You’re not alone when comparing email marketing tools. There are, after all, a growing number of tools coming to market. Lemlist, Active Campaign, Instantly, the list grows and grows. Many businesses come across Lemlist as one of their favored options, and we can understand that. After all, it offers a great number of features, but we think it only makes sense to see what alternatives there are on the market before making a choice.
In this article we’re going to cover:
- What To Look For In Email Marketing Software
- Instantly Vs. Lemlist
- Other Lemlist Alternatives - including:
- Constant Contact vs. Lemlist
- Square Space vs. Lemlist
- Active Campaign vs. Lemlist
- Keap vs. Lemlist
- Pipedrive vs. Lemlist
- Nimble vs. Lemlist
- Mailchimp vs. Lemlist
- HubSpot Marketing Hub vs. Lemlist
What To Look For In Email Marketing Software
Before we get into exploring the comparisons between Lemlist and other tools on the market it’s important that everyone understands what to look for in email marketing software. This will not only help you to consider the features that your business genuinely needs to fulfill your email marketing strategy, but also helps compare each tool against the others.
Account Warmup
Top of the list is the ability of the tool to automate the email warmup process for email accounts. Without this feature, your email campaign will barely get off the ground. The account warmup feature, such as the one offered by Instantly, gradually warms up your account by incrementally sending more and more emails until you reach a point where sending thousands of emails in one go won’t trigger spam filters or blacklist your email address.
Without warming up your account you risk spending a great deal of time on a campaign, perfecting your emails, only for them all to either not be delivered at all, or be delivered straight into a spam folder.
Don’t underestimate the importance of warmup.
Bank of Editable Templates
Starting with a blank page is just not necessary. The majority of tools will provide you with professionally drafted email templates, you just have to edit them to include your content (copy, images, links, etc). Once you’ve edited them and made them on brand, it should be a matter of simply adding them to a campaign.
Email Builder
You really shouldn’t be needing to use HTML coding just to create an email. The best tools will provide you with an email builder that performs in a drag-and-drop way. This makes creating emails a breeze or allows you to edit templates quickly so they are a perfect fit for your campaign. Having a complicated template builder isn’t necessary when there are so many easy to use email outreach tools.
Mobile Friendly Emails
There’s no hiding from the fact that a huge number, and in some cases the majority, of people will engage with your campaign through their mobile device. That means that unless your emails are presented in a mobile-friendly way they’ll be dismissed before the reader has even got to the content.
Design and Spam Tests
Certain email designs will render differently depending on the client that the recipient is using. Many tools will allow you to preview the email as the recipient will see it, allowing you to make edits appropriately so that it renders perfectly for everyone.
You should also be able to test your email against an in-built spam filter. Some content that you share (including the copy, images, or links) can immediately trigger spam filters. Spam testing should allow you to see just how deliverable your email is, ensuring that your bounce rate is as low as it can be.
Scalable as Standard
From the start of your agreement with a tool provider, you should be able to clearly see what the next tier level is for your business. If you can currently send 1000 emails a month, what does the next tier allow you to do and how much will it cost? Clarity should be expected and this information shouldn’t need to be requested. Your business should have the flexibility to scale when you want or need to.
Integrated Analytics
There are a number of core analytics that you should be monitoring during an email campaign. The best tools will provide you with a simple dashboard that displays everything in one place, including filters as necessary. At a minimum you should be able to track:
- Deliverability Rate (Open Rate)
- Click Through Rate (CTR)
- Unsubscribes
- Bounce Rate
Tracking these metrics allows you to compare just how successful your campaign is, plus it allows you to compare how campaigns measure against each other. This is especially useful when running A/B testing.
Instantly Vs. Lemlist
Instantly Entry Tier
- $37 a month
- Unlimited Email Accounts
- Unlimited Email Warmup
- 100 Active Leads
- 5000 Emails per month
- Advanced Sequences
- Email and Account Analytics
- Reputation and Bounce Protection
- General Support Tickets
Lemlist Entry Tier
- $29 a month
- Solo Seat
- Unlimited Campaigns
- 100 emails per day
- Auto email warm-up - for additional fee
Lemlist markets itself as a tool that focuses on enabling B2B businesses to create and send email campaigns within just a few minutes in only 3 steps. Those are setting up the automation, personalization, and then measurement. The reality is that there’s a lot more to it campaign creation than that, but it’s an interesting marketing point.
Instantly offers a more rounded, detailed, and coordinated email outreach campaign creation process. Starting with its unique AI-powered email warmup feature, you can be sure that all of your hard work building the campaign will lead to emails actually being read by your recipients. This feature shouldn’t be seen as an added extra, it should be a mandatory part of the campaign creation. Lemlist do offer a warmup feature, but at an additional $29 per seat, per month. A hefty addition to the starting price of $59 a month for Lemlist’s email outreach standard plan.
