Automated lead generation: how it works, and software that does it

Automated lead generation means software does the repetitive parts of finding and contacting potential customers for you: it looks for businesses that match your ideal customer, saves their contact details, writes a first email to each one and sends it from your email account, then keeps going on a schedule. You still check what it found, choose what to send and handle the replies.

Inbound automation handles people who come to you: a form or a website chat collects their details, and software answers or passes them on. Outbound automation goes and finds people who have not heard of you: it searches for matching businesses, saves contacts and sends a first email. Most guides cover one or the other. ReachClaw does the outbound search and sending, and its website chat collects the email of any visitor who asks for a person, so both kinds of lead end up in the same account.

ReachClaw automates the search for leads (AI web search from your ideal customer profile), saving each lead's name, company, role, email and the page it was found on, writing an email for each lead from what it knows about your product, sending from your Gmail, re-running the search and the campaign on a schedule, and tracking opens, clicks and replies. Scoring is on request: a found lead has no score until you press Score leads, which rates it from 0 to 100. You still look over the leads, choose the template, approve or edit emails in Co-pilot mode, and reply to the people who write back.

Setup is a short checklist, not a project. Sign up with Google or an email and password, then the onboarding walks you through five steps: connect the Gmail account that will send, paste your Anthropic API key, enter your website address so ReachClaw can read it and build your customer profile, turn on the website chat if you want it, and choose Co-pilot or Autopilot. Gmail and the API key can be skipped and added later in Settings, but nothing AI-powered runs until the key is in. After that, pick a paid plan, turn on AI lead search on the Leads page, write a template, and create a campaign. The slow part is not the software: it is reading the first batch of leads and emails properly before you let anything repeat.

From the public web. ReachClaw uses AI web search with the ideal customer profile it built from your website. It reads pages such as company sites, directories, blog author pages and public profiles, and saves only people whose email address is visible on the page. It is told to look for named people rather than generic addresses like info@ or hello@. Each lead keeps a link to the page it came from, so you can check it yourself.

No. It saves the address as it appears on the public page, and there is no verification or deliverability check. If an address is wrong, the bounce arrives in your Gmail like any other bounce. Reviewing the first batch of leads before you send is a good habit.

Not as multi-step sequences. A campaign sends one email per lead. You can run it once, schedule it for a set time, or set it to run again on an interval (for example every 3 days). On each run it emails the new leads found since the last run, so a repeating campaign plus automatic lead search keeps outreach going without you. Replies land in your Gmail and are counted in the campaign's engagement.

A bought list is a snapshot: a file of contacts someone else collected, with no record of why each person is on it. ReachClaw's search starts from your own website, so the targeting is yours, and every lead carries the page it was found on and a note on why it matched. The list also keeps growing on a schedule instead of going stale. The trade-off is volume: a search returns the people it can find with a visible email, not thousands of rows at once.

Yes. Import a CSV with name, email, company and role. Each row needs an email address; ReachClaw doesn't look up missing emails for uploaded rows. You can score imported leads with the Score leads button and put them in any campaign.

Each email is written for that lead, using the templates you keep in ReachClaw and what it learned from your website, your documents and your notes. In Co-pilot mode you read and edit every email before it goes out. In Autopilot mode it sends on its own. Most people start in Co-pilot and switch once they trust the output.

Emails go out from your own Gmail account, not a bulk-sending domain. Every outbound email carries an unsubscribe link, and leads who unsubscribe are skipped by every campaign from then on. Beyond that, it is on you: target people who have a reason to hear from you, keep volumes modest, and stop emailing anyone who asks. ReachClaw does not warm up accounts or monitor your sender reputation.

Plans are Solo at $6.99 a month with 100 outbound emails, Growth at $29.99 with 500, and Scale at $69.99 with no outbound limit. The AI itself runs on your own Anthropic API key, so Anthropic bills that usage to you at its published prices. You can sign up and look around for free; lead search and sending need a paid plan.

Fewer than the tool lists suggest. Match the tools to the five parts above: something to find or capture leads (a lead finder for outbound, a form or a website chat for inbound), something to score them, something to write and send the first email, something to repeat the search and the sends on a schedule, and something to show opens, clicks and replies. AI tools now do the finding and the writing in one place. ReachClaw builds the customer profile from your website, searches the web for matching people, lets you score each lead with a click, writes and sends one email per lead from your Gmail, repeats on a schedule, and adds a website chat for the inbound side. Add a separate tool only for a job it leaves out: multi-step follow-up sequences, email verification, data enrichment or a CRM.

No. There is no HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive sync. ReachClaw keeps its own leads list with status, score and engagement for each lead. When someone replies, the conversation is in your Gmail, and you carry on from there in whatever tools you use.

It can do the thinking and writing parts well: help you describe who you sell to, suggest where such people are listed, and draft an email. What a chat assistant does not give you on its own is the system around that. There is no leads list that keeps the page each lead was found on, no score next to each lead when you ask for one, no template filled in per lead, no send from your own Gmail with an unsubscribe link, and no schedule that runs the search again next week while you are busy. You would build and tend all of that yourself. ReachClaw uses the same kind of model (Claude, through your own Anthropic API key) for the search and the writing, and adds those parts, so the search and the first email keep happening without you.