Cold Email Marketing Software Solutions

February 1, 2023. Written by Keli Dantin. This article has been updated as of May 20, 2024 to maintain accurate information.

Cold emailing is a direct marketing technique that involves sending emails to potential customers who have not previously expressed interest in your products or services. The difference between cold email marketing and any other type of email marketing campaign is that the recipients are not customers nor have they explicitly expressed interested in your product or service.

The main goal of a cold email marketing campaign is to generate new leads. Whereas other forms of email marketing typically fall a little further down the sales funnel. Such as email strategies that are used to promote brand awareness, build relationships, nurture leads, upsell current customers, etc.

Cold email marketing can be an effective sales strategy, but it must be used carefully. The key is to personalize your emails and make them relevant to the recipient. If done correctly, cold email marketing can be a great way to reach new customers and grow your business. But if done incorrectly, it can jeopardize the company’s domain.

What is cold email marketing software?

Cold emailing can be an effective way to reach a vast number of potential customers who may not be familiar with your business or who are not actively looking for your product or service. But developing and managing cold email marketing campaigns can be time consuming.

Email marketing software can automate most of the manual work of emailing potential sales leads, saving you a lot of time. Moreover, it tracks vital metrics (open rate, reply rate, etc.) which allow you to determine how well your campaign is working.

How to choose the best cold email marketing software for your business?

If you don’t have the right infrastructure in place to manage your cold email marketing campaign, you’re not going to reap the full benefits of emailing marketing. And with a marketplace saturated with options, trying to decide which solution is best for your business can be overwhelming. Each platform varies in price, usability, features, integrations, and the list goes on.

So, what are some factors you should consider when shopping for a new email marketing solution?

• Do you want to pay by the month so you can cancel anytime? Or will you pay annually to try to take advantage of annual pricing discounts?

• How many emails do you plan to send per day/month?

• How many leads do you have?

• Do you even have a list of leads, or will you need help generating a list of leads for your cold email marketing strategy?

• Are the email addresses for your leads current, or do you need help validating your data?

• Has the email address you’re sending your email campaign from been in use for a while? Or is it a brand new email address and will thus need to be “warmed up” first?

• Do you have a CRM system or other technology that you’d like your email marketing tool to integrate with?

• Will you be the only person sending cold emails or do you have a team of people who will need access?

The single most important consideration when selecting a email marketing tool as a top of the funnel strategy, is to ensure the tool you’re selecting was developed for cold emailing marketing. Most of the more well-known platforms for sending automated email campaigns (MailChimp, Constant Contact) were not designed for cold email marketing and thus will not be an effective solution for your needs.

What are some good software solutions for cold email marketing?

Apollo.io

Apollo is one of my personal favorites. It includes both a lead generation tool (Search) and an email marketing tool (Engage). And it offers a free version that allows you access to many of its features on a small scale.

The search feature allows you access valid email addresses for potential customers who fit your target market. The platform offers over 200 data attributes, such as job title, geography, number of employees, industry.

You can export your data to Excel, integrate it with a multitude of other software platforms, or elect to execute your cold email marketing campaign right from within Apollo using the Engage tool. You can access as much data as you’d like, but there are limitations to what you can do with the data based on subscription level you choose.

With the free plan, you can only export 10 email addresses per month. If you plan to execute your email campaign within Apollo, you’ll only be able to send a two-sequence campaign with the free plan and a maximum of 250 emails per day.

$49 per month is the lowest priced “monthly” paid plan. With this subscription, you can export 250 email addresses per month. However, it also removes the limit on how many sequences (follow up emails to your original email) you can include in one campaign and there are no daily sending limits. Committing to an annual plan will provide a 20% per month discount.

While Apollo does offer an email validation tool, I have found that it isn’t 100% reliable. Even when selecting “valid email addresses only” in my search filter, I still experience about a 25% invalid/bounce rate. Check out my in-depth review of Apollo.io for cold email marketing in B2B strategies.

Hunter.io

Hunter is another good option for generating leads and deploying cold email campaigns. They also offer a free plan, plus the starter subscription allows for double the amount of email credits per month. With Hunter, for $34 per month you’ll receive 500 monthly searches.

I personally feel that Hunter’s lead generation tool isn’t as easy to utilize as Apollo’s lead finder. Hunter was built to find email addresses associated with a specific domain. So you’ll need to first have a list of companies that you’re interested in targeting, along with their website domain.

Smartreach.io

If you do not need help generating leads and simply want to deploy and manage cold email marketing campaigns, Smartreach is a great solution. Pricing is based on the number of prospects you’re allowed to add to your account each month. Smartreach’s entry level subscription is $29 per month and allows you to add 1,000 contacts to your email campaigns per month.

Smartreach is a good option if you have a new email address as it offers a whole suite of email deliverability features called Deliver4Sure. In February of 2023 Google announced it would ban email warming up services for Gmail accounts. However, many of the popular email warmup services switched from an API solution to IMAP-based authentication protocol as a safe workaround.

Apollo, Hunter and Smartreach are just a few options that are budget friendly and that I’ve found are easy to use. The market is saturated with many other solutions and new products are launching all the time.

Ready to give cold email marketing a try?

Remember, cold emailing can be an effecting marketing solution, but it must be done correctly to truly see results and more importantly to not cause harm to your domain’s reputation. Work with a team who has experience in cold email marketing or do your research to make sure you’re doing it right.

Lavish Sales & Marketing has helped dozens of clients get started with cold email marketing. Our team is experienced in many of the common SaaS based solutions for generating new leads and executing email campaigns. From finding the right leads in your target market, to writing content personalized for those leads, and then selecting, executing, and managing your email marketing campaigns, we will help you get results. Let us know how we can help.