investment companies.

Or if you pick “software and development,” your ads are shown to every other software company, regardless of whether they come under your ICP.

And we all know that an unqualified prospect can take a lot of time from your sales and marketing team, costing your company more than it pays.

Now the real question is, 

How Do You Overcome This Problem?

Here’s what Tim Davidson, VP of Marketing at B2B Rizz, has to say:

As mentioned above, creating a target account list on a third-party platform allows you to present your ads to high-intent companies that actually fall within your ICP without overshooting your paid ad spend.

You can either build a list of cold accounts on a database tool like Apollo or ZoomInfo or build granular segments of warm ICP accounts engaging on your Website, LinkedIn, G2, CRM, etc. inside Factors.

💡You can use Factors account segments to identify and create a list of web visitors segmented by source and how far along they are in the customer journey. You can also refine the list by targeting accounts that visit high-intent pages (pricing pages, comparison blogs, G2 reviews, etc.) and fit your ICP based on demographics, industry, technographics, revenue, etc. Once done, you’ll have a list of high-fit, high-intent accounts.

Upload this list when creating audiences on LinkedIn to skip the ambiguity and save ad spend. It also comes in handy when launching retargeting campaigns to prospects in the solution-aware stage.

Wrapping Up

LinkedIn’s native targeting features while useful still have some room for optimization that the LinkedIn team is currently working on solving. In the meantime, you can use target account lists to save time and exclusively target your ads to prospects in market for your solution.

Find out how you can use Factors.ai for LinkedIn retargeting

And guess what? We’re coming up with something exciting that can help you revamp your LinkedIn ad strategy and make the most of LinkedIn. Stay tuned for more!

There’s no doubt that paid advertising is one of the best channels for marketing teams to generate and capture demand. Plus, we're seeing the rise of paid social media, with over 66% of B2B marketers acknowledging its impact on improving ROI. By targeting specific audiences and broadcasting your message across various channels, paid advertising can help drive the success of your campaigns.

However, running a few ads at random does not get you conversions. A strong strategy is key to maximizing ROI on expensive ads.

Let's dive in and look at how paid advertising can benefit your B2B company ⬇️

Google ads vs LinkedIn ads: Which one is best for B2B?

While many businesses advertise online, only a few do it well. It's especially tough when you have heaps of options to choose from. So, Google, LinkedIn, Search, Display, or a combination of all of the above? The choice isn't that simple, as each platform has its unique features and capabilities. In some instances, using either of the channels would be enough. For example, you should use Google Ads to target people based on their search queries, location, device, and more. LinkedIn ads can help create targeted ABM campaigns.

However, if you’re running a full-funnel campaign, you must use both Google and LinkedIn ads to their fullest potential.

Let's understand the differences between these platforms, how they work, their pros and cons, and which platform is better for your unique needs.

Google Ads

Google search ads appear when users search for specific keywords related to your business. Here are their pros and cons:

Pros of Search Ads

• Access to a larger audience when bidding on high-volume keywords
• Typically attract in-market leads as they're based on search intent
• Detailed analytics allow you to track clicks, conversions, and ROI effectively

Cons of Search Ads

• Popular keywords in B2B industries can be highly competitive, leading to higher costs per click.
• Demographic targeting is limited compared to social media platforms.
• Primarily text-based, offering less opportunity for visual branding.
• Lesser segmentation opportunities

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn ads target users based on their professional profiles, interests, and behavior. Here are their pros and cons:

Pros of LinkedIn Ads

• Extensive targeting options based on job title, company size, and industry, allowing precise audience segmentation.
• Ideal for B2B marketing.
• Access to high-value prospects and decision-makers
• Account-based marketing opportunities
• Offers various ad formats, like sponsored content, text ads, and InMail, providing flexibility in messaging and creative presentation

Cons of LinkedIn Ads

• Relatively costlier than Google search ads
• Cannot identify high-intent buyers unless they click on the ad
• Greater risk of ad fatigue and decreased engagement over time
• Lack of in-depth reporting and analytics tools

How to use Google ads and LinkedIn ads in tandem for a successful paid advertising strategy

While search ads and LinkedIn ads have distinct pros and cons, integrating them into a cohesive paid advertising strategy allows businesses to use each platform's strengths and increase their reach, engagement, and conversions. Here are a few ways to do so:

• Use search ads to capture users actively searching for solutions, and LinkedIn ads to raise awareness and nurture leads at different stages of the buyer's journey.
• Retarget users who interact with your LinkedIn ads through search ads and vice versa, reinforcing your messaging across platforms.
• Use data from both platforms to inform targeting and messaging strategies, optimizing performance across the board.
• Broaden your advertising channels and reduce reliance on a single platform to mitigate performance variations and adapt to algorithmic shifts.

