Generate Cold Email Icebreakers from Local Business Search using GPT-4 and Dumpling AI

🚀 Why This Automation Matters

Sending cold emails that feel personal and relevant is hard , especially when reaching out to hundreds of local businesses. Most outreach feels like spam because it’s generic, boring, and clearly automated.

This workflow solves that problem.

It helps you:

• Find local businesses based on keywords like “Dentist in New York”
  
• Pull real data from their websites (email, what they do, phone)
  
• Use GPT-4 to write warm, human-sounding icebreaker messages
  
• Log everything into a Google Sheet
  
• Optionally send leads to Instantly.ai for automated cold outreach
  

You end up with a spreadsheet full of high-quality leads, with personalized icebreaker emails already written — ready to send.

🧩 Tools Used

• n8n: Workflow automation platform
  
• Dumpling AI: To search for local businesses and extract contact info
  
• OpenAI GPT-4: To write friendly, customized outreach messages
  
• Google Sheets: To store lead and message data
  
• Instantly.ai (optional): To push leads into your cold email campaigns

🛠 Step-by-Step Breakdown

🔹 Step 1: Submit Search Keyword via Form

It starts with a form that takes in a simple keyword phrase like:

Dentist in New York

This allows anyone on your team to generate cold email leads just by submitting a keyword.

🔹 Step 2: Search Google Maps with Dumpling AI

The keyword is sent to Dumpling AI’s search-maps endpoint.

This instantly returns a list of matching local businesses, including:

• Business name
  
• Website URL
  
• Phone number
  
• Google rating
  
• Description

🔹 Step 3: Split Results Into Individual Businesses

The returned list of places is split into single items. This lets us process each business one by one, and get clean data per row.

🔹 Step 4: Loop Through Each Business

We loop through the places in batches of two. This gives us flexibility and ensures smooth processing if you are working with many results.

🔹 Step 5: Extract Contact Info + Website Summary

For each business, we use Dumpling AI’s extract API to:

• Find an email on the website
  
• Generate a summary of what the business does
  

This summary is critical because it’s what GPT-4 uses to sound personalized when writing the icebreaker.

🔹 Step 6: Generate a Personalized Icebreaker Message with GPT-4

Now the fun part.

We send the following info to GPT-4 via n8n’s LangChain OpenAI node:

• Business Name
  
• Keywords from their Google Maps types
  
• Website Summary
  

And we prompt GPT-4 to write a short message that:

• Starts with a personalized comment about the business
  
• Genuinely admires what they do
  
• Gently introduces your digital marketing agency
  
• Asks if they’d like to hear some ideas
  

Here’s a sample output:

Hi 209 NYC Dental,

I came across your site while exploring established dental practices in NYC and was genuinely impressed by your long-standing reputation since 1887. Offering both general and cosmetic dentistry with financing options is a great way to serve your community.

I run a digital marketing agency and I’d love to share a few ideas that could help you get even more local visibility. Would it be okay if I sent some over?

🔹 Step 7: Filter — Only Continue If Email Exists

Some businesses don’t list emails on their website. This step checks if we got an email, and only proceeds if we did.

This avoids adding incomplete leads to your outreach sheet.

🔹 Step 8: Save Everything to Google Sheets

We now push all key lead data to Google Sheets:

• Business Name
  
• Website
  
• Email
  
• Phone Number
  
• Website Summary
  
• Icebreaker Email
  

If the lead already exists (based on URL), the row is updated. If not, a new row is added.

🔹 Step 9 (Optional): Send to Instantly.ai Campaign

If you’re using Instantly.ai for outreach, this step adds the lead directly into your campaign, with the personalized message as the intro.

Campaigns run on autopilot from there.

💡 What You Can Use This For

• Local lead generation (dentists, lawyers, roofers, etc.)
  
• Agency prospecting based on niche
  
• Cold outreach based on relevance
  
• Lead lists for SDRs or sales teams
  
• Instant campaign personalization at scale
  

🧠 Final Thoughts

This workflow combines scraping, email finding, AI writing, and CRM-ready output into one smooth, scalable pipeline.

Instead of manually googling businesses and writing emails one-by-one, you can:

• Enter a keyword
  
• Click submit
  
• Get a spreadsheet full of warm, personalized cold email leads in minutes
  

You don’t just automate outreach — you make it feel human again.