13 Best Email Outreach Tools for Sales, Link-Building, and More

Paul Newham 30 April 2024

What business couldn’t use more customers? But where do you find them? Outreach is one tried and tested method for finding new leads and growing an audience. It takes many forms. Cold calling. Networking at events. And cold emails.

Cold emailing simply means reaching out to potential prospects you don’t know via email. Email outreach tools are software that helps speed up and manage the process.

Feeling snowed under emailing cold leads one by one? Or not convinced that your current outreach platform is right for your business? Then this article is for you. I’ve put together a list of the top email outreach tools out there. Including a full breakdown of their key features and who they are best suited to.

13 Best Email Outreach Tools Overview

People turn to email outreach tools because they save a lot of time and trouble. They automate email sending at scale. Including automated follow-ups.

All the best options offer tools to boost deliverability and beat spam filters. Some will help with finding leads to reach out to in the first place. Others include or connect to sales pipelines and CRM tools. So you can move straight on to converting your best leads.

Different platforms have different strengths and benefits. Here’s a quick summary of the 13 email outreach tools featured below before we get into the detail.

What to look for in Email Outreach Software

Choosing the right email outreach tool for you will depend on a lot of things. The size of your business and what you are using outreach for. But whatever your needs, you should expect certain things as a minimum. 

To pick out the best email outreach tools, I looked out for the following:

• A well-designed, user-friendly interface
• Automated email sequences including follow-ups (conditional rules a bonus)
• Cold email outreach templates
• Email personalisation
• List cleaning and other pro-deliverability tools
• Split testing and analytics to identify which messages work best.

13 Best Blogger & Influencer Email Outreach Tools in 2024 (Free & Paid)

Time to get into the nitty-gritty. I spent some time comparing features across email outreach tools. These are what I consider the 13 best out there.

1. Woodpecker – Best for Email Outreach Sequences

Woodpecker describes itself as “an email client with superpowers for sales outreach”. It connects to your usual email client to send outreach campaigns. This means more emails land in the main inbox than the promotions or junk folder.

Woodpecker can do a lot of things your ordinary email client can’t. Like:

• Creating automated email sequences
• Personalising messages
• Split testing
• In-depth control over deliverability

After an initial message, you can set up 11 automated follow-ups to send at fixed times. But you can also add one conditional rule per campaign. This allows you to set two alternative follow-up messages. One if the condition is met, one if it isn’t.

Woodpecker lets you split test 5 versions of a message. So there’s lots of opportunity to get every message perfect.

Woodpecker works hard to protect your sender reputation and avoid being flagged as spam.  It staggers sending of bulk campaigns and gradually increases sending limits over time. It also offers email list verification and ongoing deliverability monitoring.  

Woodpecker pricing starts at $39 per month. That gives you one ‘email slot’, or connection to one email address. And up to 1500 leads. There are higher tiers aimed at agencies and sales assistants. You can get two months free for paying for a year in advance on all plans. There is a 7-day free trial with 500 emails to try.

Who’s it for? Woodpecker is ideal for growing businesses that want to run outreach from their usual email platform.

Try Woodpecker for free

2. Bouncer – Best for Flexible Email Verification

One of the big pain points of cold email outreach is dud email addresses. They cause ‘bounces’ or failed sends. Have too many of those, and your account soon gets flagged for sending spam.

Bouncer is an email verification tool designed to stop that from happening. It’s a beautifully simple concept. You upload email addresses, either in lists or one by one. Bouncer runs a check and gives one of four status updates. Deliverable. Risky. Undeliverable. Unknown. With an explanation for each result.

You can connect Bouncer to various email marketing services. Or use an API to connect with your website or anywhere you collect new leads. 

Bouncer also scans for ‘toxic’ emails such as those that have been hacked. And it offers a deliverability test that goes beyond verification. It analyses the spam filter settings of addresses in a mailing list.

Bouncer offers monthly plans or pay-as-you-go credits. Pay-as-you-go starts at $8 per 1,000 verifications. Paid plans start at $50 per month, which gives you 10,000 verifications per month. Bouncer has a free trial with 100 email verifications.

Who’s it for? Anyone who sends out broadcast emails and wants to improve deliverability.

Try Bouncer for free hereor read full review

3. Mailshake – Best for Personalized Emails

Mailshake is a sales engagement platform. Its campaign tools focus on creating simple automated cold email sequences. There are templates to help speed up writing emails. The SHAKESpeare AI copywriter drafts email copy for you. 

