You send out a handful of cold emails, only to hear crickets. No replies. No leads. Just silence. After all your hard work crafting personalized messages that connect with your target prospects, seeing such little engagement is disappointing. What went wrong? The issue could lie within your cold email infrastructure. Email prospecting campaigns can’t even start to work without these elements functioning properly. In this blog, we’ll explore email prospecting, why it matters, and how to launch successful campaigns that boost lead engagement and conversions.  

We’ll also show you how Inframail’s email infrastructure can help you get there. Inframail’s solution helps you build a healthy email sender reputation to get your cold emails deliverability where they stand the best chance of being seen: the inbox.

Table of Content

• What Is a Prospecting Email?

• The 7 Pillars of a Successful Email Prospecting Campaign

• 27 Best Cold Email Outreach Tools

• Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

What Is a Prospecting Email?

A prospecting email is an outreach email sent to someone you don’t know yet but hope to do business with one day. Rather than bombarding your contacts with generic promotional emails or newsletters, prospecting emails start a conversation. 

Their primary goal is to introduce a product, service, or offering to potential clients or leads to spark interest and drive engagement. In this way, they might encourage action, such as booking a meeting or requesting more information. 

Email Prospecting: The Process Explained

Email prospecting refers to mass email campaigns, sending emails to new prospects you don’t know yet but think could be an excellent fit for your business.

The thing about prospecting emails is that they’re not like your typical newsletter or promo blast. Nope, these bad boys are all about making a personal connection with the person on the other end. You want to show them that you’ve done your homework, know what makes them tick, and have something valuable to offer. 

The Goal of Prospecting Emails

So, what’s the point of sending a prospecting email? It’s all about breaking the ice and starting a conversation. You’re introducing yourself and your business, but more importantly, you’re showing how you can help solve their problems or make their lives easier.

Maybe you’ve got a product or service that's right up their alley, or you just want to share some of your expertise and insights. Either way, it’s a way to help your prospects get to know your business better. 

Why You Should Send Prospecting Emails

Here are the main reasons you want to send a prospecting email: 

• Get on their radar and make that first impression

• Start building a relationship and show them you’re not just another random business

• Demonstrate how you can add value and make their life easier

• Open the door to a potential partnership or sale down the line

• Stand out from the competition by being personal and relevant

The Importance of Not Being Pushy

Don’t get me wrong – it’s not about being pushy or salesy. That’s just gonna turn people off. Instead, focus on adding value and showing them how you can make their life better. Maybe you’ve got some insider tips to share or a fresh perspective on a problem they’re facing. Whatever it is, make sure it’s something they’ll care about. 

How to Write a Winning Email for Your Prospects

Writing a good prospecting email doesn’t come easy. It takes practice to get it right. The steps outlined below can help you write effective prospecting emails that get responses and open the door to new opportunities. 

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The 7 Pillars of a Successful Email Prospecting Campaign

1. Audience Targeting and Finding the Right Prospects

A successful email prospecting campaign starts with identifying the right target audience. I’m talking about the people most likely to respond positively to your outreach efforts. If you’re too generic in your messaging, it won’t click. If you email the wrong people, they will ignore you or report you as spam.

So, how do you find your ideal prospects? First, you need to create a customer persona. This involves researching and outlining the traits of your ideal customers. 

• What makes a person want to buy your products and services? 

• What is it going to take to build a relationship with them? 

• What are their values, and what’s the best way to appeal to them with a single email (and subject line)? 

Once you formally define who your target prospects are, you can start email prospecting. Just be aware that if you haven’t based your target audience decision on research and logic, it will negatively impact your strategy's other phases and elements. 

2. Discovery and Contact Info Gathering: Assembling Your Lists

You must gather information and assemble lists of potential email prospects. There are many ways to do this, but there are also many ways it can go wrong—such as:

• Not getting enough leads

• Gathering too little information

• Dealing with inaccuracies

To avoid these pitfalls, use reputable prospecting tools to help you find leads. For example, suppose you’re looking for prospects on LinkedIn. In that case, you can use tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Hunter, or Snov.io to help you find leads and gather their contact information quickly and accurately. 

3. Message Deliverability: Getting Past the Filters

Email prospecting doesn’t work if your messages end up somewhere in the digital ether. You have to make sure your messages are getting delivered. To do so, focus on improving your email deliverability. 

