Artisan: Mailouts in a smart way - $21.1M

Mass mailouts are when a company sends the same email to many people at once. Companies use this to tell customers about new products, sales, or important news.

This is an old but useful marketing tool. It's cheap and lets businesses talk directly to lots of people. Mass mailouts can help make a brand more known, find new customers, keep current customers happy, and increase sales. When done well, they can be a key part of online marketing.

However, there are two main problems with mass mailouts. First, it's hard for businesses to create a good list of people to email. Some companies buy lists of random email addresses, which often leads to sending spam. Second, sending the same message to everyone doesn't work well. People don't like getting emails that aren't personal to them. This can make people less interested in the company and more likely to delete future emails without reading them.

So what's the solution? Companies can use AI to improve their mass emails!

Artisan, the company that offers full automation for mass outreach

Artisan (https://www.artisan.co) just received $21.1 million in funding on September 3, 2024. They use AI to help businesses sell more through mass mailouts.

Here's what Artisan does:

• AI-Driven Automation: Automates 80% of outbound sales tasks, handling lead generation, email personalization, and workflow management.
• B2B Database: Provides access to 300 million+ B2B contacts with comprehensive data for enhanced targeting.
• Personalized Outreach: Crafts hyper-personalized emails based on individual prospect research.
• Tool Consolidation: All-in-one platform streamlines processes, allowing focus on high-leverage activities.
• Custom Playbooks: Automate successful strategies from top performers, making them accessible to all team members.

The company calls it a forward-thinking solution in the realm of outbound sales, leveraging AI to enhance efficiency and effectiveness in lead generation and communication. As a result, you can get more relevant contact lists; you don't need to collect them manually. And more importantly, you can send personalized emails to each of your contacts.

How it works?

Artisan offers AI automation agents, called "artisans". However, for now there is only one of them, the AI agent called Ava.

Ava acts as a Sales Development Representative (SDR). Let's not get confused — Ava is just a nice name and pretty picture personifying the automation algorithms behind Artisan.

Ava can perform the onboarding process by scanning the company's website to create a tailored internal knowledge base and develop a Target Customer Persona. It can also handle lead generation using an internal vast database of contacts, and personalize outreach by crafting hyper-personalized emails that resonate with recipients. Additionally, Ava automates follow-up communications based on responses received and automatically schedules meetings with interested prospects.

Where artisan gets their 300M contact list?

Artisan collects their lists of leads through a combination of advanced data aggregation techniques and partnerships with multiple data providers. Here’s how it works:

• Data Aggregation: Artisan combines data from various industry-leading sources, including demographic, firmographic, technographic, and intent data, to create a comprehensive database of contacts.
• In-House Data Collection: In addition to external sources, Artisan employs proprietary methods for collecting and verifying data, ensuring high accuracy and relevance24.
• Web Scraping: Ava utilizes web scraping techniques to gather unique information from company websites, social media profiles, and other online resources, enriching the data further with real-time insights about leads.
• Intent Signals: The platform captures intent signals—such as job changes or funding events—allowing for timely and relevant outreach to prospects.

Conclusion

Artisan's way of transforming mass outreach is a smart way to revitalize mass mailouts that, let's be honest, work pretty badly nowadays. Personalization and right targeting are important in all areas where we communicate with customers, and such services as Artisan should make sense in today's customer relationships.