Cold emailing can be a tough challenge. You must build an email infrastructure, warm up your domain, find quality leads, craft a compelling email copy, personalize your outreach, set up automated follow-ups, track opens, clicks, and replies, and optimize your strategy based on these metrics. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You know how tedious it can get if you’ve done this before. And if you haven’t, let’s just say it’s a lot of work. The good news is that you don’t have to do this manually. Several tools can help you automate and optimize your cold email deliverability and outreach. Two of the most popular options are Smartlead and Instantly. In this article, we will compare both options to help you confidently choose between Smartlead and Instantly by understanding which tool best fits your cold email outreach needs, enabling higher efficiency and better results.

Inframail’s email infrastructure solution can help you achieve your goals by warming up your domain and optimizing cold email deliverability. Doing this before you kick off your outreach ensures that your emails land in your prospects’ inboxes, allowing you to achieve your targets faster. 

Table of Contents

• What is Smartlead and Its Key Capabilities

• What is Instantly and Its Key Capabilities

• Complete Smartlead vs. Instantly Feature Comparison Guide

• When to Use Smartlead or Instantly for Cold Email Outreach

• Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

What is Smartlead and Its Key Capabilities

Smartlead is an email automation tool that helps sales teams improve their cold email outreach. The platform streamlines creating and managing personalized email campaigns so sales reps can focus on closing more deals, not on writing emails. With Smartlead, sales teams can boost their email deliverability, automate their follow-up sequences, and personalize their outreach at scale. The result? A more effective cold email strategy that helps increase engagement and conversions.  

Deliverability Features That Ensure Your Emails Are Seen

No one likes to discuss it, but most cold emails are ignored or marked as spam. Deliverability features like those offered by Smartlead help ensure your emails avoid the dreaded spam folder. Smartlead’s technology is crafted to improve cold email deliverability. The better your deliverability, the more people see your emails. This increases engagement and conversions and helps lower the chances of your cold email outreach efforts landing in the spam folder. Smartlead also offers unlimited email warmups to help improve deliverability. This feature helps create unlimited email accounts to reliably send large volumes of emails. This is particularly beneficial for marketers focusing on lead generation, ensuring potential leads receive and see the emails. 

Automate Follow-ups and Email Replies

Smartlead isn’t just about getting your emails seen; it also helps keep the conversation going. The cold email tool automates sending follow-up emails, saving teams time by reducing the manual effort needed for such tasks. Continuous follow-up helps maintain engagement with potential clients, which could lead to increased sales. The platform recently unveiled its SmartAI Bot, allowing users to reply to their leads using reply context and AI in one click. 

Manage Multiple Accounts from a Unified Inbox

Cold email outreach often requires multiple email accounts to improve deliverability and avoid spam filters. Smartlead’s unified inbox feature helps ease the burden of managing all these accounts. This feature allows users to manage multiple email accounts. It also allows the sales team to manage all their email interactions from one centralized place, enhancing the efficiency of addressing customer inquiries and responses.

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What is Instantly and Its Key Capabilities

Instantly, sales automation Software as a Service (SaaS) is explicitly tailored for B2B companies. The platform has a user-friendly interface designed to streamline the process of automated and personalized email campaigns through robust integrations, enhancing communication with prospects. 

Boosting Engagement and Conversions with Instantly’s User-Friendly Interface

Its primary focus is optimizing email campaigns to improve engagement and conversion rates. Instantly shines with a G2 review rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars. Trustpilot reviews highlight the platform’s usability: “The user-friendly interface is very easy and useful. We can easily implement and integrate many emails for outreach. They provide all the functionality on from the dashboard and it’s easy to use.” 

Key Features That Make Instantly Stand Out

Instantly comes packed with features to support cold email outreach. Here are some of the standout capabilities. 

B2B Lead Finder

Instantly uses advanced search techniques to scan databases, social networks, and websites; this feature is crucial for sales teams looking to rapidly build a database of qualified leads.

Email Warmup

This cold email software offers unlimited automated email warmups using over 200,000 real human accounts. This helps build a positive sender reputation, critical for maintaining high deliverability rates.

Automated Outreach Campaigns

Instantly supports automated, targeted email campaigns that utilize intelligent scheduling and inbox rotation to maximize response rates. The integration with Zapier allows for further automation by connecting with numerous third-party tools. 

