Apollo lead generation is the practice of building outbound lists from Apollo.io's contact database, filtered by title, company size, industry, technology and intent signals, then exporting them into sequences. Apollo returns an address for 70 to 80% of searches at 70 to 82% accuracy. In a BounceZero study of 100,000 Apollo contacts, 5.8% of addresses marked "verified" were invalid and 18.4% catch-all at export when checked at export time.
Apollo is a database first and a sequencer second. Its search covers more than 200 million contacts with filters that matter for outbound: job title and seniority, headcount, revenue band, industry, technologies detected on the company site, funding events, hiring signals and website visitor intent. For building a list by criteria rather than by name, nothing cheaper covers as much ground.
The weakness is the age of the record. Apollo collects addresses from partner data, public sources and user-contributed signatures, then marks them verified when its own check passed at indexing. Your export may happen many months later, and B2B addresses decay fast, with only 19.2% of addresses still valid 90 days after verification in the BounceZero decay study. The 100,000-contact accuracy study measured what that gap costs.
Apollo labels each address. The bounce rates are from the BounceZero study of 100,000 Apollo exports verified at export time; Apollo's own definitions are from its documentation and are vendor-reported.
| Apollo label | Apollo's definition | Bounce rate at export (study) | Treatment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Verified | Passed Apollo's validation when indexed | 5.8% invalid, 18.4% catch-all | Verify anyway; the badge has no date |
| Likely to engage | Verified plus recent engagement signal | Lower end of the verified range | Verify; best segment to send first |
| Guessed | Pattern-inferred, not confirmed | Materially higher; many catch-all | Verify; expect catch-all and invalid |
| Unavailable | No address on record | Not exportable | Use a second finder or LinkedIn |
The study method and full breakdown by company size are in the Apollo email accuracy study.
Exclude existing customers, open opportunities and competitors by uploading your CRM domains to an exclusion list before searching. The cheapest fix for the most expensive mistake.
Title plus headcount plus one signal (technology, hiring, funding) produces lists of a few hundred to a few thousand that a sequence can speak to. Broad searches of 50,000 contacts produce broad copy and low replies.
Keep Apollo's status column and the LinkedIn URL in the export. They are what you need when a segment bounces or when you want to move a contact to another channel.
Run the CSV through bulk verification. Expect about 6% of verified rows to come back invalid and a further 18% catch-all or unknown depending on the domain mix. Details in verifying Apollo exports.
Valid rows to the cold sequence in Apollo or your sequencer. Catch-all to a low-volume secondary-domain sequence. Unknown held for a seven-day re-check. Invalid deleted, and if the contact was a paid export, claimed back under Apollo's refund terms for bounces.
Lists that sit in a saved search for a quarter are a quarter older. Re-verify anything over ninety days before it enters a new sequence.
Apollo prices in export credits per plan; the figures are published list prices and are vendor-reported. The verification column shows the cost of checking the same export on BounceZero.
| Apollo plan | Export credits a month | Approx. cost per credit | Verifying the same volume on BounceZero |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 120 | $0 | 100 free checks a month |
| Basic | 1,000 (annual billing) | About $0.05 to $0.06 | $6 for 2,000 credits |
| Professional | 2,000 (annual billing) | About $0.04 to $0.05 | $6 for 2,000 credits |
| Organization | 4,000 per user (annual billing) | About $0.03 | $15 for 5,000 credits |
Verification costs roughly a tenth of the export credit it protects, and unknown results return their credit.
It is a snapshot from indexing time. The study measured 5.8% invalid and 18.4% catch-all on verified rows at export. Any domain sending that list goes past the 2% line on day one.
Apollo's sequencer makes it easy to connect your main mailbox. Use lookalike domains with warmed mailboxes and keep the company domain out of cold volume.
Apollo will let you schedule more. Providers notice. Scale by adding mailboxes, not by raising the daily cap.
Guessed addresses on catch-all domains cannot be confirmed by anyone. Route them to a low-volume secondary sequence or to LinkedIn, and never count them as valid in reporting.
Apollo is thin on small European companies, on government and education domains, and on anyone whose address was never in a partner dataset. For named targets at small firms a pattern finder with a live check, or a Clay waterfall, finds more. For EU data with GDPR-aware sourcing, Cognism and Kaspr are the usual comparisons; the head-to-head is in Apollo vs Cognism.
Whatever the source, the routing rules are the same: confirmed addresses to cold volume, catch-all and unknown to warm or other channels, invalid removed. The source changes the find rate; it never removes the verification step.
For building lists by criteria, yes. The database is large, the filters cover title, size, industry, technology and intent, and the free tier is enough to test. The limit is record age: 5.8% of addresses Apollo marks verified were invalid and 18.4% catch-all at export in a 100,000-contact study, so the export must be verified before it is sent.
That Apollo's own validation passed when the record was indexed. The badge carries no date, and a record can be many months old by the time you export it. A verifier at export time checks the mailbox now and reports valid, invalid, catch-all or unknown.
Apollo will schedule as many as you set, but mailbox providers throttle senders above 30 to 50 cold emails a day per mailbox. Scale by adding warmed mailboxes on lookalike domains. Volume from a single mailbox is the second most common way Apollo users burn a domain, after sending unverified lists.
Apollo publishes refund terms for exported contacts that bounce, with conditions on timing and proof. Verifying the export before sending both avoids the bounce and gives you the evidence to claim the credit back for addresses that were invalid at export.
One BounceZero credit per address, $6 for 2,000 or $15 for 5,000, with unknown results refunded. That is roughly a tenth of the Apollo export credit it protects, and it is the step that keeps the sending domain under the 2% bounce threshold.
Upload the Apollo CSV, keep every column, get valid, invalid, catch-all and unknown back. 100 free checks a month.
Ayoub built BounceZero's 5-stage validation pipeline, its dedicated BGP-announced IP infrastructure, and the Patroni HA PostgreSQL cluster behind every verification. Previously built high-volume email delivery infrastructure. Trained at 1337 Benguerir (École 42 network, 2019). Open-source: bgp_analyzer.
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