Sales outreach strategies and techniques have evolved over the years, from inbound sales to outbound sales, social selling, and now cold emailing.
With recent trends and technologies in sales, email campaigns have developed to become one of the most effective and trusted channels for sales teams to reach out to their prospect, build strong relationships with them and nurture them till they convert.
Beyond this, cold emails have also become popular in recent times based on their multifunctional capabilities – virtually any kind of business and department can use cold email outreach to prospect and generate leads.
If you still have doubts about the effectiveness of cold emails, here’s the proof; According to a study by Campaign Monitor,
For every $1 spent on email marketing, $44 is made in return, which equals a 4400% ROI
In addition to this, emails are also known to be more 40x more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter combined. Sadly, sending cold emails and getting your desired result can be tricky even with all of the known benefits and results.
Luckily, there are now hundreds of cold email software that you can use to streamline cold email outreach. The real work in this situation is narrowing down to the best cold email software for your business and team. In this article, we have identified the 20 best cold email marketing software for your sales and marketing teams and factors to consider when choosing one.
Keep reading!
Table of Contents
- What is Cold Emailing?
- Is Cold Emailing Illegal?
- 7 Best Practices of Cold Emailing Tools
- What is a Cold Email Outreach Tool?
- Factors and Features to Consider Before Choosing a Cold Email Tool
- 20 Best Cold Email Software
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is Cold Emailing?
Cold emailing is the practice of sending cold emails. A cold email is an unsolicited email that is sent to a recipient with no prior contact, connection, or relationship. In most cases, the recipient is not even expecting the email from you.
Cold emailing is the equivalent of cold calling. In most business situations, cold emails are one of the most effective means of starting and building business relationships. Although cold emailing was solely used for pitching product/service offers to prospects in the past, it is usually, a generic email without any personalization or customer segmentation.
The approach to crafting and sending cold emails has evolved drastically over the years. The use of an impersonal, one-size-fits-all type of email with aggressive sales pitches no longer does the trick on prospects. Anyone still using such an approach risk getting blocked from the prospects.
Nowadays, cold emailing is about sending about building and nurturing lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with prospective clients and existing customers. Rather than aggressively trying to sell and force your products or service on your prospect, cold emails require that sales reps and marketers focus more on the value or benefit of the product/service to the prospect than the features.
Personalization is key to winning cold emails. It offers salespeople and marketers the opportunity to connect with prospects and nurture them to conversion.
Is Cold Emailing Illegal?
Different countries of the world have different legislations on creating and sending cold emails and spam emails to people.
Cold emails are protected and strictly guided under the CAN-SPAM act and the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in the United States and Europe. This law states the rule and guidelines that every cold email must have to differentiate it from spam emails.
Legally, the U.S and E.U laws permit you to send cold emails as long as it contains the following;
- Mention in the email how you found the recipient’s information and your reason for reaching out to them.
- Provide email recipients with the option to unsubscribe or opt out.
- Include your accurate contact details in the email to make it easy to contact you.
- Outrightly identify any form of advertising in the email.
- Avoid using contact lists that were obtained illegally from third parties such as website crawling bots.
To stop your cold email from ending up in the spam folder, you must strictly abide by the above guidelines. Beyond this, you must also ensure that you do thorough audience research and ensure the email campaign is relevant to the recipient, and importantly, be sure the emails are sent to verified addresses.
7 Best Practices of Cold Emailing Tools
Cold emailing aims at crafting and sending personalized and tailored emails to targeted prospects. Although the practices for successful cold emailing vary, here are some of the best practices that you should ultimately adhere to when sending cold emails.
1. Segment your mailing list
The ultimate goal of achieving success in your cold email campaigns is by segmenting your email contact list into smaller, manageable groups.
Instead of sending your email to thousands of email recipients who might not even need your product or service, consider conducting your research to understand the sets of people who need your product or service and send them the email.
In addition to this, segmenting your mailing list also enables you to personalize your emails and tailor them to fit the needs and interests of particular groups. A good way around this is segmenting your list by industry, career position, and financial budget/authority and sending emails based on this. Check out the guide for sales budget.
