5 of the Best Cold Email Software

Effective communication is essential for businesses to thrive in today’s fast-paced digital world.

Among the various outreach methods, cold emailing has emerged as a powerful tool for connecting with potential clients, customers, or partners.

However, crafting personalized and impactful cold emails can be a time-consuming task. That’s where the best cold email software comes in, revolutionizing how businesses approach their outreach strategies.

In this article, I hope to give you some perspective on which of the options below is the right cold email software for you.

First things first, however, I want to clarify…

What is cold email software?

Cold email software, also known as a cold email outreach tool, is software that automates or streamlines the cold emailing process.

Cold email software tends to include the following:

• Email automation features: Since you’re likely looking to send emails in bulk, it only makes sense that cold email software includes tools to help users schedule cold outreach campaigns and automate follow-ups. This is especially helpful for follow-up emails, as auto follow-ups save users a lot of time in creating personalized emails for each and every lead they contact.
• Custom email templates: As cold email is inherently impersonal (note: cold email personalization is possible, but requires extra effort), it’s very easy for a cold email outreach tool to provide its users with cold email templates they can work off of.
• Inbox warm-up tool: If you’re starting with a fresh domain your email-sending will be limited to between 300 and 2,000 emails per day, depending on what mailbox provider you use. To solve this, some cold email outreach software includes a tool that “warms up” your inbox by sending emails from your domain to a network of email accounts the cold email software controls and positively interacts with them. This gradually increases your daily sending limit over time and looks natural to mailbox providers, so your domain won’t get flagged as unnatural or fishy.
• Email tracking: With any platform you’re sending emails from, it’s only natural that you would want detailed analytics to go with your email outreach campaigns. This includes everything from deliverability insights to campaign stats and more, all displayed through a user-friendly interface.
• Integration: To enhance the capabilities of your cold email marketing software, most integrate with major CRMs like Hubspot, Zoho CRM, Salesforce, and more. Overall this makes the sales process much simpler, as sales teams don’t have to do the work of manually importing prospective clients into their cold email marketing software of choice.

There are more tools that can come with cold email software, but these are some of the common through-lines you’ll see with the best cold email software.

Now that that’s done with, we can get to the question you likely came here to answer.

What is the best cold email software?

Here is our shortlist of the best cold email software:

• Saleshandy – best overall
• Yesware – runner-up
• GMass – best for Gmail
• Reply.io – best for AI
• Woodpecker – best for teams

Saleshandy is a cold email outreach tool designed with deliverability and scalability in mind, making building personalized cold email campaigns as simple as possible for users.

While this does seem counter-intuitive, they include a built-in send limiter so you don’t send too many emails per day and tank your sender reputation. After all, your sales outreach won’t mean anything if you can’t reach inboxes in the first place.

Features:

Email Sequences

Saleshandy breaks their email sequences down into five simple steps, which I’ll list below:

• Prospecting: Saleshandy makes it easy to import contacts from your CRM or wherever else you keep them, where you can start creating your personalized email campaigns.
• Create templates: Once you’ve started your email campaign, Saleshandy will “grade” your email content based on how personalized it is and recommend ways to increase your personalization to boost click-through rates.
• Schedule outreach: Now that you’ve created your email templates, you can organize them in whatever order you want them to send in, and create multi-stage email sequences that increase reply rates.
• A/B test: If you’ve set up several pathways for your email sequences, you can track which pathway performs the best and continue your cold email outreach strategy accordingly.
• Analyze data: Once you’ve come to a conclusion on what works best, you can analyze and share recipient analytics like open rates and replies within Saleshandy using their dashboard.

Email Deliverability Toolkit

Included in Saleshandy’s suite of cold email tools are their email deliverability features, which aim to ensure your emails reach inboxes instead of being blocked by ESPs or spam filters.

To do this, Saleshandy provides you with a real-time writing assistant that scores the content of your emails based on how spammy it is and gives tips on how to increase the personalization level of your emails. Additionally, once you craft your emails, you can preview your email content with Saleshandy’s Preheader, showing exactly what your emails will look like in inboxes.

To increase email deliverability and the number of emails you can send, Saleshandy uses a unique algorithm to warm up your domain in record time compared to competitors. This means you can get to sending bulk emails quickly and efficiently, without waiting for the mailbox warm-up to do its thing.

LinkedIn Email Finder

This might have worked better if I put it as the first feature of Saleshandy, but I digress.

Without prospective clients, there’s no point in using cold emailing software in the first place. After all, you’d have no one to reach out to.