💡Read: How to Measure LinkedIn True ROI With Factors

How to execute paid advertising across the funnel

When it comes to paid marketing, most people start with Google, which provides a decent number of quality leads by capturing searches that show intent. However, it's essential to create a well-structured funnel that attracts the right audience and converts them quickly. Instead of having countless uninterested users, it's better to have interested ones heading in the right direction. 

Here's where LinkedIn retargeting helps you reach a high-intent audience from Google and target them on LinkedIn.

1.  Pick the right advertising channels 

Consider where your ideal customers spend their time online and choose platforms with the potential to reach them. Before selecting the right platform, consider your budget and advertising goals for your paid advertising efforts. By thoughtfully selecting the right mix of channels, you can create a cohesive and effective B2B advertising strategy tailored to your unique business needs.

2. Get a high-quality and high-intent audience.

When reaching an audience on LinkedIn, you have two options. You can either target a new audience or retarget an existing one. If you choose the former, you'll reach out to a completely cold audience that may not be familiar with you or your brand, making it more challenging to capture their attention. However, suppose you choose to retarget your Google ads traffic. In that case, you'll reach out to an audience that has already shown interest in your brand by searching for relevant keywords on Google, clicking on your search or display ad, and visiting your website. This audience is more likely to have high intent and be receptive to your message.

Ideally, you should invest in both options if your budget allows it. However, if you have to choose between the two, it makes more sense to retarget a warm audience that has already shown interest in your product or service.

💡Also read: Build Better LinkedIn Retargeting Audiences with Factors

3. Optimize ad spend

Many clients want to establish a presence on LinkedIn but find advertising on the platform expensive. LinkedIn's cost per click (CPC) and lead (CPL) are relatively high compared to other platforms. However, the quality of leads on LinkedIn is worth the extra cost.

If you have already advertised on other channels, you can use LinkedIn to enhance your conversion rates. Different channels can add relevant leads to your LinkedIn campaigns, which can be part of your mid-funnel strategy. Proper retargeting of high-intent traffic via LinkedIn ads can lead to increased conversions.

4. Convert more by staying on top of their mind

According to the marketing rule of 7, "a prospect needs to "hear" the advertiser's message at least seven times before they'll take action to buy that product or service."

A customer's journey towards making a purchase is not always straightforward. They may come across your business through a LinkedIn Ad, search for your business on Google, visit your website, leave, and stumble upon you again on LinkedIn. They may revisit your website before deciding to reach out or make a purchase. Retargeting helps push website traffic towards purchase.

💡Also read: How to Measure the Impact of Paid Marketing Using Factors

Paid advertising best practices

Paid ad campaigns are dynamic, and the right strategies can significantly impact your brand's success. To improve your efforts at online paid advertising, consider the following best practices:

1. Establish realistic goals

Having measurable goals allows you to track your progress and stay on schedule. Define your KPIs to measure lead generation, sales conversion, or brand awareness success. This will help you make informed decisions and optimize your ad spend.

2. Create compelling paid campaigns 

Your ad creatives must grab the attention of your target audience. Keep them engaging, informative, and visually appealing. Avoid using jargon or complex language. Instead, focus on the value of your product and how it can solve a problem for your audience. Create a strong value proposition that highlights your unique benefits. Stand out from competitors and guide prospects to take action with a persuasive CTA.

Source: LinkedIn

3. Personalize your campaigns

Retargeting is a great way to personalize your marketing funnel for each campaign and tailor your message to the audience of that campaign. 

For example, you have a search ad campaign targeting your competitors' branded keywords, which generates much interest. You can use LinkedIn and launch a retargeting campaign based on how you compare against them and what you offer that they don't. Running retargeting ads helps you identify what drives people to click and then adjust your LinkedIn ads to push them toward your offerings.

💡Factors helps you identify accounts that view your LinkedIn ads and visit your website through a search ad. You can use this information to personalize your cold outreach and focus on accounts with higher intent. 

4. Measure and analyze

Track key metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, CPA, and ROAS to make data-driven decisions. By setting campaign goals such as a target cost per lead or target conversion rate, you can track performance and analyze audience data like CTR and impressions to improve your marketing. 

