Reaching out cold from an email inbox to a potential client can be a daunting task, but it's one that is more than worth doing. It can lead to extensive new opportunities, new clients, and a growing audience for your products and services. Sitting and writing endless emails and manually sending them out takes a huge amount of time, effort, and manpower. That is, thankfully, where email outreach tools can help.
What Is An Email Outreach Tool?
Email outreach tools are there to help facilitate the email outreach process. They take the laborious process of sending individual emails and automate it for you. This means sending initial emails, follow-ups, creating funnels, and even adding personalization, analytical data, templates, and more. Certain tools go one step further and also include the actual sourcing of email prospects within their software, thus taking their tool into a sales tool level rather than specifically email outreach.
Why You Need An Email Outreach Tool
There are myriad reasons why you’d benefit from using an outreach tool; it saves time, it removes a fairly mundane task from the daily list, it provides leads automatically, and it saves money! But there are grander reasons than that simple list, here are our 5 core reasons:
Growth
It stands to reason that an automated system that finds prospects, automatically contacts them, and follows up with them is going to be more efficient and have a greater capacity than if you sat at your computer. The level of growth is far larger than using just your or your team's direct input.
The actual growth of numbers (the emails sent, the prospects communicated with, etc.) is one thing. But actual growth within your business is another, and that includes mindset and strategy. When the process is automated you’re able to complete a far higher and varied set of tests to see what works. You could, for instance, brainstorm a wide range of subject lines within your team and then use the tool to test them. Even better? The system will likely provide you with cold hard data to show you exactly what’s working and what’s not.
Scalability
By design email outreach tools are scalable. You can find more potential customers to email. You can build out templates for all different levels of the sales process. You can build out the team members involved in the process, including the addresses that you’re sending mail from and how many people are directly involved in the orchestration of a campaign.
Simplified Workflows
Email outreach tools will include clearly marked and segmented data and information related to specific users. No more digging into inboxes and trying to find something. If a certain sales team member is allocated accounts X, Y, and Z, then it’ll be clear where their campaigns are and the emails attributed to them. These simplified workflows blend with scalability. As your team grows, your inbox grows too. The organization required to manage an inbox at scale can get seriously messy with multiple members.
When you get to the stage where multiple members of your team are working on the same accounts, having a system that clearly shows where they are in delivery makes life so much easier, saves internal communication, and leads to a far more streamlined process. Someone can walk in, see what has been sent previously, and pick up the conversation.
Easy Reporting
When you send an email from a simple inbox, you’re hoping for a response. Maybe you’ll get one, maybe you won’t. How about after that? Do you reply? Do you follow up? Did someone actually even open the email? Did they click on the blog link you sent? The answers to these questions are left a mystery when using a simple inbox, but when using outreach tools you’re provided a suite of analytical data that lifts the fog.
It means that you can create reports, understand what’s working and what’s not, adapt and make changes, and build on successes.
Get Insight
Email outreach tools allow you clearly see where you are in terms of your goals and attaining them. Imagine that you’ve set yourself a target of sending X emails, or receiving Y number of replies. When using a normal inbox this is a difficult metric to track, or rather doing so manually is incredibly onerous. Even more so when you’re working as a team. Having a tool at your disposal allows you to see all of these insights at the click of a button or simply sign in to a dashboard.
How To Use Email Outreach Tools
Email outreach tools provide you with a great arsenal to use but there are still some best practices that you should adhere to in order to get the most out of them:
Choose An Intriguing Subject Line
For any email campaign, the subject line is the first thing that a potential customer or prospect sees. It’s your first opportunity to engage with them. In fact, it’s your only chance to get them to spend some of their precious time and click on your email. Keep it simple, clearly share your message, or get creative to stand out from the crowd.
Personalize The Message
Personalization goes a long way with subject lines, people like to think that they’re being addressed directly and not just another number. There are ways to automate this process by pulling data through from the database built into the email outreach tool. Once the initial cold outreach is complete, make sure to keep the personal touch going by focusing on personal points related to them individually.
Keep The Email Short
People do not have long attention spans when it comes to the digital world. You have mere seconds of their time to get your point across or ask a request. Keep emails clear and concise, retain their attention and avoid a wall of text.