To get those initial contacts, Saleshandy has a free Chrome extension that can extract LinkedIn data like emails, names, companies, and more that can be used with Saleshandy’s mail merge feature to create personalized cold emails at scale and automatically.

Pricing: Saleshandy offers users a 7-day free trial to test out the platform, and their paid plans start at $27 per month, including unlimited email accounts, unlimited email warm-ups, 2,000 total prospects, and 10,000 monthly emails.

Yesware is a cold email outreach platform meant for sales teams who need a sales engagement platform, but not something as complicated as an enterprise-grade tool. Plus, it lives right on top of your Outlook/Gmail account, so you don’t need to change your workflow if you use either of those platforms, which you likely do.

Yesware is technically a sales engagement platform first and a cold emailing tool second, but it is still one of the best cold email software you can find on the market.

Features:

Multi-Channel Outreach Campaigns

Cold email outreach is great by itself, but you don’t have to limit your campaigns to one cold outreach method

You can choose from different touch types depending on the needs of your cold outreach needs, from automated email sequences to manual email to phone calls. While Yesware isn’t necessarily a cold-calling platform, you can go with that if you want to.

Once you’ve sent your campaign, you can get auto-reminders whenever it’s time to follow up on your emails, or, if you want to automate the process, you can do that too if your recipients don’t respond to your first email. Then, if a recipient replies or books a meeting, you can have them automatically removed from your email campaigns.

Email Templates

With Yesware, you can find (or create) a template for every step of the sales pipeline, from the initial cold outreach to follow-up emails. Yesware has a ready-made library of templates accessible straight from your email account, so you don’t have to go out of your way to find them.

Once you’ve found or created an email template you like, you can share it with your teammates and collaborate to create emails that convert. This ensures everyone is using the most efficient cold email outreach tools for the job, and ultimately guarantees higher performance as a whole.

Data Enrichment

Another feature that’s incredibly nice to have in cold emailing software is the ability to enrich whatever data you already have on your prospects. For example, if you just have a name, you can use Yesware’s Prospector tool to source company names, position titles, locations, and more, all so you can further personalize your cold emails.

This is courtesy of Yesware’s database of over 100 million business profiles, which keeps all of the following data on prospects:

• Phone number
• Email
• Title
• Company
• Website
• Location

Plus, this is all GDPR and CCPA compliant, so your sales intelligence is always compliant and you’re always reaching out to verified email addresses.

Pricing: Yesware has a free-forever plan that includes basic sales outreach and automation tools, and their paid plans start at $19 per user per month including sales automation, multi-channel campaigns, auto follow-ups, and more.

GMass is a cold email software that works directly from your Gmail account (as the name implies) and keeps things pretty simple as far as functionality goes.

If you’re looking for something relatively simple that sits on top of your Gmail inbox, then GMass is a good cold email software for your use case.

Features:

Breaking Gmail’s Limits

Normally, a Gmail account has a sending limit of ~500 emails per day and a Google Workspace account has a sending limit of ~2,000 emails per day. However, GMass can get around this limit in a few ways.

The first way isn’t really getting around the limit, but it does allow you to send campaigns with more than 2,000 recipients. GMass will use distributed scheduling (A.K.A. spacing emails out over a few days) to ensure your campaign reaches everyone it’s targeting.

The second way is a more direct bypass of Gmail’s limits, and that is through the use of a third-party SMTP server. Whether it’s through GMass’s internal SendGrid server or through your own SMTP server, you can effectively bypass the limits set by Google and reach up to ~10,000 people per day.

If your account has a good sender reputation with high deliverability, GMass will sometimes push your campaigns through their internal SendGrid server if you go over your daily account limit.

Mail Merge

If you’re looking to create personalized email campaigns using cold email software in your Gmail inbox, GMass has you covered.

You can use Google Sheets to create mail merge fields and personalize your campaigns at scale, given you have the information to personalize those emails with.

Unlike Yesware or some other sales engagement platforms, GMass doesn’t have native data enrichment functionality, but it doesn’t necessarily need it. GMass is meant to be a lightweight email tracking and sending solution after all, and doesn’t claim to be a full sales suite.

Campaign Analytics

Of course, if you’re sending campaigns, you’re going to want some insight into how they perform. GMass provides you with a user-friendly interface with detailed analytics including CTR, replies, unsubscribed, bounces, and more.

Especially when it comes to cold email campaigns, studying your metrics is important because this could be your first impression on your prospective clients and you want to make sure you’re not making a mistake over a prolonged period that results in a funnel leak.

Pricing: GMass has a free Chrome extension and can be used for free indefinitely; their paid plans start at $19.95 per month (and per user, kind of), and are divided into Individual and Team plans, the former is where the $19.95 per month comes from.