Rev up your paid advertising game with Factors

While search and LinkedIn ads have unique features and capacities, integrating them into a cohesive paid advertising strategy allows businesses to use each platform's strengths and increase their reach, engagement, and conversions. Companies can optimize performance across the board by using data from both platforms to inform targeting and messaging strategies.

Thanks to Factors, you can gain a comprehensive view of buyer journeys, understand how your target accounts interact with your ads and determine whether your ad strategy is increasing revenue. Speak to our team today to optimize your paid advertising strategy in 2024.

Imagine working hard for months to close the deal with a prospect, only for them to churn in less than a year. There could be several reasons, such as:

• Poor customer service
• Choosing a competitor's solution 
• Users not achieving their KPIs

Reducing customer churn is vital for businesses because it ensures customer satisfaction and boosts profitability. The best way to avoid high churn rates is to predetermine the customers at a churn risk. 

In this article, we'll detail how customer churn prediction is the key to reducing churn and keeping the cash flowing in 💸

What is Customer Churn Prediction?

Customer churn prediction involves analyzing data to detect customers likely to cancel subscriptions. SaaS businesses use this analysis to identify at-risk customers, leading to cost savings and improved customer lifetime value.

Analyzing churn through data-driven insights can help your business understand patterns and provide a roadmap for improvement. For example, if your surveys reveal that your platform has a complicated onboarding process – you can direct users to your onboarding specialist to assist them.

Why is Customer Churn Prediction important?

Losing customers is always costly. However, the costs involved go beyond the revenue lost from the customers who leave. It also includes the marketing expenses required to find new customers to replace the old ones. In many cases, the amount spent on acquiring a new customer is not covered by the amount paid during their time with the company. This means that customer acquisition is usually more expensive than customer retention.

Plus, unhappy customers share their experiences with others, impacting the company's reputation and customer acquisition budget. Businesses must predict churn and take action beforehand to prevent customers from leaving. 

Once you know a customer is going to churn, you can take actions such as:

• Providing more targeted re-engagement campaigns
• Launching incentives such as loyalty programs that encourage them to stay 
• Creating educational material that is tailored toward their specific needs
• Ensuring accessible and improved customer support 

How to Build a Customer Churn Prediction Model

Creating a churn prediction model can help businesses retain customers and sustain growth. Using data analytics and machine learning, companies can identify which customers are likely to leave and take action to prevent it. 

Here are the key steps to develop an effective churn prediction model ⬇️

1. Data collection and review

Ensure that the data is accurate by handling missing values, removing duplicates, and converting it into a suitable format for analysis. Before moving on to calculations, reviewing the data for accuracy and validity is crucial. Every piece of customer info is valuable in the upcoming churn calculations, so it's worth ensuring accuracy.

2. Model selection

Select an appropriate machine learning algorithm for churn prediction, such as logistic regression, decision trees, random forests, or gradient boosting machines. Split the data into training and testing sets, train the model, and tune hyperparameters to optimize performance. Evaluate the model using testing data and cross-validation. Deploy the model into production to make real-time predictions and prevent churn.

3. Use an automated predictive model

Do people with lower NPS scores tend to leave more? Are they evaluating competitor solutions? You can predict who might leave by spotting these signs in the data. You must use machine learning with a dataset containing all the information you have about customers who stayed and those who left. The algorithm learns from this historical data to understand how different factors relate to churn. Then, it can predict if future customers with similar behaviors might leave or stay.

💡Factors can help you identify customers evaluating competitor solutions by helping you track when they visit their G2 pages. 

4. Establish retention strategy

Optimize your retention strategy by prioritizing actions based on the probability of customer churn. When customers first sign up, use checklists and personalized help to ensure they understand and use the product. As they keep using it, watch out for signs they might leave. For instance, if they're not using a feature they need, you can send them helpful tips to get them back on track.

5. Track results regularly 

Continuously monitor the churn prediction model's performance and update it with new data periodically to ensure it remains effective as customer behavior evolves. Before introducing any further changes to your plan, collect enough data to measure the real impact of your efforts.

Your churn model will provide probabilities for various customer segments. It's essential to keep testing new strategies and recording the impact on these segments. While creating a mathematical model of churn requires time and resources from your team, each test can help you create a better model for the future. 

