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Companies spend thousands of dollars on email marketing and social media posting to increase their sales and keep existing customers coming back.
However, when it comes to the acquisition of new customers, cold emailing is still one of the best acquisition channels for both retail and tech companies.
An efficient cold emailing campaign can drive growth and have an amazing ROI.
So, what is cold email outreach and why is it so effective? Is it worth investing in cold email software rather than just doing it manually? And which cold email tools are the best?
Today, we’re covering exactly that – what cold email outreach is, why you should invest in cold email software, how to choose the best cold email tools for your needs, and a full review of the best cold email software available on the market today.
Let’s dive right in!
This is a summarized comparison of the top cold email software to use in 2024. Keep reading for the full reviews!
Best Cold Email Software | Pros & Cons | Pricing | Our P2P Rating |
SmartReach |
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Woodpecker |
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Saleshandy |
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Snov.io |
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Hunter.io |
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Reply |
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UpLead |
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AutoKlose |
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Outreach |
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Cold emailing is an unsolicited email sent to a receiver without prior contact. Usually, companies use it to get in touch with people who could be potentially interested in their products or services.
Cold emails are not necessarily considered spam. Companies who are doing it right target specific audiences that are genuinely interested in what they have to offer. The key to cold emailing is to target the right audience and truly provide value with your email content.
When a company or an individual decides to bombard an audience with irrelevant and unwanted content, this practice is called spamming.
Essentially, cold emailing works as an advertisement that the receiver can opt-out from at any time so they don’t receive similar emails in the future.
Cold emailing can be repetitive work as marketers will have to do endless copying and pasting. That’s where cold email software will come in handy!
SmartReach is a feature-rich solution that offers hyper-personalization, advanced scheduling, omnichannel outreach, reply sentiment analysis, and team-centric features.
SmartReach has built-in tools for email deliverability, like list-cleaning (email validation), gradual daily send increases, and spam test reports.
Reply sentiment analysis prioritizes responses for improved efficiency, and advanced scheduling lets you send emails timed for the recipient’s time zone.
It supports all major email clients, including GSuite, Office365, Outlook, Mailgun, and SendGrid.
Omnichannel outreach means you can use LinkedIn, SMS, WhatsApp, and calls alongside your cold email campaigns.
SmartReach is ideal for teams, with team-level settings, role-based permissions, a shared Team Mailbox for easy collaboration and transparency, 2FA for all team members, SOC-2 Audit Reports, and an agency dashboard to manage multiple clients, etc.
Pros:
Cons:
Website: smartreach.io
Woodpecker is the best tool for B2B companies that contact prospective clients via automated personalized emails. Woodpecker is specially designed for cold emails and follow-ups. You can send your cold emails directly from Gmail, Office 365, or Exchange accounts.
It integrates with Zapier, Salesforce, and a wide range of other business tools.
They claim to be one of the most secure software for automated campaigns. Further, it is a great choice for teams who need to collaborate, share lists of contacts, and/or blacklist domains.
Woodpecker offers sophisticated functions that include A/B testing, if-campaigns to move prospects to alternate streams, manual tasks to include non-email actions in the campaign and snippet-based conditions for easy customization and personalization.
One of the benefits of using Woodpecker is that they’re continually improving and updating their software. You can check their roadmap here to see their major updates.
Woodpecker has also developed a new pricing structure, which allows you to pay the basic price per slot and only pay for the add-on features you actually use.
Add-on features can be turned on and off whenever you want, which means you’re only paying for exactly what you need, when you need it, and no more.
Pros:
Cons:
Website: woodpecker.co
Saleshandy is one of the best cold email software to send personalized cold email campaigns at scale with high email deliverability.
It allows you to connect unlimited email accounts and execute your outreach campaigns seamlessly by verifying your emails and sending them one by one.
This mimics a human-like sending approach, which helps prevent your emails from landing in your prospect’s spam folder.
Saleshandy also allows you to connect multiple email accounts in a sequence and schedule your sequences based on different time zones and time slots, improving your email deliverability, engagement, and conversions.
You also get detailed analytics which allows you to check reports on open rate, reply rate, clicks on links, bounce rate, etc., which can help you optimize your sequences and increase your conversion rate.