Personalisation options are very flexible. You can add unlimited customised tags to contacts to personalise cold emails. And you can change personalised messages at any point in a campaign.

All good outreach tools pause sequences when a lead replies. But Mailshake also scores the quality of the responses. This lets you focus on only the best prospects. There are tools for managing follow-up tasks. Or you can push your best leads into sales pipelines in your CRM. Mailshake offers direct integrations with Hubspot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce. You can also use Zapier or Mailshake’s API to connect to any other platform.

Mailshake comes with list cleaning tools that remove fake or inactive email addresses. It isn’t as good as standalone email list cleaning services. Still, it’s a nice addition. Especially for rented email list. The Lead Driver feature reports on which parts of your campaigns are performing best.

Mailshake pricing starts at $58 per month for 5,000 prospects per campaign and 5,000 email verification credits. There is a higher sales automation tier that includes SMS and phone campaign tools. There is no free plan or free trial.

Who’s it for? Mailshake is great for any sales team that wants to improve the targeting of its outreach campaigns.

4. Close.io – Best for Small Business CRM

Close is a CRM software platform. CRM, or customer relationship management, is all about handling communication with leads and customers. With Close, this starts with email outreach campaigns. And then trying to turn leads into customers.

Close’s email sequence builder is very easy to use. Even if you have never created a cold email campaign before, you’ll be able to do so in minutes. You can set up automated emails or SMS messages. Or create a calendar task for someone to call a contact directly.

There are a couple of email templates to get you started. These are useful as they show you how to use tags to personalize messages. But as there are only 2 templates, most of the time, you will need to create your own.

Where Close comes into its own is what happens after an email outreach campaign. It provides in-depth analytics about every interaction. You can filter leads by any criteria to create a follow-up segment. There is a set of pre-made ‘Smart Views’ that give you instant follow-up segments. And you can build sales pipelines, or ‘Opportunities’. These are another type of automated sequence that take your new leads forward to a sale.

Close pricing starts at $25 per user per month. This gives you all the core features apart from sales pipelines. There is a free 14-day trial.

Who’s it for? Close is an affordable option for SMEs looking for a sales CRM.

5. Reply.io – Best for Finding Sales Leads

Reply is a multichannel sales outreach and engagement platform. You can mix and match email, phone, SMS, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn messages in a single outreach campaign. 

One of Reply’s coolest email tools is Jason AI. This is an AI writing tool powered by ChatGPT. Just write a prompt for an initial email, and Jason does the rest. There are also more than 40 email templates to help you get started.

Ever wonder where you get a list of prospects to reach out to in the first place? Reply has a business contacts database with more than 140 million names. There’s also a Chrome extension that searches for email addresses via websites. You can check every email with an email scrubbing tool. 

Reply starts at $60 per month for a single email account. This gives you unlimited contacts and unlimited email searches. There is a 14-day free trial. The email search tool can be used for free.

Who’s it for? Reply’s lead-finding tools are great for any sales or marketing team looking to grow their lead lists. Or agencies looking to prospect on behalf of new clients.

6. Smartreach.io – Best for Email Outreach Templates

SmartReach is an email outreach tool. For individual users and smallbusinesses, it’s easy to use and affordable. For larger sales teams, it can be scaled up for big campaigns.

SmartReach has a great selection of templates. There are 59 in total, both for first emails and follow-ups. You can personalize your messages with content tags.

SmartReach takes deliverability seriously. It tests your emails against spam filters and validates all contact emails. It will only send to email addresses it can verify. There is also a ‘soft start’ option to stagger campaign sending over a few days. This helps with email warm-up.

SmartReach has some strong list management features. Personal data fields, categories, and tags are fully customisable. There is also a handy visual feed that shows you a rating for prospect engagement.

SmartReach pricing starts at $24 per month for a single user. This lets you contact 1000 prospects. There is a 14-day free trial that lets you reach out to 200 prospects.

Who’s it for? SmartReach offers flexible, affordable outreach for sales teams big and small.

7. Snov.io – Best for Creating Automated Cold Email Campaigns

Snov.io covers the full sweep of email outreach, from lead generation tools to sales CRM. You can look up email addresses of leads or search for matches on LinkedIn. You can verify emails and optimise your own email account for deliverability. You can build sales pipelines and even peek at what tech your competitors are using.

