Whether you’re a budding entrepreneur, a seasoned marketer, or a sales professional, cold emailing remains a powerful tool to generate leads for your business.
But crafting, sending, and managing hundreds of cold emails daily can be a daunting task. And that’s where cold email software lifts the burden off your back and helps you scale your email outreach efforts.
With a plethora of options available, choosing the right one for your needs can be challenging. From advanced automation and analytics to personalization and integration capabilities, each software offers unique features tailored to various business needs.
In this blog we'll guide you through the 15 best cold email software for 2024, detailing their pricing, pros, and cons to help you make an informed decision.
What is Cold Email Software?
Cold email software is a tool designed to send personalized emails to individuals who have not previously interacted with your brand.
Unlike regular email marketing platforms, which focus on mass mailing to existing subscribers, cold email software focuses on personalization, deliverability, and automation to ensure that your emails not only reach the inbox but also resonate with the recipient.
How to Choose the Best Cold Email Software?
Before we delve into the different cold email software available in the market, let’s address the key issue of knowing how to choose the best tool.
Here are the 4 key features and capabilities you need to look for while choosing cold email software:
1. Personalization Features
Sometimes, name personalization isn't enough to snare your reader's interest. Here are some advanced personalization features to look for in your cold email software:
- Image and video personalization to seamlessly embed images and videos into the email body without impacting deliverability.
- Email preview and edit - This allows you to edit an email in your sequence before it’s scheduled to go out for maximum customization.
- Liquid Templates - To dynamically alter content based on the prospect's region, and day of the week or time of day.
2. Deliverability Features
Look for cold email software that improves the deliverability of your emails. Here are some of the email deliverability features you can look for:
- Email Validation - This feature allows you to verify email addresses of your prospects and keeps bounce rates down.
- Custom Domain Tracking - To build custom links and domains to avoid spam filters.
- Custom Unsubscribe Options - You can create your own unsubscribe messages. To give recipients an opt-out option and therefore be CAN-SPAM/GDPR compliant.
3. Email Sequence Features
A cold email tool should help you send email sequences with minimum supervision. But that's the bare minimum. Here are some of the other email sequence features you should look for in the cold email platform you invest in:
- Multi-channel Outreach - To reach out to your prospects through multiple channels like emails, LinkedIn, cold calls and SMS, and create a lasting impression.
- OOO and Automatic Reply Detection - To ensure that your sequences stop once you get an automated OOO reply or your prospect actually replies to you.
- Metrics and Insights - To track the performance of your cold email outreach campaigns and optimize future campaigns based on the insights gained.
4. Integrations With CRM
A cold emailing software that works in tandem with your CRM can save you from long hours of admin work. Here’s what you get with native CRM integrations:
- Bi-Directional Data Flow Between CRM and Cold Email Software - Lets you skip the time-consuming task of manually logging in the activities performed using the cold email software to the CRM, like the emails sent, emails opened, and replies received.
- Auto-Import of Leads - Ensures that a new lead in the CRM gets imported to the cold email software and an appropriate cadence begins for them automatically.
- Assign Email Sequences Based On Prospect’s Interest - A person who has opened your email twice has more buying intent than someone who has never opened your email. A cold email software gauges this interest and starts relevant email sequences for each audience segment.
- Plug-in - To use the cold email software right from your CRM, even if you haven't logged in to the software.
15 Best Cold Email Software to Boost Your Response Rates
Need a quick glimpse of all the solutions before the deep dive? Here’s a ready reckoner for you:
1. Klenty
Klenty is a sales engagement platform that helps mature sales teams engage prospects strategically across multiple channels, execute the right next step for every prospect and generate qualified pipeline.
Pros:
- Advanced email personalization capabilities. Klenty’s Liquid Templates feature uses dynamic formulas to change the content of your emails based on when the prospect receives and opens the email.
- AI-powered personalization. Kai, Klenty’s AI Cadence Writer, scans the prospect’s website and LinkedIn profile and picks out ‘personalization points’ for your emails. It also inserts hyper-personalized openers, ‘problem sentences’ and CTAs to your emails.
