If you’re a salesperson, you know that reaching out to new leads is a great way to generate new business. But the process of finding prospects, drafting messages, and sending emails that never get replies is both tedious and demoralizing. Fortunately, there are email outreach tools available that have made the process simple and streamlined.
If you use the right email outreach tools, you can simultaneously reduce the amount of time you spend on email outreach and increase your results.
By the way, we offer a done-for-you B2B lead-gen outreach service — so rather than worrying about doing all this email stuff on your own, we can do it for you! Interested? Grab a time from my calendar and let’s chat!
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The Best Email Outreach Tools
These are some of the best apps, add-ons, platforms, and tools to add to your arsenal if you want to be faster and more efficient at email outreach:
1. Mailshake
Mailshake is designed as a simple platform for sales, recruiting, and PR outreach. With it, you can search for new prospects, plan your campaigns, and personalize automated emails and follow-ups to those potential leads.
You can also use merge tags to customize your email campaigns even further, and track key metrics like email bounce rates, clicks, open rates, and replies. Mailshake also provides you with dynamic suggestions, which you can follow to (hopefully) see better results.
2. Lemlist
If you’re interested in personalizing your cold email outreach and automating as much as possible, consider using Lemlist. You can use one of Lemlist’s built-in email templates or build your own emails from scratch.
Either way, you can personalize your message, automate how your emails are sent, and jump in manually whenever you’re ready to take over the conversation.
3. Prospect.io
Prospect.io is a sales automation platform designed for outbound sales, and has dozens of features and tools to help you improve your cold email outreach process.
Targeted to small- to mid-sized businesses, this tool allows you to gather prospects, create an automated follow-up email campaign, analyze the data from your campaign (so you can improve in the future), and even integrate your new data into the CRM of your choice (see our list of the best CRM software tools).
4. Yesware
Yesware is a plugin for Gmail or Outlook that includes a suite of email sales tools. But I like to use its “Mail Merge” functionality for email outreach. The advantage of Mail Merge is that it enables you send emails directly from the Gmail or Outlook interface, which keeps all your outreach efforts and communication right within your inbox, so you don’t have to use an external tool or app to manage conversations.
It also includes automatic follow-ups that you can create and manage, which are crucial for maximizing your response rates.
Be sure to see our complete guide to automated email responses for more info on how you can save time with email automation! And for more on how to mail merge in Gmail, click the link!
5. SmartReach
SmartReach tries to simultaneously simplify and improve the process of cold emailing. With it, you’ll gain access to an in-depth “Prospect Feed,” which allows you to track the open and response rates of your prospects and analyze it at a high level.
You can also pause your flow of emails to people at any time, whenever you feel the need to manually take over. You’ll also get unlimited access to AB testing.
6. SalesHandy
With SalesHandy, you’ll be able to personalize email campaigns, track emails you send to your prospects, track documents (like contracts) you send out, and even automate your follow-ups.
Additionally, SalesHandy is designed to send your emails to the inboxes of your prospects, skipping the Promotion tab (where lots of cold emails end up in Gmail). It even integrates with Gmail to make your life easier.
7. Reply.io
You could also try Reply.io. With it, you can integrate your LinkedIn account and leverage the contact details from people in your network. You can also use it to plan and execute both email outreach and phone-based campaigns.
Best of all, Reply.io features an integrated, comprehensive dashboard where you can monitor the results of your campaign in every channel, and at every level. It’s also one of our top sales enablement tools, so check it out!
8. Klenty
Klenty is one of our top 10 recommended sales engagement platforms. It can help sales teams reach out to prospects by sending personalized emails and automated follow-ups at scale.
Using Klenty, you can automate all the repetitive activities involved in your sales process like sending cold emails, follow-ups, tracking engagement metrics, etc – so that you can focus more on activities like building relationships and closing deals.
9. Close
Close is primarily a CRM, but it also features tools for built-in email outreach management. You can use it to draft and send messages to new leads, and automatically update your information for those leads when you get replies or make progress in your relationships.
With advanced tracking and tons of automated features, it has the potential to save you hours of time.
10. AutoKlose
There’s also AutoKlose, one of the simpler tools on this list. With an extremely intuitive UI, AutoKlose allows you to find new prospect information, generate leads, and integrate directly with Gmail—so you can minimize your chances of getting flagged as spam.
It also features plenty of options you can use to orchestrate and automate your follow-up messages.
11. Respona
Respona is an all-in-one blogger outreach platform outfitted with all of the necessary tools to set up and launch an email campaign of any kind, be it for link building, digital PR, marketing, or sales. An easy-to-use email finder is also included, making it easy to find the right person’s contact information without having to rely on any other tools.
Respona’s intuitive interface guides you through every step of creating and launching your outreach campaigns, keeps track of your performance, and also the status of your conversations with each prospect.
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12. Postaga
If you’re looking for an all-in-one platform for cold outreach, Postaga can help. A Swiss-army-knife when it comes to outreach with a powerful AI, Postaga is useful for beginners or experts.