6 Customer churn prediction best practices

Now that you know how to build a churn prediction model, here are a few handy tips you must remember to prevent customer churn:

1. Segment Customers

After obtaining your data, it's time to shift your focus towards the users and begin segmenting them. Since users have distinct needs and usage patterns, they don't churn for the same reason. Hence, it's essential to categorize them into separate segments. You can segment them based on their:

• Demographics, such as location, region, company size, and the year they signed up for your company.
• Behavior and usage, such as how often they log in, whether they use a particular feature more or less, or whether they have completed the onboarding process.
• Contract terms include pricing plans and whether customers signed up for a monthly, quarterly, or yearly deal.

You can design retention strategies and marketing campaigns tailored to specific customer segments by segmenting customers based on their churn likelihood and characteristics. Domain knowledge or clustering techniques can help you define meaningful segments.

2. Monitor product usage data of existing customers

Product usage data captures how and when customers use your software. Important data points include feature usage, customer behavior, clicks, and other metrics such as time-to-value and product stickiness.

To build an effective model, it's important to consider some key product usage data points such as:

• Monitor feature usage data to show users' engagement with your product's features, indicating popularity and relevance.
• Observe users’ actions within your product, like when they use it, how long they use it, which features they engage with, and how they progress through it.
• Track the number of times a user clicks or interacts with a UI element, such as a button, checkbox, text area, or menu.
• Track other product usage data such as time-to-value, product stickiness, interactions, and more.

3. Keep an eye on customer success metrics

Understanding your users' success with your product is crucial in determining if they will continue using it. Surveys such as NPS and CSAT can be used to measure customer success. An NPS score of less than 7 or 8 means you may need a win-back campaign or value incentive to change their attitude towards your product. NPS measures loyalty and willingness to recommend, while CSAT measures customer satisfaction. Conduct these surveys periodically to track customer success and satisfaction.

4. Gather customer feedback regularly

Apart from gathering feedback through conventional ways, you can use various other forms of customer feedback to gain insights into their experience with your product or service. For example, in-app surveys can provide you with contextual input from users. You can use them to find out about your customer's overall satisfaction with your product, their experience with a particular feature, any issues they may have faced, or even the features they would like you to add or implement. This can be very helpful in understanding the general sentiment of users and identifying areas of improvement or strengths.

To promptly address issues and demonstrate responsiveness to user input, incorporate real-time feedback loops within your product. Acknowledge the feedback received through in-app surveys and communicate any actions taken to address user concerns.

5. Enhance customer experience

You can streamline the customer experience using automated onboarding, self-service options, and personalized support. Furthermore, you should use customer feedback to identify areas of improvement and proactively address any customer dissatisfaction rather than reacting after the fact.

6. Improve customer service

Respond promptly to inquiries and complaints, offer helpful advice, and measure performance using metrics like support tickets, call center response times, and social media interactions. Monitor these metrics to gain insights into customer service trends and effectiveness.

Wrapping up

Reducing customer churn is crucial for businesses as it directly impacts long-term revenue, customer loyalty, and overall business stability. However, understanding why customers leave requires analyzing data and tracking various metrics over time. Effective churn analysis involves monitoring overall customer turnover rates and identifying factors contributing to attrition.

Businesses can use advanced analytics and machine learning techniques to identify potential churners and implement targeted retention strategies.

If you’ve landed on this article, chances are you’re looking for an intent data tool to improve your marketing efforts and drive pipeline for your company. 

While Koala is a great tool for beginners to experiment with intent-based marketing, many other platforms offer a wider set of features that can take your marketing game to the next level.
Scroll ahead to find 7 Koala alternatives that you can consider for your business ⬇️

Why look for a Koala alternative?

Koala is an AI-powered buyer intent data platform that helps businesses identify and prioritize their most promising sales prospects based on their website interactions and engagement. The tool was launched in 2022 and is relatively new compared to other lead scoring tools in the market. 

Koala offers a range of features such as:

• Visitor identification: Identify and track how prospects interact with your website by analyzing historical pageviews, events, and form-fills.
• ICP Scoring: You can assign an ICP score based on various demographic and technographic data points, such as company size, industry, ARR, among others.  
• Intent signals and engagement scoring: Capture intent data and prioritize leads based on how engaged they are with your product.
• Alerts: Get Slack alerts when an ICP account interacts with your website.
• Automations: Sync intent signals to your CRM and route high-intent leads to the assigned sales reps. 