Marketing Automation

Despite its strengths, it faces several notable challenges that may impact its effectiveness for certain businesses. The platform's email warm-up service, a key feature for maintaining high email deliverability, reportedly must comply with Google's policies. This non-compliance raises concerns about the future usability of this feature. Instantly needs sophisticated tracking capabilities; it does not support click-tracking and only displays bounced emails and unsubscribes as raw numbers. Furthermore, Instantly relies heavily on third-party integration via Zapier to connect with other tools, which might not suit businesses looking for more direct, native integration options. This dependency can complicate workflows for users who prefer a more streamlined, all-in-one platform.

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Complete Smartlead vs. Instantly Feature Comparison Guide

Campaign Management: Who Can Manage Outreach Better?  

We’ll start with the main feature of any sales or marketing platform—outreach campaign management. In simple terms, we’re referring to the step-by-step sequences, including: 

• The initial cold email

• Follow-ups

• Nurturing touchpoints 

It then automates them across hundreds or thousands of prospects. After testing out the tools, it’s pretty interesting that both Instantly and Smartlead are quite similar in this feature—they have elegant campaign dashboards, allowing users to easily create complex email sequences. 

Both tools provide ready-to-use variables like: 

• {{first_name}}

• {{last name}}

• {{company_name}} 

Streamlining Email Personalization and Automation with Smartlead and Instantly

As well some other, more interesting ones such as {{website}} and {{linkedin_profile}} to facilitate personalization at scale. Users can simply plan the timing of the campaign, in other words—after how many days the following automated message will be sent, and… that’s it, after structuring their: 

• Emails

• Subject lines

• Follow-ups

• Nurturing messages

Smartlead takes this one step further by including some easy-made email templates for some of the most common sales use cases to simplify the email writing process (though there aren’t many to choose from). Smartlead and Instantly allow users to add multiple (virtually unlimited) email accounts and manage them all under one roof through their dedicated Master Inbox features. 

AI: Which Software Has Better AI Features?  

Instantly and Smartlead can manually create emails and follow-ups or leverage AI’s power to simplify this process when creating outreach campaigns. Meaningful, tailored messaging at scale has never been more straightforward! With these tools’ native AI features, sales and marketing teams can leverage relevant prospect and company data to create hyper-personalized emails, significantly reducing the time spent creating compelling messaging and empowering them to focus on other tasks that AI can’t handle. 

Leveraging Instantly’s AI Personalization for High-Converting Emails

With a click of a button, Instantly users can access its neat AI personalization tab and fill in some relevant prospect and company data. Then, Instantly AI will create compelling, converting email messages. 

Enhancing Email Outreach with Smartlead’s ChatGPT Integration and AI Warm-Up Tools

Smartlead’s AI features are quite similar. The product allows users to integrate the famous ChatGPT right into it to create meaningful, personalized emails at scale. To take advantage of this feature, users must integrate ChatGPT into Smartlead on their own with a dedicated API key, so make sure you have someone on your team with technical expertise. Smartlead’s AI features are also one reason why their email warm-up is top-notch—they ensure that all those emails sent out to build up your sender reputation are meaningful and humanized at all times, which brings us to our next feature. 

Email Warmup and Deliverability: Who Gets Emails Delivered?  

Don’t overlook the importance of email deliverability in 2024—it can make or break your entire outreach campaign! Especially with the rise of Google’s new security policies, manually ensuring your email deliverability is intact has become virtually impossible. Luckily, Instantly and Smartlead have built a solid reputation, providing users with premium deliverability features, ensuring that your emails reach your recipients’ inboxes and don’t end up in spam. 

Maximizing Email Deliverability: Comparing Instantly and Smartlead Features

Instantly offers unlimited email warm-up to gradually ramp up users’ sender reputation, one of the most crucial factors affecting deliverability, and a detailed deliverability dashboard to help you stay on top of the most critical metrics, including spam rates. 

Enhancing Email Deliverability with Smartlead: Unlimited Warm-ups, Inbox Rotation, and Spam Rescue

Smartlead is just as impressive regarding email deliverability. It offers users unlimited email warm-ups to gradually build a solid and sustainable sender reputation. Smartlead has an additional ‘inbox rotation’ feature that strategically varies the email account used for outreach, significantly decreasing the chances of Gmail or Outlook blocking your emails from reaching their intended recipients. As a cherry on top, Smartlead users can enjoy its dedicated ‘spam rescue’ tab that monitors spam rates and ensures users don’t surpass the strict spam thresholds in 2024. 