2. Craft an Intriguing Subject line
A cold email subject line can be regarded as the gateway to your email success. It is the key that unlocks the door to your email message.
Considering that a lot of email recipients determine whether they want to read the email or not from the subject line, you must ensure that you craft a catchy introduction subject line that drives them to open the email and possibly respond to it.
A good practice with writing email subject lines is to personalize the email subject line by adding the prospect’s name or company name. Take some time to do thorough research on your prospect, finding out all the improtant information about them – their name, career information, goals, and pain points – to include this in the email.
3. Always keep the email short
Yesware
It is no news that a lot of professionals are busy with work these days, coupled with the massive number of emails that are sent and received daily.
If you are looking to achieve success with your cold email campaigns, it is best that you keep your email length short, value-focused, and straight to the point. The reality of creating and sending cold emails is that your email recipients are most likely not going to open or read your emails due to many reasons.
Your best chance at achieving success is to keep the emails short, and compact to retain the interests of the reader. This way you can increase your email open and response rate.
4. Personalize your email
If you have been very conversant with email marketing and some of its best practices, you would understand how significant personalization is to the success of cold email campaigns.
The days of sending generic and boring emails are long gone and outdated, nowadays, cold emails must be relevant to the prospect and use their names sparingly in the email content (one to three times), highlight a mutual connection, compliment them where necessary, focus on their interests, use personalized visuals and mention their pain points, interests or goals.
Personalized email campaigns are the ultimate solution to mastering your cold email outreach.
5. Include a Call-to-Action
Every cold email must include a call to action (CTA) – a marketing term that prompts an immediate response or encourage an immediate sale.
To achieve your cold email success, it must be relevant to the prospects and the real purpose of sending the cold emails. The purpose of the CTA is to tell the prospect what specific action they need to take after reading your email.
You must craft the email in a way that the email recipients are compelled to perform the CTA. Your CTA must be clear to the prospect and should not be more than one. A confusing CTA will make your prospect abandon your email. More than one email CTA can also overwhelm your prospect.
6. Be persistent with follow-ups
Email follow-ups are critical to the success of every cold email campaign. Since your prospects are most likely not going to respond to your email on the first attempt, you need to follow up with them and be persistent till the prospect hints to you to stop sending them your emails or you get the feeling they are not interested.
Unfortunately, a lot of salespeople withdraw from sending follow-ups after the first or second attempts. The reality of cold email outreach is that you will possibly get a ‘Yes” answer from your prospect after a series of ‘Nos’.
7. It must be compliant with every country’s regulations
Different countries have different regulations that govern email marketing and you must comply with these regulations to achieve your desired results.
For United States prospects, you must comply with the guidelines of the CAN-SPAM act, while the CASL applies for Canadian prospects. Similarly to this, countries of the European Union have the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) to guide email marketing acts in the countries.
As per the guidelines of these laws, you must reveal your complete contact information including your physical address in your emails. Additionally, you must also include the option to unsubscribe or opt out of your emails if they choose to stop getting your emails. You must also refrain from using an illegal third-party contact list
What is a Cold Email Outreach Tool?
A cold email outreach tool enables sales and marketing teams to carry out their cold email outreach with ease and aims to make your cold emails to be more effective by automating and streamlining the process.
Cold email software or tool exists to facilitate the cold outreach or sales prospecting process in general. It also facilitates sending follow-ups and mostly comes with advanced features like personalization, email tracking, automated email sequences, and pre-made templates. Some cold email software like Sloovi Outreach also helps with lead generation and qualification, report creation, etc.
Irrespective of their name, features, and functionality, a cold email tool is any software that helps you send out a cold email to your prospects more effectively. With the vast amount of sales engagement, automation, and outreach tools/software available for teams, it can be hard sometimes to figure out what exactly counts as cold email software and what doesn’t.
Considering that a lot of them use different words to connote the same things, you can still consider some of the sales engagement platforms or sales management tools to cover cold email to some extent. Additionally, when the software comes with automation features, then you should be able to use it for your outreach.
