How to send Apollo prospects to Instantly

The most common way to send Apollo prospects to Instantly is to export them from Apollo as a CSV file and upload that file to an Instantly campaign. In Apollo, you select the contacts you want from a saved list or a search and export them, which uses your plan's export credits. The file carries each person's first name, last name, title, company, work email, email status, and LinkedIn URL, along with company details such as website and employee count. In Instantly, you open the campaign, add leads from a CSV file, and match each column to a lead field. Columns that don't match a standard field, such as the job title, can be mapped as custom variables your email templates can use.

During the upload, Instantly offers a few protections worth turning on. It can skip anyone who's already in the campaign, in another campaign, or anywhere in your workspace, and it can verify the email addresses before they're added.

Apollo's own integrations push contacts to CRMs such as HubSpot and Salesforce, but Instantly isn't one of them. To get new Apollo contacts into Instantly without a manual export, teams usually build a workflow in Zapier or Make. The workflow watches Apollo for new contacts and adds each one to the Instantly campaign you choose, with the fields you map. Teams with a developer sometimes use Instantly's API, which accepts leads one at a time or in bulk.

Both routes move records reliably, but neither one decides which records should become leads. An Apollo list holds everyone you saved from a search. That includes the person who changed jobs last quarter, the contact at a company that already pays you, and the address Apollo marked as unverified. It can also include someone your team is already emailing from an Apollo sequence.

Instantly raises the stakes on that choice. It's built to send a lot of cold email from many mailboxes, and every lead in an active campaign gets your first email and each follow-up on schedule. Bounces and spam complaints count against the sending domains you warmed up, so a weak list costs you more here than it would sitting in a CRM.

The other half of the job is what each email says. Instantly fills your templates from each lead's fields, and most teams open the first email with the {{personalization}} variable. That line is only as good as what you put in it. An Apollo export gives you a title and a company name, but it doesn't give you a reason to write to that person this month.

A good result, then, is an Instantly campaign full of people who fit your ideal customer profile and still hold the role, who aren't already hearing from you, whose email addresses are safe to send to, and whose personalization line says something specific and true.

Kite does that work for you. It qualifies the prospects from Apollo, checks Instantly for everyone who's already there, and adds each lead with the research its emails need.

Start by telling Kite which prospects you want in Instantly and which campaign they belong in. You can point it at people you've already saved in Apollo:

"Add the contacts on our Apollo list called Q4 healthcare targets to the Instantly campaign called Clinic operators."

Or you can ask Kite to find them:

"Find 100 heads of operations at US home services companies with 50 to 500 employees and add the best ones to a new Instantly campaign."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. By the time you ask, it already knows your ideal customer profile, your current customers, and your competitors from that research, so it can propose the titles, seniority, company size, and locations to target without a long brief. Confirm the profile or adjust it, and Kite starts.

You can work with Kite in your browser or in Slack. You'll need to connect your Instantly workspace by adding an API key, which you create in your Instantly settings. To find new prospects, you don't need an Apollo account, because Kite has its own Apollo connection built in. To work from contacts you've already saved, connect your own Apollo account, or export the list from Apollo as a CSV file and attach it to the conversation.

Adding someone to an active Instantly campaign starts outreach to them, so Kite shows you the list first. Approve it, and Kite adds the leads.

Kite works from the contacts you've saved in Apollo or finds new people in Apollo's database, depending on what you ask for. With your Apollo account connected, it searches your Apollo contacts by keyword or stage and reads your stages, lists, and labels, so it can match what you asked for, such as everyone in a "Ready for outreach" stage. If you attached a CSV export, Kite reads every column in the file.

When you ask Kite to find prospects, it uses its built-in Apollo connection. It searches for companies by headcount, location, revenue, funding, keywords, and the technology they use, then searches for people at those companies by job title, seniority, and location. Kite puts every part of your profile that Apollo can filter on into the search itself, so it isn't sorting through people who were never a fit. It also reads each company's open job postings and recent news in Apollo, which often supply the reason to get in touch.

Kite decides who belongs in the campaign by checking each prospect against your profile before it adds anyone. First it confirms that the person still holds the role at that company, using their public profile or the company's own pages, and it drops anyone who has moved on. Next it removes your existing customers and your competitors.