• Start by checking your sender score and working to improve it if it’s low. 

• Look for any signs that your domain or IP address is blacklisted, and take steps to rectify the situation. 

• Warm up your email account before sending out many prospecting emails to unknown recipients. 

This process involves gradually increasing your email-sending activity to establish a positive reputation with Internet Service Providers (ISPs). 

4. The Subject Line. Writing Compelling Introductions

Okay—message delivered. We’re good now, right? Wrong. The vast majority of your recipients aren’t going to open your message—unless you give them a good reason to. You need a compelling subject line or your introductory messages will fall flat.

To write a compelling subject line, keep these tips in mind: 

Conciseness 

Don’t make it a point to cram in as much information as possible. Instead, your subject line should be short and sweet. Limit the number of words you include and keep your message near the beginning. If that, you only have a few seconds to convince someone to open your message. 

Directness 

Get to the point. There’s some power in writing an ambiguous subject line, teasing your prospects with something interesting. But for the most part, it’s better to come out with what you want. Something like, “Start saving 40 minutes a day” is better than “Ever wanted more out of your day?” 

Originality 

You wouldn’t believe how many emails I receive that are carbon copies of emails I’ve already seen. It’s the same subject line, altered only slightly, over and over again. Don’t do this! It’s important to develop something original if you want to succeed. 

Value

What does this prospect have to gain by opening your email? You have to make it worth their while. Promise them saving time or money—or let them in on some important information. 

5. The Body: Writing Effective Email Copy

It’s an achievement to get someone to open your email. But you still haven’t won them over. Your next job is getting them to take action. And you do that with the body of the email.

To write an effective email body, keep these tips in mind:

Conciseness

It’s not just about the subject line! Conciseness is a valuable quality of almost any sales or marketing content. Your message needs to be short and to the point, if you want people to read it and absorb it in full. 

Personalization

Personalize your message as much as possible. It’s not enough to replicate and send the same template to hundreds of people. At the very least, you should be customizing the name, the greeting, and a few details of the message to suit the individual prospect you’re trying to reach. It’ll be seen as much more relevant and much more impressive. 

Conversational Nature

You can try to write a formal, polished email while prospecting; for some audiences, it might even work in your favor. But for the most part, email prospecting is easier if you maintain a conversational tone. Talk to this person in your normal voice and reach out to them the way you would a friend. It’s a quick and easy way to build rapport. 

Facts/statistics

You might have impressive claims, but can you prove them? People will trust your messaging and be more likely to engage with you if you include specific facts and statistics. For example, don’t just say, “You’ll save time with our tool;” say, “Our tool saves customers an average of 2.5 hours every week.” 

Clear Value

Make the value of your offer obvious. Do you want people to download an eBook? Tell them why it’s going to help them. Do you want them to sign up for a free trial of your software? Explain how it’s going to improve their life. The more specific and precise you are, the more likely I’ll be to succeed. 

A Simple Next Step

Okay, so what’s next? Your email needs a call to action (CTA) and direction to some kind of next step, whether clicking a link or replying to the message. Make it obvious and push your readers to take this next step. 

6. Scalability and Efficiency: Creating a Repeatable System

If you nail all the above factors, you’ll be well on your way to a successful sale. But if you want to do this efficiently and reliably, you need a repeatable, scalable system.

For example, once you define your target audience, you can create prospecting emails that can be used for any individual within that niche. You can organize your prospecting list and use an email outreach tool to send emails on your behalf. These tools can also automate follow-up messages to improve your efficiency further. 

7. Measurement, Analysis, and Improvement, Optimizing Performance Over Time

You’ll probably not be very successful with your first attempt at email prospecting. Even if you follow all the “rules,” it will take some time to get to know your audience, A/B test, and find winning subject lines and email templates that convert. That’s why measuring, analyzing, and improving your work over time is super important.

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27 Best Cold Email Outreach Tools

1. Inframail: The Future of Cold Email Infrastructure

At Inframail, we are revolutionizing cold email infrastructure with unlimited inboxes at a flat rate. 

We provide: 

• Microsoft-backed deliverability

• Dedicated IP addresses

• Automated technical setup 

This helps customer outreach efforts efficiently like: 

• Agencies

• Recruiters

• SDRs

The main benefits of using our service: 

• Automated SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup

• Dedicated email servers for each user

• 16-hour priority support daily

Unlike traditional providers that charge per inbox and leave you wrestling with technical configurations, Inframail streamlines the entire process. We handle the complex infrastructure setup while you focus on reaching more prospects. 

