Marketing & Sales · Tip
Asset-Based Cold Outreach Automation Workflow
Automate personalized sample assets and lead generation inside cold email campaigns.
This Make.com automation pipeline combines lead scraping with automated asset creation to increase cold email response rates. It extracts lead lists from Apollo via Apify, scrapes and analyzes each company's website with OpenAI, generates a customized sample asset in Google Docs, and uploads the lead directly into an Instantly email sequence.
How it works
Step-by-step Make.com automation architecture:
- Scrape Leads: Use Apify (specifically the actor 'code_crafter/apollo-io-scraper') to pull up to 50,000 leads from Apollo.io search URLs with names, email addresses, and company domains.
- Fetch Website Context: Use Make's HTTP module (GET request) targeting the lead's website URL ('organization.website_url'), followed by a Text Parser module (HTML to text) to clean the raw web page data.
- Extract Insights: Pass the parsed text to an OpenAI module ('Extract Data From Profile(s)') with instructions to output structured JSON summarizing the prospect's business context, tone, and offerings.
- Generate Tailored Asset: Send the structured context into a second OpenAI module ('Generate Newsletter') that writes a ready-to-use custom asset (e.g., a personalized ~400-word newsletter issue or audit).
- Export Document: Convert Markdown to HTML and use the Google Docs module ('Create a Document') to store the personalized asset.
- Push to Cold Email Tool: Trigger an HTTP POST request to Instantly's API ('https://api.instantly.ai/api/v2/leads') to insert the prospect along with the shareable Google Doc asset link into an automated campaign.
What it's for
- Scrape targeted B2B contact lists from Apollo search URLs using Apify
- Analyze prospect websites automatically with OpenAI to extract brand tone and offerings
- Generate personalized sample deliverables like newsletter drafts or audits as Google Docs
- Upload enriched leads and custom asset links into Instantly cold email campaigns
Key points
- Scrape prospect data and company domains using Apify's Apollo scraper actor
- Fetch and clean prospect website content using Make.com HTTP and Text Parser modules
- Extract business context into structured JSON using OpenAI
- Produce ready-to-use custom assets tailored to each lead using a second OpenAI prompt
- Save the generated asset to a shareable Google Doc using Markdown-to-HTML conversion
- Push enriched contact records and asset links into Instantly via API
Pricing
Free. Workflow blueprint is free; requires paid or free tiers across Make.com, Apify, OpenAI, and Instantly.
Details
- Type
- Tip
- Category
- Marketing & Sales
- Topic
- Cold Outreach
- Open source
- No
- Platforms
- Web, API
- For
- Cold emailers, B2B sales development reps, agency owners, and growth marketers.
- Alternative to
- Clay, Generic cold email mail merges
- Tags
- cold email, make.com, apify, openai, instantly, lead generation, automation
Why it was saved
- @nick_saraev: Drastically improves cold email response rates by automatically generating and gifting tailored sample assets upfront instead of sending generic pitch emails.
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