When you’re selling marketing technologies and services to B2B brands, all you need is a customised CMO email list that comes from a trustworthy source.
Of course, finding their contact information can be tough. These busy leaders don’t usually put it on their company website or LinkedIn profile.
Fortunately, tools like Cognism are designed for getting around this issue.
Below, we’ll discuss Cognism features and compare them to other CMO email databases. We’ve also answered common questions about building and buying CMO email lists to aid your cold outreach and email marketing efforts.
Cognism is a B2B sales intelligence platform that enables you to build CMO email lists in minutes with its company and contact search filters.
First, filter for companies that match your ideal customer profile. Then, to get a long, tailored list of CMOs' email addresses, select “CMO” as your desired job title. The list will also include their cell phone numbers.
Cognism also comes with buying intent data that informs you when your target CMOs are in the market for a solution like yours, empowering you to send personalised emails at the perfect time.
2. Kaspr
Kaspr is a prospecting tool meant to help SDRs find CMO email addresses and phone numbers in their target accounts.
Using its LinkedIn Extension, you can quickly reveal CMOs contact info connected to any LinkedIn profile, group, or post. You can then automate LinkedIn outreach or export CMO email addresses to your other tools.
From the Kaspr app you can also manage those leads, send emails, make calls, and automate LinkedIn invites.
Ampliz is a B2B data intelligence platform that contains company and CMO contact data across the globe, but with an emphasis on the APAC region and healthcare. It’s sourced from government records and listings, trade shows, corporate events, annual reports, and third-party data vendors.
Its filters allow you to drill down into the database and create lists of CMO emails.
An all-in-one email outreach platform, Hunter.io helps B2B salespeople find CMO email addresses at target companies, and verify them as accurate.
To use its name-based email finder, you simply type in the name of the target CMO and the domain name of their company, then click search.
You can also bulk search for emails by uploading a TXT or CSV file of your leads — the software will then check them and return only the verified CMO email addresses list.
Apollo.io is a lead intelligence and sales engagement platform that helps salespeople find, email, call, and nurture B2B leads.
With its Prospect feature, you can use its B2B database, ICP search, and 65+ filters to build targeted CMO email lists.
Apollo.io uses LeadSift intent based on public web scraping.
Check out Apollo.io alternatives list.
Thomson Data provides marketers with a B2B database containing information on over 75 million B2B contacts, including many Chief Marketing Officers.
With its custom list-building feature, you can create CMO email lists using various filters, from job title to company size to some combination of multiple for an especially targeted list.
RocketReach is an email lookup tool with a sizable CMO email database.
Users can find emails of target marketing leaders or bulk download lists of leads that meet their specific criteria.
You can also uncover email addresses connected to CMOs' social media profiles via a browser extension. It might not be best for supplying lead phone numbers.
ZoomInfo is an all-in-one GTM platform with a wide range of built-in features. It has a vast B2B database with C-level executives' email addresses, including Chief Marketing Officers.
ZoomInfo has recently improved its coverage in Europe, but you’ll have to pay extra for a Data Passport if you need CMO emails outside the USA. Check out the best database providers in the UK.
Check out ZoomInfo alternatives for more options.
By far, the best and fastest way to get CMO emails is to use a B2B sales intelligence software that allows you to build targeted lists based on your ICP using advanced filtering.
For example, with Cognism, a martech salesperson could specify that they wanted email addresses of CMOs from Colorado-based real estate management companies with 1,000 - 2,000 employees and other specified qualities.
Once you’ve generated the list of highly qualified CMOs and their verified email addresses, you can export it to Salesforce, HubSpot, and other popular sales enablement tools. Then you can start your cold email outreach campaign.
If you already know your ICP and are using the right platform, the whole process of building a CMO sales lead list should take under five minutes and result in hundreds to thousands of B2B emails that lead to connections, not bounces.
There are some serious problems with buying pre-made CMO email addresses online.
First off, these lists tend to be filled with outdated, inaccurate data that drives down your deliverability rates.
It’s likely that you’ll send many well-crafted emails to CMOs only to find out later that they’re no longer at that company or using that email address. Talk about frustrating.
In addition to being inaccurate, the email lists are also often filled with irrelevant emails of CMOs outside of your target audience, or of people who aren’t actually CMOs at all.
Another common issue with buying a CMO email database is that you may run into compliance issues.
Unlike Cognism, some of the email list-makers don’t abide by GDPR and other regulations when collecting their email data, which puts your business at risk.
A final problem, less mentioned but still significant, is that thousands of other sellers trying to contact CMOs will also be using these pre-made lists as well.
That means many of the CMOs on the list will likely have built up a strong aversion to cold outreach. As a result, the spraying and praying approach doesn’t work anymore and you need to think of the best ways to personalise your emails to C-level executives.
There are seven factors to consider when evaluating a CMO email list provider, including affordability, data compliance, and data quality.
Knowing these will help you pick a provider that empowers you to achieve your sales goals.
Let’s go over them one by one:
If you want a platform that excels in the above categories, look no further than Cognism.
The cost of a CMO email database depends on several factors, the most influential of which is the data's accuracy.
Generally, the more up-to-date and accurate the contact data, the higher you should expect to pay.
Providers often offer several packages, the higher-cost ones offering more features and data access.
Some providers, like Cognism, will build a custom package for you based on your specific data requirements.
You’ll also find that some email database providers offer free subscriptions. However, these tend to be rather limited in terms of how many emails and phone numbers you can unlock per month.
Most of the time, you’re best off paying for unrestricted access to a B2B database through a seat-based payment model.
This way, you know the costs upfront and get access to all the CMO email data in the database for a monthly or annual fee.
Some brands use a credit-based system instead of a seat-based. With these, you pay for a certain number of credits, which act sort of like keys to open up emails.
The problem is that it can be hard to predict how many credits you’ll need when you start out. And this can cause you to run out of credits and have to buy more, thus complicating your budget.
Some providers, like Apollo.io, use “free plans” to access to user customer-submitted data and, supplement their database and sell their services, which include this incorporated data. You can find this information in the vendor’s data privacy. With Cognism, your CRM data stays with you.
Knowing the email addresses of target CMOs is only half the battle. You must also know how to craft an email that results in opens and positive replies.
For that, you’ll need to enhance your CMO email list with various other types of information, such as intent data, sales triggers, and technographics.
A tool like Cognism stores and updates this data in its database while allowing you to enhance your CMO email lists with it easily.