In cold email marketing, using email automation is a significant factor for efficient email management. The right approach to implementing email automation is using cold email software.
Over the past few months, we have employed Instantly to orchestrate cold email campaigns, and it has proven to be an exceptional tool.
In this blog, we'll explore Instantly.ai as one of the best cold email tools, providing a detailed exploration of its features. Additionally, we will examine some of the advantages and disadvantages we have encountered.
Let's delve into this Instantly.ai review and learn how to use this powerful tool.
What is Instantly?
Instantly is a cold emailing and sales automation platform that helps companies generate leads. It was launched in 2021. Despite being a new player in the cold email game, it does an excellent job by offering tons of features like Lead Finder, Lead Management, Analytics, and Unibox.
One cool thing about Instantly is its ability to warm up emails, ensuring they get delivered and boosting their reputation. This makes handling lots of emails for your cold email campaign easy. Instantly also gives you AI-powered analytics, A/Z testing, and templates to send emails automatically.
Let's discuss some of the Instantly features in detail.
Key Features: Unraveling the Toolbox of Instantly.ai
Instantly, it has many features to help with your cold emailing efforts. Let's discuss some of the features in detail.
1. Lead Finder
Cold emailing depends on reaching out to people but finding prospects to reach out to can be a hell of a task. Instantly offers a lead finder tool which can be used to find prospects.
The lead finder Instantly lets you find B2B prospects without leaving the app with access to 160 million database contacts.
You can use it for prospecting contacts and finding email addresses by setting up filters according to your ICP. It has a lot of filters like Industry, Technology, Job title, Locations, etc. This is a handy tool to find and create lists of emails.
2. Enrichment
Even if you have a list of emails, you still need to verify those emails to ensure your emails are not bouncing. That's where enrichment comes in. Instantly, you can create a list and enrich the contact data to ensure it is verified. You can then import those contacts into your campaigns.
3. Unlimited email accounts
You can add unlimited email accounts in Instantly.ai and scale your email outreach as much as possible. This helps send emails strategically and fewer emails with each account to make it seem less automated.
You can create multiple email accounts with multiple email domains and scale your campaigns by sending a small amount of emails from each account, which makes your emails seem less automated and reduces the chances of ESPs identifying you as spam.
4. Email Warmup
Ensuring your emails are warmed up is crucial to prevent them from landing in spam folders and to improve the likelihood that your target audience will read them. It's not something you can skip.
Email warming in Instantly is an entirely free process. Many other alternatives charge extra for this feature on a per account per month basis, which can become costly for large campaigns.
Instantly allows you to warm up as many email accounts as you choose at no additional expense. Moreover, it ensures your emails achieve the best possible email deliverability score.
In the screenshot above, the fire symbol (highlighted in red) will change to green for the emails where you've activated the warm-up feature. The column highlighted in green indicates the number of warm-up emails sent from your account, while the column marked in blue reflects the email health of all accounts.
5. Campaigns
Sending emails is very easy using the Instantly email campaign feature. You can set up each campaign. You can strategically plan and send your campaigns accordingly.
Several features in the campaign make it easy for you to manage and run campaigns effectively:
Analytics
For each campaign, you can access individual analytics. Click on the campaign to view its performance. Analyze metrics like opens, clicks, and replies to make informed decisions based on the data.
Leads
This is where you add and oversee the prospects you intend to reach in your campaign. You can continue adding them even after the campaign has started. You can easily track who has been contacted and identify those who have not been contacted.
Sequences
This is where you can manage your email templates and sequences for the campaign. You can edit, preview, and use templates for your sequences here.
you have the option to personalize your email sequences by incorporating variables like first names and company names. The AZ testing feature (AB testing) allows you to create different versions of your emails, providing valuable analytics on the performance of each variation.
You can leverage a diverse selection of powerful pre-written email templates to streamline your outreach efforts, ensuring both efficiency and effectiveness.
Schedule
You can schedule your email campaigns to find the optimal time for reaching your recipients, adjusting schedules based on their time zones. This boosts open rates.
Using the scheduling feature to determine what works best for your campaign, experiment with different times or days. Choose the timing that yields maximum results for a more effective campaign.
Options Sending & Tracking
Here, you can choose the email accounts you want to use for sending campaigns, and you can select multiple accounts. Additionally, you can specify the number of emails you want to send daily for your campaigns.