Personalization: Who Makes Emails More Personal?  

Personalizing your emails completely changes how your prospects respond. What can Smartlead and Instantly offer here? 

Smartlead 

Smartlead shines in creating personalized email campaigns. With its dynamic content insertion, you can tailor each message to resonate with your audience. It’s possible to customize information such as: 

• Time of the day

• Day of the week

• The exact date

• First name, among other examples

Instantly 

Instantly also offers robust personalization features. Adding a personal touch to your outreach efforts is fine. Its advanced tools customize every aspect of your emails, including: 

• Subject lines

• Name

• Sending account, etc.

Instantly’s AI-powered insights are great for understanding what works best, so you can refine your approach and make your emails more compelling. 

Analytics and Reporting: How Well Do They Track Performance?  

Like other reputable sales and marketing automation platforms, Smartlead and Instantly offer comprehensive analytics with detailed reports highlighting campaign performance. This is the only way to objectively measure your outreach campaigns’ performance, and both platforms take care of this without lifting a finger. 

Comparing Campaign Analytics and Reporting in Smartlead vs. Instantly

In Smartlead, users can filter their analytics reports by campaign or by client, getting a visualized and detailed overview of their performance, as seen below. Instantly provides similar reports on your campaign performance. While they are less visual than Smartlead’s, they provide many detailed metrics that help sales teams tweak their outreach strategies for maximum conversions. Instantly reports: 

• The open rates

• Click-through rates

• Reply rates

• Opportunities

• Meetings booked, completed and closed

Users can also choose to check the analytics on the campaign level or on the step level, which analyzes the performance of each step in their sequences

Integration Capabilities: Who Connects With Other Tools Seamlessly? 

Integration is critical for streamlining workflows and enhancing campaign analytics. 

Smartlead 

Smartlead integrates seamlessly with a wide range of tools, providing flexibility and ease of use for sophisticated marketing strategies. It supports standard integrations like CRMs and advanced setups via APIs. 

Instantly 

Instantly offers essential integration capabilities suitable for basic needs but may require additional configurations or third-party tools for more advanced requirements. 

Sequences and Follow-Ups: Who Can Keep Outreach on Track?  

The ability to create sequences and follow-ups is a game-changer when it comes to keeping your outreach messages on track. 

Here’s how these two tools perform in this area: 

Smartlead 

Smartlead is all about helping you stay connected with your prospects. It offers tools to create sequences that keep your outreach efforts on point. You can set up automated follow-ups that kick in based on specific triggers, so you never miss a beat. 

Instantly 

Instantly shines with its follow-up features and easy-to-use sequence setup. It makes your outreach campaigns as top-notch as possible. With Instantly, you can create detailed sequences that guide your prospects through the entire lead generation process. Moreover, the platform’s advanced analytics help you tweak and perfect your follow-ups.  

Customer Support: Who Has Your Back?  

Smartlead

Smartlead is committed to offering strong customer support across its plans. Depending on your subscription, you can access different levels of assistance: 

• Basic Plan: 

  • General support with a response time within 24 hours. 

• Pro Plan: 

  • Active support

  • Quicker response times

  • More dedicated assistance

• Custom Plan: 

  • Priority support

  • Often including direct assistance from account managers for a more personalized experience

Instantly 

Instantly has varying levels of customer support based on the plan you choose: 

• Growth Plan: 

  • Chat support for general inquiries and basic troubleshooting 

• Hypergrowth Plan: 

  • Premium live support, giving you access to more immediate and comprehensive assistance. 

• Light Speed Plan: 

  • Also includes premium live support

  • With additional priority handling

• Enterprise Plan: 

  • Comes with a dedicated account manager

  • Shared Slack channel for continuous, direct support.  

Email Templates: Who Has Built-In Templates?  

Regarding email templates, there is a notable difference between Smartlead and Instantly. 

Instantly

Instantly offers a library of email templates that are readily available and customizable within the platform. This makes it easy to set up your campaigns with professionally designed templates quickly. 