In addition to its robust suite of features, Saleshandy also offers dedicated support and valuable resources, such as a blog, masterclass, and a community that helps you stay updated on the latest trends and best practices in cold emailing.
Pros:
Cons:
Website: saleshandy.com
With an easy-to-use interface and powerful features, Snov.io is another popular software designed for cold emailing. Snov.io allows you to automate your email campaigns and save time. You can also download the Snov.io extension for Google Chrome that lets you find someone’s email address on a website.
You can set triggers that will notify you when a person opens your email. Another automated action that you can set is a follow-up email if a user opens your email, but does not reply.
Finally, with the Domain Search Tool, you can find an email address that is attached to a certain domain name.
Pros:
Cons:
Website: snov.io
Hunter.io is a web-based email research and verification tool that helps businesses collect and verify professional email addresses.
The cold email campaign feature of Hunter.io is probably not its strongest suit as it was only recently added to the platform.
However, if you are looking for an all in one solution for your cold outreach efforts, Hunter.io is your best bet.
With Hunter.io you can find emails of your target audience within seconds, verify them, and even discover hard-to-find contact data of your prospects so that you could truly personalize your campaigns and improve the results on your outreach campaigns.
If you’re operating in the B2B space, Hunter.io is a must-have tool for your next cold outreach campaign.
If you do not require any sophisticated email automation features and are using Gmail, you can also use their campaigns feature, this way you get an all-in-one solution. From finding emails to converting them to customers.
TIP: Whether or not you decide to use Hunter.io, you must check out their chrome extension, as it can do wonders for your business!
Pros:
Cons:
Website: https://hunter.io/
Bonus: Hubspot’s 25 Cold Email Templates: Free & Ready-to-use
Take your sales outreach to a whole new level with Reply. With this dashboard, you can set up an email campaign with follow-ups, and then do split tests to improve your conversion rate.
One of the best things about Reply is its powerful reporting system. This system shows you all the data and indicators for your email campaigns, including delivery, open rates, link clicks, bounced emails, and more.
You can filter certain users from your queue of automated emails depending on their actions. Additionally, it lets you setup personalized email campaigns.
Pros:
Cons:
Website: reply.io
If you’ve been looking for a powerful and reliable B2B sales intelligence platform, only to be disappointed with leads that go nowhere, you need to try UpLead.
UpLead’s database includes over 54 million B2B contacts for you to browse through, allowing you to quickly connect with highly qualified leads. You can also use the data to update and enrich an existing lead database, find leads according to the CRM they use, and verify their contact information in real-time. That way, you can spend more time selling to prospects, and less time looking for them.
And, unlike multiple other lead generation tools, UpLead gives you a 95% data accuracy guarantee, so you know you’re not contacting leads with old information that will get you nowhere.
Pros:
Cons:
Website: uplead.com
With AutoKlose, you can find, target, and nurture your prospects hassle free because it automates all of your email tasks. AutoKlose comes with some amazing features, such as drip email campaigns, lead generation, and CRM integration. You can also send a large number of emails at once.
Further, you can turn your cold emails into warm communications using their follow-up option. Based on your interactions with emails, the tool sorts your contacts into warm and cold folders. You can integrate AutoKlose with different email platforms and Salesforce.
Pros:
Cons:
Website: https://autoklose.com/
Outreach is an all-in-one platform that makes your sales team’s work more efficient. It is one of the most useful software for salesmen since it allows you to not only send cold emails, but to also make calls to other regions and countries.
Additionally, they have an SMS integration feature that lets you reach your potential customers via phone. It also provides you some additional info about your prospects that allows you to send more personalized emails. While Outreach offers you a wide range of features, they also have the highest cost.
Pros:
Cons:
Website: Outreach.io
Using good cold email software allows you to streamline and scale your cold email campaigns in all the ways that matter most.
From sending personalized emails to cold prospects and automatic follow-ups when people don’t respond to triggered email sequences to keep people engaged and keeping track of your results, a good cold email software will help you manage and track your email campaigns easily and at scale.
Cold email software also makes your cold outreach more effective and more cost-effective.