- Multichannel outreach. Apart from Email, Klenty empowers sales reps to make complete use of channels like Phone, LinkedIn, SMS, and WhatsApp to help you reach prospects wherever they are and book more meetings—all at scale.
- Strong email deliverability. Klenty provides email validation that helps reduce bounce rates by automatically validating email addresses for both new and existing prospects. It also provides email sending control to limit the number of emails you send per day and stagger email sending in an irregular manner.
- Deliverability insights. Get the percentage of emails that land in the Primary Tab across different email service providers, along with suggestions for improving deliverability.
- Intent detection. Cadence Playbooks helps you detect intent in prospects based on where they are in their buying journey, establish the right next steps for every prospect, and execute precisely those activities which take each prospect towards a meeting. No more blind follow-ups.
- Top-of-the-line email sequencing. With Klenty, you can set up a sequence of emails and follow-ups to be sent to your prospects automatically. Your follow-ups are customized based on the date, time, and day of the week. If your prospect doesn’t reply, Klenty will follow up with them based on the delay of your choice. And when your emails elicit a reply, Klenty automatically pauses the sequence for the prospect to avoid bombarding them with emails again.
- Robust CRM integrations. Klenty integrates with 5 CRMs—Salesforce, MS Dynamics, HubSpot, Zoho CRM and Pipedrive. Its tight integration ensures an up-to-date CRM, saves hours per day by eliminating manual activities, and allows you to focus on selling.
Cons:
- User interface. Klenty’s UI can take a few minutes to get used to.
- Pricing. Due to advanced capabilities, the product’s pricing can be a little out of reach for small businesses.
- Not suitable for spray-and-pray. Getting the most out of Klenty requires you to set up a well-planned sales strategy, which can be a bit daunting for teams that use a spray-and-pray approach to outbound.
Klenty pricing:
Here are the klenty pricing detials for different plans that offers:
- Startup plan: $50/user/month (billed annually) and $60/user/month (billed quarterly).
- Growth plan: $70/user/month (billed annually) and $85/user/month (billed quarterly).
- Pro plan: $100/user/month (billed annually) and $125/user/month (billed quarterly).
- Enterprise plan: Customized plans available.
G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
2. Lemlist
Lemlist is an email outreach and sales engagement platform that gives you the ability to start more conversations with your prospects, communicate across multiple channels, and build win-win relationships with them.
Pros:
- Add-on email warmup service. Lemwarm is a specialized email deliverability add-on service that allows you to help you improve and maintain a high sender score while executing email outreach at scale.
- Wide integrations. Lemlist integrates with about 34 tools in the categories of CRM, Enrichment and Workload.
- Multiple sending accounts. Lemlist allows you to use multiple sending accounts to achieve a higher number of emails landing in your prospect’s inbox.
Cons:
- Unable to review emails once drafted. Users have reported that Lemlist doesn’t allow users to review or edit the emails once they have been drafted.
- Hard-to-navigate UI. Some users have encountered challenges in navigating the platform smoothly and optimizing their workflow.
Pricing:
- Email Starter: $32/user/month (billed annually), $35/user/month (billed quarterly), and $39/user/month (billed monthly)
- Email Pro: $55/user/month (billed annually), $62/user/month (billed quarterly), and $69/user/month (billed monthly)
- Multichannel Expert: $79/user/month (billed annually), $89/user/month (billed quarterly), and $99/user/month (billed monthly)
- Outreach Scale: $129/user/month (billed annually), $144/user/month (billed quarterly), and $159/user/month (billed monthly)
G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5
Here’s a detailed look at Lemlist vs. Klenty.
3. Woodpecker
Woodpecker is a cold email software that helps you set up email campaigns in minutes, warm up email accounts, and validate prospect lists in real time.
Pros:
- AI-powered email automation. Woodpecker’s AI email writing assistant helps you save hours on crafting emails. Its AI capabilities also automates out-of-office replies and identifying hot leads for successful prospecting.
- Strong email deliverability. To ensure high deliverability at scale, Woodpecker lets you avoid bounces with real-time email validation, warm up email accounts automatically, and rotate mailboxes without worrying about daily provider limits.