Factors and Features to Consider Before Choosing a Cold Email Tool/Software
As highlighted above, the main problem with using cold email software is not about the availability or where to get them but majorly which one to choose. As you may already know, there are hundreds of cold email tools that come with the same features, others with some distinct features.
How then do you choose from a wide array of software, all promising to help you achieve your desired results? This can be a tough decision to make, however, certain features are critical for cold email outreach that you must check out before choosing any.
Here are the important features that your cold email software must have;
1. Automated Email Sequences
This is one of the most popular features that most cold email software has. Automated email sequences enable you to automate your emails at different intervals to help you get the work done faster and manage leads more effectively (and without stress).
This also enables you to send automated follow-ups to your prospect without you doing this manually. For example, you can automate your follow-ups to be sent three days after no response from the prospect. Some more advanced tools also enable you to set conditions that are dependent on the action that your prospect takes.
2. Personalization
Email personalization is by far the best feature any cold email software could offer you. With the death of generic, sales emails, email personalization enables you to tailor the email to the needs and interests of the prospects. If you fail to include this personalization in your email, your email risk getting ignored or ending up in the bin.
The email personalization feature enables you to add various elements of personalization to your emails, although the type and degree of personalization vary from one tool to another. While some offer text personalization, others offer image personalization, CTA personalization, personalized email signature templates, etc.
Irrespective of the software brand you choose to work with, make sure it enables personalization for your email campaign success.
3. Email Tracking
Email Tracking is another important feature that your cold email software should have. It is really important because it enables you to see whether your prospect has opened, responded, or click on a link in your email so you can respond accordingly.
For example, if you notice that your prospect failed to respond to your email after some time, you’ll be most likely inclined to want to send a follow-up email however, if you can see from email tracking that they opened the email recently, you might want to hold on to see what action they take before sending them your follow-up email.
4. A/B Testing
Every email sent is a form of an experiment to show you how the emails are performing and how best they are helping to achieve your goals.
While this can be slightly difficult to achieve with one email, A/B testing enables you to send two different email campaigns to the prospect to track the performance of both emails to see which brings you closer to your goals.
From these tests, you can conclude and improve your email marketing strategy to help you achieve your goals better.
5. Campaign Automation
Ideally, the biggest purpose of cold emailing software is to help you reduce your workload and take care of some of your time-consuming tasks like creating contact lists, personalizing emails, scheduling follow-ups, automating sending email and drip campaigns, etc.
If the cold email software helps you automate any of these tasks, and many more tasks, then it makes your top choice.
6. Multichannel Capabilities
Although several reports and marketers have rated email marketing as the best channel to reach out to prospects and nurture them to conversion.
The reality of most sales and marketing efforts is that email is never going to be enough to do the trick, in most cases, you would have to combine this with other marketing channels preferably, social media, SMS, and calls.
Customers and prospects also have their preferred communication methods, so you must ensure you contact your leads the way they prefer, be it via LinkedIn, email, or SMS. For this reason, many cold email software includes multichannel capabilities to allow you to create sales campaigns across several different communication methods.
7. Integrations
Nowadays, it is a lot harder to have tools or software perform all the tasks required for sales. This explains why most cold email software must be able to integrate with other functional tools to make things easier for you.
Beyond this, it also helps you save time
20 Best Cold Email Software
Cold email software is used by sales and marketing teams to enhance their email-sending processes and help you achieve your sales goals faster. Here are some of the leading cold email software that you choose to improve your cold email outreach.
1. Sloovi Outreach
Sloovi’s Outreach is an all-in-one platform that enables your sales and marketing teams to accelerate, manage and enhance campaigns by managing leads, automating sales outreach, developing customized reports, and managing the sales pipeline.
Sloovi Outreach will enable your sales teams to smash your sales target, reduce cost, and improve sales productivity by tracking your daily sales workflow, creating customized and intuitive reports, scheduling more meetings, and prioritizing leads with dynamic Smart Views.
