12 Best Cold Email Software for Sales Prospecting 2022

Cold email software refers to any tool that can support salespeople through the cold email process. That includes online tools that help reps find email addresses, verify that the address is valid, gather intel about a lead for personalization, and compose, send, and track cold emails. We’ve therefore separated 12 of the best tools into these four main stages of the cold email process and illuminated each tool’s costs, features, and use cases: 

• Cold Email Software for Finding Emails: Use these tools to find email addresses of leads via their full names or company names. Read more below. 
• Cold Email Software for Verifying Emails: Verification software tells you if an address is legitimate and will actually receive an email you send to it. Read more below.  
• Cold Email Software for Gathering Information: Leverage these tools to learn more about leads to better personalize their cold emails. Read more below.
• Cold Email Software for Sending Emails: Use this software to craft, send, and track emails and to automate parts of the process. Read more below.

Cold Email Software for Finding Emails

First, you’ll have to find your lead's email address. Email finder tools help you discover the emails of leads if you already have their names or company domain names. Most of the below tools have free options that give you a specific number of credits to unlock emails. However, they charge to uncover email addresses at a larger scale, which is usually necessary when creating prospecting lists. Read on to learn about Snov.io, VoilaNorbert, and Hunter plus their monthly pricing with an annual plan.

Snov.ioVoilaNorbertHunter

Snov.io is an affordable email finder tool with a Chrome extension for uncovering the email addresses associated with websites or social media profiles you visit. It also has a searchable database and other ways to find emails. B2B sellers can enter a company’s domain to find all of the possible decision makers’ email addresses. With bulk domain searches, you can enter up to 20,000 domains at a time to quickly build out your lists with emails from ideal companies.

Snov.io Pricing

Snovi.io's pricing tiers are listed below:

• Free: 50 credits per month
• S: $33 per month (1,000 credits per month)
• M: $83 per month (5,000 credits per month)
• L: $158 per month (20,000 credits per month)
• XL: $308 per month (50,000 credits per month)
• XXL: $615 per month (100,000 credits per month)

Snov.io Key Features

Check out Snov.io's key features below:

• Domain Search: Uncover all the email addresses associated with a domain name.
• Bulk Domain Search: Find email addresses from up to 20,000 company domains at once.
• Social Media Search: Upload a CSV or TXT file with links to your leads’ social profiles and Snov.io will find their email addresses.
• Snov.io Email Finder Chrome Extension: Open the extension on a web page or social media page and get all email addresses associated with it.

Snov.io's domain search

After you use an email finder tool to identify the email addresses of your leads, you can move on to email verification software to make sure the emails are valid and operational.

Cold Email Software for Verifying Emails

Now it’s time to verify the email addresses you’ve collected. Email verification software helps salespeople determine if an email address is valid so that they don’t waste their time and money crafting emails that don’t reach the intended lead. Verification also protects you from sending emails to inactive users, which can hurt your domain reputation and get your emails sent to spam. Read on to learn about DeBounce, Clearout, and Mailfloss.

DeBounceClearoutMailfloss

DeBounce is an email verification tool with which salespeople can upload lists of email addresses that the software will then analyze for invalid, spammy, or non-operational mailboxes, leaving you with a clean list of emails. A trustworthy list will save you time and money while also preventing you from hurting your sender reputation. DeBounce is also one of the most affordable tools on the market with a starting price of $10 for 5,000 verifications.

DeBounce Pricing

DeBounce's pricing tiers are listed below:

• Free Credits: 100 free verifications
• 5,000 to 50,000 Verifications: $10 to $50 (pay as you go)
• 100,000 to 1 Million Verifications: $90 to $500 (pay as you go)
• 2 to 5 Million Verifications: $800 to $1,500 (pay as you go)

DeBounce Key Features

Check out DeBounce's key features below:

• Bulk Email Verifier: Upload a TXT or CSV file with email addresses and let DeBounce analyze it for invalid or non-operational emails and remove ones it finds.
• Syntax Eliminator: DeBounce will automatically remove email addresses with invalid syntax from a mailing list.
• Email Deduplication: When the feature is turned on, DeBounce will remove all duplicate email addresses automatically.
• Bounce Minimizer: DeBounce will do an SMTP check to remove all hard bounce and invalid email addresses from your database.

DeBounce bulk validation report

Now that you’ve verified your email addresses with a verification tool and formed a clean list, it’s time to use some prospecting tools to research these leads so you can write more personalized emails.

Cold Email Software for Gathering Lead Information

With your emails verified, you now have to collect intel about your leads. There are prospecting software tools out there that can help you find this information so you can better qualify the leads you've generated and tailor your email messages to fit their interests, roles, and needs. Read on to learn about ZoomInfo (a B2B lead database), Clearbit (lead enrichment tool), and Datanyze (a Chrome extension).