Segment Your Mailing List
Blanket emailing rarely works, people are individuals after all. What works for one person or company won’t work for another, especially if they require different services, are at different stages of the sales process, or simply like to talk with you in a different level of formality or tone.
Segmenting your mailing list allows you to send more specific, more personalized emails to manageable groups of people based on company, industry, sales funnel stage, requirements, and more. Furthermore, it gives a great set of data, that is far more specific, for you to investigate.
Obey Regulations
The last thing you want to have happen is to be reported for spam or unsolicited “junk” mail. Some regulations must be complied with when conducting cold outreach. If you’re in the US it’s worth investigating the CAN-SPAM act or CASL in Canada. Make sure to include your contact information including your address on all emails, and give them the option to opt out and unsubscribe. It’s important that automated tools that you use follow these same rules.
Don’t Forget To Follow-Up
Just because a prospect didn’t respond to the first email doesn’t mean they won’t respond to the following ones. Email outreach tools will typically allow you to create flows where emails are automatically sent depending on whether a contact has opened a mail, clicked on something, in particular, or visited a particular page of your site. Giving up on a potential client after a single email or two is often quitting too soon. There is, however, definitely a point where you should call it quits. You don’t want to look like a stalker or look desperate.
Add A CTA
Sending an email without including a CTA (Call to Action) renders the process fairly pointless. Introducing yourself is one thing, but most people aren’t going to reply to a simple introduction. Be sure to ask them a simple question, ask if they’d like a meeting or a demo, or invite them to visit your website, an event, or complete a survey. Whatever you choose, make sure to include something. It’s a great indicator of interest and also can provide you with the next set of information you require to continue the sales process.
The Best Email Outreach Tools Of 2022
Instantly
Instantly is a cold email outreach tool powered by AI with the aim of improving the delivery rates and response rates of cold emails. Connecting email accounts is quick, easy, and unlimited, meaning your team can get prospecting without delay. It’s a perfect fit for B2B businesses, but also works excellently for freelancers and individual contractors.
Key features include:
- Deliverability - Instantly’s warm-up tool ensures that your emails avoid spam filters, especially with new email accounts. The sending account is warmed up, through a series of processes, and your cold emails land right in the inbox of prospectors rather than being deleted by spam folders. Usually, this process takes 4 weeks, but Instantly does this process for you. Instantly offers unlimited email warmups, to match the unlimited email addresses you can add. The process is fully automated and ensures that deliverability stays high. Want to double-check? Check the warmup analytics!
- AI Optimization - The AI system within Instantly is built using copy and content from the best experts in the field of cold email marketing. It’ll help you write emails that are readable, openable, and deliver a great conversion rate.
- Campaign Uploads - Use CSV fields and files with leads in, personalize them then launch the campaign including scheduling and unique deliverability options such as email rewriting, stopping emails from sending if you get a reply, and Smart Send (where the tool slowly ramps up to daily sending limits).
- Comprehensive Analytics - the analytics dashboard is incredibly straightforward, in fact, you can receive almost all of the information you receive within 30 seconds of arriving. At a glance, information includes; sent, opened, open rate, replies, and reply rate.
Pricing starts from $37 a month, with the most popular Hypergrowth package at $97 a month.
BuzzStream
BuzzStream offers a comprehensive suite of features to their email outreach tool including research, email sending, management suite, and reporting. The tool can discover metrics within your sending data that better qualify your mailing lists allowing you to build a database of strong leads.
- CRM-like dashboard - offering everything in one simple set of screens
- Activity tracking - to ensure that responses are all within BuzzStream allowing multiple team members to work on the same leads.
- Analytics - data-driven information on metrics such as open rates, reply rates, and more.
Pricing starts from $24 a month for 1 user up to custom packages at over $1000 a month
Ninja Outreach
Ninja Outreach is a slightly different beast. It allows you to search through business and social media influencer profiles by niche and location. You’re then able to contact those accounts using an automated email outreach campaign.
- Automated Campaigns - automate the campaign and even send up to 2 follow-up messages.
- Personalized Templates - Custom fields allow you to populate emails with the personal information of your recipients.