Outreach offers four services;
1. Lead generation: This feature helps you manage all your leads from a unified platform. It also allows you to add thousands of sales leads and prioritize and track every integration with a sales lead. It also allows users to find leads very fast, without stress.
2. Cold Outreach automation: This feature will enable you to send personalized, scalable, and automated sales outreach via emails, global calls, and SMS. This feature enables mass personalization and automated follow-ups, as well as power up daily reach rate to book more meetings and win more sales.
3. Report Creation: This feature provides sales leaders with all the insights about the activities of their sales reps and helps you create customized and intuitive reports. It has a dynamic leaderboard that helps to measure individual and team performance to foster healthy competition.
4. Manage Pipelines: This feature tracks all the deals you are about to crack as they travel through each sales stage. It also enables users to accelerate daily sales workflow and unify all sales tasks.
Pros –
- All-in-One Centralized Hub
- Multichannel Outreach
- Ability to prioritize leads
- Dynamic leaderboards
- Easy to set up
- Offers free trial
- Value for money
- Active customer support
Cons –
- Doesn’t have a chrome extension
Pricing
Sloovi Outreach has four (4) different pricing plans for the different needs of users. Here’s a closer look at Sloovi’s plans,
1. Starters Plan – $16 per month per user
- It allows 3 users
- It allows you to store 2500 leads
- It allows you to store 4000 contacts
- It enables activity, task & pipeline management
- It enables one (1) pipeline
- 10 contact custom fields, 10 opportunity custom fields, and 10 lead custom fields.
2. Basic Plan – $42 per month per user
- It allows 30 users
- It allows you to store unlimited leads
- It allows you to store unlimited contacts
- It enables activity, task & pipeline management
- It enables one (1) pipeline
- 100 contact custom fields, 100 opportunity custom fields, and 250 lead custom fields.
3. Professional Plan – $59 per month per user
- It allows 100 users
- It allows you to store unlimited leads
- It allows you to store unlimited contacts
- It enables activity, task & pipeline management
- It enables one (3) pipeline
- 250 contact custom fields, 250 opportunity custom fields, and 1000 lead custom fields.
4. Ultimate Plan – $84 per month per user
- It allows unlimited users
- It allows you to store unlimited leads
- It allows you to store unlimited contacts
- It enables activity, task & pipeline management
- It enables one (10) pipeline
- 250 contact custom fields, 250 opportunity custom fields, and 1000 lead custom fields.
2. SalesBlink
SalesBlink is a sales outreach automation tool that can help you automate your sales outreach from prospecting to outreach, deal closing, performance management, etc. It automates the sales process and simplifies tedious tasks to reduce workload.
SalesBlink does not only automate cold emailing but takes care of other aspects of the sales cycle. It guides sales teams from finding leads to reaching out to them to eventually closing the deal.
SalesBlink offers three services;
1. Prospecting:
SalesBlink enables you to find the business email addresses of prospects from its vast database. The domain search and email search features can help you get the contact details of the businesses and their employees
2. Outreach
It has a campaign builder or pre-built campaign templates to create personalized outreach campaigns. It also enables multichannel outreach.
3. Closing
This has an in-built meeting scheduler, a sales pipeline, and an in-built CRM for the closing stage.
Pros –
- Has visual campaign builder
- User-friendly
- Fairly priced
- Offers free trial
Cons –
Nothing specific
Pricing –
SalesBlink has 3 different plans to offer based on the different needs of users.
- Email Warm-up Plan – $15 per month per user
- Email Outreach Plan – $39 per month per user
- Sales Outreach Plan – $99 per month per user
3. Woodpecker. co
Woodpecker works to help B2B salespeople reach out to their prospects in a way that reflects human interaction. It also enables users to automate follow-ups and schedule email campaigns.
It also enables users to detect replies, and track campaigns with the email open, replies, clicks, and bounces. Woodpecker also enables users to perform A/B testing on email templates to assess what resonates or works best for the recipients.
Pros –
- Easy to set up
- User-friendly interface
- Offers free trial
Cons –
- Can’t send email attachments
Pricing –
- Subscription plan – $40 per month per user
4. Reply.io
Reply.io is a multichannel platform that supports outreach automation to get the best conversion rates. It enables a drip campaign with automated follow-ups and email tracking to measure the campaigns open, clicks, replies, and bounce rates.