Every prospect who passes gets a fit score from one to five, with a one-line reason, such as "Head of operations at a 220-person HVAC company that just opened its fourth branch." When the list runs past about fifteen people, Kite splits it into primary and secondary groups. If the primary group deserves a more personal sequence than the rest, Kite can suggest putting them in a campaign of their own.

If fewer people qualify than you asked for, Kite tells you how many it kept and why the rest fell short. A short list of good prospects protects your sending domains better than a long one padded with weak ones.

Kite makes sure every lead has a work email worth sending to before it goes near Instantly, because Instantly can't create a lead without one. Apollo's person enrichment supplies the work email, current title, and LinkedIn profile, and its company enrichment supplies the domain, industry, and employee count. Kite keeps each email's verification status exactly as Apollo returns it.

When Apollo marks an address as anything other than verified, Kite can check it again with Instantly's own email verification before adding the lead. A prospect with no work email, or with an address that fails, stays out of the campaign, and Kite lists that person separately so you can decide what to do. Kite includes only business details, which means it leaves out personal email addresses and phone numbers.

Kite checks Instantly for each prospect before adding them, because the same person often turns up in more than one Apollo search. It looks up each email address across your Instantly campaigns, so it can see whether the person is already in a sequence and what their lead status is, such as interested, not interested, or wrong person.

It also checks your Instantly block list, which holds the addresses and domains your campaigns never send to. Anyone on it stays out, along with anyone already in an active campaign. When Kite adds the leads, it tells Instantly to skip anyone who already exists anywhere in your workspace, so a lead added by a teammate last month can't slip through.

With your Apollo account connected, Kite also reads each contact's stage in Apollo. A contact your team has moved to a stage such as "Replied" or "Do not contact" stays out, and Kite tells you about anyone who looks like they're already in an Apollo sequence. Kite reports each person it held back and the reason.

Kite reads the campaign before it writes anything, including the subject and body of each step in its sequence. That way it knows whether your first email opens with {{personalization}}, mentions {{companyName}}, or relies on a custom variable your team created. Each lead gets the following:

• Work email
• First and last name
• Company name and company domain
• Website
• Personalization line
• Custom variables, such as job title, LinkedIn URL, and fit score

The personalization line is where Kite's research does the most work. Kite writes one or two sentences for each person from what it found about their company in Apollo's job postings and news and in its own research, such as a new location, a funding round, or the roles they're hiring for. It reads the email the line will sit in, so the sentence matches your brand voice and leads naturally into the rest of the message. If a variable your template needs is one Kite can't fill truthfully for a person, it tells you instead of leaving a gap that would show up in the sent email.

Kite adds the approved leads to the campaign you chose in one batch, with the fields and variables above. If you'd rather look at them in Instantly before they join a campaign, Kite can put them in a new lead list instead, and you or Kite can move them into a campaign later.

If you asked for a new campaign, Kite creates it in Instantly. It writes the subject and body of the first email and each follow-up, sets the sending schedule, picks which of your connected mailboxes send it, and sets a daily sending limit. Kite brings you the finished campaign with its sequence, its leads, and its schedule. Approve it, and Kite activates the campaign so Instantly starts sending.

With your Apollo account connected, Kite can then update each contact in Apollo, such as moving them to a stage your team uses for people in Instantly outreach. That keeps the two tools in agreement about who is being contacted, so nobody on your team adds the same person to an Apollo sequence next week. In Instantly, Kite can also assign the primary prospects to the teammate who should handle their replies.

When the work is done, Kite posts a summary in the conversation where you asked. It says how many leads it added and to which campaign, who it held back and why, and how many people it delivered against how many you asked for. The full list comes with it as a table showing each person's fit score, email verification status, and personalization line, so you can read every opening line without opening Instantly.

Once the campaign is running, Kite reads its results in Instantly. It reports leads contacted, opens, clicks, and replies for the campaign and for each step of the sequence. When a reply shows interest, Kite can mark that lead as interested, and when someone asks not to be contacted, it adds them to your block list. If you want new prospects added regularly, ask Kite to run the same job every week, and it will check each batch against Instantly and Apollo before adding anyone.

When Kite finishes, your Instantly campaign holds a set of qualified prospects ready for your sequence, and the conversation holds the record of what changed.