Instantly.ai Review: The Best Cold Email Software In 2024?

In the rapidly evolving digital marketing space, cold emailing remains a great strategy for outreach and sales. Yet, it’s not without its challenges. From crafting personalized messages to managing large lists of prospects, the process can be tiring. Enter Instantly.ai—a platform that not only simplifies these tasks but elevates your email campaigns to new heights.

Instantly.ai is a tool designed to streamline the entire cold email campaign process — from lead generation to campaign optimization to CRM. With its advanced features and user-friendly interface, Instantly enables businesses of all sizes to launch, manage, and refine cold email campaigns in one place at a cost-effective rate.

This blog post dives into how Instantly.ai stands out in the cold email space, offering a detailed walkthrough of its features.

Getting started with Instantly.ai

The first thing you’ll see once you log into Instantly is that the interface is split into 6 tabs:

Lead Finder
Email Accounts (and Warmup)
Campaigns
Unibox (and CRM)
Analytics
Lead Management

Let’s dissect what each tab does.

1. Lead Finder

An important step to a successful cold email campaign is finding the right leads. Instantly helps you with this by offering an advanced lead scraper under the Lead Finder tab.

You can tailor your search to find the most relevant contacts – with filters like job titles, location, company size, head count, industry, etc.

Let’s say you’re looking for French decision-makers in the retail industry. Your filters might look like this 👇

Pro tip: Use the revenue filter with caution because it will always have inaccuracies. The revenue metric is almost always a guess because there’s no public information that will tell you the revenue of most companies.

If you already have a list of companies you’d like to reach out to, you can instead use the enrichment option to just get their contact information.

Just upload your list, pick the job titles you’d like to reach out to, and Instantly will do the email enrichment for you.

With your leads in hand, the next step would be to set up your sending infrastructure. The Email Accounts tab deals with exactly that.

2. Email Accounts

When running cold email campaigns with Instantly, you will be able to have multiple email accounts sending your emails in the same campaign at no extra cost. This tab is where you can add and manage those accounts.

Instantly makes connecting your email accounts very easy with step-by-step instructions for adding both Gmail and Outlook accounts (we do recommend adding your accounts through the direct oAuth connection instead of IMAP / SMTP for better deliverability).

A crucial aspect often overlooked in cold emailing is the warm-up process. Luckily, Instantly handles that for you as well.

The tool’s warm-up infrastructure simulates human-like sending patterns by automatically sending emails back and forth between your accounts and other Instantly user accounts. This process builds a positive reputation with email service providers, reducing the risk of landing in spam folders or being blacklisted.

But that’s not all. Instantly also has a cool “read emulation” feature which mimics human interaction by scrolling through warm-up emails, further improving your sender reputation.

Once you add your emails, you can easily enable the warm-up process by clicking on an email account and configuring the right warm-up settings. To speed up the process, you can use the bulk edit feature that will allow you to apply settings across all your accounts simultaneously.

With email accounts added and warmed up, it’s time to dive into the heart of cold emailing: the campaigns themselves.

3. Campaigns

Instantly’s campaign management tab makes launching cold email campaigns a breeze.

To get started, simply hit the “Add new” button, and once done, you’ll have a set of options for your campaign, including adding leads, adding sequences for emails, and setting a schedule for email sending.

You can add leads to your campaign by importing leads from the Lead Finder tab or from an enriched lead list you already have.

You can then craft your email scripts under the sequences option. With features like custom variable insertion and spin syntax, Instantly ensures every email sent will feel individually crafted, increasing the likelihood of engagement and improving deliverability.

Under the schedule option, you can decide when your emails will be sent, tailoring the timing to your audience’s timezone and work hours.

And finally, you can add the email accounts you’ll use to send your emails and further optimize the campaign under the options tab.

Once you finally have your campaigns running, you will have to deal with responses, and you can easily do that in the Unibox tab.

4. Unibox

Your campaigns will be using multiple email accounts to send your emails. This helps with scaling and deliverability, but it also makes it harder to handle replies from all the email accounts at once.

That’s where the Unibox tab comes into play, as it provides a centralized place to manage all your responses from all your email accounts.

The Unibox is a testament to Instantly’s commitment to efficiency. You can manage responses per campaign, per email account, or just have all responses in one master inbox regardless of campaigns or email accounts.

You can also categorize leads and set reminders for follow-ups 👇

The Unibox tab also has CRM integration which helps you track interested leads and move them through your sales funnel.

5. Analytics

Understanding campaign performance is crucial for refining your cold emailing strategy. Through real-time analytics in the Analytics tab, you can monitor open rates, reply rates, and more, allowing for timely adjustments.

You can use your data to understand which messages resonate best with your audience and refine your approach accordingly.

6. Lead Management

The Lead Management tab is where you can manage the leads in your campaigns. You’re presented with information like the current status of each lead in the outreach process and whether or not your emails have been sent to your leads.

The tab also has an AI prompt feature that contains useful automated actions to further improve your campaigns.

For example, you can use the “General unique opening sentence” template to create a hyper-personalized cold email intro.

What About Pricing?

Instantly offers a free plan, and two types of paid plans: Sending and Warmup plans, and Leads plans.

Sending and Warmup Plans

These plans are great for people who want full access to all the features Instantly offers.

You can choose between three plans depending on the size of campaigns you wish to run:

Leads Plans

These plans are great for people who just want to use Instantly’s lead enrichment features. You have three options:

Instantly.ai in Short

Now that you have an idea of everything Instantly has to offer, let’s wrap it up with some quick pros and cons.

The Pros

It’s cost effective when managing a lot of email accounts at once
Brings all of the responses from leads in the campaigns to a master inbox that also acts as a CRM
Has deliverability boosting features
Has warmup included

The Cons

It has a public warmup pool, which can sometimes have issues with bounces or inconsistencies (more inconsistencies than private pool)

So, Is Instantly.ai the right outreach tool for you?

With Instantly, you’re equipped with a powerful tool that simplifies the complex process of cold emailing, from lead generation to campaign optimization.

But while the tool is a powerhouse for cold emails, integrating it with the right tech stack can elevate your email campaigns even further. Consider incorporating other lead generation tools or personalization software to enhance your outreach efforts.

Each tool adds a layer of depth to your campaigns, making them more targeted, efficient, and effective.

For more insights on harnessing the power of cold email marketing, you can join our outreach community to get expert tips, templates, and much more!