Smartlead

On the other hand, Smartlead does not have built-in email templates. They provide separate resource articles where you can find various email templates. 

Optimizing Email Creation: Instantly’s Template Library vs. Smartlead’s Resources

While both platforms offer resources to help you craft effective emails, Instantly’s integrated template library provides a more seamless experience.  

Lead Finder: Who Helps You Find New Prospects?  

One key difference between Smartlead and Instantly is the lead finder tool.

Instantly

Instantly includes a built-in lead finder that allows you to search for potential leads based on your specific parameters. Each search you perform will cost you credits. This feature makes it easy to find new prospects directly within the platform. 

Smartlead

On the other hand, Smartlead does not have a lead finder tool. This means you must source your leads from other tools or databases. 

Expanding Your Network: Instantly’s Lead Finder vs. Smartlead’s Outreach Focus

While both platforms excel in email outreach, Instantly’s lead finder adds an extra layer of convenience for finding new contacts.  

Email Verification: Who Helps You Find Real Prospects?  

A significant difference between Smartlead and Instantly is the email verification tool.

Instantly

Instantly offers an email verification feature to validate whether your email addresses are valid and active. This tool helps improve your deliverability rates by ensuring your emails reach actual recipients. Using this feature will cost you credits. 

Smartlead

On the other hand, Smartlead does not have an email verification tool. You may need to use a separate service to verify your email lists. 

Ensuring Email Accuracy with Instantly’s Built-In Verification Tool

Instantly’s built-in verification tool adds a layer of assurance to your email campaigns.  

Unique Bonus Features: What Else Can They Do?  

While the two tools have been somewhat similar, it’s time to cover the unique features that make them stand out. 

Instantly

Right off the bat, Instantly has announced its plans to become a fully-fledged AI-powered CRM soon. This will add several extra outreach channels like cloud calls and SMS, new AI sales workflows, and a dedicated ‘website visitors’ feature that will help businesses capture and nurture their B2B inbound leads. After this, qualified website visitors (determined by your set filters) will be automatically pushed into your existing automated outreach campaigns. It’s pretty neat if you ask me! Instantly’s native lead database also deserves mention, offering 160M verified B2B contacts and constantly working on increasing the number. It’s straightforward to use; simply put in their filters (location, company size, job title, etc.) — get extensive lists of targeted prospects for your outreach campaigns, and push them into your created sequences with a push of a button. 

Smartlead

Now it’s Smartlead’s time to shine! Users can enjoy their cool ‘Client Access’ feature, which provides limited access to view the performance of their campaigns, undeniably facilitating agency-client collaboration. These detailed agency reports empower clients to monitor their campaigns’ key metrics and KPIs in real time, removing the need to generate separate reports for all your clients and constantly share them. This feature is designed for: 

• Sales

• Marketing

• Lead generation agencies

Smartlead has its very own mobile app! That’s right, sales and marketing teams can access and manage their inboxes anywhere on the go, never missing a potential time-sensitive opportunity. The app provides a decent amount of advanced features making it more than sufficient to ensure your outreach campaigns are consistently running smoothly, such as: 

• Real-time alerts

• Advanced filtering options

• Inbox categorization, and more 

Smartlead vs Instantly Pricing: Who Is More Affordable?  

Equipping your sales team with a reliable outreach platform is an investment, directly impacting how well they will engage with prospects and convert them into long-term customers. It’s crucial to balance your business needs, and budgeting is one of the key steps in the decision-making process. 

Unlike many other sales automation platforms, Instantly and Smartlead price their product per workspace—not per person, which is especially useful for bigger teams on tighter budgets. 

Plans: 

• Smartlead’s starting plan is priced at $33/month, and 

• Instantly’s is at $37/month

This makes it a very similar entry point for sales teams.

Instantly’s Pricing Plan

After that, Instantly’s pricing plans become increasingly more expensive than Smartlead’s, with its premium ‘Light Speed’ plan priced at $358/month. It’s worth noting that Instantly separates its platform into two separate products—‘Sending & Warmup,’ the email automation and deliverability suite, and ‘Leads,’ the contact database. Each has its own pricing plan and is sold separately. 

Smartlead’s Pricing Plan

Smartlead’s pricing plans are pretty straightforward. It has 3 plans, with the ‘Basic Plan’ designed for individual users and solopreneurs and the other for sales teams of two or more. These two plans, Pro Plan and Custom Plan allow businesses to add their clients to the platform to enjoy relevant agency features such as real-time campaign reports, priced at $29/client/month. 