It also has readily available email templates for users, with advanced email validation to validate the email list and protect the sender’s reputation by ensuring that emails are only to sent to valid addresses. As an add-on, Reply users can also integrate the tool with other platforms such as Salesforce, Slack, Pipedrive, etc.
Pros –
- Has Chrome extension
- Multichannel outreach
Cons –
- Targeted at advanced users
- Expensive
Pricing –
- Subscription plan – $70 per month for three (3) email addresses
5. Mailshake
MailShake is a sales engagement platform that enables salespeople to promote personalized email campaigns and reach out to prospects via email, phone, and social media. It has the dynamic variable feature to tailor and send bulk emails.
Just like Reply.io, Mailshakes also enables users to schedule follow-ups automatically based on opens, clicks, and replies to emails which also helps to reduce manual workload. This platform allows you to perform A/B testing to get better results and reach out to prospects via other channels such as phone, and social media.
Similar to Reply, you can also integrate other tools such as Salesforce and Pipedrive into Mailshake.
Pros –
- Easy integration
- Intuitive interface
Cons –
- Lacks prospecting features
Pricing –
- The subscription plan starts at $39 per month per user
6. Lemlist
Lemlist is another amazing email outreach tool that helps sales and marketing teams to automate and personalize cold emails in bulk with the option to add custom variables. This tool also enables users to personal visual content too – images and videos.
Additionally, Lemlist also enables users to insert screenshots and logos as images in their emails and insert dynamic landing pages. Users of this tool also provide an email warm-up feature to help new domains to have high email deliverability.
Like other cold email software, Lemlist users can also schedule automated follow-ups and perform A/B testing for email templates
Pros –
- User-friendly
- Value for money
Cons –
Pricing –
- The subscription plan starts at $29 per month per user
7. Klenty
Klenty is a sales engagement platform that helps sales teams with cold email outreach automation. It automates follow-ups and personalizes emails with the advanced feature of importing prospects with CSV or Google Sheets automatically with CRM software.
In addition to this, Klenty also offers its users email campaign features like mail merge, A/B testing, email detection, team report, and integration with CRMs like Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, Zoho, and Freshsales.
Pros –
- User-friendly interface
- Easy integrations
Cons –
Pricing –
- The subscription plan starts at $30 per month per user
8. SalesHandy
SalesHandy is an email tracking and outreach automation tool that allows extension with an outlook or Gmail account. This tool can help sales and marketing campaigns to create emails with pre-made email templates and automatic scheduling of emails and follow-ups.
SalesHandy users are also able to track individual email links to help them see who clicked them to create a better strategy for the next campaign. The mail merge feature is effective in sending mass outreach making an overall practical cold email automation software.
Pros –
- User-friendly interface
- Reasonable pricing plan
Cons –
- Supports only email outreach
Pricing –
- The subscription plan starts at $9 per month per user
9. Overloop
Overloop is a cold email software focused on helping sales and marketing teams achieve cold outreach a lot easier. It helps users to improve the sales process from prospecting to finding emails, building segmented prospect lists, connecting with them using personalized emails, and effectively managing the pipeline with any CRM solution of their choice.
This tool has an email finder and verification feature to verify your email addresses. It enables you to build multi-step campaigns easily and set automated reminders for multi-channel outreach.
Beyond these features, Overloop offers users email tracking, personalization, and extensive team reporting.
Pros –
- Simple interface
- Free trial
Cons –
- Lack of cold-calling features
Pricing –
- The subscription plan starts at $39 per month per user
10. QuickMail
QuickMail is a cold email automation tool with amazing deliverability features focused on helping sales teams maintain high email deliverability and simplify outreach. It enables users to upload prospects seamlessly and carry out effective outreach by creating email campaigns and follow-up sequences.
Users of QuickMail can personalize emails effortlessly and ensure high email deliverability with its advanced outreach features. Additionally, this tool automates the entire sales process and sales sequence as well as integrates with other tools and email service providers for sales.