However, since it is a new tool, it doesn’t have all the features a marketing team might need to build out their GTM motion:

Koala offers a free plan with a 250-account limit, and its paid plans begin at $350/month.

This pricing might be steep for early-stage companies, especially when other tools on the market are cost-effective and offer more features. 

4 Factors to consider when looking for a Koala alternative

Robust integration options: Since Koala only offers integrations to Hubspot, Salesforce, and Apollo, you must look for a tool that seamlessly integrates with your existing tech stack.

Custom workflow automations: Find a tool that allows you to build custom workflows that automate your sales and marketing processes across your CRMs to save time. 

AI-powered insights: Don’t just consolidate data and reports; understand the ‘why’ behind your numbers and learn how you can improve with AI-powered insights.

Extract intent data from multiple platforms: Your prospects conduct research beyond your website before they make a purchase. Invest in a solution that gives you intent signals from relevant sources such as LinkedIn, review sites, communities, and the like. 

Top 7 Koala alternatives

Want to find the right tool and boost your marketing ROI? We’ve done the research for you and compiled a list of the 7 best Koala alternatives you can browse to make the right decision.
P.S.: We’ve ranked these tools in alphabetical order to ensure impartiality. Let’s dive in 🏊

Clearbit

Clearbit is a data enrichment platform that provides businesses with intent data about their customers and prospects. The key things Clearbit does are:

• Data Enrichment: Clearbit integrates with various tools like CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and websites to automatically enrich customer and prospect data with detailed company and contact information. 
• Lead Scoring and Routing: Clearbit's data and AI-powered algorithms allow businesses to score and route leads based on fit and buying intent signals. 
• Intent Tracking: Clearbit's IP intelligence data allows businesses to identify anonymous website visitors who match their ideal customer profile and show buying intent signals.
• Dynamic Form Shortening: Clearbit can reduce form friction by automatically populating form fields with enriched data, requiring users to only provide an email address.

Why Clearbit is a good alternative to Koala

• The form-shortening feature isn’t available in Koala. 
• Clearbit has greater integration options.
• Clearbit also offers auto prospecting, a feature that’s yet to arrive in Koala.

Limitations

• Clearbit doesn’t integrate with LinkedIn, which makes it difficult to transfer data between the two platforms.
• The setup process is relatively trickier than other products.
• Users have reported that the new UX updates make the platform difficult to use. 

Pricing 

Clearbit’s pricing is currently unknown. You have to fill out a form and contact their sales team for further details. 

Factors.ai

Factors is an account intelligence and analytics platform that helps you grow pipeline by identifying sales-ready accounts and using data to create marketing campaigns that resonate with your target accounts. We have partnered with 6sense and Clearbit for industry-leading IP data, identifying up to 64% of anonymous companies.

Why Factors is a good alternative to Koala

• Factors can pull intent signals from LinkedIn and G2, which gives greater visibility into high-intent accounts considering your solution. Plus, you can unify all your account-level data from multiple sources.
• Our newest segment insights feature allows you to gain a broader understanding of how different user segments resonate with your product. 
• Factors also can help you personalize your cold outreach based on intent data, thereby taking your sales strategy to the next level.
• Use Factors to create custom workflow automations to simplify your business processes across multiple CRMs.
• The account and engagement scoring features allow you to assign a value to every interaction an ICP account has with your website. You can now prioritize accounts with high scores to close deals faster. 

Limitations

• Factors doesn’t offer information at a user level due to privacy and compliance regulations.

Pricing 

💡Learn more about our pricing here.

Leadfeeder (now Dealfront)

Leadfeeder (now known as Dealfront) is a website visitor identification tool that identifies anonymous high-intent accounts and sends them to your sales team. Combined with Echobot, Dealfront is a popular tool in the account intelligence space used by 10K+ customers worldwide. 

Why Leadfeeder is a good alternative to Koala

• If you are based in Europe, Leadfeeder is a better option for your business.
• Leadfeeder has better reporting capabilities for customers looking to go deeper into account analytics.

Limitations

• The product is limited to identifying website intent data.
• Leadfeeder does not offer funnel analytics and signal reports.
• Users have reported that they’d prefer more filters when segmenting their lead list. 

Pricing 

💡 Also read: 5 Leadfeeder Alternatives For Visitor Identification In 2024 

Lead411

Lead411 is a B2B data provider that offers buyer intent data with Bombora. They offer a set of features such as:

• Intent topics: You can classify and set between 5-25 intent topics.  
• Lead prospecting: Lead411 has an in-built prospecting tool to streamline the outbound process.
  CRM Enhancer: Automatically update your CRM with the latest data.