Cons:
- No option to add email attachments. Woodpecker doesn’t offer the option to add attachments like sales decks or white papers to your cold emails.
- Hard-to-navigate UI. Some users find Woodpecker’s user interface difficult to get used to quickly, posing a steep learning curve for new adopters.
Pricing:
- Cold Email: $20/month (billed annually) and $29/month (billed monthly)
- Agency: $20/month (billed annually) and $29/month (billed monthly)
- Custom: Available on request
G2 rating: 4.1 out of 5
4. Mailshake
Mailshake is a sales automation platform that helps you automate outreach at scale and get more replies for prospects. The platform helps sales teams to connect with thousands of prospects all at once with personalized messages—through email, social and phone.
Pros:
- Strong email deliverability. Mailshake warms up your email domain to improve your sender score and pauses email sequences when a prospect replies, unsubscribes, or bounces.
- AI assistance to write and analyze emails. SDRs can write dozens of email copies and subject lines in a matter of minutes that will get more opens and replies.
- Prospects view. Get a bird’s eye view of a prospect and see every email, social message, and phone call they've received across multiple campaigns.
Cons:
- Basic email personalization capabilities. Mailshake doesn’t provide advanced email capabilities like changing the email content based on when the prospect’s interaction.
- Basic CRM integrations. Advanced capabilities like syncing conversation history with prospects and tasks to the CRM are not found.
- Lack of behavior-based playbooks. Mailshake can’t customize your outreach and follow-up efforts based on the prospect’s intent and behavior.
Pricing:
- Starter: $25/user/month (billed annually) and $29/user/month (billed monthly)
- Email Outreach plan: $45/user/month (billed annually) and $59/user/month (billed monthly)
- Sales Engagement plan: $85/user/month (billed annually) and $99/user/month (billed monthly)
G2 rating: 4.7 out of 5
Here’s a detailed look at Mailshake vs. Klenty.
5. Reply.io
Reply.io is a cold email tool that helps sales teams reach out to prospects across 5 different channels—email, phone, LinkedIn, SMS, and WhatsApp—and book more meetings.
Pros:
- Multichannel capabilities. Reply lets you engage with your prospects through multiple channels like email, calls, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and SMS.
- AI-generated sequences. The platform automatically creates outreach sequences with AI and lets you customize sequences for your goals and audience.
- AI-driven email personalization. Reply automatically tailors your emails to each prospect to boost engagement and response rates. You can adjust the tone and content of each email based on your prospect’s profile.
Cons:
- No intent-based playbook approach. Reply doesn't offer the option to tailor your follow-ups based on the prospect's buying intent.
- Basic CRM integrations. Reply lacks deep CRM integration features like deal stage automation to automatically add prospects to appropriate cadences depending on the deal stage they enter.
Pricing:
- Email Volume: Starts from $49/month (billed annually) and $59/month (billed annually)
- Multichannel: Starts from $89/user/month (billed annually) and $99/user/month (billed annually)
- Agency: Starts from $166/month (billed annually)
G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5
Here’s a detailed look at Reply.io vs. Klenty.
6. QuickMail
Quickmail is an email automation platform that helps reps create email sequences, automate their follow-ups to scale their email outreach and boost email deliverability.
Pros:
- Best suited for bulk email outreach. You can send up to 300,000 emails per month with Quickmail, making it an ideal platform for email-heavy teams engaging in bulk cold email outreach. Teams can add as many users to their account as needed at no extra cost.
- Strong deliverability at scale. The platform comes with free email warmup integration, blacklist monitoring, Google-approved sending API that mimics a human cadence, and real-time deliverability scores for every inbox, even for bulk email campaigns.
- Supports a wide range of email providers. Quickmail supports Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Amazon SES, PostMark, MailJet, MailGun, Zoho Email and any other email account using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP).
Cons:
- Not suitable for mature sales processes. Quickmail is primarily an email automation tool and it isn’t a full-fledged sales engagement software suited for sales teams dealing with complex buying journeys and intent stages of prospects.
- Basic multichannel capabilities. Quickmail’s email-centricity prevents sales reps from leveraging the full potential of other outreach channels using the same platform.
