Building an Automated Outreach System for Catering Companies

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore how to build a powerful automated outreach system specifically designed for catering companies. This system leverages Google Maps scraping, website analysis, and email extraction to create a complete sales funnel.

The Complete Workflow Overview

Our automated outreach system consists of four key components working together seamlessly:

1. Google Maps scraper to find catering companies by zip code
2. Website screenshot and analysis system
3. Email extraction automation
4. Personalized outreach email system

Step 1: Scraping Catering Companies from Google Maps

The first step involves setting up a workflow that systematically scrapes catering companies from Google Maps using specific zip codes. This workflow:

• Takes a list of zip codes as input
• Searches Google Maps for catering businesses in each area
• Extracts business names, addresses, phone numbers, and website URLs
• Adds each business to a Google Sheet with a status of “in progress”
• Avoids duplicate entries by checking if the business already exists in the sheet

The system runs automatically every few minutes, working through the zip code list to build a comprehensive database of potential clients.

Step 2: Website Screenshot and Analysis

Once we have a list of businesses with websites, the next workflow:

• Takes screenshots of each business website using a self-hosted Browserless instance
• Uploads the screenshots to Google Drive with the website URL as the filename
• Uses AI vision models to analyze and rate each website from 1-5 stars
• Updates the Google Sheet with the website rating

This analysis allows us to segment potential clients based on their current website quality – those with low-rated websites are prime candidates for website improvement services.

Step 3: Email Address Extraction

To enable direct outreach, we need to extract email addresses from each website:

• A scraper workflow checks each website in the “in progress” status
• Uses FireCrawl to extract content from the homepage
• Searches for email address patterns in the extracted content
• Updates the Google Sheet with the found email addresses
• Changes the status to “email found” when successful

A backup workflow is also implemented to check contact pages and other sections if the initial email extraction fails.

Step 4: Personalized Outreach Campaign

With all the data collected, we can now implement a targeted outreach strategy:

• For all businesses: Offer our outreach system that allows them to find potential corporate clients for their catering services
• For businesses with low-rated websites (1-2 stars): Offer website improvement services
• A/B testing different offers: paid website improvements vs. free website with hosting package

The system sends personalized emails that include a snippet showing how we found their business information, demonstrating the power of our outreach system while simultaneously offering to help protect them from similar scraping.

Self-Hosting Benefits

A key advantage of this system is the use of self-hosted services:

• Self-hosted Browserless for website screenshots
• Self-hosted n10 for workflow automation
• Self-hosted YouTube transcription services

This approach significantly reduces costs compared to using paid API services and provides greater control over the entire process.

Results and Follow-up

The system tracks responses and uses AI to analyze sentiment, allowing for personalized follow-up strategies. Angry responses receive additional attention to convert them into satisfied customers, while positive responses move to the next stage of the sales process.

This automation demonstrates how powerful workflow tools can be leveraged to create a complete business development system that continuously generates new leads and opportunities.