InfraMail provides the robust email infrastructure you need without the usual technical headaches and per-inbox costs, whether you're: 

• An agency looking to scale outreach

• A recruiter connecting with candidates

• An SDR driving sales

Start buying domains now and set up your email infrastructure today with our email infrastructure tool.   

2. Close: Smart Email Automation for Growing Teams

Best for: 

• Growing teams and small businesses that want to combine 

• CRM and cold emailing under one roof. 6,500+ happy customers agree 

• Close is a powerful CRM software worth looking at. 

• Close comes with advanced cold email automation options that save you time and help you reach more prospects.

• With our Smart Views, you’ll build segmented contact lists that you can later put into Workflows.

• A Workflow can also include calls, SMS, and tasks to add more touchpoints to your emailing efforts. With its user-friendly interface and various options to manage and engage leads, you’ll improve your cold outreach campaigns and drive more sales.

3. Outreach: The Best Cold Email Tool for Enterprise Businesses

Best for: 

• Big corporations that want to unlock seller productivity and make sales teams efficient. 

• Outreach is best for enterprise-level companies that need a sales engagement platform. 

• The tool combines CRM, sales forecasting, conversation intelligence, and sales coaching (among other aspects). 

• On top of their CRM, they offer advanced features for emailing: 

• Sequencing

• Email templates

• Reply rate tracking

• Advanced analytics.

4. Smartlead.ai: AI for Cold Email Deliverability

Best for: 

• Small businesses that want to improve cold email deliverability and warmup email accounts. 

• Smartlead.ai is a modern cold email software that uses AI to optimize email deliverability and help warm up email accounts. 

• Thanks to Smartlead, you can improve your sender's reputation and email engagement. 

• As a result, cold outreach campaigns should reach your recipients' main inbox more often (instead of landing in a spam folder).

5. Mailshake: The Cold Email Tool for Personalization and A/B Testing

Best for: 

Salespeople and marketers who want to improve their email outreach and cold emailing campaigns. 

Mailshake is an easy-to-use tool that offers advanced cold emailing features. Its personalization, A/B testing, and automated follow-ups are designed to help you improve your outreach activities. The tool can pause a sequence when a prospect replies, unsubscribes, or bounces. With a customizable sending schedule, you can improve response rates, and with native integrations, your leads land in your CRM.

6. Mixmax: Cold Email Automation Inside Gmail

Best for: Mixmax is a solid cold emailing software with automation and scheduling capabilities. Sales, customer success, and account execs can send personalized: 

• Emails

• Track engagement

• Automate follow-ups. 

You can do it all from within your Gmail inbox.

7. Drip: The Best Cold Email Tool for E-Commerce

Best for: 

E-commerce businesses and marketing campaign managers who want to use email marketing automation for cold and warm leads. 

Drip is a marketing automation platform that helps grow: 

• e-commerce brands

• Drive repeat purchases and increase conversion rates by creating dynamic segments that engage customers with single emails or automated campaigns.

8. Hubspot: The Best Cold Email Tool for Teams

Best for: 

Sales and marketer teams that want to collaborate on the same platform. 

HubSpot is a feature-rich marketing automation platform that offers a variety of tools to help businesses grow and engage with their audience. While HubSpot primarily focuses on inbound marketing, it also provides features that can be used for cold email campaigns.

9. Woodpecker: The Best Cold Email Tool for Personalization

Best for: 

Salespeople from SMBs that want to personalize and automate cold outreach. Woodpecker is an automated cold email software that simplifies and optimizes outreach campaigns. With its intelligent follow-up system and personalized email automation, Woodpecker helps you reach more prospects and increase response rates. The tool integrates well with Gmail and Outlook.

10. Reply.io: The Best Cold Email Software for Sales Teams

Best for: 

Sales and marketing professionals working for SMBs involved in outbound sales and email outreach. 

Reply.io is the AI-first sales engagement platform that helps SDR teams find new prospects, engage them through multiple channels, and create new opportunities at scale while keeping every touchpoint personal.