Weighing Cost vs. Value: Instantly’s Premium Features Compared to Smartlead

As a result, Instantly’s is undoubtedly the more expensive of the two, especially if you also want their lead database, though, in all fairness, you will get more bang for your buck.

When to Use Smartlead or Instantly for Cold Email Outreach

Smartlead Overview

Smartlead is a cold email tool focusing on: 

• CRM integration

• Advanced analytics

• Automation 

Its personalization and warm-up features help you improve your email deliverability and engagement. Smartlead also integrates with ChatGPT to help you generate email copy.

When to Use Smartlead for Cold Email Outreach

If you need a tool with flexible pricing and robust CRM integration for cold email outreach, you should use Smartlead. It is ideal for businesses with a system for sourcing leads, as it doesn’t have a built-in lead finder. Its advanced email warm-up and personalization features help improve deliverability and engagement. If you have a ChatGPT API key, Smartlead can also assist in generating email copy.

Use Cases Where Smartlead is Better

Smartlead excels in several specific use cases for cold email outreach. If you’re looking for advanced automation, detailed analytics, and seamless CRM integration, Smartlead is an excellent choice. It also shines when you generate an email copy with a ChatGPT API key. 

When to Choose Smartlead: Superior CRM Integration, Analytics, and Personalization Features

Here are some scenarios where Smartlead is better:

CRM Integration

Smartlead's CRM integration allows you to manage your leads and email campaigns within one platform. This centralizes your database, improving efficiency and coordination.

Detailed Analytics

Smartlead offers comprehensive analytics to track metrics like: 

• Open rates

• Click-through rates

• Conversions

These insights help you refine your strategy for better results.

Personalization Features

Smartlead's personalization variables let you tailor emails to each recipient. This customization boosts engagement and response rates.

Existing Lead Sourcing System

If you already have a system for sourcing leads, Smartlead is ideal. You can import your leads and focus on optimizing your email outreach.

AI-Generated Email Copy

With a ChatGPT API key, Smartlead can generate an email copy for you. This feature helps you craft effective and personalized emails quickly. These use cases highlight Smartlead’s strengths and make it a powerful tool for email outreach efforts.

Instantly Overview

Instantly is a cold email tool that offers users everything they need for successful email outreach in one platform. It features: 

• A built-in lead finder

• Email verification tool

• Robust AI assistant to generate email sequences

These capabilities Instantly help you save time and improve your email deliverability.

When to Use Instantly for Cold Email Outreach

You should use Instantly for cold email outreach when you need a comprehensive tool with built-in features like email verification and a lead finder. Instantly's powerful AI assistant makes generating complete cold email sequences easy. Instantly also offers a library of customizable email templates, saving time and effort. It's a great choice if you’re looking for a platform that includes everything you need for successful cold email campaigns.

Use Cases Where Instantly is Better

Instantly shines in several specific use cases for cold email outreach. It’s a versatile tool with features that cater to different needs. 

Here are some scenarios where Instantly is better:

Email Verification

Instantly's built-in email verification tool helps ensure your emails reach valid and active addresses, improving deliverability.

Lead Finder

The integrated lead finder tool allows you to search for potential leads based on your parameters, making it easy to find new prospects.

AI-Generated Email Sequences

Instantly's powerful AI assistant can generate entire email sequences for you, streamlining your campaign creation process.

Customizable Email Templates

Instantly offers a library of customizable email templates, allowing you to set up professional-looking campaigns quickly.

All-in-One Platform

With features like email warm-up, spintax, and CRM integration, Instantly provides a comprehensive solution for your email outreach needs. These use cases demonstrate Instantly’s strengths, making it an excellent choice for enhancing your email outreach efforts.

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Start Buying Domains Now and Setup Your Email Infrastructure Today

Inframail revolutionizes cold email infrastructure so you can scale your outreach without technical headaches. Our service stands out from traditional providers by offering unlimited inboxes for a single flat rate. 

• Microsoft-backed deliverability

• Dedicated IP addresses

• Automated technical setup

It scales its cold email outreach efforts efficiently:

• Agencies

• Recruiters

• SDRs  

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.