Why Lead411 is a good alternative to Koala

• Lead411 offers a comprehensive contact database and triple verification, a feature currently missing in Koala.
• They also offer a Chrome extension so you can identify and find phone numbers and emails in no time.
• If you’re looking for a tool to also boost your outreach, Lead411 offers multi-channel outreach and sales engagement to improve your outbound processes.

Limitations

• Users have found that even verified contacts may not be accurate at times.

• The data can be difficult to manage because the platform doesn’t have the capabilities to sort it out into multiple manageable lists.

Pricing

Snitcher

Snitcher unmasks anonymous companies visiting your website. The platform helps you understand their interests and convert them into qualified leads by tracking visitor behavior and enriching leads with details. Snitcher’s key offerings are:

• Website deanonymization: Sintcher’s “identify” turns your anonymous website traffic into actionable leads and information in real-time.
• Google Analytics enrichment: Snitcher adds context to Google Analytics data by enriching the numbers with company identifications. 
• Lead segmentation: You can segment your leads into audiences and run relevant marketing campaigns.

Why Snitcher is a good alternative to Koala

• Snitcher’s white label service is great for agencies who want to provide their clients’ sales teams with high-quality leads.
• Snithcer gives you a deeper insight into how you can optimize your ad spend across LinkedIn, Google and Facebook.
  

Limitations

• Users have reported that the filtering setup can be improved to navigate the platform easily.

• The pricing is higher than most account intelligence tools since they charge with usage-based pricing

Pricing

Warmly

Warmly is an AI-powered sales orchestration tool that offers website identification and allows you to tailor your outreach based on intent data. It offers multiple features such as:

• Autonomous Sales Orchestration: Capture buyer intent to personalize engagement across email, LinkedIn, and live chat.
• Scales Sales Capacity: Allows engaging with every target account visiting the website via multi-threaded conversations without needing to add headcount.
• Orchestrates Tech Stack: Consolidates tools, workflows, and actions to instantly capture decision-makers’ interest by integrating with Warmly.
• AI Chatbots: AI Chat automatically scrapes your account’s website information to create personalized, proactive chat messages to prospects.

Why Warmly is a good alternative to Koala

• Warmly is a better Koala alternative if your SDRs and AEs are looking to improve their sales game 
• Koala lacks the AI chatbot feature, which can play a major role in closing deals on behalf of your sales teams

Limitations

• If you’re looking for a product with more marketing-related use cases, Warmly may not be the best option. 
• The pricing is higher than most of the tools on this list. Users have stated that it’s a huge jump from the free plan

Pricing 

💡Also read: Top 10 Warmly.AI Alternatives | Compare Pros, Cons & Pricing 

Zoominfo 

Zoominfo is a comprehensive B2B contact enrichment and analytics solution that offers a suite of products for sales and marketing teams. You can use Sales OS and Marketing OS to find high-intent prospects and send personalized outbound campaigns. 

Why Zoominfo is a good alternative to Koala

• Zoominfo offers data enrichment services, a feature that’s currently missing in Koala
• They offer conversation intelligence to help sales teams analyze every demo call and refine their sales strategy accordingly.  

Limitations

• Multiple users on G2 have stated that the tool has a steep learning curve, which isn’t ideal for agile marketing teams who want to use the platform for their day-to-day activities
• The contacts provided by the tool could be outdated, thus hampering your outreach efforts

Pricing 

Since Zoominfo doesn’t publicly display its pricing, you can learn about it here: ZoomInfo Pricing, Alternatives & Overview | 2024 

Choose the best Koala alternative today

Investing in intent data software depends on your company's needs. SMBs who are new to account intelligence may prefer a slimmed-down platform like Koala. However, if you’re looking to create a well-rounded GTM strategy while aligning your sales and marketing efforts, Factors.ai is the one for you.

Speak to our team today to find out how you can best use intent data for your marketing campaigns. 

{{CTA_BANNER}}

The current state of B2B LinkedIn advertising

LinkedIn is the place for B2B marketers to engage with key accounts and decision-makers. Unlike traditional social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn has a large user base of professional users who include precise details of job title, seniority, and department. 