- Limited CRM integration. Quickmail provides bidirectional integrations with 2 CRMs—Pipedrive and HubSpot—and not with other CRMs popular in the market.
Pricing:
- Basic Plan: $49 per month.
- Pro Plan: $89 per month.
- Expert plan: $129 per month.
G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5
Here’s a detailed look at Quickmail vs. Klenty.
7. Mixmax
Mixmax is a cold email tool that helps organizations build more pipeline by automating email outreach and streamlining workflows of sales and customer success teams.
Pros:
- Insights on prospect activity. Mixmax lets sales reps track opens, clicks, bounces, replies, downloads, and RSVPs across all templates, sequences, and prospects.
- Strong automation capabilities. Some of Mixmax’s automation capabilities include automatically triggering email templates or sequences based on prospect activity, real-time addition of high-priority items to rep’s tasks, and automated Salesforce CRM updates on leads/opportunities/accounts.
- Deep integration with Salesforce. Reps who use Salesforce CRM can automatically update their CRM records from within their email inbox, personalize messages using Salesforce dynamic fields, and create rule-driven workflows.
Cons:
- Not suitable for mature sales processes. Mixmax is a Chrome extension and not a full-fledged sales engagement software, making it less-than-ideal to scale your sales activities and build repeatable processes.
- Limited CRM integration. Mixmax integrates well with Salesforce, but does not provide deep and bidirectional integrations with other CRMs popular in the market.
- Restricted email provider support. Apart from Gmail, Mixmax doesn’t support other popular email providers like Microsoft Outlook.
Pricing:
- Free Plan: $0
- SMB Plan: $34/seat/month (monthly billing) and $29/seat/month (annual billing).
- Growth Plan: $65/seat/month (monthly billing) and $49/seat/month (annual billing).
- Growth+Salesforce Plan: $89/user/ month (monthly billing) and $69/seat/month (annual billing).
- Enterprise Plan: Customized plans available.
G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5
Here’s a detailed look at Mixmax vs. Klenty.
8. Outreach
Outreach automates your prospecting workflow and enables you to have personalized conversations with prospects at every stage of their buying journey.
In addition to sales engagement, the platform also provides revenue intelligence and revenue operations functionalities.
Pros:
- Smart Email Assist. Leverage generative AI to automatically generate email replies based on the prior context of conversations between buyers and sellers. Rather than starting from scratch, reps can focus their time on editing and personalizing the AI-generated content and boost their productivity.
- Advanced automation capabilities. Outreach lets sales teams automate a large portion of their sales processes, including automated follow-up sequences, auto-pausing sequences for OOO prospects, and auto-syncing of prospect data with CRM.
Cons:
- Steep learning curve. With its umpteen integrations, functionalities, and complex analytics reports, even experienced reps would face a steep learning curve when they begin to use Outreach.
- Integrates with only limited CRMs. The platform integrates well with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and not with other CRMs popular in the market.
Pricing: Available on request
G2 rating: 4.3 out of 5
Here’s a detailed look at Outreach.io vs. Klenty.
9. Salesloft
Salesloft is a cloud-based sales engagement platform that enables sales teams to automate their workflows and connect with prospects more effectively, helping teams to accelerate their sales cycles and drive more revenue.
Pros:
- Multiple templates. Salesloft equips you with a variety of templates to choose from or even create your customized templates.
- Advanced email sequence capabilities. Salesloft equips you with advanced email sequence capabilities such as email engagement tracking and real-time analytics.
- Hot Leads. Salesloft’s Hot Leads functionality notifies users of their most highly engaged prospects so that they can prioritize one-to-one engagement efforts.
Cons:
- Interface inefficiency. Salesloft's interface, while functional, has been described by a portion of users as somewhat less efficient than they would prefer.
- Email cadencing navigation concerns. Users have raised concerns about the perceived excess of clicks required to perform the email cadencing process.
Pricing: Available on request
G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5
Here’s a detailed look at Salesloft vs. Klenty.
10. Saleshandy
Saleshandy helps you automate your cold email campaigns and scale your email outreach without compromising on your deliverability.