All of this is great. But even better is how easy Snov.io is for creating automated drip campaigns. It has what I’d call a proper automation workflow builder. A drag-and-drop editor with a user-friendly visual layout.  It includes conditions to split automations. This opens the door to hugely flexible multi-flow campaigns. The aim is to make every message relevant.

Snov.io doesn’t stop there. A lot of cold email outreach platforms let you connect an external CRM to build sales pipelines. Snov.io has a sales CRM within the platform.

You can set goals for your outreach campaigns to filter out the leads. Then you can filter these ‘hot leads’ straight into custom-built sales pipelines. The drag-and-drop pipeline editor is as easy to use as the drip campaign builder. You can add up to 100 stages.

Snov.io pricing starts at $30 per month. This lets you reach out to up to 5,000 leads a month. There is a ‘free forever’ plan with 100 recipients, email finder, verification, warm-up, drip campaign, and sales CRM.

Who’s it for? Snov.io is perfect for anyone wanting to explore more advanced outreach automations. Or build sales pipelines directly on the back of outreach campaigns.

8. Overloop – Best for Combined Sales and Outreach

Overloop (formerly Prospect.io) is a powerful all-in-one sales platform. Flexible multi-channel outreach combines with CRM tools like sales pipelines and conversion tracking. It helps you find prospects online or through LinkedIn. And it has reporting on all activity, including revenue forecasting.

Overloop has a very intuitive automation workflow editor. Not quite drag-and-drop easy, but straightforward all the same. You can create basic timed sequences by setting send times for different messages. But even better, you can set conditions.

If you are new to building advanced automations like this, don’t worry. Overloop has an onboarding tool that takes you through campaign building step by step.  It has some templates to help you get started.

If you haven’t got any leads or contacts to start with, Overloop helps you out in 3 ways. You can search for an email address if you know a contact’s name and business. You can use the Chrome Extension to look up contact details for any website you land on. Or you can connect to LinkedIn to search for prospects.

Once prospects start replying to your emails, you can move them into sales pipelines. Again, you can automate workflows with a simple, effective pipeline builder. Overloop includes collaboration tools to manage tasks across teams.

In-depth reporting includes revenue forecasting from your sales pipelines and team performance monitoring.

Overloop keeps pricing simple. There’s just a single tier, costing $82 per user per month. There is also a 14-day trial to test it all out before you commit.

Who’s it for? Overloop is great for larger sales and marketing teams looking to combine sales and outreach.

9. Saleshandy – Best for Flexible Testing and Optimisation

Saleshandy is a straight-up automated email outreach tool. It leaves things like sales pipelines and multi-channel outreach to other platforms. And focuses instead on doing cold email outreach well.

Saleshandy’s biggest strength is how it helps you optimise your emails. It offers ‘A/Z’ testing for every email and follow-up. That means you can send and compare the performance of 26 different variations. Open and click rates are shown in the sequence builder.

This is all aimed at increasing opens and clicks. But Saleshandy is equally concerned with your messages landing in inboxes.

There’s an email verification tool, and every message you write comes with a ‘Content Guide’. This rates your subject line length, level of personalization, and ‘spamminess’. You can apply ‘spintax’ to randomly change words and phrases across bulk emails. And it uses email warm-up to gradually increase send limits. All to protect domain reputation and avoid getting flagged as spam.

Email automations are simple timed sequences. But you can add unlimited steps. There are 3 templates with contact fields included for personalization.

Pricing starts at $27 per month for 2,000 prospects, 10,000 emails, and 2,500 email verification credits. But the basic tier misses features like A/B testing. And advanced deliverability tools. There is a 7-day free trial to test the tool.

10. Klenty – Best for Multichannel Automation

Klenty is a sales engagement platform with multichannel automation. There are two levels of automation. Automated outreach sequences are straightforward. You can combine email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and phone in the same campaign. 

There are 16 email templates to get started with. Messages are triggered to send at different times. You can personalize messages, and A/B test different versions.

The second type of automation is Klenty’s ‘Playbooks’. These let you set conditional rules and add actions to sequences. You can use these to tag and score leads. And set up what happens next.

So if a prospect responds, you can tag them as a ‘hot’ lead. Or create a follow-up task for your team. Or forward them to a sales funnel with a CRM integration. You can send anyone who doesn’t reply to another campaign.

Applying conditional rules lets you build advanced sales automations. But the workflow editor is very straightforward and clear. And there are 4 playbook templates to choose from to get started.

Klenty starts at $50 per user per month. There are no limits on prospects, campaign steps, or emails. But a lot of the stand-out features are not available until the higher tiers. There is a free 14-day trial that gives you access to all features.

