11 Best Cold Emailing Tools to Help You Quickly Close Sales Deals

NOW UPDATED! This post has been expanded with new cold email tools for 2023. Enjoy!

How many times have you sat down at the computer to write cold email and thought, “There must be a better way to do this!” Quality cold emailing is an extremely time-consuming activity, and without cold email software, the process looks something like this:

• Find an appropriate prospect
• Find the right person to contact
• Find a way to connect on a personal level
• Find an email address
• Create a personalized pitch of why you can help their business

Let’s say that the whole process takes you seven minutes and you plan to email just 30 prospects per day. You will have used up 3-5 hours each day just sending cold emails!

Oh, and the average email open rate is between 15.22% and 28.46%. So what are you going to tell your boss in your next meeting when she discovers that you’ve spent all your time sending endless cold emails?

Fortunately, we put together a list of the best cold email software to help you start closing those deals – in much less time!

1) Right Inbox

What It Does:

Right Inbox is a chrome extension that makes it easy to schedule emails, create email sequences, and track emails. In addition, Right Inbox brings your sales efforts to the next level with recurring emails and email reminders to ensure that you never miss important emails.

Key Email Features:

• Email tracking
• Email sequences
• Email templates
• Mail merge

Why We Love It:

With 11 different features, it’s no surprise that users are closing more deals with Right Inbox. Put your sales outreach on autopilot because while you can easily forget to follow up with prospects, Right Inbox won’t.

• Email Tracking: Activate open and link tracking with one click before you hit send on your outreach email. Find out who reads and clicks your emails, how many times, and when. This  allows your follow-ups to be more timely, more relevant and, ultimately, more effective.
• Send Later: This feature is particularly useful for prospects in different time zones. Write your emails now and schedule them to be sent later at just the right time for your recipients.
• Email Templates: Turn your most effective emails into templates that you can insert and optimize with one click. Optimize and personalize your template to fit every contact’s unique context. Save time while bringing consistency to your sales outreach.

Dive Deeper:

• How to Get More Responses From Your Cold Emails
• 7 Creative Ways to Collect Emails Without Being Spammy
• The Customer Acquisition Playbook: Email & In-Person Outreach
• Hacking Email Marketing: 14 Tactics that Work [Infographic]

2) Close

What It Does:

Close makes it really simple for companies to scale their sales teams by allowing you to send more emails, track all communication with your leads in one spot, and preload templates so the software will automatically populate them with the right information.

Key Email Features:

• Personalized email templates
• Automated sequences/follow-up
• Advanced tracking
• All communication in one spot

Why We Love It:

Their software allows you to track all communication with your leads in one spot. For example, you might send one introductory email to your prospect, then get them on a sales call, then get them on another call with someone higher up, etc. All that communication is automatically tracked within Close without the need for any data entry.

Besides making calls and sending emails through the software itself, you can preload templates and the software will automatically populate them with the right information.

Case Study:

Close makes it really simple for companies to scale their sales teams and make their processes more efficient.

Krossover  was able to hire additional sales people with the use of Close and each sales rep increased quality outreach by 10x, which led to a direct increase in revenue. Not only that, but by using Close, their sales reps “have to do 0% data entry.”

One of the common things about Close that most people rave about its simplicity. Unlike other more complicated tools, it is easier to get set up and train people to use.

Dive Deeper: Top 10 Best Email Marketing Services

3) Reply

What It Does:

Reply lets you A/B test email sequences and subject lines so you can figure out exactly which template formats generate the most open rates and responses, and then double down on what works.

Key Email Features:

• A/B test email sequences
• Personalized emails at scale
• Analytics
• Automated scheduling/follow-up

Why We Love It:

Through their system, you can set your own email sequence for follow ups and then A/B test them to maximize your conversions. This saves you time that you could be spending on other, more important things than just data entry or manual organization.

Case Studies:

• HotelsByDay used Reply to save 7 hours a week for each salesperson on their team. They used the software to contact their leads through an automated campaign with an automated follow-up sequence. As a result, HotelsByDay has been able to close a whopping 50% of deals after the Reply campaign, while actually saving time each week.
• People™ generated an additional $15,000 in a few months, along with $5,000 in recurring revenue, by using Reply. With the automatic filter feature, they were able to filter out certain prospects from the series of automated messages based on their behavior, which helped boost the number of emails they sent out while also keeping the interaction personalized.
• RelocateMe got an immediate 37% reply rate after implementing the software. After switching from another CRM to Reply, they were able to stop bulk emailing their prospects with the same generic template and instead craft campaigns that were more personalized.

Dive Deeper: How to Use Personalization to Increase the Impact of Email Marketing

4) PersistIQ

What It Does:

PersistIQ includes a Chrome extension to figure out the right types of information about your prospect through their professional site so that you can quickly send out emails instead of digging through pages and pages of details.

