The 14 Best Tools for Email Outreach in 2023

Email is the Crocs of the internet. Love it or hate it, it’s not going anywhere.

Email is so powerful, in fact, that many businesses — even AppSumo — are built on a combination of email tools, strategies, and tactics.

For today’s article, we’re going to delve into some of the tools for email outreach.

Sure, you can do email outreach manually: Find and research contacts, write emails, hit send, track the response, and repeat. But that process is slow and doesn’t scale.

The reality is, email outreach can be much more powerful when you add some additional tools. In this article, we’re going to delve into some of the top tools for email outreach.

I spoke with Guillaume Moubeche, cofounder and CEO of lemlist, to discuss the tools he recommends. Here’s a combination of his answers, as well as a few additional helpful tools:

Finding emails

You won’t get far in email marketing without any contacts. You can browse the internet for emails in your spare time, steal your dad’s old Rolodex, or you can let these tools do the hard work for you:

1. Hunter

Don’t need thousands of email addresses? If you’re only looking for a handful of email addresses, Hunter is an excellent freemium tool that quickly reveals a person’s email address. It can also help you deduce the format of email addresses at certain companies: {first}.{last}@company.com, etc.

• Price: Free Plan (for 50 requests/mo, requests = searches), Starter is $40/mo (1,000 requests), Growth is $99/mo (5,000 requests), Pro is $199/mo (20,000 requests), Enterprise is $399/mo (50,000 requests)
• Where to get started: hunter.io/users/sign_up

2. Zoominfo

This email database lets you search for contact information based on multiple criteria. You can browse and download email addresses and phone numbers based on location, industry, company size, and more.

• Price: Free trial is usually limited to 3 days, quotes tend to start at $5950 after the trial is over
• Where to get started: zoominfo.com/business/free-trial

3. FindThatLead

Another trusted email database (and AppSumo partner), FindThatLead lets you search and browse for contact information based on specific criteria. FindThatLead also includes a built-in email validation tool, which can streamline your process by cutting out the next step (see below).

• Price: Free Plan (50 credits, credits = searches), Growth Plan is $49/mo (5,000 credits)
• Where to get started: app.findthatlead.com/dashboard/login

4. Voila Norbert

Another tool worth checking out is Voila Norbert’s email finding tool. Find corporate emails of decision-makers at scale to build more and better relations. Norbert claims to be the most effective email finder on the market with an accurate and up-to-date database of B2B contacts right at your fingertips when you sign up.

• Price: Free Plan (for 50 requests/mo, requests = searches), Valet is $49/mo (1,000 requests), Butler is $99/mo (5,000 requests), Advisor is $249/mo (15,000 requests), Enterprise is $499/mo (50,000 requests)
• Where to get started: https://app.voilanorbert.com/#!/auth/register

Validating emails

Sending an email to an outdated or straight-up incorrect address can be worse than useless. It can hurt your overall email deliverability (meaning a higher percentage of your emails end up in the spam folder). Plus it’s literally a waste of time.

Before you send a cold email, it’s worth validating it using one of these tools:

5. Zerobounce

One of the most popular tools for validating emails, ZeroBounce lets you plug emails in one at a time or in bulk. You’ll quickly know which emails are likely still active.

• Price: Free (for 100 credits per month), a 2,000 credit/mo plan starts at $15/mo and plans scale steeply at first, and then generous discounting starts after $400/mo or 100,000 credits.
• Where to get started: zerobounce.net/members/register/

6. Dropcontact

This tool connects with your CRM to ensure your contacts remain up to date. Dropcontact auto-corrects mistakes or outdated information by regularly validating it.

• Price: Free (100 credits/mo), Bronze Plan improves 1,000 contacts at 24€/month + 56€ setup fee, Silver Plan improves 8,000 contacts at 128€/month + 314€ setup fee, Platinum Plan improves 40,000 contacts at 436€/month + 1,068€ setup fee
• Where to get started: app.dropcontact.io/app/login/email

7. Bouncer

Similar to ZeroBounce, Bouncer lets you quickly validate individual or bulk emails to improve their deliverability.

• Price: Free for first 1,000 contacts, then it’s $2 for every 1,000 contacts and eventually discount pricing kicks in once you pass 50,000 contacts.
• Where to get started: app.usebouncer.com/signup

(Want more information about finding and validating email addresses? Read our previous post on the topic.)

Relationship management

Some of the tools mentioned throughout this article include a built-in CRM. But if you don’t have a CRM already, it’s important to make that investment early if you plan to send more than a handful of emails. When you’re starting to scale cold outreach, trying to remember just 10+ emails is setting yourself up for a lot of mistakes.

