Both Lemlist and Apollo can streamline your sales processes and enhance your cold email campaigns, but they are slightly different. While Lemlist’s strength relies in personalized outreach, Apollo is more popular for its large user base. Dive into this article to learn more about the two cold email tools.
If you run cold email campaigns that require building a lead list, creating personalized messages, and following up on your prospects, you probably need a cold outreach tool to scale your operations.
Lemlist and Apollo can be your secret weapon in handling these sales processes efficiently. While each tends to position itself as a force within the cold email industry, they differ slightly in terms of usage and offering the best user experience.
This in-depth comparison guide explores the two cold outreach tools, highlighting the differences between their key features to help you make an informed decision. Let’s get started.
Although Lemlist and Apollo offer similar features, some unique differences exist within these features at a high level:
Lemlist is a cold outreach and sales engagement platform designed to automate and enhance your prospecting and outreach efforts. With access to over 450 million contacts, you can easily filter and identify your most qualified leads. You can also create personalized emails that resonate with your recipients at scale.
Additionally, the sales automation software allows you to engage your prospects across multiple channels such as emails, LinkedIn, and phone calls. Its built-in warmup and deliverability feature makes it versatile to ensure your emails get delivered to your recipient’s inbox. With a robust contact database, automated features, and integration capabilities, Lemlist remains an ideal choice for sales and marketing teams to find and reach the right contacts to boost your sales efforts.
Apollo.io is a sales intelligence and engagement platform designed to help users efficiently identify, engage, and convert their ideal buyers. Its vast database of about 275 million contacts and 73 million companies makes it a perfect choice for generating qualified leads for your business. You can also reach your prospects across various channels such as email, SMS, LinkedIn, phone calls, and AI-powered chatbots.
Users can score leads, create personalized outreach campaigns, and monitor their campaign performance within Apollo. The sales engagement platform also integrates with your existing tech stack to streamline your sales workflow. Whether you need to source the right contact, engage with your prospects, or scale your overall outbound process, Apollo.io is one of the best fit for your cold email campaigns.
Lemlist and Apollo.io share similar features including:
The core foundation of any cold outreach platform is its ability to find quality leads and data. Lemlist and Apollo both offer an extensive contact database to fuel their users’ prospecting and outreach efforts. However, these platforms implement a different approach to ensure data coverage and accuracy.
Lemlist
The all-in-one cold outreach platform, Lemlist, offers an extensive 450M B2B lead database to identify your most relevant leads. With a few clicks, you can discover key decision-makers who can boost your lead-generation efforts. To find your ideal buyers on Lemlist, navigate to the “People Database” on the Lemlist dashboard.
You can also narrow down your search results with the platform’s advanced features that allow you to target your ideal buyers. This feature enables you to filter your search by various criteria such as website visitors to company size, location to industry, technographic details to hiring intent.
Additionally, the cold outreach platform offers various enrichment options to ensure the success of your cold email campaigns. Its email finder and verifier enable you to obtain your lead’s verified contact information — email addresses and phone numbers — all within the database. This approach prevents you from wasting time targeting the wrong leads, but instead tailor your efforts to the ones that matter.
Apollo.io
As an end-to-end sales enablement platform, Apollo arms sales teams with actionable data and insights to identify and target the highest quality leads. Its 275 million contact database offers a wide range of potential leads, allowing users to find the most qualified prospects for your business. To get started, navigate to “Search” on the dashboard.
With over 65 filters, you can target leads that best fit your criteria, whether by industry, job title, funding details, company size, and more. This approach allows you to drill down to your most niche audience, enabling you to execute your targeted go-to-market strategies.
Unlike Lemlist, Apollo’s database may contain some outdated information, frustrating your prospecting efforts. Besides, reviews from Reddit claim that their built-in email verifier doesn’t truly work. Even though it claims “verified emails,” you will need a third-party tool to verify those emails, thus preventing you from reaching your prospects.
AI Personalization helps boost your cold outreach efforts, nurture your prospects, and streamline your overall engagement process. Lemlist and Apollo offer AI features that help to create personalized cold emails at scale to fast-track engagement.
Lemlist
Lemlist features an AI campaign generator that helps create highly personalized sequences within seconds. You can incorporate custom intro lines, customized images, custom videos, dynamic landing pages, or liquid syntax to make your email messages look natural. This approach turns your generic cold emails into hyper-personalized ones, boosting the credibility of your messages.
To use this feature, navigate to “Campaign” on the left side of your screen. Select “Create a new campaign” > “Email.” Click “Add Personalization” and select the variable you’d like to personalize. As displayed in the image below, you can personalize various elements such as first name, last name, picture, phone, and the overall email message.
Apollo.io
Apollo features an AI writing assistant that crafts personalized emails to boost engagement. Aside from personalization, this AI assistant also performs other functions such as generating emails, analyzing them, or rephrasing some selected parts.