If you’re a business that works with a team greater than 1 person, Instantly’s unlimited account feature is sure to take your fancy. Lemlist also allows you to add additional seats to your plan, but at a significant further cost.
Both products offer detailed personalization within their email builders. Lemlist does offer an extra step of personalization with personalized image creation which is a nifty feature.
Integrations across both Lemlist and Instantly are extensive, and all of the major names from within your tech stack are likely to feature, including Slack, Calendly, Calendars, Zapier, and more.
Picking between the two, Instantly or Lemlist, really comes down to your ambitions. If you want to run a campaign that can scale, grow and genuinely drive consumers to your business, Instantly is the better option. The unlimited email accounts, unlimited email warmup, and ability to send 5000 emails a month at the base pricing tier are significantly more productive than what Lemlist offers at the same tier.
Other Lemlist Alternatives
There are, of course, other alternatives to Lemlist available. What follows is a selection of what the email outreach tool market has to offer. Some have very similar features, others might aim to fulfill a slightly different purpose. The key is to consider your business’ specific requirements and select a tool that best matches them.
Constant Contact vs. Lemlist
Constant Contact aims at slightly smaller businesses than Lemlist with a focus on 1-20 users, rather than Lemlist’s 1-1000+ users. This is reflected in their pricing with the starting price of $9.99 a month and a pricing model based on usage rather than a flat rate. Constant Contact offers a simple-to-use drag-and-drop email builder that makes building great-looking emails simple. The support offered by Constant Contact is somewhat more accessible with FAQs, a knowledge base, and even phone support.
Squarespace vs. Lemlist
Square Space made its name through its accessible website builder. They have enabled thousands of small businesses to embrace online, as well as opened the world of eCommerce to many established brick-and-mortar businesses. You could argue that email isn’t at the forefront of Squarespace’s mind, and is an afterthought to their web builder, but it is a welcome addition to businesses already within the Squarespace ecosystem. At only $19 a month for entry-level, Squarespace is a great option for startup businesses.
ActiveCampaign vs. Lemlist
Starting at only $15 a month for the Lite version ActiveCampaign makes for another tool that is useful for businesses at the start of their journey. They offer a host of features including lead importation, newsletter templates, sales email templates, and a huge selection of automations available out of the box. If you’re working with a developer the APIs and webhooks could come in particularly useful.
Keap vs. Lemlist
Entering at a higher price point than many of the other options on our list, Keap starts at $59 a month. They like to work with businesses of all sizes from freelancers all the way up to large enterprises. The visual automation builder helps you to understand the flow of automation based on how a user has interacted with your campaign. Keap includes a simple email builder, it’s not as intuitive as some other competitors but is a welcome feature of the tool.
Pipedrive vs. Lemlist
Pipedrive is more than just email outreach, it aims to be a sales CRM that holds all of your individual prospect data in one central hub. There’s more of a focus on individual sales (including a contact-by-contact sales pipeline) rather than cold email outreach. You can, of course, add cold prospects and segment them as such, but that’s not the main focus of this platform.
Nimble vs. Lemlist
Nimble looks to create a useful CRM platform for small businesses that use Office 365 or G Suite. It combines all of your contacts, historical communication, inboxes, and calendars into one dashboard. It’ll also integrate with a wide number of SaaS business apps and social media accounts. That said, if you’re looking for an email outreach tool, this isn’t likely to be it as the features you’ll require simply aren’t offered.
Mailchimp vs. Lemlist
Mailchimp is one of the biggest email marketing platforms on the market. It has been synonymous with email marketing for years. One of the enticing features of Mailchimp is the completely free version of it that offers many features that a small or startup business might require. Helpful in the bootstrap world. It has a huge number of templates that are editable, although its editor has started to feel more cumbersome than competitors in recent times. As a starting point, however, Mailchimp does tick all of the boxes that you would expect from an email platform.
HubSpot Marketing Hub vs. Lemlist
HubSpot is a behemoth in the marketing and sales sector. Their marketing hub in particular offers a vast suite of tools for businesses looking to launch a marketing campaign of any type, including cold email outreach. Hubspot is unashamedly expensive, with eye-watering costs for their full CRM and the Marketing Hub starting from $50 a month. The community around HubSpot is a big draw for many, as well as the natural integration to your CRM if you’re already a HubSpot user. Analytics are included as standard and are detailed, including some of HubSpot’s own branded analytics.
Key Takeaways
Choosing the right email marketing tool for your business is a decision that requires research, thought and comparison. Instantly is, for most businesses, a superb choice that offers everything that you’re likely to need, as well as the all-important account warmup feature.
- Consider the needs of your business before looking at tools, this will make comparing options much easier.
- Many tools offer free trials, and making use of these can be far more useful.
- Email builders and personalization are great tools but pay attention to deliverability features to ensure your campaign is successful.
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