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How to find B2B prospects and build your list
Everything starts with the data. A fresh, well targeted list makes up for a lot of clumsiness in the message; the reverse is never true.
A database goes stale faster than you think
A contact list loses about 20% of its validity in six months. People change jobs, leave their company, have their address deactivated. It is mechanical, and it has nothing to do with how good the source was on the day you built the list.
This is the number one cause of bounces on bought lists and on files pulled back out of a drawer. And a bounce rate above 10% puts the reputation of your sending domain at risk, which costs you far more than the time you saved by recycling an old file.
The practical consequence: build your list just before you launch the campaign, not three months ahead. And if you reuse an old file, assume one contact in five is already wrong.
Around 3% bounces, all is well; under 5% is what you expect from a clean list. At 6 to 7%, keep an eye on it. At 10%, stop the campaign and clean the list before going any further.
In Emelia, every contact lives in a list
Before talking sources, a word on how things are organized. In Emelia, contacts are never added straight to a campaign: they live in lists, stored under Lead Lists in the menu, and it is the list that you then plug into one or more campaigns, in the Lead list block of their settings.
The New List button, at the top right of the page, offers six starting points: a CSV file, a classic LinkedIn search, a Sales Navigator search, your HubSpot or Pipedrive contacts, or an empty list you fill in later. The same window opens from a campaign, when you create the list at the moment you plug it in.
You can plug the same list into several campaigns: contacts who bounced or unsubscribed are then skipped automatically. On the other hand, nothing stops you from writing twice to the same person from two different lists plugged into two campaigns: that is what the campaign's Lead exclusion block and the lists' Deduplicate button are for.
You already have a file
This is the simplest case, and yet the one where people lose the most time. The number one cause of a failed import is not technical, it is a duplicate column name: two columns with the same heading shift the entire mapping, the data lands in the wrong fields, and nothing warns you.
The three other classic traps: a file exported in an encoding other than UTF-8, which turns accented first names into gibberish inside your emails; custom variables missing from the file, which can no longer be added afterwards to contacts that are already imported; and the first name mapped to a custom field instead of the standard one, which breaks personalization and LinkedIn automation.
If your contacts live in HubSpot or Pipedrive, you do not need a file at all: the sync creates the list directly.
You have names, but no email addresses
This is the situation that follows any LinkedIn extraction: you have the profiles, never the emails, because LinkedIn does not show them. You have to go through an email search, which starts from the name and the company website to rebuild the address and then verify it.
The order of magnitude to keep in mind: around 50% discovery, in a range of 30 to 70% depending on the sector. That is not underperformance, it is what the data really looks like. Some targets structurally return almost nothing: private individuals, freelancers with no company domain, doctors, notaries. For those, no tool will find anything, and stacking enrichment providers will only add wrong addresses.
In Emelia, the search costs 1 credit per address found, and nothing when it finds nothing.
You are starting from nothing
The right tool depends entirely on your target, and getting it wrong here costs weeks.
If your prospects are on LinkedIn, extraction is the most direct route, and Sales Navigator is not mandatory: Emelia also extracts the classic LinkedIn search, up to 1,000 profiles per search, with the LinkedIn account you connected. Sales Navigator still offers the sharpest targeting, with 2,500 profiles per day and per account, a limit that comes from LinkedIn, not from the tool.
If you are looking for French companies by sector, size or area, a database such as Basile gives a more complete and faster result than an extraction, because it already cross-references LinkedIn, company registries and Google Maps.
If you are targeting tradespeople, shops or local professions, forget LinkedIn. Restaurants, heating engineers, osteopaths: these professionals are barely on it, and the useful data sits in registries and on Google Maps.
Clean the list before sending, not after
Five minutes of preparation that keep you from paying twice for the same data and from wrecking your deliverability.
Deduplicate before you enrich, never after: a contact that appears in three lists will be billed three times if you launch the email search without merging first.
