Find local business leads by city

Galactic Outreach finds local businesses the way you would by hand, only faster: pick a business type and a city, and it searches at that moment, reads each business's own website for the address it publishes, and leaves you a queue you can read before anything is sent. It does not sell a contact database.

How does a search work?

A search takes a city and a business type, such as dental clinics in Austin. It looks in two kinds of public source: businesses' own websites, found by a web search for that type in that city, and public business listings, which include businesses too small to rank in a search. Each website found is read once.

A search spends one credit per city, and the cost is shown before it starts. One that finishes having found nothing gives its credit back. Searches add to the queue rather than replace it, and anyone already contacted is filtered out, so running a city again leaves only the businesses you have not written to yet.

Where does each email address come from?

From the business's own website: its homepage, the pages it links to as contact, about or team pages, and any address the site publishes in its structured data. Nothing is bought, and nothing comes from a social network. The site's robots.txt is checked before every page is fetched, and no site is asked for more than one page every two seconds.

A small business's website rarely names a person, so what you usually get is the company's own address, not a named decision-maker with a job title. A business where no address was found is left out of the queue altogether.

What do I get for each business?

The fields a template can use: the company, its city and country, its website, the business type you searched, the platform the site is built on and, where the site names one, the owner. Each site is also scored from 0 to 100 on what a visitor would notice, such as no HTTPS or no layout for phones — useful when what you sell touches websites. How to describe the businesses you sell to is on your Ideal Customer Profile.

Which leads are held back, and why?

A lead that should not be emailed stays in the list with its reason rather than vanishing: consent required in its country, a city whose rules are unknown, a department inbox rather than a person, an enterprise brand, a malformed address, a domain with no mail server (it would bounce), the do-not-contact list, or already sent. Held leads never cost a send, and no setting turns the country rules off.

Which cities can I search?

These. Each carries one rule for its country, set when the queue is built. Leads in Germany, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands and Singapore are held, because the law there requires opt-in before a first email or forbids mail to addresses collected from the web. A city that is not in the table is held too, as unknown jurisdiction.

Some conditions are yours to keep, because Galactic records them but cannot check them: in the UK and Ireland the address must belong to a company, and in Canada and Australia it must be one the business publishes itself. The country rules give the law behind each row.

How is this different from buying a list?

A list is a record of what was true when somebody collected it. A search finds what is published now: the website was live when it was read, and the address is one the business put on it, not one taken from a list somebody else put together. Public business listings also reach businesses that do not rank in search results.

A live search can still be wrong, because what a business publishes can be. Read the queue in All leads before a batch is written, and drop anything that is not a real prospect; what to remove is in the docs. Before anything is sent, the safety checks run over the whole batch.

Where next?

• Find leads: running a search and reading the queue
• Choose who to email: what to remove, and the law in each country
• Pricing: packs bought once, with a free allowance at signup