If your email outreach tool doesn’t have a CRM plugged in, here are two popular standalone alternatives:

8. Mailshake

Mailshake is a sales engagement platform that helps salespeople create highly personalized outreach cadences using email (via your personal email account), social, and phone. With Mailshake, you can upload a list of prospects with personalization fields like name, links to social profiles, phone numbers, and even fully personalized sentences and paragraphs.

Once you publish the cadence, the messages are sent automatically according to your campaign settings, and can be paused automatically if a recipient replies or clicks a link. When a lead engages with your outreach, you can reply to them directly from Mailshake, or through your own email. You can also track your campaign’s performance in real time, and see which messages in your cadence have the best engagement.

• Price: Starting at $59/month per user
• Where to get started: https://mailshake.com/app/#/signup

9. Mailvio

Mailvio is a well-established and stable email marketing tool that can be used for automated campaigns as well as transactional emails. They offer many advanced features such as easy segmentation, email segmentation, dynamic email personalization, mailing to multiple lists, workflow automations, pre-designed emails, and many more.

• Price: starts at $39/mo (up to 10,000 contacts) and goes up to $149/mo (up to 50,000 contacts)
• Where to get started: https://app.mailvio.com/login

10. HubSpot

This CRM caters to small businesses and uses a Freemium business model. You can enjoy the benefits of tracking email opens and responses without spending a dime. As one of the most popular CRMs on the market, it’s easy to try the tool to determine if it offers the right tools for your outreach goals.

• Price: Free
• Where to get started: app.hubspot.com/signup-v2/crm/step/user-info

11. Salesforce

This is the grandaddy of CRMs. If HubSpot is designed for simplicity and small businesses, Salesforce is designed for customization and caters to larger organizations needing more control. Salesforce is built to handle complex sales funnels.

• Price: Free Trial for 30 days. $25/month per user.
• Where to get started: salesforce.com/form/signup/freetrial-elf-v2-hp/

Response tools

Most email outreach attempts should include a clear call to action for the recipient. As a rule of thumb, the simpler you can make that request, the more likely it is for the recipient to take action.

So why not streamline their ability to respond or interact with your email?

Here’s a tool to consider:

12. Mixmax

Use Mixmax to embed intended actions into the email. You can include a button that gives the recipient options to set up a meeting, complete a survey within the email body, and more. Imagine Calendly, but built for email outreach.

• Price: Free
• Where to get started: app.mixmax.com/dashboard

Personalization

Successful email outreach boils down to one key factor: personalization.

Generic, impersonal emails get ignored. But emails with a personal touch can inspire remarkable opportunities. For most businesses using cold email outreach, the problem is that personalization usually requires a lot of time and energy.

The good news is, there are tools to help you streamline the personalization process:

13. SmartWriter

AI writing tool is the cool kid on the block. With Smartwriter AI, you get to increase your reply rate by 8 times with its personalized cold email generator. The best part? Smartwriter AI integrates and syncs with your favorite tools like Mailshake, Lemlist, Reply, and Hubspot.

• Price: Starts at $49/month, billed annually (7-day free trial)
• Where to get started: https://app.smartwriter.ai/sign-up

14. Lemlist

What’s more personal than a photo or video? lemlist helps you personalize every email with images that connect with the recipient. lemlist also includes a send algorithm to improve deliverability and an email warmup feature that helps emails stay out of the spam folder. This tool helps you send personalized messages at scale.

• Price: Starts at $29/month (14-day free trial)
• Where to get started: app.lemlist.com/campaigns/?mode=create

Reply: Reply lets you segment your audience and then use AI suggestions to help you determine the strength of each message before you click send.

Create emails worth reading

Now that you’re armed with these tools, go forth and fill the world with better, more personalized cold emails.

In the words of Seth Godin, “There’s always the opportunity to cut a corner, sacrifice lifestyle quality and suck it up as we race to grab a little more market share. But the problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win.”

Use these tools to send the best damn cold emails that any of us have ever seen. There’s enough spam out there. Rise above the noise to send something worth responding to.

Thanks again to Guillaume from lemlist for suggesting many of these outreach tools. This email is part of a larger series Guillaume is helping us write about email outreach. You’ve just read the fourth post in that series. Don’t miss the others:

1. Defining your buyer persona
2. Finding and validating emails
3. Ensuring high deliverability

What are your favorite tools for email outreach?