Pros:
- Sender rotation for deliverability. If you connect multiple email accounts with Saleshandy, the platform will randomly alternate between email accounts when sending emails to maintain deliverability and sender reputation.
- Strong split testing capabilities. The A/Z testing feature in Saleshandy lets you test up to 26 variations of subject lines, cold email copy, and follow-ups to find which variation works best.
Cons:
- Lack of behavior-based playbooks. Saleshandy can’t customize your outreach and follow-up efforts based on the prospect’s intent and behavior.
- Complex analytics. Some users report that Saleshandy’s data analytics can be a bit overwhelming initially.
Pricing:
- Outreach Starter: $25/month (billed annually) and $36/month (billed monthly)
- Outreach Pro: $74/month (billed annually) and $99/month (billed monthly)
- Outreach Scale: $149/month (billed annually) and $199/month (billed monthly)
- Outreach Scale Plus: $219/month (billed annually) and $299/month (billed monthly)
G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5
11. Yesware
Yesware is an email outreach automation platform that helps you increase sales productivity by automating your outreach at scale. Its Outlook and Gmail add-on tracks your activity, and easily integrates with the tools you already use.
Pros:
- Outlook Add-on. The add-on brings all of Yesware’s capabilities to your Outlook inbox. Once set up, you can access features like Campaigns, Templates, Meeting Scheduler and My Reports at the top of your inbox without having to juggle with multiple windows.
- Seamless Salesforce integration. Yesrware automatically syncs your email activity, calendar activity, Campaign activity and engagement data with Salesforce.
- Email engagement reports. To track email engagement. The Recipient Engagement report shows which prospect has engaged the most with you—who opened the most emails, clicked links and viewed attachments—so that you can follow up with messages that grab their attention.
Cons:
- Lacks deep personalization capabilities. Yesware’s email templates don't offer advanced email personalization features like changing the email content based on when the prospect receives and opens the email.
- Not suitable for mature sales processes. Yesware is an add-on to existing email providers like Gmail and Outlook and not a full-fledged and comprehensive sales engagement software that goes beyond email campaign tracking.
Pricing:
- Free Forever: $0/seat/month.
- Pro plan: $19/seat/month (billed monthly) $15/seat/month (billed annually).
- Premium plan: $45/seat/month (billed monthly) and $35/seat/month (billed annually).
- Enterprise plan: $85/seat/month (billed monthly) and $65/seat/month (billed annually).
- Custom Plan: Contact sales team.
G2 rating: 4.4 out of 5
Here’s a detailed look at Yesware vs. Klenty.
12. Instantly
Instantly offers dynamic email sequencing and automated personalization to ensure that your email campaigns always have high deliverability and response rates.
Pros:
- Unlimited email accounts. Instantly allows you to connect as many email accounts as you need for your cold email outreach needs.
- AI personalization. Instantly’s AI analyzes your leads and discovers insights into your prospects helping you craft more personalized messaging for emails.
- Robust email warmup capabilities. Instantly’s email warmup functionality comes with AI-written emails that mimic human conversations between email accounts, which signal to email service providers that your email account and sending domain is relevant and legitimate, increasing your sender reputation.
Cons:
- Basic email sequencing. Users have reported Instantly’s email sequencing capabilities to be basic as users can’t adjust sequences based on prospect behavior.
- Limited CRM integrations. Its CRM import feature allows you to only import lead lists from 3 CRMs (Pipedrive, Salesforce, and HubSpot) and doesn’t provide deep bidirectional integrations.
Pricing:
- Growth: $30/month (billed annually) and $37/month (billed monthly)
- Hypergrowth: $77.6/month (billed annually) and $97/month (billed monthly)
- Light Speed: $286.3/month (billed annually) and $358/month (billed monthly)
- Enterprise: Available on request
G2 rating: 4.9 out of 5
13. Apollo.io
Apollo is a data intelligence and sales engagement platform that helps sales teams to discover customers, scale outbound activity, improve existing workflows through analytics, and automate sales processes.
Pros:
- No email send limit. Apollo.io doesn't restrict your email sends, giving you the flexibility to reach out to as many prospects as you need.