ZoomInfoClearbitDatanyze

ZoomInfo is a subscription-based B2B prospecting tool with a giant searchable database housing useful information about 130+ million B2B contacts and 100+ million companies. Users can find rich profiles of their leads that include their business and mobile numbers, education, job title, employment history, revenue, location, intent data, and intel about technologies they’re using, making it quite handy for B2B salespeople doing lead research.

ZoomInfo Pricing

ZoomInfo's pricing tiers are listed below:

• Call for Quote 
• Free Trial: Available for Professional+

ZoomInfo Key Features

Check out ZoomInfo's key features below:

• Searchable B2B Database: Find companies that fit your ideal customer profile and uncover 300+ attributes about them and their employees.
• Buyer Intent Intelligence: Discover which companies are researching topics related to your business online and reach out to them.
• Conversation Intelligence: Analyze calls, emails, and meetings to learn how to optimize your cold outreach.
• Lead Enrichment: Fill in missing lead data across your tech stack thanks to ZoomInfo’s data and integrations.

ZoomInfo database example

Armed with data regarding the leads on your prospecting list, you can now start to craft personalized emails and send them off to individuals or groups of leads using specialized tools like sales engagement software or marketing-forward CRMs.

Cold Email Software for Sending Emails

Now it’s time to write and send those emails out to your leads. Marketers and salespeople take advantage of tools with cold email features like templates, email campaign builders, and automated fields to write more effective cold emails and send them efficiently.  Plus, these tools track all email communication for easy reference and analyze email performance. Read on to learn about how Outreach, Agile CRM, and ActiveCampaign can increase conversions.

OutreachAgile CRMActiveCampaign

Outreach is a sales engagement platform that increases the rate at which sales reps can create and send personalized cold emails. Salespeople can use its workflow feature to build out repeatable cadences (cold outreach processes) containing calls, tasks, and emails that use automated fields for name, job title, etc., and auto-populate with each lead’s details. Reps can also quickly create one-off cold emails using saved templates and snippets.

Outreach Pricing

Outreach's pricing tiers are listed below:

• Call for Quote

Outreach Key Features

Check out Outreach's key features below:

• Streamlined Workflows: Build automated email sequences using templates and snippets.
• Meeting Scheduler: Include the integrated one-click meeting scheduler to enable leads to book meetings directly in your email.
• Integrated A/B Testing: Test subject lines, emails, and sequences to see which perform the best.
• Team Analytics: Track important cold email metrics like open, reply, and click rates.

Outreach cadence example

After sending a cold email, be sure to follow up consistently over the span of two weeks until you get a reply — send a maximum of four emails. In the meantime, track the open and reply rates of your cold emails to figure out which copy is working best and which needs tweaking.

How to Optimize Your Emails

There are some ways to increase the effectiveness of the emails you send to cold leads. For example, you can add videos to them using Loom or screenshots of your digital product using Placelt, or you can simply run a grammar check with a tool like Grammarly. Techniques like these can help you stand out from the crowd and ensure you come across as both sharp and personable.

Use Loom to Include Videos

Loom (free starting price) is a software that allows users to create and share promotional videos in their cold emails. Salespeople can film themselves giving a personalized introduction and pitch, thereby making the email feel much more personal and improving the likelihood the recipient trusts them enough to respond. Its free account supports 25 videos under five minutes in length. For $8.00 per month, you get unlimited videos with no cap on duration.

Leverage Placelt to Add Screenshots

Placelt ($14.95 starting price) is an online tool that enables you to easily add high-quality screenshots of your website, digital product, or app to your cold emails. The editor also allows you to add text and other design features to your screenshots, making them even more engaging. This strategy can help your leads better understand your product and the value it offers. Marketers can also make their email campaigns more interesting through visuals.

Install Grammarly for Spell Checks

Grammarly is a free Chrome extension that when turned on will automatically scan your email for spelling, syntax, or grammar mistakes and recommend corrections. An email with errors can make you seem unprofessional and lazy to your leads, so it’s best to be safe and use a tool like this. Grammarly also offers a premium option ($12 per month) that helps you improve the clarity of sentences, adjust an email’s tone to fit its purpose, and choose the most appropriate words.

Salespeople can use the above tools to make their emails more engaging with video, visuals, and wordsmithing. These tools, alongside your email finder, verifier, prospecting tool, and CRM, are destined to increase your cold email reply rates.

Bottom Line: Best Cold Email Software

Cold email software is any online tool that can help you more effectively send emails to cold leads and get positive responses. Therefore, tools that help you find and verify email addresses, gather intel about the lead for personalization, and properly send the email all fall under the umbrella term "cold email software." With the right tools at your disposal, you can send out more personalized emails more quickly, and therefore generate more sales for your business.