Key Email Features:

• Analytics
• Sync engine
• Semi/fully automated sequences
• Automated follow-up

Why We Love It:

Their system allows you to import your leads while catching duplicate names, launch outbound campaigns that are personalized, and then improve them based on data.

• Error Protection: You can’t send out emails that have not yet been personalized. For example, it won’t send an email that looks like this:

It also won’t let you send any badly formatted emails.

• Integrations: One of PersistIQ’s most valuable features is their integrations. For example, they offer bi-directional sync with Salesforce to keep your records up to date without double data entry:

• Chrome Extension: They also have a Google Chrome Extension that allows you to get your prospect’s information from sites like LinkedIn and then automatically populate them into your email campaigns. This will make your lead generation efforts much more efficient.

Case Studies:

PersistIQ has a proven record of helping companies that want to scale their cold email outreach while maintaining that personal connection that drives conversions.

• Lever got a 91% open rate and a 39% reply rate while saving an entire day’s worth of work each week with PersistIQ.
• Parse.ly boosted their reply rates by 10% and increased their email outreach by 5x per week.
• Backerkit got a 25.1% reply rate and saved nearly 2 hours per day. Previously, Backerkit was using a “duct tape” sales solution with multiple CRMs and an Excel spreadsheet. They were able to reduce the time spent on tedious tasks and spend more time using PersistIQ’s features to get more of the right people through the top of their funnel.
• Gusto saw a 10% open rate increase, a 3x response increase, and a 10x rep productivity increase after implementing PersistIQ. The sales reps at Gusto were previously doing the same tedious activities over 50 times per day which led to lower employee morale and a higher risk of human error. Using PersistIQ, they were able to stop logging activities across multiple databases and manually tracking follow ups.

One downside seems to be that PersistIQ doesn’t track cold calls that companies make to their prospects. Because outbound sales often involve both emailing and calling leads, it may be more efficient to have an all-in-one solution that helps scale both cold calling and cold emailing.

5) Sendbloom

What It Does:

Sendbloom offers hyper-targeted segmentation so that you can send personalized cold emails based on the most granular details about the company you’re reaching out to.

Key Email Features:

• Advanced prospect segmentation
• In-template personalization
• Automated follow up and reply
• Bounce, open and reply data

Why We Love It:

Sendbloom is another tool that helps sales teams scale their cold outreach while keeping emails personalized, and the main difference between Sendbloom and other similar solutions is their segmentation feature:

• Segmentation: Sendbloom allows salespeople to send prospects highly relevant e-mails because of the level of granularity they offer when it comes to segmentation. This means, for example, that you’d be able to figure out whether your potential customers are using KISSmetrics or Mixpanel for their analytics.

By understanding the details of what they use, you’ll have a good sense of their current workflow, and you’ll be able to send more personalized messages to increase your likelihood of getting a response.

• Analytics: Like the other platforms, Sendbloom also offers in-depth data analytics so you’ll know exactly who is opening your emails, who replied, which emails bounced, and more:

• Personalization: Sendbloom has technology that helps salespeople write more personalized emails compared to other similar solutions. This technology analyzes the prospect’s website in depth, so you’ll know the various types of software they use, their web frameworks, and more.

Case Study:

If you are using Sendbloom, you’re in pretty good company! Some of Sendbloom’s customers include LinkedIn, Zendesk, Dropbox and Optimizely. With 5- and 4-star reviews, it is proving to be a pretty popular tool among leading marketers.

Dive Deeper: Segmentation 101: A Strategist’s Complete Guide to Marketing Segmentation

6) Mixmax

What It Does:

Mixmax makes it easy to schedule emails, create sequences, schedule appointments with your email recipients, and embed graphics like presentations, PDFs and links within the email.

Key Email Features:

• Email scheduling/sequences
• Easy Salesforce integration
• In-email appointment scheduling
• Embed graphics

Why We Love It:

Mixmax is a cold email outreach tool that comes with a variety of additional features that salespeople can leverage to close more deals:

• Email Tracking: Email tracking is a “table stakes” feature that lets sales reps see when someone opens one of their emails. This makes it easier to gauge response rates and see where the “friction” in the sales process lies.

For example, if your open rates are low but your response rates are high, that means your subject line is good but you probably need to work on your email copy. With Mixmax’s email tracking feature, you can see when your email was opened, and how many times. They also have added a geographic location tracker, where you can see which locations your recipients were in when they opened your emails.

• One-Click Meetings: Appointment setting is a pretty big pain for most salespeople. Once your recipient agrees to get on the phone and chat, there’s usually a long email thread that follows where you and your prospect try to find a time to chat. With Mixmax’s one-click scheduling, your recipients can schedule a time in your calendar directly from the email.