11. Instantly: The Best Cold Email Tool for Personalization

Best for: 

Sales and marketing teams working in small biz looking for personalized cold email outreach and follow-ups. Instantly is an email outreach platform that helps businesses send personalized and automated cold emails to prospects and leads. They help you find the best leads, create campaigns, and automate workflows using AI.

12. Customer.io: The Best Targeted Cold Email Software

Best for: Businesses aiming to send behavior-based, targeted cold emails for customer engagement. Customer.io is a customer engagement platform designed for marketing teams to create data-driven campaigns that reach people across all messaging channels. They have Journeys for messaging automation and Data Pipelines, a customer data platform connecting the entire stack.

13. Overloop: The Best Cold Email Tool for Multi-Channel Campaigns

Best for: 

Sales teams (SMBs) looking for a platform to run multi-channel outbound campaigns. 

Overloop is an email outreach and engagement platform for sales teams. It offers email: 

• Tracking

• Templates

• Analytics. 

• Users can create ultra-personalized campaigns and mix cold emails, LinkedIn automation, and phone calls. Overloop also supports link-building activities. The product can be handy for agencies running campaigns for their customers

14. Lemlist: The Best Cold Email Software for Creative Campaigns

Best for: 

Sales and marketing professionals in SMB seeking a tool for personalized, creative cold email campaigns. Lemlist is an advanced AI-powered sales engagement platform. It’s all-in-one: 

• Offering prospect lists with details

• Discovering valid emails

• Organizing personalized multichannel campaigns. 

Emails in Lemlist can have custom intro lines, images, and dynamic landing pages.

15. QuickMail: The Best Cold Email Tool for Small Business

Best for: 

Small to mid-sized businesses aiming to simplify cold email outreach and follow-ups. They also have options for agencies. 

QuickMail is an email automation platform designed to help businesses send cold emails and follow-ups more efficiently. It’s designed to build a predictable sales pipeline by reaching out to cold prospects by email. It has what most of the best sales tools have: 

• A follow-up option 

• Custom tags

• Email deliverability reports

16. Constant Contact: The Best Cold Email Tool for Beginners

Best for: 

• Small businesses 

• Nonprofits

• Individuals looking for an easy-to-use email marketing and marketing automation platform. 

They also offer Lead gen & CRM. Constant Contact is an email marketing and marketing automation platform that simplifies: 

• Creating

• Sending

• Trackingracking

It offers various tools to help businesses engage with their audience through email. Constant Contact is a better option for smaller campaigns targeted at generic audiences.

17. InsideSales (formerly Xant): Best for Large Businesses with Advanced Needs

Best for: 

Businesses operating in the mid-market and enterprise, and their sales teams, seek an advanced sales engagement platform for outreach and lead management. 

InsideSales offers Playbook, an enterprise-level sales engagement platform rather than a cold emailing tool. With Playbook, salespeople can increase; 

• Productivity

• Optimize customer interactions

• Connect to the right buyers

They have sales engagement tools, including: 

• email outreach

• Lead scoring

• Predictive analytics

18. Yesware: The Best Cold Email Tool for Tracking

Best for: 

Sales and marketing professionals looking for advanced email outreach: 

• Email tracking

• Analytics

• Templating

It’s for small and mid-sized businesses. 

Yesware is an email productivity and analytics tool that integrates with popular email platforms. Suppose your team wants to drive more revenue through email outreach without complex enterprise-level software. In that case, the tool can be helpful. Yesware will help your sales team build a better pipeline and increase conversions.

19. Streak: The Best Cold Email Tool for Gmail Users

Best for: 

Gmail users and small businesses looking for a CRM with email tracking and integration. 

Streak is more of a CRM tool rather than cold emailing. It integrates directly with Gmail and offers email tracking and pipeline management. Sales teams can manage workflows inside Gmail, including:

• Sales

• Customer support

• Hiring

• Projects. The tool makes collaboration easier by automatically sharing: 

• Emails, 

• Notes

• Call logs

20. GMass: The Best Tool for Warming Up Your Email Account

GMass is a tool for sending email campaigns inside Gmail. It helps warm up your email accounts, preparing them for successful cold outreach campaigns. GMass helps you avoid triggering spam filters or flagging your emails by gradually increasing the number of emails sent over time. 