This AI writing assistant is accessible after creating your email sequences. Click your preferred sequence to see “AI writing assistant” right below the generated template. Then, select “Create New Sequence” > “AI assistant” > “Personalize email” to begin the personalization process.
Following up on your prospects via their preferred channel is also a crucial part of any outreach campaign.
Lemlist supports various channels such as emails, LinkedIn, and phone calls, for a comprehensive outreach strategy. You can also add manual tasks to remind you to perform some specific actions such as commenting on social media posts, mentioning a prospect in your posts, and more. This omnichannel approach helps to boost your response rate and cater to various prospects’ communication preferences.
Similarly, Apollo allows you to reach out to your prospects on their favorite channels such as emails, LinkedIn, and phone calls. You can leverage automation in your outreach efforts to build and maintain relationships with your prospects. However, unlike Lemlist, Apollo doesn’t support manual operations to remind you of a specific task. All operations, whether through email, LinkedIn, or calls are automated.
A low email deliverability will only send your cold emails to the spam folder and ruin your campaign no matter the volume of the emails sent. That’s why you need to ensure they get delivered to your prospect’s inbox. Lemlist and Apollo offer an email deliverability feature to achieve this process.
Lemlist offers an email warmup and deliverability booster tool called Lemwarm. Once you switch on Lemwarm, the initial warm-up process, which takes place for about 3-4 weeks, begins. The warmup tool sends personalized warm-up emails to your cluster and creates custom replies to make the process look natural. During this period, your deliverability score improves, enabling you to increase the sending volume gradually and reduce the chances of landing in spam.
Apollo’s email warm-up feature called Inbox Ramp-up, also enhances deliverability to your prospect’s mailboxes. The email warmup solution gradually increases the number of emails sent per day for about two weeks. It also aligns your cold emailing behavior with the standards of notable email service providers such as Google and Microsoft to reduce the risk of landing in spam.
Once you are done with these processes, you will need to check your campaign’s performance. Lemlist and Apollo provide detailed analytics for your cold email campaigns.
In Lemlist, navigate to the “Reports” icon on your Lemlist dashboard. You can get a comprehensive overview of your campaign’s results and identify what’s working. There is a progression bar that shows an overview of the whole campaign. It features details such as the number of leads you’ve imported, the history for specific metrics, and your overall campaign activities.
You can also obtain stats per channel or stats per step. The stats per channel give you in-depth analytics for your various used channels, whether for emails, LinkedIn, or phone calls. The stats per step provide a detailed breakdown of how well the steps in the cold sequences worked.
Similarly, Apollo offers an analytics feature to measure your cold email campaign’s performance. Navigate to the “Analytics” icon on the Apollo dashboard. The cold email platform shares your reports and organizes them by default by creation date.
The analytics dashboard provides insights into metrics like the emails sent, calls connected, response rate, open rate, calls completed, and more. These metrics enable you to figure out what’s working and adjust on areas that need improvement.
Lemlist integrates seamlessly with 33 other tools including CRMs, data enrichment platforms, and other tools to enhance your workflows. Some common Lemlist integrations include HubSpot, Salesforce, Clay, Airtable, n8n, Pabbly, and more.
Lemlist also features a LinkedIn Chrome extension to run a multichannel LinkedIn campaign. This approach makes it easy for sales professionals to streamline outbound sales processes and operate systems efficiently.
Unlike Lemlist, Apollo mainly integrates with eight tools such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn, Slack, and more. This approach benefits users seeking to enhance their sales tech stack, enabling them to manage their sales operations efficiently. The cold outreach software also features a Chrome extension that works efficiently across various platforms such as LinkedIn, Gmail, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more.
Apollo allows a low-entry barrier adoption with its free plan. However, its paid plans provide more functionalities for users. These plans include:
However, Lemlist is more affordable and offers more functionalities to scale your cold outreach campaign. Its free plan grants access to the vast B2B leads database, email finder and verifier, AI message writing, and more. Meanwhile, its paid plans offer access to features such as email deliverability, CRM integrations, and more.
Its pricing information includes:
The right platform you choose depends on your sales team’s needs. However, you should consider choosing Lemlist as it offers more features that scale the cold outreach process efficiently. Some of these distinct features include:
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In general, Lemlist tends to be a better choice with more extensive features in terms of a wider database, email verifier, targeted personalization, and integration options. Apollo.io, on the other hand, has features to enhance your overall sales operations.
Potential reasons to avoid Apollo are its limited free plan, a smaller lead database, verification of emails, and limited integration options.
Lemlist offers substantial value with cold email campaigns. With accurate data, AI hyper-personalization, automated sequences, and more integration options, Lemlist remains a worthy investment for your business.
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