• Send Later: Another fairly standard feature Mixmax provides is scheduling emails to be delivered later. For example, if you’re writing emails and catching up on your inbox late at night, you’d want to schedule your emails to be delivered at an appropriate time the next day. This feature can also be used to send yourself reminders if you need it.
• Mixmax Sequences: Sequences are the holy grail of cold email automation. Based on people’s responses and behavior throughout the sequence, you can send them specific emails and exclude them from others. You can automate follow-ups and personalize emails at scale, as Mixmax currently integrates with Gmail, Google Inbox, and Salesforce.
• Advanced Embedding: Mixmax allows you to embed things like slide decks and PDFs directly into the email. That way, you don’t need to persuade your recipients to click on the link you want them to — they’ll already see it directly in the email.

Case Studies:

• Hiretual claims to save 90 hours per week by using Mixmax. Not only that, but they close more deals than before, perhaps due to the 70% open rate they experience.
• Selffee also claims to have received success with the tool, with close rates increasing by 10%. Last year, they averaged a 33% close rate, up from 10% the year before.

Dive Deeper:

• 14 Ways to Kickstart Your Mobile Email Marketing Campaign
• 8 Quick Tips to Ensure SEO-Friendly Emails
• Beyond the Newsletter: You’ve Got Their Email, Now What?
• Email Marketing Myths & Truths: How to Enhance Your Email Marketing Strategy

7) Outreach

What It Does:

Outreach offers a very comprehensive system to not only send highly personalized emails, but also make calls, send text messages or company-branded items, and track them for each prospect.

Key Email Features:

• Email sequence
• Analytics and reporting
• Coaching analytics
• Numerous integration options

Why We Love It:

• Comprehensive: This software is probably the most comprehensive tool for sales teams out of everything we’ve covered. Through Outreach, salespeople can make calls to any city or country, automate their cold email outreach, and integrate social media as part of their sales process. They also recently added an SMS integration feature along with postcard delivery to turn fans into advocates.
• Email Sequences: As with Reply, Outreach also allows salespeople to create automated email sequences for their prospects:

• Data and Integrations: In addition to all this, Outreach offers data on the personas of the people you’re reaching out to, and other patterns and insights that could help you send more personalized messages to the right people — like measuring email engagement by role within the company. They also have a wide array of integrations for various aspects of the workflow.
• Personalization: The platform allows a company to communicate with a vast array of prospects in a way that feels like it’s 1-on-1 because of the comprehensive features and analytics provided.

Case Study:

Bizible converts 6% more leads into demo appointments with Outreach, and convert their leads into 2.8% more opportunities. Bizible was able to A/B test their subject lines, email copy, and automated email sequences.

While Outreach does boast a large number of features and integrations, they also have the highest cost. Because of this, they may be a better fit for more established companies with a larger budget.

Dive Deeper: The Ultimate Guide to Developing Buyer Personas (with Templates!)

8) Mailshake

What It Does:

Mailshake makes it easy to organize your cold email campaigns by using personalized templates, automating follow-up messages and hitting pause on any email quickly – all from your Google account. And its Lead Catcher feature makes tracking and closing leads a breeze.

Key Email Features:

• Existing customizable templates
• Automated follow up
• Trigger-based emails
• Qualify leads

Why We Love It:

Mailshake is an email outreach tool that makes it easy for you to promote content, build relationships and generate leads – and all you need is a Google account. Mailshake is a great resource for cold emails as it allows you to track emails, automate follow-up messages and hit pause on any email or even the whole campaign:

• Pre-Written Customizable Templates: This tool provides many popular email templates (i.e. pre-written messages) that you can personalize by answering just a few simple questions. Some of these templates include:
  • Guest posts
  • Content promotion
  • Lead generation
  • Link-building
  • PR pitches
• Monitor Prospect Actions: Mailshake allows you to monitor clicks and replies, view charts and stats on the progress of your emails and easily scroll through recent activity to see the full history of any email thread.
• Lead Catcher: It has a new feature called Lead Catcher which you can personalize. For example, if you decide that a lead is only someone who replies to rather than simply opens your email, you can easily adjust the criteria. And when you finally close that lead or even assign it to another member of your team, Lead Catcher will automatically take you to the next one in your queue:

• All Leads in One Place: Because all your communications, including clicks and opens, with leads are in one convenient place, it’s easy to  see the history of messages sent and received and therefore reply with the needed context.

Case Study:

Vira360, a startup with a one-person sales team, managed to reach a close rate of 43% by using Mailshake. The tipping point was being able to change the base copy for every email without having to use a spreadsheet.