Let’s take a look at some of the key benefits of cold email software:
Take a look at the table below to see how scaling your efforts can boost your profits:
The table above assumes response rates of between 2% and 10%, which is a ballpark average for good cold emails (some campaigns may be much higher, depending on the industry) with decent delivery rates.
However, deliverability and response rates vary widely, and using the right cold email software is essential to achieve consistently good results.
Here are 7 key factors to consider when you’re evaluating different cold email software:
Consider how easily you can set it up and connect it to your existing email account and the other tools in your tech stack, like your CRM, and if you can add multiple email accounts and use different ESPs.
Scheduling and automation are at the core of all good cold outreach campaigns, so make sure the solution you choose has robust features for:
Deliverability is everything when it comes to effective cold outreach. Good cold email software includes features to boost deliverability and build good sender reputation, such as:
Cold emailing is much more effective when you use advanced personalization to connect with the recipient.
Good cold email software will allow you to add personalization to the subject line, preview text, and the body of the email. Personalization should be as detailed as possible and should include things like customizable CTAs.
Tracking, reporting, and analytics are essential for success. These are the details and insights you need to make informed decisions and optimize your campaigns to improve performance.
Your cold email software must be able to track your campaigns and report on open rates, click-through rates, reply rates, bounce rates, and the number of unsubscribes.
Notifications should be real-time, and you can generate reports whenever needed. Reports should also be customizable and offer robust filtering options so you can really drill down into your data for fine-grained insights on all aspects of your cold outreach.
As you will often be managing multiple campaigns across multiple email accounts, the cold email software should allow you to manage all conversations from a unified dashboard.
This will enable you to stay on top of all your replies from one place without wasting time switching between platforms and give you an overview of your efforts as a whole so you can manage your campaigns more effectively.
It never makes sense to pay for more than you need right now. Look for cold email software that offers packages that will allow you to upgrade gradually as your needs increase rather than paying for a solution you must grow into before it becomes cost-effective.
Here you need to balance capabilities with your goals and choose an option that can handle your campaigns at scale when required but that will still be cost-effective until you get there.
Look for tools that allow multiple or unlimited inboxes and charge based on the number of prospects rather than users/seats.
When it comes to running successful cold email campaigns, choosing the right software to use is vital. That said, even with the best software you won’t achieve great results unless you follow cold email best practices too.
Here are some of the most important best practices for cold emailing:
The best practices above, combined with the right cold email software, will set you up for success.
For more tips on how to run a good cold email marketing campaign, check out this video by Patrick Dang:
Like all marketing campaigns, you need to carefully monitor and measure your campaigns to make sure you’re achieving real results and good ROI.
There are many different metrics you can use for cold emailing, depending on your unique campaign’s objectives, but there are three key metrics that every cold email campaign must track:
Tracking these metrics will help you identify and fix any issues, for example, a subject line with a very low open rate needs to be changed, and give you a pretty clear picture of how your cold emails are performing.
Your bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and conversion rate are also important cold email metrics to track, which will provide additional information on how effective your campaign is.
So, how do you know if you’re performing well?
It’s useful to compare your performance to industry benchmarks for cold email campaigns to get an idea of how your campaign is doing.
Here are some cold email benchmarks for 2024:
Personalization is essential for successful cold emailing, it influences open rates and click-through rates, and personalized emails have higher conversion rates too. SmarWriter AI is a tool for creating highly personalized emails, without spending hours researching the recipient.
The tool automatically generates email copy, and even whole sequences of emails, that are tailored for your prospect, based on their data from LinkedIn, and 40+ other sources like podcasts, blog articles, and interviews.
SmartWriter AI can also help you find email contacts on LinkedIn, connect with prospects via LinkedIn, and write email copy, customized ice-breakers, backlink propositions, and personalized sales pitches.
Using AI to do the legwork cuts out a huge amount of manual research and will save you hours and hours every week!
MailerCheck is a comprehensive email verification and deliverability testing tool. You can use it to verify email addresses and identify invalid or risky email addresses, so you can keep your mailing lists clean.
MailerCheck offers several features for testing and analyzing your email deliverability, where your emails are landing, blocklist activity and domain health, and the quality of your email content.
