Why We Built Finder.io?

In business, there are few things more important than productivity. It’s a key performance indicator (KPI) that always applies no matter the objective. No matter the goal, productivity is always a desirable underlying theme. In order for productivity to thrive in business, things (and people) have to work together. To put it another way, the more seamlessly software integrates at work, the more productive the workflow will be. Things like machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and automation all play important roles in ensuring productivity. But integration is foundational, and it’s often overlooked.

We designed Agile CRM to be a central hub of activity for both marketing and sales teams - a solution that worked (and continues to work) to integrate the two departments and beyond. With that launch, Agile CRM filled a hole for businesses and organizations around the world, and brands still benefit from its features and functions today. The positive response from the marketplace exploded even more as we began providing apps to help small and medium businesses in other areas of business productivity; each app performing a specific function and integrating with the others, working in harmony to achieve maximum output and productivity.

However, as a growing business, our sales and marketing teams constantly look for new ways to evolve and grow within our domain. Sometimes, part of growing a business involves taking an honest look inward and having the courage to accept the results. When something isn’t working, it should be fixed. It’s that simple.

As we took stock of our marketing processes, it became clear that our campaigns were failing in a critical area: email marketing.

“With all the talk of video, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and chatbots, it sometimes seems like email is long past its prime, said marketing expert and CrazyEgg founder Neil Patel.”

But if you think email is dead, you’re missing out on the real metrics. The truth? Email marketing is still going strong today, and is possibly the best possible strategy for your business.

Smart Insight, in an article delivering marketing best-practices and advice, said that email marketing is consistently one of the top 3 most effective channels driving website visits, leads and sales.

We all know that the magic happens by email and unlike social media platforms, you actually OWN your list.Oct 1, 2020

Email marketing has always been powerful. However, it’s easy to forget about email outreach with all the new social platforms and marketing channels opening up to the masses. Why is it still so popular?

Patel gives us his take on why email still stands the test of time:

“I think the answer has something to do with the fact that people use email more than other platforms. After all, what’s the good of marketing to someone if they’re not there? Data from 2017 shows that most people are on email 85% of adult internet users in the US. That beats out search engines by 15% and social media by 22% not small numbers in an industry that gets excited over single-digit conversion rate improvements. That’s why building a successful email marketing campaign is more important than ever for entrepreneurs.” - Neil Patel

Despite the ever-shifting, dynamic landscape of digital marketing (or marketing in general), email marketing has remained a constant fixture. That’s why Finder is so important for this marketplace. The ROI for successful email campaigns is astonishing.

“When it comes to customer interaction, email is the Holy Grail of marketing communication. That’s because done right, it produces phenomenal results. In fact, the ROI for email marketing can be as high as 4400%. That’s $44 for every dollar spent on an email marketing campaign.” - Campaign Monitor

The trick is to maintain successful email campaigns. While some recipients look forward to the weekly newsletter published by their favorite online catalogues, others are not so open. Without good information, email outreach suffers - not to mention lead generation efforts.

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In email marketing, there are certain KPIs that are more important than others. These include:

• Open rate
• Click rate
• Click-to-open rate
• Conversion rate

Of course, the overarching KPI here is return on investment, but without these crucial elements in place, you’ll never reach your goal ROI.

Our problem was that we were failing to obtain accurate data. And it was more than just the KPIs. As we reviewed our email outreach processes, we quickly realized that many of our email lists had information that was outdated and incorrect, and that’s why Finder’s powerful data collection features are so powerful. Without effective data and analysis solutions, it’s almost impossible to stay on top of information like that. Emails that we were sending were going nowhere.

As a result, we went to work determining how we might improve this initiative and get our message out to our customers and prospects.

The Problem

As we grew, our marketing department and strategies grew with us. We started initiatives to get our message out. Among those initiatives, we began email campaigns to connect with our current audience and to reach new segments, as well. We used email lists from our CRM, events we had attended, and lists of organizations that we were sure would be able to use our products to grow their own brands.

