The Best Cold Email Tools for Sales Managers to Scale Up

Cold email outreach is an important part of a sales team’s strategy, but managing outreach manually can be a huge time sink.

Personalization takes time, effort, and research. Tracking campaigns can be difficult. Without the right tools, there’s a good chance that the emails that get sent out won’t even be read. They’ll just sit toiling in someone’s spam folder, doing no one any good.

That’s why it’s a relief that sales teams don’t have to waste hours of their day with manual cold emailing efforts. There are plenty of automated tools today that can do it not only faster, but with personalization and the built in ability to track a campaign’s success.

This article will take you through important features to look for in a cold email tool, and which tools may be best to help you scale your business.

What Features to Look for in a Cold Email Tool

There are four essential features that every cold email tool needs to have: deliverability, personalization, and analytics. Other features can be great when they’re relevant to you, but without these four basic components, a cold email tool isn’t even worth your money.

Deliverability

Email deliverability means that your messaging will end up in the inbox exactly where it belongs. You should look for tools that have email warm-up, domain authentication, and spam testing. Without doing a deep dive, just know that you should be seeing acronyms like DKIM, SPF, and DMARC.

Automation

Automation is also important. Cold email outreach isn’t just about sending one message and being done. The tool you go with should be able to automate the follow-up process. This can include email sequences, scheduling, and trigger-based actions.

Personalization

Your tool should also offer personalization options. Personalization is at the heart of engagement, because people like feeling special. A one-size-fits-all approach to sales just ends up with the recipient slamming the delete button before they even really read the email. Cold email creation should be personalized not only to the recipient but the contents should also be catered to their prior activity and purchase history.

Analytics

The last must-have is the ability to track your analytics. You want your tool to provide you with insights like open rates, click-through rates, and response rates. This lets you help optimize your campaigns over time. Features like A/B testing can also give you important information on what works and what doesn’t.

The Five Best Cold Email Tools for Sales Teams

1. Instantly

Instantly is one of the top cold email tools for sales teams. This is down to affordability, the ability to send unlimited messages, and an AI-driven email warm-up that ensures high inbox placement.

With Instantly, you also get a built-in tool to help you streamline the prospecting process. You can use the tool to generate leads, create personalized messaging, and deliver advanced information on the rate of open messages, replies, and email-to-customer conversions.

2. Close

Close is a Customer Relationship Management tool that helps your sales team manage leads, calls, and execute email outreach. This is great for a team that wants to focus on multi-channel outreach, since it also has call and SMS features.

One of Close’s best features is the ability to combine CRM and cold email outreach in a single platform, but it does come with a price tag. For a sales team that wants to focus primarily on just cold email campaigns, this may be more than you need and therefore not worth paying the extra for.

3. Outreach

Outreach gears itself toward sales, CS, and RevOps leaders. This is a tool designed for large-scale sales operations, and uses the Kaia AI engine. If you’re part of an enterprise team and you need advanced automation and analytics, this may be the perfect option.

There are a couple of things to watch out for. Outreach has a steeper learning curve than some of the others on this list, and it does cost more. This is a better choice for a bigger sales team that needs a more sophisticated type of analytics.

4. Mailshake

If you veer more toward the small business end of the sales spectrum, Mailshake may be worth checking out. This is a user-friendly tool that works well for startups and small teams, with pre-built templates and a drag and drop interface that are easy for anyone to pick up and run with. Mailshake also comes with some useful integrations for prospecting on platforms like LinkedIn.

This is a good choice for anyone who wants a tool that’s affordable and easy, though in return, you are trading away some of the more advanced features of other options on this list. The AI and automation features aren’t quite as stacked, and the personalization may not go quite as deep. As your business scales, you can graduate to a more complex tool as needed.

5. Mixmax

If your sales team operates primarily through Gmail, then Mixmax may be the one for you. Mixmax offers Gmail integration, email tracking, shared templates for team collaboration, and meeting scheduling all through the same platform. It’s a one-stop shop for anything Gmail-related.

If you don’t use Gmail, you may find Mixmax to be somewhat limited. Not using their primary email program hinders the scalability and functionality of a lot of their integrations. If that describes your sales team, you’ll find more flexibility and help scaling up from a tool like Instantly.

Conclusion

Cold email outreach can be time-consuming and frustrating – but it doesn’t have to be. The right tool can completely change the way your team approaches this very basic and necessary foundation for sales by saving you time and streamlining the most tedious tasks along the process.

A tool like Instantly may be the best choice if you want a little bit of everything you need at an affordable price, but still consider carefully the specific needs of your team.

All of the recommendations on this list will help you drive engagement, scale up, and land your emails in the inboxes that they need to be in.