Dive Deeper: The Ultimate Recipe for Effective Customer Lead Generation

9) SalesHandy

What It Does:

SalesHandy allows you to engage smartly with prospects and close more deals, which helps sales teams perfect their sales and marketing strategies. This tracking, productivity and outreach tool includes such features as Email Tracking and Scheduling, Mail Merge Campaigns, and Auto Follow Up, Link Tracking, Document Tracking, and Analytics.

Key Email Features:

• Integrations for Outlook and Gmail, etc.
• Templates and follow-up sequences
• Email verification
• Document tracking

Why We Love It:

Apart from the most important features, SalesHandy also provides Link Tracking, Document Tracking, and Analytics. In short, it is a power-packed tool!

• Data & Analytics: You’ll get detailed analytics of each stage, like bounce rate and the exact reason why, which will help your sales teams perfect their sales and marketing strategies. It will also give you valuable insight into customer behavior, spot trends, and evaluate sales performance, making it a great tool for small- and medium-sized companies.
• Email Verification: Prior to sending out emails, it will automatically remove any email addresses that are invalid. This is good for you, because you will be able to replace it with an address that is valid.
• Real-Time Notifications: With this tool, you can get real-time notifications when someone opens your email and there are no limitations on the number of notifications you can receive or of emails sent. SalesHandy works with Gmail and Outlook, and you can send and track emails from these platforms with an Outlook plugin and Gmail plugin for Chrome — and some of the features can be accessed by using their web application:

Case Study:

Jolly Food Fellow is a startup that managed to get seven investors to invest in the company from just one campaign with SalesHandy. The reason that they were so successful was due to the analytics that SalesHandy offers. They were able to track who had opened a PitchDeck and the CEO then called each investor who had opened it and spent a substantial amount of time, thus closing 7 out of the 10 calls.

Dive Deeper:

• The Email Marketer’s 4-Step Guide to GDPR Compliance
• How to Create A High-Value Lead Magnet to Quickly Grow Your Email List
• How AI Helps Add Personalization to Your Email Campaigns
• Buyer’s Journey 101: What Your Email Data Says About Your Customers

10) Woodpecker

What It Does:

Woodpecker allows you to upload a CSV of email addresses, and it sends automated personalized emails and follow-up sequences. It also has open-rate tracking and analytics and integrates with Gmail and Outlook.

Key Email Features:

• Personalized automated email sequences
• Gmail and Outlook integration
• Automated follow-up
• Advanced analytics
• Agency-friendly

Why We Love It:

Woodpecker is another tool that is known for its automated personalized sequences. It’s agency friendly and allows the sales team to scale its outreach and A/B test various emails due to its advanced analytics.

• Easy Personalization: Getting started, all you need to do is make a CSV that includes the prospect’s name, company name, etc. It also automatically stops outreach on your list to people who have either responded already or have blacklisted you as spam.

• Customizable Campaigns: We also like that it lets you customize the follow-up sequence. You can send up to seven follow-up emails and personalize each one as you wish. You can also choose the time at which you want to send the emails and then it spaces them out to please your email provider.
• Smart Sending: One thing that can get you blacklisted very quickly is having a lot of hard bounces (sending an email to an invalid address). If Woodpecker sees a questionable address, it won’t send it. In addition, if it sees that there are two emails for the same person, it will only send it to one.

Case Study:

Katallyze.io used Woodpecker for lead generation and had some campaigns performing at a 75% reply rate. They managed to book 30 meetings in less than 30 days with Woodpecker.

11) Lemlist

What It Does:

Lemlist takes personalization to a whole new level. Not only does your prospect get to see your face in the email, but they can also have their name written on a card. It looks like this:

Key Email Features:

• Personalized photo with prospect’s name
• Personalized videos
• Personalized email templates
• Automated follow-up

Why We Love It:

• Personalization: If you want to take your personalization to the next level, this is the way to go. It’s the only service in 2019 where you can send personalized images and videos embedded in your emails. Creating a photo of your team with a sign that has your prospect’s name on it is the next level of personalization and isn’t all that commonly used (yet!).
• Customization: Another great thing about Lemlist is the level of customization. From the email templates and personalization fields to the custom images they allow, you can tailor everything to fit your target market.
• A/B Split Testing: In addition, they offer a number of useful split testing tools for your emails. The dashboard and analytics are all within the software and teams can easily collaborate together.

Conclusion

Email is one of the very few marketing channels where you can own your audience completely. It’s also still one of the longest-standing and effective channels for lead generation and is unique in that it can be personalized on a much higher level than most other marketing channels.

By taking advantage of these tools, you can 2x, 5x or 10x the power of your sales team by allowing them to perform higher-level tasks. It also allows employees to feel more useful and exercise their true skills, which are far more extensive than writing repetitive emails.

Remember that the companies that survive are the ones that automate and innovate. This is one of the fastest ways to scale your business without hiring.

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