Simply put, LinkedIn is the perfect place to run ABM campaigns that educate the market about the problem you solve and how you solve it best. Whether you’re a small startup looking to promote your product to a new market segment or an enterprise aiming to build brand awareness, LinkedIn is the key. 

And while there’s no doubt that LinkedIn ads can help you attract high-qualified leads, there could be a few reasons why your leadership team might be skeptical of LinkedIn as a marketing channel:

1. LinkedIn ads are expensive: As of 2024, the average CPC of LinkedIn ads ranges from $4 to $6, which is relatively pricier for SMBs looking to add LinkedIn to their marketing strategy. The CPMs could also be higher, depending on how niche your audience is. 

2. Hard to measure ROI: LinkedIn only tracks ad clicks and impressions, which doesn’t give a complete view of how your ads impact pipeline. One such example includes demo ads, where marketers typically face low conversion rates, mainly because users are less likely to sign up for a demo call while scrolling through social media. 

3. Limited control over how you show your ads: LinkedIn campaign manager allows you to upload a target account list for your ABM campaigns. However, if you want to show your ads to specific accounts showing higher intent and aren’t present in your CRM, it’s an uphill battle of scouring your tech stack and integrating data to ensure your ads are displayed to the right accounts. 

So, does this mean LinkedIn ads aren’t worth it? No, quite the opposite. ❌

Ignoring the channel altogether is a major risk, as you’ll miss out on many high-value deals. While other platforms, such as Google ads, help convert 5% of the in-market buyers, you’ll still lose out on 95% of the opportunities by not directly engaging with key stakeholders.

Source: LinkedIn

How to do LinkedIn ads the right way?

If you want to make the most bang for your buck, invest in a solution that gives you a complete view of how LinkedIn impacts your revenue and helps you optimize your spend. 

At Factors, we currently offer LinkedIn attribution, which allows you to track how LinkedIn influences pipeline, but now we've decided to take it up a notch!

Presenting: AdPilot

AdPilot finally answers every B2B marketer's long-standing question: “Are we doing LinkedIn ads right?” We’ve built out an exciting set of features that can help you generate 2x ROI from your ad campaigns: 

Audience Builder

Manually building lists across Apollo and Zoominfo is tiring, and you also tend to miss out on accounts with high buying intent. Not to mention, your data is spread out across multiple tools. With our new Audience sync feature, you can sync all your data across multiple platforms to create accurate audiences on LinkedIn and target the right accounts without the extra effort. 

Smart Reach

Naturally, your audience list will include companies of varying sizes, and some are bigger than others. We audited 100+ LinkedIn ad accounts and found that 80% of your ad impressions are taken up by the top 10% of the accounts. Why miss out on potential revenue with this lopsided distribution of impressions?

With Smart Reach, you have all the power. You can control how ads are shown to your audiences so that every account on your list has the chance to view your ads and make the right buying decisions. 

💡Learn more about our research here: Resolving LinkedIn’s Frequency Capping Paradox

Campaign Automation

Advertising is all about pitching your product to the right people, be it online or offline. Instead of displaying your ads to prospects who aren’t currently looking for a solution, use intent-based impression control and allocate your ad budget accordingly to target high-intent and in-market buyers. 

LinkedIn True ROI

Do you remember the last time you clicked on a LinkedIn ad and booked a demo straight away? Neither can we because social media channels like LinkedIn never show the complete picture of how prospects make their buying decisions. So, how do you prove LinkedIn’s true ROI to leadership?
Since every ad click doesn’t equal revenue, Factors offers view-through attribution. This gives you a granular view of how target accounts view your ads and interact with your website, giving you an accurate idea of how LinkedIn affects revenue generation.  

💡You can learn more here: Measuring LinkedIn True ROI: Click vs View-through Attribution

LinkedIn CAPI

When you’re A/B testing your ads and finally find success, you naturally want to repeat the process and continue getting positive results. 

As a LinkedIn Marketing Partner, we could always pull LinkedIn data into factors for better reporting, but with the new LinkedIn CAPI integration, you can send conversion data back to LinkedIn Campaign Manager. Now, you no longer need to rely on guesswork to scale and optimize your ad campaigns. 

Join the waitlist today

No marketer likes to see their ad budget wasted on unqualified leads. Quit letting siloed data and inaccurate audience lists get in the way of your ad performance. With AdPilot, you can use data-driven insights to effectively target the right accounts and boost your LinkedIn ROI in no time. Speak to our team today to learn how AdPilot can be a game-changer for your marketing strategy.