Instantly and Lemlist are two prominent cold email platforms that can scale your cold email campaigns. With similar features, choosing between the two platforms can be a hard choice. Read this comparison guide to learn about the tools and make an informed decision.
Choosing between two prominent cold email platforms — Instantly and Lemlist — can be challenging. With similar features such as a vast lead database, email verification, cold email sequences, and integrations, you may struggle to select one that best fits your needs and aligns with overall business objectives.
However, a comparison guide between the two cold email tools can help you make an informed decision and determine the best fit for your business. In this article, we compare these two cold email platforms to help your decision-making process.
Here is the summary:
While Instantly and Lemlist offer similar features, they have unique differences in scaling users’ cold email campaigns. Dive into this quick comparison to learn about these two cold emailing software and make informed decisions.
Instantly is a sales engagement and lead intelligence tool designed to help users scale their cold outreach efforts and enhance their overall email campaigns. It’s ideal for sales and marketing teams, lead generation agencies, and enterprises seeking to find their ideal buyers, automate their outreach efforts, and convert their potential leads into paying customers.
With a 160 million B2B contact database, you can find and connect with key decision-makers of various companies in their target market. This makes it perfect for any user seeking to find their ideal buyers and boost their lead generation efforts.
Instantly is also renowned for its cold email outreach features. With a few clicks, you can create personalized cold emails and send them to thousands of prospects at once. A resonating email that addresses your prospects’ needs triggers responses and yields positive results.
Additionally, Instantly’s warmup features ensure your cold emails avoid the spam folder. With its automated setup, the platform’s delivery network sends cold emails to your prospect’s inbox, improving your sender’s reputation. Plus, its dedicated centralized “Unibox” feature integrates all your mailboxes under one roof, allowing for easier campaign management.
Overall, Instantly remains one of the best cold email platforms to find your ideal buyers, boost your outreach efforts, and increase revenue.
Lemlist is a sales automation tool designed to streamline lead-generation activities, boost your outreach efforts, and generate revenue through cold email campaigns. With a vast database of 450 million contacts, users can find and connect with their ideal buyers and advance their prospecting efforts.
Moreover, the platform allows users to create personalized email campaigns that resonate with their audience. Lemlist is also renowned for its multichannel sequence options, enabling users to reach their prospects via diverse channels such as cold emails, phone calls, and LinkedIn.
Its email warmup booster and inbox rotation can’t be left out. Users have access to unlimited email accounts from which they can gradually send their cold emails to ensure they reach their prospect’s inbox, not the spam folder.
Altogether, Lemlist remains one of the top cold email platforms for prospecting and outreach, advancing your sales efforts and generating the most returns from your investment.
Instantly and Lemlist have key features that share similarities and unique differences to enhance your sales workflow. These features include:
Every email outreach platform’s foundation lies in its ability to offer a lead database that enables users to find and connect with their ideal buyers. This section unravels the differences between Instantly and Lemlists’ lead database.
Instantly
With an extensive database of over 280 million contacts, Instantly allows you to search and discover your new leads for your cold email campaigns. Based on the right keywords, you can find and connect with decision-makers relevant to your ideal customer profile (ICP).
The cold email platform also provides advanced filters that you can use to segment your leads and target the most qualified ones. From technologies used to revenue, headcount, funding details, and other criteria, Instantly enables you to filter the search results based on your preference. It also verifies lead information automatically, enabling you to reach your prospects in real time.
Lemlist
Similarly, Lemlist's B2B contact database is valuable for businesses looking to connect with their ideal buyers. With over 450 million verified contacts, users can effortlessly find potential leads who can advance their prospecting efforts.
The cold email tool also includes advanced filtering options which you can use to target the prospects that match your ICP. With various criteria such as job titles, company size, industry, and more, you can select one based on your preference and streamline your lead generation process.
Your cold email campaign is set up for failure without a proper verification process. Inaccurate email addresses or phone numbers prevent you from reaching your ideal prospects and further engaging with them, limiting your outreach efforts.
However, cold email platforms with verification systems prevent these issues, allowing you to easily reach your ideal prospects. Instantly and Lemlist offers features to ensure your outreach efforts target legitimate contacts, improving overall campaign effectiveness.
Instantly
Instantly’s B2B lead finder verifies your lead list from its 160 million B2B contact database. You can verify your leads in two ways — bulk and individual verification. To bulk verify your lead list, check the “Verify leads” box when uploading the CSV file before clicking “Upload All.” On the other hand, individual verification occurs when you have already uploaded your lead list.
Select the leads you want to verify from the leads tab and click the “Verify leads” button in the top right corner. Leads that get verified will have the “Verified” status while invalid or risky leads are not contacted by default. This proactive approach helps improve deliverability, and boost engagement rates, so you can focus on building genuine relationships and engaging in meaningful outreach.
Lemlist
Alternatively, Lemlist offers an email finder and verifier to allow users to verify their lead’s email address. The email verifier tool validates email addresses, achieving over 80% accuracy compared to other services that typically reach only 60%.
Users can verify emails individually or in bulk, with additional features like LinkedIn enrichment available. The verification process is straightforward — input the email you want to verify and click the “check email address” button to receive a status indicating if the email is deliverable, risky, or undeliverable.