You can decide whether to track email opens and links. You also have the option to pause campaigns for prospects who have replied automatically.
There's also an option for advanced settings where you can choose the time gaps between each email to make it seem less automated. Additionally, you can enable auto-optimization for A/B testing, allowing the campaign to use the best-performing variant for better results automatically.
6. Unibox
In Instantly.ai, you get the Unibox feature, a shared inbox for all email accounts. This feature allows you to check responses from all your campaigns and emails in one single place.
You can also apply tags to your replies/leads accordingly. Tags help you identify the lead's status and make it easy for you to manage them according to the nature of their reply.
Instantly has an AI that automatically tags your contacts based on the nature of their replies. For instance, if you receive an automated “OOO” reply, it will often be tagged as “Out of Office.” However, this only works sometimes; in the end, it is better to tag the contacts manually.
7. CRM
Instantly offers a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) feature specifically designed to assist you in managing deals related to your contacts.
This CRM feature is directly linked to tags in your inbox, seamlessly integrating your email system. It allows you to organize and track interactions with your contacts, making it easier to manage and nurture relationships.
You also have the option to include notes and move the deals based on your lead's status using the Kanban board. Additionally, you can make specific notes and deal value for each deal. While this CRM is relatively simple, it proves effective, mainly if you manage your campaigns through email.
8. Analytics
There is a unique feature of analytics where you can track analytics of campaigns and accounts separately, which makes it easy to understand which email account is yielding better results.
The only drawback here is you cannot track the bounces and check how many emails bounced.
9. Lead Management
This is where you can create and manage lists of contacts. You can create lists and enrich those lists using the enrichment feature. You can create unlimited lists here.
The primary objective of this feature is to offer a comprehensive and consolidated view of all your campaign leads. This feature allows you to transfer leads between various lists and campaigns seamlessly. The overall goal is to streamline your contact management process and enhance the efficiency of your campaigns.
10. Instantly.ai Integrations
Instantly, AI has minimal integration and only integrates with a few productivity software. However, you can use Zapier automation to connect your other tools Instantly.
Pros and Cons of Instantly.ai
Here are the advantages and disadvantages of the email outreach tool Instantly.ai.
Pros
- Instantly allows you to connect unlimited email accounts, enabling you to send a higher volume of emails without the risk of being blocked or marked as spam.
- The platform employs intelligent AI for email warmup, enhancing your email accounts' sender reputation and deliverability.Â
- You can set sending limits for each email account and the option to use multiple email accounts in campaigns to avoid being flagged as spam.
- With ease of use, you can schedule emails based on the optimal time for your recipients, considering their time zones. This feature is designed to improve open rates.
Cons
- The lead finder tool Instantly is part of an additional add-on plan, unlike Snov.io, which offers its email finder tool for free.
- Instantly has few direct integrations, connecting only four applications.
- Instantly lacks a trigger feature for setting up campaigns, whereas Snov.io allows setting triggers in drip campaigns.
- Being relatively new Instantly is continually rolling out more advanced features over time. Users should anticipate ongoing updates and improvements as the software evolves.
Instantly.ai Pricing
Here are the pricing plans of the cold email outreach tool Instantly.ai. Consider the best plan as per business requirements and avail of the amazing features of the tool.
Pricing Plans
Sending and WarmUp: Growth Leads – $37/month – 1000 verified leads
Sending and WarmUp: Hyperleads – $197/month – 10,000 verified leads
Sending and WarmUp: Light Speed – $492/month – 25,000 verified leads
Leads: Growth – $37/month
Hypergrowth – $97/monthÂ
Light Speed – $358/month
Considering using this Cold Email Outreach Tool?
How effectively you design and execute your campaigns is the key to success with cold emails. While tools like Instantly can simplify your job, always remember that your strategy, research, and email content play the most crucial and game-changing roles in ensuring your campaign's success.
Selecting the ideal tool for your outreach campaigns can be challenging, but I trust this review provides valuable insights if you're contemplating using Instantly for your outreach requirements. Whether you are a new business or an existing business, this review can be the roadmap to make the best decision.
If you want professional help with email marketing, reach out to us, and we are happy to help. Happy emailing!
Also, let us know in the comments about your review of Instantly.ai.