Stick to two or three contacts per company, and shuffle the list so you never send two addresses from the same domain back to back. When you target several people at the same company, their internal IT security spots the pattern and blocks your messages. The nasty part is that there is often no bounce at all: you simply see a 0% open rate, because the emails are intercepted before they reach the recipients.
Clean up and deduplicate your list→The people you must never write to
Current customers, partners, competitors, people who asked not to be contacted again: they belong in the Blacklist (Settings > Blacklist), not in a side spreadsheet nobody remembers to check.
It applies to the whole account, and Emelia checks it before every send, including mid-sequence: a contact added between two follow-ups receives nothing more. You can add a single address, a whole domain to set aside an entire company, or a LinkedIn profile.
Adding a consumer domain such as gmail.com or outlook.com to the blacklist by mistake blocks sending to every address on that domain. If a campaign seems stuck for no reason, take a look at the blacklist.
How many contacts to plan for
Work backwards, starting from your sales target. To land one meeting, count on roughly 100 delivered emails. For 10 meetings, you therefore need around 1,000 contacts who receive your emails.
Then go back up the chain: if the email search returns half the addresses, you need 2,000 extracted contacts to start with. And at 35 new contacts per day per sending mailbox, 1,000 contacts represent about a month of campaign on a single mailbox, or a week across four.
This calculation is worth doing before you build the list, not after. It is what tells you how many sending mailboxes to prepare, and therefore when to start the warm-up.
10 meetings means about 1,000 delivered emails, so 2,000 extracted profiles, which is a month of sending on one mailbox or a week on four.
Frequently asked questions
The questions we get asked on this topic, answered briefly.
Can you buy a prospect database?
Technically yes, and it is almost always a bad deal. Files sold as a flat package are resold to dozens of buyers, so your prospects get the same approach ten times over, and the data is often more than a year old, which sends the bounce rate out of control. A searchable database that you filter yourself, at the moment you need it, gives you fresh data and targeting you control.
Do you need a Sales Navigator subscription to find contacts?
No. Emelia also extracts the classic LinkedIn search, with a connected LinkedIn account, up to 1,000 profiles per search. Sales Navigator brings finer filters and larger volumes, but it is not a must. And for a French target, a database such as Basile spares you the extraction altogether.
How many contacts do you need for a first campaign?
Between 300 and 500 contacts for a first test. That is enough for the rates to mean something: below 200 sends, a reply rate is nothing but chance. And it is few enough that you can correct course without having burned through your whole target with a message that did not work.
Why does the email search only find half the addresses?
Because half the addresses cannot be found, not because the tool searches badly. The search rebuilds the address from the name and the domain, then verifies it against the mail server. When the person has no named work address, or when their server refuses to answer verification requests, no tool in the world will find it. The normal range runs from 30 to 70% depending on the sector, and the company website is the piece of data that makes the difference.
Do you need to verify emails before sending?
If your addresses come from Emelia's email search, they were already verified at the time of the search, so a second verification is pointless. If they come from an old file, a purchase or a CRM export, then yes: it is the only way to avoid discovering a 20% bounce rate in the middle of a campaign. In Emelia, verification costs 1 credit per 4 addresses.
Can you add contacts without going through a list?
No. Every contact belongs to a list first, and it is the list that you then plug into a campaign. It feels restrictive at first, but it is what lets you reuse the same data across several campaigns, deduplicate in a single place, and know who has already been contacted.
Will a contact who is in two lists get the same message twice?
Not within the same campaign: when several lists are plugged into one campaign, Emelia removes duplicates automatically. Between two different campaigns, nothing is automatic, on purpose, since you may want to contact someone again. Use the campaign's Lead exclusion block, or the Deduplicate button in Lead Lists.
How many people should you target at the same company?
Two or three at most, and space the sends out. Beyond that, the company's IT security spots the run of similar emails arriving on the same domain and blocks all of them. The telltale sign is not a rejection but total silence: the messages are accepted, then held before the inbox, and you see a 0% open rate without a single bounce.