This way, you can establish a positive sender reputation and increase deliverability rates, ensuring your cold emails reach the intended recipients. Only some cold email tools have an email warmup feature, so GMass might be a great addition to your cold email strategy.

21. Apollo: The Best Cold Email Prospecting Tool

If you want to enrich your lead list, Apollo might be useful. It offers a comprehensive B2B database that helps you identify and target the right contacts. With its vast collection of company profiles and contact information, you can find potential leads based on various criteria such as: 

• Industry

• Location

• Company size

Its pricing is affordable for small and mid-sized businesses.

22. Seamless: The AI Cold Email Prospecting Tool

Seamless is an AI-powered prospecting tool that can improve your cold email strategy. It analyzes vast amounts of data to help you identify and prioritize the most promising leads, and its data quality is superior to that of its competitors. Its advanced algorithms can detect patterns and predict which prospects are more likely to engage with your emails. With such insights, you can craft cold emails that resonate even more with your audience.

23. Hunter: The Best Tool for Finding Email Addresses

Hunter is a great tool for finding the email addresses of potential leads or contacts. By simply entering a company's domain name, Hunter searches the web for email addresses associated with that domain. This makes reaching out to specific individuals within an organization easier and lets you personalize those cold emails a bit better. 

It’s simple—by having more accurate contact information at your fingertips, you can improve the effectiveness of your cold email outreach. The tool’s pricing is suitable for small and mid-sized businesses. It offers good support, and, rarely, the tool can’t find the contact.

24. Dealfront (previously Leadfeeder): The Best Tool for Identifying Website Visitors

Dealfront (previously Leadfeeder) is a tool for turning website visitors into potential leads. By integrating with your website analytics, Dealfront identifies the companies that visit your site and provides you with valuable information about their browsing behavior. It lets you prioritize warm leads and tailor your cold email approach based on their interests and needs. 

Using the tool can significantly boost the efficiency and effectiveness of your cold email outreach. It's mostly suitable for smaller businesses and has straightforward pricing plans. Sometimes, the tool can face challenges when integrating with other software.

25. SavvyCal: The Best Cold Email Tool for Scheduling

SavvyCal is a great addition to your cold outreach activities. It allows your prospects to schedule calls directly via those cold emails. It has a user-friendly interface, and recipients can easily choose a suitable time slot, eliminating the need for back-and-forth coordination. 

SavvyCal has a powerful integration with Close, making the scheduling experience smoother. Those leads can automatically land in your CRM. The tool is easy to configure, and users usually have no specific complaints.

26. Snov.io: The Best Cold Email Verification Tool

This cold emailing tool verifies your emails but does so in bulk. You need to import the list. This means they’re not checked in real time. Snov.io doesn’t offer an email/domain warm-up feature, so you must handle the process manually. Snov.io offers some email automation features. 

It offers A/B testing, but it’s only available for users starting with an M plan. So, if you have an S plan or freemium, you won’t be able to A/B test your emails to find the best-performing version for your email campaign. You can add conditions to your campaigns based on prospect behavior. You can also send personalized cold email campaigns by using custom fields.

27. Klenty: The Best Cold Email Tool for Personalization and Testing

Klenty’s Liquid Templates can help you personalize your emails, and you can also record and add videos to your messages (if you integrate Klenty with Hippo Video). This cold email software also allows you to use A/B testing to see which template in a running campaign gets a better response rate. Klenty is natively integrated with tools such as: 

• Pipedrive

• Zoho CRM

• Hubspot

• Salesforce 

• Slack

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Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

At Inframail, we are revolutionizing cold email infrastructure with unlimited inboxes at a flat rate. 

We provide: 

• Microsoft-backed deliverability

• Dedicated IP addresses

• Automated technical setup 

This helps customer outreach efforts efficiently like: 

• Agencies

• Recruiters

• SDRs

The main benefits of using our service: 

• Automated SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup

• Dedicated email servers for each user

• 16-hour priority support daily

Unlike traditional providers that charge per inbox and leave you wrestling with technical configurations, Inframail streamlines the entire process. We handle the complex infrastructure setup while you focus on reaching more prospects. 

InfraMail provides the robust email infrastructure you need without the usual technical headaches and per-inbox costs, whether you're: 

• An agency looking to scale outreach

• A recruiter connecting with candidates

• An SDR driving sales

Start buying domains now and set up your email infrastructure today with our email infrastructure tool.