Reply.io (or just Reply) is an AI-powered sales engagement and cold email platform built to create 1:1 conversions at scale, again with the help of AI.

Trusted by companies like Adobe, Reply can handle every step of the sales process and essentially get new clients and book meetings with them on auto-pilot.

Features:

B2B Contact Database

Similarly to some other tools on this list, Reply has a built-in B2B contact database so you can do your prospecting and cold email campaigns on one platform.

You can filter through this database using any of the following filters and more:

• Account name
• Account HQ location
• Industry
• Employee headcount
• Revenue
• Contact name
• Department
• Seniority
• Email status
• Contact details
• Job title

Once you’ve found your prospects, you can use Reply’s CRM integration with a platform like Hubspot or Salesforce to import those prospects right into your sales pipeline.

AI-Driven Sales Engagement

The most advertised feature of Reply is its AI capabilities, specifically Jason AI. Using Jason, which is powered by ChatGPT, you can set up outreach sequences, handle prospect responses, and book meetings with speed and at scale.

Jason handles everything from narrowing down your audience in Reply’s B2B database to personalizing outreach campaigns to follow-ups and more. It can handle basic customer inquiries and even book meetings for you, so you can focus your effort elsewhere and not on follow-up emails.

Chrome Extension

Even if you don’t want to pay for Reply’s higher-tier plans, you can gather prospects using their Chrome extension on Linkedin. This extension uses email validation on every email it gathers, so you’re not sending emails to a junk inbox and wasting your time.

Once you’ve found the contacts you want to pass on to a sales team or your CRM, you can open the extension in your Gmail or your CRM of choice and transfer the information seamlessly.

Pricing: Reply has a free plan which allows users access to their Chrome extension, 1,000 data credits monthly, and their AI sequence generator. You can’t really do any cold emailing with their free plan, but you can with their paid plans which start at $60 per user per month, including one mailbox, 10,000 data credits per month, Reply’s Jason AI, CRM integration, and more.

Woodpecker is a B2B-focused cold email software that helps you build a sales pipeline from scratch with it and its integrations. Specifically for cold emails, Woodpecker has features like reply detection, cold email personalization, open and click tracking, and more.

Features:

Cold Email Platform

Woodpecker divides its services into three platforms: Cold Email, Sales Assistant, and Agency. I’ll be focusing mainly on the Cold Email platform, as the name of this article would imply.

Onboarding with Woodpecker is incredibly intuitive, whether you’re just starting out with cold email outreach or are transferring data from another of the many cold email marketing tools. They have tutorials for how to set things up as you transfer, and if those don’t answer a question of yours, Woodpecker’s support will have you covered.

You can connect multiple email accounts if you’re using more than one for your cold email outreach campaigns, and send emails from one account while warming up the others for the next batch of cold emails. Even with this, if you ever approach the send limit for your account, Woodpecker will notify you when to stop sending emails and save your sender reputation for your later email campaigns.

Another important feature of Woodpecker is their email validation and verification capabilities, which checks your contact list for invalid email addresses right before you send your campaign to minimize unwanted email addresses sneaking through the cracks and messing up your results, as they put it.

Cold Email Templates

As with most cold emailing tools, Woodpecker allows users to create, edit, share, and store templates as needed for whatever cold email campaign you’re running. Since you can have unlimited team members as a part of your Woodpecker account, you can share these templates with your team and test which ones work and which ones don’t at a larger scale than one person.

Integrations

Woodpecker integrates with a wide variety of platforms, the most popular of which being Calendly, Google Sheets, Pipedrive, Hubspot, Close, and Salesforce. The first four are native integrations, as where the last two are not.

You can create an entire sales pipeline with Woodpecker’s integration suite. For example, for prospect-hunting, you can use Hunter and LinkedIn.

From there, you can import those contacts into a CRM of choice like Hubspot or Salesforce.

Woodpecker itself handles the next stage alongside multichannel marketing integration slike LinkedIn and Twitter, then once you’ve made contact with a prospect, you can schedule meetings with them using Calendly, Zoom, and Slack.

Plus, Woodpecker integrates with Zapier, which means you can create code-free tech stacks with access to over 5,000 more platforms.

Pricing: Woodpecker has a 7-day free trial including (no credit card required) with free access to Woodpecker Cold Email for either 7 days or 50 cold emails. Their paid plans start at $49 per user (in this case per “email slot”, meaning if you want to send email from 5 email addresses, you’ll need 5 slots) per month and scales up based on how many emails you want to send monthly and add-ons like A/B testing and API keys/integrations.