11. PitchBox – Best for SEO Link-Building

Pitchbox is an email outreach tool for SEO link-building. It does what you might call ‘normal’ email outreach. You add a list of contacts and set up email campaigns. But it does a lot more. 

Many of its ‘prospecting options’ are tailored to SEOs and content marketers. So things like campaigns to get a product reviewed. Or to remove unwanted or broken links to a client’s sites. Or to place a guest blog.

The core of what Pitchbox does is blogger outreach. It’s built around a powerful search feature. Typing in the name of a campaign generates suggested keywords. Pitchbox then searches for bloggers, influencers, or websites that publish relevant content.

The email outreach processes are pretty straightforward. It’s email only, and there are pre-made templates you can edit. Or you can create or upload your own. Templates include contact fields to personalize messages. Campaign automations are simple timed sequences.

Pitchbox integrates with SEO platforms like Moz, Majestic, and Link Research Tool. This provides detailed SEO and social metrics for each target.

Pitchbox can send to multiple contacts at each organisation. Sequences stop when any one contact at an organisation responds. Once someone replies, Pitchbox comes with a full set of lead management tools, like follow-up tasks and pipelines.

Pitchbox pricing starts at $495 per month. There is no free trial or free plan.

Who’s it for? Pitchbox is a specialist email outreach tool for PR and marketing agencies. 

12. Outreach.io – Best for Data-driven Outreach and Engagement

Outreach puts data and AI at the centre of sales engagement. It has email outreach, but it’s one part of the sales platform.

You can create automated outreach sequences with emails, texts, and calls. One stand-out feature is called ‘Smart Follow-up’. This updates lead data in real-time as campaigns are running.

Despite its name, Outreach puts as much focus on deal management and sales pipelines as it does email outreach. It uses AI to help the process. Machine learning algorithms learn from interactions to optimise deals. There are sales forecasting tools so you can always refer back to the bottom line. Conversation intelligence AI provides prompts and automatically transcribes conversations in calls and meetings.

Outreach also offers close to 100 integrations. These include full-blown CRM platforms like Hubspot and Salesforce.

Pricing is by application only. There is no free plan or trial.

Who’s it for? Outreach suits large professional sales teams looking for an integrated sales outreach tool.

13. Mixmax – Best for Team Outreach

Mixmax is a straightforward email outreach tool. It lets you build simple automated sequences that fire off emails at scheduled times. Or instead of emails, you can assign follow-up tasks or schedule a call. You can include LinkedIn connection requests or messages in campaigns, too.

Mixmax doesn’t have any pre-made templates, but you can create your own. It tracks opens, and clicks, so you always have a clear view of what is working and what isn’t.

Where Mixmax stands out is with team collaboration features. It connects your G Suite account to send through Gmail. But it also adds colleagues from the same domain into a single account. And it syncs activity through Google Calendar.

Beyond that, Mixmatch lets you create rule-based workflows for personal and team tasks. You can set up alerts when outreach emails are opened, or sequences are completed.

They tie in directly with Mixmax’s integrations. Mixmax’s integration list is small but carefully chosen. Options include Salesforce and Pipedrive. You can set up workflows to send leads from cold outreach campaigns into your CRM. You can also hand out tasks via Slack. And create meetings in Zoom.

Pricing starts at $29 per month. This limits you to 1,000 emails a day and doesn’t include features like integrations and reporting. There is a Free plan, but it’s very basic. You can’t run outreach campaigns, but you can create templates for Gmail. There is also a 14-day trial that includes all features.

Who is it for? Mixmax is a good fit for sales teams that want to improve collaboration on outreach.

Which email outreach tool is right for you?

Sending cold emails manually is time-consuming and hard work. You risk missing out on hot prospects. Or annoying potential leads with duplicated messages.

The best email outreach tools take care of all of this and more. But which is the right email outreach tool for you? Your decision will depend on factors like budget, the size of your team, and what you want to use outreach for.

Email Outreach Tools FAQ

About Paul Newham

Paul Newham is a content writer specialising in business blogging, report writing, software reviews, and online copywriting. He has 5+ years of email marketing, marketing automation and software review experience. He tested over 60 business software including email marketing tools, CRMs, outreach services, SMTP providers, email verification, and AI writing tools.
With a background in journalism and PR, he understands business content from both sides. And knows what makes for great, engaging copy, but also understands that for businesses, the written word is all about driving value.

• LinkedIn