Pros –
- Offers in-depth training
- Value for money
Cons –
Pricing –
- The subscription plan starts at $59 per month per user
11. Outreach
Outreach is a cold email software that enables users to connect with prospects across multiple channels. It works for sales teams using the outbound approach for selling – personalized outreach helps with cold calling tasks, and enables salespeople to connect with their LinkedIn prospects.
Aside from this, Outreach also provides users with an insight into the rep’s performance using its in-built sophisticated analytics
Pros –
- Prospect management
- Offers lead scoring
Cons –
- Complex user interface
- Absence of a prospecting feature
Pricing –
12. Snov.io
Snov.io is a sales engagement tool that makes it easy for users to find leads easily from the database, scale their business, reach out to prospects by email and manage them using a CRM. This platform helps with prospecting, outreach, and deal management with its CRM.
Snov.io has advanced sales engagement and CRM features with an email finder, drip campaigns, email verifier, email warm-up, sales CRM, and email finder extensions. With these features, users can build campaigns, automate email sending, and track rep’s performance using analytics.
Pros –
- Has an easy-to-use interface
- Provides versatility
Cons –
- Fewer native integrations
- High pricing
Pricing –
- The subscription plan starts at $33 per month per user
13. Yesware
Yesware is a cold email tool that makes outreach easier for salespeople and marketers. It enables users to track open and click rates, detect replies, import prospects from CSV files and so much more.
Yesware also allows linking with a Gmail account or Outlook to send emails from the official email address. Users can also integrate Yesware with the Salesforce CRM to make the sales process easy and seamless
Pros –
- Easy to use
- Offers real-time email tracking
- Fairly priced
Cons –
Pricing –
- The subscription plan starts at $15 per month per user
14. Mixmax
Mixmax is a cold email software that is ideal for sales reps and marketers with little or no technical knowledge or experience to set it up. Mixmax enables users to schedule emails and follow-ups easier with the option to link it with a Gmail account.
Mixmax also has smart personalization to make outreach more effective and allows users to book meetings using calendar links based on their availability. In addition to these features, Mixmax has an email tracking tool and real-time alerts to measure campaign performance.
Pros-
- It doesn’t require technical skills
- Works with Gmail
- It is affordable
Cons-
- Extension slows down the browser
Pricing –
- The subscription plan starts at $9 per month per user
15. Smartreach.io
Smartreach.io is a cold email tool that enables users to deliver emails straight into the recipient’s inbox. Beyond the email deliverability tool, it also has email verification and SPam check to keep the sender’s reputation and email deliverability intact.
It also allows automated scheduling of emails and follow-ups with personalization and email tracking capabilities. In addition to that, it also allows s A/B testing of email sequences to improve the results of email campaigns.
Pros –
- Unlimited campaigns
- Easy to use
Cons –
- Limited contact list filters
Pricing –
- The subscription plan starts at $24 per month per user
Cold Emailing Tools: Conclusion
Cold email software is an automated email-sending tool that helps to simplify tasks of reaching out to prospects through email. Although cold emailing has been reported to be very effective and result-oriented, it can be tricky sending emails without the help of sophisticated advanced email tools.
Though many cold email tools exist for sales reps and marketers to use, you will often find some of them not equipped with all the right tools you need to make your cold email outreach work. This is why we have provided you with 15 top email outreach tools that you can choose from to improve your cold email performance and scale your business.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. What is cold emailing?
Cold emailing is the practice of sending cold emails – unsolicited email that is sent to a recipient with no prior contact, connection, or relationship.
2. What is cold email software?
A cold email outreach tool enables sales and marketing teams to simplify their cold email outreach and make it more effective by automating and streamlining the process.
3. Is it legal to send cold emails
Although cold emails can be mistaken for SPAM, they are very different from SPAM. Cold emails are legal because the emails are sent to verified contacts of people who most likely need the product or service being advertised.
SPAM is illegal because they are bulk email sent to thousands of users who might not need the product or service being advertised.