Postaga can analyze your website and content to offer suggested outreach campaigns to run. Find relevant websites, bloggers, podcasters, and businesses to connect with, retrieve and verify their email addresses, and build and send personalized outreach email sequences.
13. Snov.io
Snov.io is a platform designed for cold email outreach automation. It allows you to find contact information for new prospects, validate email addresses, and plan full messaging campaigns to send automatically. It’s fantastic if you’re trying to find email addresses for prospects on a domain-by-domain basis.
It also allows you to track dozens of metrics for your campaign, including open rates, click-through rates, and replies. For more sales automation software tools, click the link!
14. SendPulse
If you’re used to marketing to many different audiences simultaneously, SendPulse could be the best tool for you. It’s designed to help you automate and improve efficiency in cross-channel outreach campaigns, with channels like email and SMS text messages at the forefront.
Use one of SendPulse’s many templates, or use drag-and-drop tools to create your own messages from scratch.
15. Mailtag.io
Yet another tech brand with the .io domain, MailTag.io is an email outreach tool that can help you land more sales and save time doing it. Designed for bloggers and freelancers who want to use email outreach for finding guest authors and link building opportunities, MailTag has its place as a sales tool as well.
There are dozens of tracking features that make it incredibly good at helping you analyze your campaign results.
16. Woodpecker
You could also try Woodpecker, which is especially effective if you’re trying to work both as a collective agency and as an individual. It allows you to set automatic follow-ups, like most of the tools on this list, but will automatically detect replies and cease further follow-ups.
It also has “smart sending” features to restrict sending emails to questionable addresses, maximizing your number of hit inboxes.
17. Vocus.io
Vocus.io is a chrome extension for Gmail that serves as an all-in-one solution for Gmail outreach and sales. The tool offers features such as email and link tracking (per recipient), and it allows you to schedule automated follow-ups and reminders with customizable email templates.
Moreover, the tool can also be used for mail merge, scheduling, meeting coordination and to find email addresses. It has an exclusive dashboard for monitoring analytics that can be shared across the team for performance review.
The tool comes with a 30-Day free trial, and does not require a credit card to start the free trial.
18. Rebump
Rebump was created to help business owners get your email outreach messages answered (and automate much of the process). Rebump helps you design, send, and automate follow-up messages to all your prospects, with the intention of making them seem more personal and less automated.
Afterward, you can track replies and open rates, and make tweaks to your approach to get better results.
19. Mixmax
With Mixmax, you can schedule emails to send, create in-depth, logic-based sequences for automatic email transmission, and even schedule appointments for your email recipients.
You can also keep track of your PDFs, links, graphics, and presentations, and dig deep into your analytics to learn from your past campaign efforts—and optimize your email outreach to better fit your sales targeting demographics.
20. Outreach.io
Outreach.io is a team-focused platform for better email outreach. With it, you’ll be able to guide your new prospects through four main channels: email, social, voice, and text. Because it’s an integrated platform, you’ll be able to customize and fine-tune your campaigns individually in these areas, and tweak them to work together for even better results.
Most of the email outreach tools on this list offer a free trial, but are paid subscription services; rates vary, but you’ll pay a fixed rate per user per month to use these services.
Don’t miss these sales email templates and sales email follow up templates that you can use with these email outreach tools to maximize your chances of getting replies – and conversions! And be sure to check out my top-rated email testing tools and email warmup tools to ensure your emails get delivered and display correctly across all devices.
Also, if you want to learn the differences between leads vs prospects, check out our full guide. And check out our guide to LinkedIn outreach for other ways to step up your outreach efforts.
21. Hunter Campaigns
Campaigns is a free tool from Hunter that allows you to send personalized cold email campaigns directly from your Gmail account. You can fully personalize your emails at scale with custom attributes, set up and schedule your follow-ups, and track the performance of your outreach campaigns.
The tool is free for those who use one Gmail account for email sending (most of the features are available in the free plan). The Premium version, which includes multiple Google accounts, click tracking, and images and attachments in emails, start at $49/mo.
Measuring Your Email Outreach Efforts
Now that you’re armed with one of these top email outreach tools, you’ll need a way to measure your results as you execute your cold email outreach campaign.
Use a tool to measure your email activity, like EmailAnalytics. With EmailAnalytics, you’ll be able to study dozens of different metrics related to your email activity, including your busiest times and days, your average response time, and even your top senders and recipients. Get started with a free trial today, and learn how you can improve your approach to email-based sales!
Jayson is a long-time columnist for Forbes, Entrepreneur, BusinessInsider, Inc.com, and various other major media publications, where he has authored over 1,000 articles since 2012, covering technology, marketing, and entrepreneurship. He keynoted the 2013 MarketingProfs University, and won the “Entrepreneur Blogger of the Year” award in 2015 from the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs. In 2010, he founded a marketing agency that appeared on the Inc. 5000 before selling it in January of 2019, and he is now the CEO of EmailAnalytics.