- Resourceful email database. Apollo.io provides access to a substantial database of over 270 million records of emails, enhancing your prospecting capabilities.
Cons:
- Lack of custom playbooks. Users are limited to pre-existing automation templates and may not create custom triggers, reducing customization options.
- Non-intuitive reports. Apollo.io's reporting system, while functional, may not fully meet some users' preferences for intuitiveness. This could lead to occasional challenges in extracting actionable insights from the data.
Pricing:
- Free: $0
- Basic: $49/seat/month (annual billing) and $59/seat/month (monthly billing)
- Professional: $79/seat/month (annual billing) and $99/seat/month (monthly billing)
- Organization: $119/seat/month (annual billing) and $149/seat/month (monthly billing)
G2 rating: 4.8 out of 5
Here’s a detailed look at Apollo.io vs. Klenty.
14. EnagageBay
EngageBay is an integrated marketing automation email marketing, and CRM solution that also includes email sequencing capabilities. You can create automated and highly personalized email sequences for each prospect based on where they are in the sales funnel.
Pros:
- Automated responses to triggers. EngageBay helps you automate email responses based on your prospect’s triggers and interactions.
- One-click personalization. The platform’s extensive range of personalization elements helps you create personalized nurture email sequences in just one click.
- Pre-built email sequences. With EngageBay’s pre-built email sequences, you don't have to start from scratch. You can choose from the available collection of email sequences and cold email templates, modify, and send.
Cons:
- Limited automation capabilities. Users of EngageBay have reported limitations when it comes to advanced email automation capabilities and customization options.
- Limited template customization. EngageBay’s pre-built email templates, some users feel, are difficult to customize and don't cater to every situation.
Pricing:
- Free: $0
- Basic: $12.74/user/month (billed biennially), $13.79/user/month (billed annually) and $14.99/user/month (billed monthly)
- Growth: $55.24/user/month (billed biennially), $59.79/user/month (billed annually) and $64.99/user/month (billed monthly)
- Pro: $101.99/user/month (billed biennially), $110.39/user/month (billed annually) and $119.99/user/month (billed monthly)
G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5
15. Snov.io
Snov.io is an all-in-one CRM and outreach automation platform offering solutions for lead generation, data and contact management, and email sequencing.
Pros:
- AI-powered email campaigns. With Snov.io, you can create email campaigns where each next email will be automatically sent to your prospects depending on their behavior. Plus, its AI writer helps you craft high-performing emails from and even translate it to 36 different languages.
- Send bulk emails in Gmail. The GBlast mass email merge extension saves your time by helping personalize your emails and send them in bulk. The tool is free and builds right into your Gmail account.
- Verify email addresses. Snov.io’s email verifier helps you check if your emails are valid to avoid undesirable bounces and boost deliverability. The verification process includes syntax check, MX record check, and SMTP authentication.
Cons:
- Limited campaign customizations. A section of Snov.io’s users feel that the platform doesn’t recognize the filled-in contact details while setting up email campaigns, making some emails less personalized.
- Less scope for multichannel outreach. While Snov.io can work well for email outreach, it falls short when it comes to true multi channel outreach that lets you use Phone and SMS.
Pricing:
- Trial: $0
- Starter: $30/month (billed annually) and $39/month (billed monthly)
- Pro: $75/month (billed annually) and $99/month (billed monthly)
G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5
Choosing the Best Cold Email Tool to Scale Your Outreach
Choosing the right cold email software is crucial for the success of your email outreach campaigns. By focusing on key factors such as deliverability rates, personalization features, and automation capabilities, you can ensure your cold emails reach the right audience at the right time.
If you're looking for a tool that excels in these areas, Klenty is the answer.
Klenty helps you craft personalized cold emails at scale, execute multi-channel outreach, and leverage buyer intent.
Want to see how Klenty helps you elevate your cold outreach and convert more leads? Book a demo now!
FAQs
1. What is cold email software?
2. Why should you use cold email software?
3. Is cold emailing illegal?
Here are some tips to avoid getting blacklisted while cold emailing:
- Reveal your identity in the email
- Avoid clickbait subject lines
- Send relevant emails to your prospects
- Provide an opt-out link