- Browser Extension - Allowing you to autofill contact forms on prospect’s websites.
Pricing starts from $389 a month
WebFluential
Another influencer marketing software tool that includes some automated email outreach. There’s a heavy focus on leveraging influencers to showcase your brand with this tool, focusing on building connections and leveraging their content.
- Search influencers
- Co-create branded content with influencers
- Smart contracts - an interesting use of web3 technology to ensure influencers are only paid when you’re satisfied.
Prices start from $100 a month
Pitchbox
Pitchbox aims their email tool at SEO providers, they have a unique inbox system that has typical SEO metrics built into it. The company offers far more than just email outreach including link building, prospecting, workflow, and a CRM.
- Smart Templates - allowing scaled personalization, conditional logic, and pre-written content aimed at a link-building campaign.
- Sequencing - email sequencing to automate follow-ups based on user action.
- Scheduling - set the time and date you want emails to go out, based on time zones and recipients.
Prices were unavailable publicly at the time of writing.
Upfluence
An influencer-focused marketing tool that fits in with a wide marketing stack including outlook, Gmail, HubSpot, and more. The workflow part of the tool allows you to automate outreach to influencers at scale. You can manage everything from one dashboard that easily integrates with popular email inboxes.
- Contact entire influencers with only a few clicks.
- Custom templates to use as you see fit.
- Bounce management system that flags emails that are invalid.
Prices were unavailable publicly at the time of writing.
TapInfluence
A whole influencer CRM system that allows you to discover influencers that your brand wants to work with, automate an extensive workflow, track and measure key metrics and then amplify your content using promoted posts.
- The discovery part of the tool allows you to search out prospects using keywords and create lists accordingly.
- Once you’re ready to start a campaign there’s a robust campaign management tool that includes scheduling and tracking as well as in-platform communication.
Prices were unavailable publicly at the time of writing.
MaroPost
Going beyond just email outreach, this tool allows you to create outreach campaigns for SMS, mobile, and eCommerce. Focusing on email outreach, Maropost reports a deliverability rate of 98% and offers dynamic content for different devices, user segmentation, and smart scheduling.
- Dynamic personalization - send emails that are hyper-targeted to your recipients, allowing for unique emails sent based on unified customer data.
- Strong deliverability - including a unique deliverability score, spam checker, and other tools.
Prices start from €62 a month.
Reply.io
Ukrainian based Reply.io brands itself as a sales engagement platform focusing on multiple channels of outreach. They offer a free 14-day trial and you only need to sign up using a Gmail or email account.
- LinkedIn outreach - using a browser extension you’re able to find verified emails of prospects and add them straight into your email lists.
- Not just email - using the platform you’re able to combine email, SMS, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn into a single sequence.
- AI powered content - AI reads your text quality and assigns a score based on a chance of a reply. It will also read replies and automatically tag those who seem interested in what you have to offer.
Business prices start at $70 a month per user with a minimum of 3 users.
Outreach
Branded as a sales execution platform, Outreach aims to empower your sales team and increase their productivity. It provides a clear step by step series of tasks that they’re able to work through linked with automation.
- The engagement section of the tool allows you to prospect using playbooks that have been proven to win sales.
- Their onboarding system enables new starters to get to work quickly.
Prices were unavailable publicly at the time of writing.
Seamless.AI
Seamless.AI provides prospecting and outreach all in one. Their database allows you to filter certain roles at certain companies and provides a plethora of contact information, massively reducing your time spent researching. Furthermore, their Chrome extension allows you to pull contact information from websites straight into your lists.
- Receive extensive information about potential prospects with customized insights.
- Database updates in real time if data changes, hugely reducing manual updates.
Prices were unavailable publicly at the time of writing.
Key Takeaways
Leveraging an email outreach tool should be a top priority for a business looking to grow in a reliable, sustainable, and scalable way. Automating vast parts of the process will hugely benefit you and your team whilst increasing the number of potential prospects that you contact and, hopefully, turn into profitable leads.
- Make sure to include personalization within your automated emails.
- Adapt campaigns based on data you receive.
- Do your own research, trial some tools, and find the one that best suits your business.
