Buzzstream Review: A Tool for Email Outreach Management

Email outreach is an effective way to promote your brand, but it can also be very time consuming.

Quite a few software tools have been created to help make email outreach simpler and one of the most popular tools for email outreach is Buzzstream.

I’ve tried Buzzstream myself and this post goes into some of the features and the pros and cons of using Buzzstream.

Pros:

Buzzstream has been around for awhile and is used by many digital marketing professionals. Here are some of the features on this tool.

Easily upload CSV of websites

There are plenty of tools that you can use to find websites to target for email outreach. For example, SEMRush and AHrefs allow you to scrape a list of websites that link to your competitors.

You can then import these URL’s by simply copying and pasting them into the Buzzstream interface.

Prospecting tool to find outreach prospects

Another neat feature of Buzzstream is that you can use it to find outreach prospects based on certain criteria. You can even have it run periodically, like weekly, so that you can find prospects on an ongoing basis.

This post goes into detail about how to use the prospecting feature in Buzzstream to generate a list of prospects:

http://www.buzzstream.com/blog/buzzstream-university-lesson-4-finding-new-opportunities-with-buzzstream.html

Automatically searches for contact info from a list of websites

One of the biggest time saving features of Buzzstream is that it can automatically search for contact info from the website. If no email address is found, it can find contact forms and social media profiles instead.

This feature will not find emails that are displayed as images or guess emails from popular naming conventions.

CRM to manage outreach process

Keeping track of email outreach is important so that you can have a record of your relationship with other influencers and bloggers. Buzzstream can keep track of your correspondence with multiple users so that you can continue the conversation intelligently.

You can also create multiple campaigns to organize your outreach efforts.

Supports multiple users

Since Buzzstream is web based, multiple users can log into and use Buzzstream. The centralized tracking of email correspondence, the ability to assign tasks to specific people and ability to use templates make Buzzstream a viable tool for teams with multiple people.

Track relationships stage, post frequency, domain authority and overall ranking

Buzzstream keeps track of information for each website that can be helpful in prioritizing your outreach efforts.

• Relationship stage – You can update this field manually to indicate what stage your relationship is in. This way you can target your outreach differently for people that you have a strong relationship with versus new prospects that you haven’t communicated much with yet.
• Post Frequency – One of the best features is that you can track post frequency and Buzzstream will automatically update this when it scans a website. You can see if a blog gets updated weekly, monthly or has become inactive.
• Domain Authority – Another useful feature is that Buzzstream can automatically update domain authority for sites you add. You can use this information to prioritize outreach.
• Overall ranking – You can give sites an overall ranking of your own if you want. Using your own ranking can allow you to prioritize outreach using your own criteria.

This feature can save you from wasting time reaching out to bloggers who don’t update their sites any more.

Filter records by tags, website type, purchases and more.

After you’ve enter some websites into Buzzstream, you can filter them by your own tags, website type, purchases and more. You can even include your own custom fields.

Bulk send feature

With Buzzstream, you can now send emails to multiple contacts simultaneously or you can send out emails individually if you want to do a more personalized outreach.

Customer response time within 24 hours

Customer support for Buzzstream is by email. Replies don’t usually happen right away, but I always got a reply within 24 hours.

Cons:

While Buzzstream is a good tool overall, there are several cons worth mentioning.

Only a single line for each website

When you import URL’s into Buzzstream, it consolidates multiple URL’s from the same domain into one record.

For example, I uploaded a list that contained 3 separate URL’s from Moz and Buzzstream consolidated it into one record. When you open the domain record for Moz, you can view the 3 links in the “links” tab.

The positive side of this setup is that it can eliminate redundant pages. For example, sometimes tag and category pages are included in records when retrieving backlinks using SEO tools. You don’t need these pages in your records if you have the URL of the main blog post.

However, for multi-author blogs (like Moz) or social media accounts, this can be a big negative. For example, if I upload a list of Twitter profiles, Buzzstream will add one line for all of them at twitter.com.

Customer support indicated that it is possible to store multiple URL’s under the main domain record. However, it would be more convenient to be able to store one contact per line rather than to be constrained to one domain name per record.

Ideally, you should find and upload the URL of the blogger’s main site, but not all bloggers have their own website. Or you may prefer to store contact records by Twitter URL. So in my opinion, having only one record per domain is one of the biggest negatives of Buzzstream.

Only searches site for contact info

In one of my previous posts, I shared over 65 tools that people can use to find email addresses. To get the best results, it is often a good idea to use a mix of these tools and tactics to maximize your chance of finding the email address.

Buzzstream can save a lot of time by searching the website for the contact information. Sometimes, it will reveal an obvious match, like firstname@website.com.

However, like many automated tools, it can miss things that a human would otherwise pick up, like if the email address is shown as an image instead of text. Or if the website owner uses a format like myname [at] gmail [dot] com.

Sometimes you can find the email by clicking through to social media or guessing their email using popular email naming conventions.

So while Buzzstream does look through the site for contact info, it does miss out on the opportunities listed above.

Overall Recommendation

Buzzstream is a good tool overall for performing email outreach and is relatively inexpensive, especially if your strategy is SEO related. You will still have to visit each site, research your prospect and find the name of the person you want to reach out to as those tasks cannot be automated.

They also offer a free two week trial, so if email outreach is something you are doing to promote your brand or connect with influencers, then you can try it out before you buy.