Every outreach process begins with crafting a personalized email that resonates with your audience’s needs. Instantly and Lemlist offers personalization features to create compelling emails that resonate with each lead.
Instantly
Instantly’s AI generator crafts personalized cold emails to suit your prospect’s needs. This feature generates AI-powered insights based on specific criteria such as the company’s description, pain points, or competitors which you can use to personalize your emails. You can also personalize variables such as the prospect’s first name, last name, company name, or any custom variable.
Additionally, Instantly features “Spintax” which creates variations of texts and phrases in cold emails. This personalization feature alternate words during the crafting process to make each email unique to the recipients. For instance, if you create a syntax such as {{Random |Hello |Hi }}, Spintax will randomly alternate between “Hello” or “Hi” when crafting the email.
Lemlist
Lemlist also features an AI campaign generator that creates personalized sequences to boost your outreach efforts. Unlike Instantly where you can only use personalized texts, Lemlist allows you to incorporate advanced features such as personalized images, custom videos, dynamic landing pages, or liquid syntax to create an ultra-personalized campaigns.
You can also customize various variables such as subject lines, first names, company names, LinkedIn URLs, and more. This approach converts your generic cold email into an ultra-personalized message, optimizing the campaign's performance.
Next, let’s look at how you can launch your email campaigns using the outreach tools — Instantly and Lemlist.
Instantly
Instantly primarily focuses on cold email sequences for its outreach campaigns. Its campaign sequence editor allows users to set up detailed sequences, whether personalized emails or automated follow-ups, for an effective outreach campaign. You can also use the platform’s pre-built templates to create cold email sequences. These templates cover diverse topics that you can modify to suit your preferences.
However, since Instantly only focuses on cold email sequences for outreach, it limits users from engaging with their prospects on different channels such as phone calls and LinkedIn. This unavailability often prompts users to find an alternative option.
Lemlist
Conversely, Lemlist supports a comprehensive multichannel outreach strategy to enhance your cold campaigns. You can reach your audience through emails, LinkedIn, and phone calls.
As you launch your cold email sequences, you can also automate various LinkedIn processes such as sending LinkedIn messages, visiting profiles, sending connection requests, automating follow-up emails, and more. Managing your outreach campaign from one platform makes Lemlist a befitting solution for users seeking a multichannel approach.
Now that you have launched your cold emails, you want to ensure they get to your prospect’s inbox, not the spam folder. Instantly and Lemlist offers email deliverability features to enhance your sales process.
Instantly
Instantly warm up your cold emails before launching your cold email sequences. It gradually increases your email account’s outgoing volume to reduce bounce rate and ensure deliverability.
The cold email software also supports connecting multiple email accounts from which you send your cold emails. This proactive approach imitates human behavior to make the sending process look more natural, ultimately preventing email service providers from blacklisting your email accounts. This further improves deliverability and increases your sender’s reputation.
Lemlist
Lemlist employs Lemwarm, an email warm-up tool to avoid deliverability issues and increase your domain’s credibility. Once you switch on this booster, the initial warm-up process begins, taking about 3-4 weeks. This warm-up tool sends your cold email to a deliverability network where it generates custom replies to make the process look natural. It keeps track of your sending volume, improves your deliverability score, and checks for blacklists to ensure smooth deliverability.
Instantly integrate with very limited tools through APIs. If you want to integrate with more tools, you may need to seek an alternative platform. That said, Instantly integrates with tools such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Open AI, Zapier, Google Calendar, and more.
On the other hand, Lemlist integrates with more options – 33 software — across various categories such as CRMs, enrichment platforms, and other tools that streamline a user’s workflow. Common integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Pharow, Uplead, Clay, Phantombuster, n8n, Zapier, Make, and more. This integration capability supports seamless data synchronization and workflow automation, making Lemlist a top choice for efficiency and improved productivity.
Instantly offers a 14-day free trial for new users to explore its features without upfront commitment. Upon expiry, it offers a four-tiered pricing structure designed to accommodate various business needs:
Lemlist also offers a 14-day free plan that grants users access to its B2B contact database, email finder and verifier, and AI message-writing feature. However, additional features come with its paid four-tier pricing plans which include:
Instantly and Lemlist have advantages and disadvantages that affect users during adoption. Here is a summary of these pros and cons based on review sites such as G2 and Capterra.
Instantly is reputable for its easy-to-use interface, lead database, and warmup feature that ensures email deliverability. However, its lack of a multichannel option creates a major setback when compared to other cold email platforms.
Instantly Pros
Lemlist shines for its user-friendly interface, vast database, warmup tool, and more integration options. However, the platform suffers criticism for its poor customer support and pricing structure.
In the end, Instantly and Lemlist are two great cold emailing software that cater to the unique needs of businesses. They both perform an excellent job in filling your sales pipeline with qualified leads and scaling your outreach efforts. However, you should consider this guideline when selecting between one of the tools:
That said, ColdIQ is an excellent choice for finding the most qualified leads to scale your business’ outbound sale processes and hit your revenue goals. Our experienced sales team utilizes the right AI sales tools to manage your leads, streamline your workflow, and boost your sales efforts. Get in touch with us today!
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