However, because our emails were being sent to too many outdated and incorrect email addresses, spam filters began picking them up, ensuring even the correct email addresses were not receiving our content. To make matters worse, we realized the email addresses we were receiving from some lead generation initiatives had typos or data entry errors, furthering undeliverable emails, and solidifying why Finder.io was needed.

We wanted a way to check individual emails or domains as well as whole lists of email addresses. We looked for solutions that would enable us to quickly check individual emails or domains and validate email lists, but our search came up empty. There seemed to be a shortage of apps that checked all the boxes we needed checked.

And so, we began to look at our problem as an opportunity. When we revisited the issues plaguing our outreach campaigns, we noticed two common trends:

• Inputting the information manually was causing too many errors
• The process of cleaning up the email lists was not trustworthy

We realized that if we were having this problem, there must have been a number of other businesses out there going through the same thing.

Designing a new app can be overwhelming. One of the biggest problems that faces designers and brands is finding a hole to fill - or, to put it another way, finding a need to address, or a problem to fix. Sometimes it’s obvious, but other times it’s not. Fortunately, our next hole to fill fell right in our laps. That’s why Finder.io is so focused to tackle a specific problem plaguing businesses and organizations.

As we considered how we would tackle the issues before us, our teams collaborated to come up with the basic requirements - the boxes we needed to check in order to have a solution that would be valuable.

The Requirements

We determined that our primary requirements were as follows:

1. Ability to Search Domains: We wanted to be able to find email addresses of people by company or domain name.

2. Find Individual Email Addresses: We needed our solution to be able to quickly locate individual email addresses via a quick search.

3. Verify Individual Email Addresses: It was important to us to be able to verify the validity and authenticity of email addresses as needed.

4. Find Multiple Addresses: We also wanted to be able to upload an entire list of names to find email addresses, and we wanted this feature to run just as quickly as the individual name search does.

5. Verify Multiple Email Addresses: We wanted to ensure a way that our team (and future teams) would be able to quickly clean up an entire email database with ease and confidence.

6. Ability to Generate Reports: We also wanted to make sure we could define the triggers of specific apps to allow specific actions to occur, and we needed detailed reporting.

7. More Options for Developers: Thinking ahead, we wanted to be able to offer more advanced API options for developers to have the ability to create seamless workflows and processes and make the app their own.

The Solution

As an organization committed to helping businesses be more productive and efficient, it was only natural to put that into practice with a solution created in-house. As our teams came together to create a solution to this problem, Finder.io was born.

The solution we came up with includes a robust domain search to find the email address of the decision-makers within targeted companies. Searches and search histories were created to be simple, easy to view, and intuitive in nature.

Our email verification software also included ways to search individual addresses and lists of email addresses with nothing but names and company URLs to draw from. Importing entire lists allows for quick and easy searches with immediate results.

In order to verify email addresses adequately, we created an email verifier for instant authentication, and leads can be qualified immediately, increasing the number of prospects that receive your emails.

Finder.io provides detailed reporting. These reports boost confidence and clarity by detailing search performance and the effectiveness of the email validation processes being implemented. This data is invaluable to our marketing and sales teams, and the data itself, as well as the app, integrates seamlessly with other elements of our workflow. This allows us to make data-driven decisions that help boost those KPIs that matter most to us.

This all-in-one email verification software can now be leveraged by brands of any size and from any industry. We built Finder.io to be affordable for all businesses, but also to provide robust features that provide value to anyone who uses it.

While some may think email marketing is a dying art, the truth is that it’s still one of the best ways to reach and grow your base of consumers. By engaging with your audience on such a personal, one-on-one channel like email, you turn customers into fans. Whether you’re a business owner, a marketing manager, or a Fortune 500 COO, if you believe in your brand’s products or services, and if you truly believe they can help others, then you have an obligation to put those products or services in front of prospective customers who need them most. At the end of the day, Finder.io helps you do just that.

If you’re in the market for a new email solution to add to your workflow, we encourage you to try Finder.io free for 30 days. We’re convinced you’ll fall in love with our solution.