All these features are important for achieving and maintaining high deliverability and improving your open rates (and ROI). The reports it generates provide actionable insights so you can optimize your cold emailing to achieve the best results.
Zapier is an automation platform that supports the integration of over 5000 apps so that you can link the processes that you manage in separate software tools. You can then automate the tasks you don’t want to do manually.
For cold emailing, Zapier integrates your cold email software with any other tools you’re using, like Slack or your CRM, so you can automate boring, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks.
Useful things like getting a notification in Slack when someone replies to your cold email or your CRM automatically updating after someone takes a specific action, will streamline your cold email campaigns and save you a huge amount of time.
Zapier requires no coding and offers a free plan so you can use it and see what it will do for you, without any cost or commitment.
RocketReach is a great tool for finding contacts, with a searchable, global database of 700 million professionals that is updated in real-time.
You can use it to find the perfect prospects and access their current contact information. You can search using dozens of criteria to filter your results and find personal and professional email addresses, and direct telephone numbers for your prospects.
RocketReach also offers a browser extension, bulk look-ups, API, and a feature to send emails directly from within their platform.
Using RocketReach will save you a huge amount of time and show you prospects you may never have found on your own.
ChatGPT can be a very useful tool for cold email copywriting. With the right prompts, it can write great email copy, subject lines, preview text, and follow-up email sequences. It can also create variations of the same email in different tones and styles.
The copy ChatGPT produces will need some careful editing and fine-tuning but it works well for first drafts, and it can give you a ton of content to work with very quickly.
ChatGPT can also function as quite an advanced editing tool to check your emails for spelling, grammar, and tonal issues. It can even suggest edits and additions to improve the clarity and delivery of your emails.
You will need to read, edit and fine-tune everything you use AI to generate but it takes a lot of the legwork out of your writing process and will save you loads of time, and quite possibly improve your own writing in the process.
Writing subject lines for cold email campaigns can be a surprisingly difficult and time-consuming task.
Reply’s Cold Email Subject Line Generator is a very useful tool that can generate dozens of personalized subject lines for your campaigns.
It is free and very easy to use. All you need to do is input a few parameters, like a keyword and the type of subject line you want, and it will generate dozens of options, that you can copy and paste, or export as a CSV file. It really is that simple!
Email marketing is one of the most important channels for lead generation.
Combine your experience with useful cold email software listed above and you’ll achieve success in your campaigns.
These software allow you to make your work easier and faster. Evaluate and select the tool that suits your needs and available resources.
Cold emailing is the act of emailing a recipient without prior contact or permission from the recipient. This is similar to cold calling, but is much less intrusive. Cold emailing is considered a powerful marketing tool- using personalized emails to contact your customers. Read further to find out which are the best cold emailing software available to you, to maximize your marketing efforts.
Make sure that the email software you use includes dynamic email content, where you can automatically add the first name of the recipient, the company name and other details. The more personalized the email looks to a recipient the better! A worthwhile trick: identifying a mutual connection or point of interest with the recipient and mentioning it in the email. See the article to learn more about cold emailing best practices.
When searching for cold emailing software, make sure to find software that includes a range of personalization features, as well as customized images and links. It is also ideal if it includes email tracking and analytical functions to help you manage your customers effectively. Check the article for the full list of top email tools we reviewed.
Cold email outreach software is built to create, deploy and manage cold email outreach campaigns. Most cold email software tools provide features for managing contact lists, personalization, automated email sequences, email warmup, A/B testing, and detailed reporting. Read the full review to learn more about cold email software and the features it provides and the best options to consider for your cold email outreach.
Yes. You can send individual cold emails like you would send any other email or you can use a Gmail extension, or cold email software that integrates with Gmail, to send out higher volumes of emails. You can send up to 500 emails per day from a free @gmail.com address, or up to 2000 emails a day with a Google Workspace account. Read the full review to learn more about cold email software and how to run a cold email campaign.
Yes. Good cold email software has the features you need to automate and streamline your cold email campaigns, including the creation of mailing lists, scheduled bulk sending, automated follow-up sequences, if-then sequences, and drip campaigns. Read the full review to learn more about cold email software and how to automate your cold emailing.
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