The Best Cold Emails Tools for Outbound Sales & Lead Generation

There are multiple uses for a cold email platform, from link building, press and public relations outreach, to lead generation. The process and mechanics between the various cases are quite similar.

One such use of cold email tools is to help facilitate outbound sales automation. This process is commonly referred to as sales development, or demand generation. A good portion of the effort here is spent qualifying leads & prospects as to most effectively leverage the time of the account executives (AE’s), or “closers”. Configuring outbound email automation is a part of B2B outreach for lead generation, and includes setting-up drip sequences. Learn how to build a cold email campaign here, or take my course for more information.

Lead Generation Automation Tools for Outbound Sales

Mailmeteor

Mailmeteor is a Google Sheets add on for Mail Merge within Gmail. It basically allows you to plan and launch cold email campaigns directly from within Google Sheets.

Sendbloom

Sendbloom has a beautiful, easy to use interface! It has a direct integration with Salesforce, and was designed for enterprise sales teams. Sendbloom makes segmentation easier when drafting new email campaign cadences with different templates and mail merge fields in the cold email copy.

LemList

LemList was made in France. It’s a cold email outreach app that allows you to automatically generate custom personalized images within the emails themselves. “If you disconnect and reconnect your email account in Lemlist, you need to reactivate LemWarm. Even if it is the same email.”

Interseller.io

Interseller is a cold outreach platform built by Steven Lu in California. Their focus is on helping recruiters, human resources, and talent scouts find and connect with job candidates. They had an email deliverability test available, which would send out emails to various providers (Outlook, Google, Apple, Yahoo, etc.) to see how they would perform. I got a 95.12% score.

Reply.io

Reply.io – which is also launching a new messenger CRM system, has a really nice reporting interface. It’s just as good as Sendbloom, in my opinion. They’re based in Canada and Ukraine.

PersistIQ

PersistIQ  is a sales engagement tool that integrates with Clearbit, Copper CRM, and Scratchpad, with updates your Salesforce pipeline. They have a sync engine, which allows for Bi-Directional Sync with Salesforce. I think that should be standard for all tools & CRM’s, but sadly that’s not always the case. There’s not much information about the company itself on their website.

Woodpecker

Woodpecker is a cold email tool based in Wroclaw, Poland. Their CEO is Matt Tarczynski. This outreach software is named after a type of forest birds.

Mailshake

Mailshake is the latest creation from Sujan Patel, originating from Contentmarketer.io‘s outreach tool. It was first designed for a different type of outreach campaign – link building, where you send out emails to other sites asking if they can please post a link to your website on their page to help with domain authority and SEO. Another use for outreach emails is getting press coverage. So this process can useful for B2C businesses as well, just not for sales. They’re split from Austin, Texas to Australia.

Mailshake is a cheap tool, which is to say that you’ll only get what you pay for, as opposed to a high-quality cold email tool like Sendbloom, Reply.io, or SalesLoft, perhaps. They had to turn off link tracking without a custom subdomain because it was causing messages to get flagged as spam, which is something you don’t want to happen in cold email automation marketing.

Mailshake used to cost only $10/month per account, but their prices have since gone up to $29 & $49/month. I had purchased a lifetime deal off of AppSumo, which apparently does not include access to their “Pro” tier of functionality.

Outreach.io

Outreach has raised quite a bit of money ($239,000,000 total). They’re on the west coast (Seattle, Washington), and now Max Altschuler of Sales Hacker is working for them.

Salesloft

SalesLoft is a sales engagement platform for inside sales teams. They’re out in Atlanta, Georgia. Kyle Porter is the CEO, and they raised some money as well ($145,700,000).

GMass

Gmass is a cheap alternative to other outbound email tools. It allows for mail merge tags directly from Google Sheets, allowing you to bypass those pesky CSV files.

Actionable.me

Actionable.me seems to believe in personalisation, which is quite important for making sure that your messages appear to be handwritten (or rather hand typed, I suppose).

Honorable Mentions & Other Sales Tools

Some software businesses combine multiple functionalities into one suite of products, such as sales prospecting tools, along with cold email outreach capabilities:

• Hubsell
• Snov.io
• Hunter

Mixmax

MixMax is an email productivity tool that can almost function as a cold email software, due to its capability for users to craft highly customizable outreach messages. There’s a Salesforce integration, and it looks like they’ve raised some funding.

Mailtag

MailTag is an email automation & tracking tool owned by a guy out in Arizona.

Sales Beach

Sales Beach was one of the first cold email tools that I ever used as a beta tester years ago. While they are no longer trading these days, they were perhaps one of the earliest pioneers in the sales technology software. Their founder, Tim Schwab, is currently an entrepreneurial Sales Leader that advises companies.

Make no mistake, these cold email platforms & outreach tools are essential for B2B Lead Generation & sales enablement. You’ll need to have each one of your sales development representatives to have a seat. Don’t try to pinch pennies! If you have a product that the market values and have a scalable demand generation process, then the cost per seat of the lead generation software shouldn’t be an issue.

A key point to bear in mind when writing cold email templates for outbound sales is that you need to be as direct or succinct as possible. Don’t try to cram too much text into the email itself! If the recipient is smart enough, they will research your firm and perhaps browse your content, perhaps opting-in to your inbound content marketing funnel. Subsequent touches should be intelligent enough to reference any such action. If their timing is off, then don’t worry about them until they become a marketing qualified lead, for example.

This then means that you’ll have to choose cold email marketing software that has an API integration with either your CRM or marketing automation platform, or at least Zapier. You can find a good list of B2B Sales CRM’s here.