How to send Apollo prospects to Lemlist

The most common way to send Apollo prospects to Lemlist is to export them from Apollo as a CSV file and import that file into a Lemlist campaign. In Apollo, you select the contacts you want from a saved list or a search and export them, which counts against 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 Lemlist, you open the campaign, upload the file, and match each column to a lead field. Columns that don't match a standard field become custom variables your email templates can use.

Apollo's own integrations push contacts to CRMs such as HubSpot and Salesforce, but Lemlist isn't one of them. If you want new Apollo contacts to reach Lemlist without a manual export, the usual answer is an automation tool. A Zapier or Make workflow can watch Apollo for new contacts and add each one to the Lemlist campaign you choose, with the fields you map.

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 may also include someone you're already emailing from an Apollo sequence, which is easy to miss when two tools can both send.

Lemlist raises the stakes on that choice, because it's a sending tool rather than a database. In a running Lemlist campaign, a weak lead gets your first email and your follow-ups, from your own mailbox. Every message that bounces or gets ignored counts against your sender reputation, so the list matters more here than it does in a CRM.

The other half of the job is the personalization. Lemlist fills each email from the lead's fields and variables, so an email that opens with {{icebreaker}} is only as good as what that variable holds. Apollo's export gives you a title and a company name. It doesn't give you a reason to write to that person this month.

A good result, then, is a Lemlist campaign full of people who fit your ideal customer profile and still hold the role, who aren't already hearing from you in Lemlist or Apollo, and whose variables carry a specific, true reason to get in touch.

Kite does that work for you. It qualifies the prospects from Apollo, checks Lemlist 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 Lemlist 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 for Q4 fintech targets to the Lemlist campaign called Fintech founders."

Or you can ask Kite to find them:

"Find 50 VPs of sales at US logistics companies with 100 to 1,000 employees and add the best ones to a new Lemlist 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 Lemlist account in Kite so it can read your campaigns and add leads to them. 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 a running Lemlist 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 name, title, company, or keyword and filters them by contact stage. It also reads your stages and lists 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.

For the people who pass, Kite uses Apollo's enrichment to fill in what's missing: the work email, current title, and LinkedIn profile for the person, and the domain, industry, and employee count for the company. It keeps each email's verification status exactly as Apollo returns it. A prospect with no work email stays out of the campaign, because Lemlist needs an email to create the lead, 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.

Every prospect who passes gets a fit score from one to five, with a one-line reason, such as "VP of sales at a 300-person freight company that just opened two account executive roles in Chicago." 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 a campaign of its own for them.

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 domain better than a long one padded with weak ones.

Kite checks Lemlist 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 among your existing Lemlist leads, so it can see whether the person is already in a campaign and whether they've replied or been marked as interested or not interested.

It also checks each address against your Lemlist unsubscribe list, which covers people who opted out and any domains you've blocked. Anyone on that list stays out, along with anyone already in an active sequence. When Kite adds the leads, it also turns on Lemlist's own deduplication, which stops Lemlist from adding a person who's already in another campaign.

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 being worked in Apollo. Kite reports each person it held back and the reason.

Kite reads the campaign before it writes anything, including its sequence steps and the variables your templates use. That way it knows whether your first email opens with {{icebreaker}}, mentions {{companyName}}, or relies on a custom variable your team created. Each lead gets the following:

• Email
• First and last name
• Company name and company domain
• Job title
• LinkedIn URL
• Icebreaker
• Contact owner, when you named one

The icebreaker 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 funding round, a new location, or the roles they're hiring for. It reads the template the line will sit in, so the icebreaker matches your brand voice and the tone of the email around it. Kite writes the fit score, its reason, and any other details your templates call for into custom variables on the lead. 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 each approved lead to the campaign you chose, with the fields and variables above. If you asked for a new campaign, Kite creates it in Lemlist, writes the email and LinkedIn steps of its sequence, attaches a sending schedule, and sets it to stop for anyone who replies or books a meeting. You start a new campaign yourself in Lemlist, so you can read the sequence there before the first email goes out.

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 Lemlist 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. When you want someone to follow up by hand, such as calling the primary prospects, Kite creates a task in Lemlist for each one, assigned to the person you name and given a due date.

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 icebreaker, so you can scan the personalization without opening Lemlist.

Once the campaign is running, Kite reads its results in Lemlist. It reports opens, clicks, replies, and bounces 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 to stop, it can unsubscribe them from the campaign. If you want new prospects added regularly, ask Kite to run the same job every week, and it will check each batch against Lemlist and Apollo before adding anyone.

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