How To Build A Lead List For Cold Email (2025)

Your lead list is the most important factor affecting the success of your cold email campaign.

If your lead list isn’t relevant, then your response rate will be low.

And if your response rate is low, then ESPs like Gmail & Outlook will blacklist your email accounts, and your emails will go to spam.

In this article, I show you the four step process I use to build relevant lead lists, so my cold emails don’t go to spam:

1. Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)
2. Determine where your customers are located online
3. Make a list of the top 20%
4. Find their email addresses

Pro Tip: Do not buy pre-existing lead lists. There are companies that sell lead lists, but these lists are outdated, not relevant and contain “spam traps” which will cause your emails to go to spam.

1. Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)

In sales, the term “Ideal Customer Profile” (ICP) refers to a hypothetical customer type that would most benefit from your product or service.

For example, the ICP for Emailchaser is someone who already uses cold email software.

If I send cold emails to random business owners, then my response rate will be very low, since most people don’t even know what cold email software is.

But if I build a list of people that already use cold email software, then they are 10x more likely to respond to my emails, since they are already in the market for what I’m selling.

The mistake that most people make is they think that using generic filters like {job_title}, {location} and {industry} are sufficient. Just because someone is a CEO and in a certain industry, doesn’t mean that they are your ICP.

2. Determine where your customers are located online

Now that you know who your ideal customer is, you need to find out where they hang out online.

Expanding on the above Emailchaser example, I wanted to build a list of people that already use cold email software.

I made a list of companies that use our competitors’ email warm up tools, and then found the owner of each company with their email address.

There is no lead database tool that can build the above list for you.

I had to hire someone to build a custom scraper, which allowed us to make a list of all of the domains that are in our competitors’ warm up pools. We then were able to find the owner of each domain (company) and their email address, using Emailchaser’s Email Finder tool.

The above is just an example; I’m not saying the above strategy is right for everyone. My point is that identifying where your ideal customers are, and then building a list of them, can take time and effort.

If you think a $99 per month subscription to a generic B2B database tool like Apollo is going to allow you to make a list as relevant as the list described above, then I have bad news for you.

3. Make a list of the top 20%

Now that you have determined where your ideal customers are located, you need to trim the fat.

Expanding on the above Emailchaser example, we removed all leads that were from low income countries, as the likelihood that these leads would convert to a relatively expensive B2B monthly subscription is virtually zero.

You should do the same.

Identify the top 20% of your leads, and cut out the rest.

The basis of the Pareto principle states that 80% of results come from 20% of actions.

In reality, you might not need to cut out 80% of leads; this is just a ball-park estimate.

Below is a LinkedIn post that discusses how Charlie Munger’s head of sales was able to grow their company’s revenue to #1 in the market by reducing their lead list from 2,000 companies to 167 companies:

4. Find their email addresses

Once you’ve decided who the top 20% of leads are, you can then find their email addresses.

You can use Emailchaser’s Email Finder tool to find almost anyone’s email address, even if their email isn’t publicly available.

If you don’t want to spend hours manually finding email addresses, then you can hire an assistant from OnlineJobs.ph and pay them to do this for you.

There are other tools that you can use to enrich lead data to find email addresses, but in my experience, taking a manual approach can sometimes deliver more accurate results.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

I recommend that you follow my 4-step process when building your lead list:

1. Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)
   
2. Determine where your customers are located online
   
3. Make a list of the top 20%
   
4. Find their email addresses

If you want to build a self-replenishing lead list, then check out my article How To Create An Evergreen Cold Email Campaign.

I also recommend that you read my article How To Write A Cold Email so that you can learn how to write your email copy around your lead list.