12 Best Cold Email Software for Sales Prospecting 2022

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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.io

VoilaNorbert

Hunter

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

VoilaNorbert is an email finder tool that identifies business leads’ email addresses via their first name, last name, and company domain name with a high level of accuracy. Salespeople can also use its data enrichment tool for $20 for 500 email addresses, which will give you such information about the lead as their job title and social profiles. That means you may be able to forgo buying another tool for gathering lead information.

VoilaNorbert Pricing

VoilaNorbert's pricing tiers are listed below:

• Valet: $39 per month (1000 credits per month)
• Butler: $79 per month (5,000 credits per month)
• Advisor: $199 per month (15,000 credits per month)
• Counselor: $399 per month (50,000 credits per month)
• Prepaid: 10 cents per credit (500 credit minimum)
• Data Enrichment Tool: $20 per 500 email addresses
• Free Trial: 50 searches

VoilaNorbert Key Features

Check out VoilaNorbert's key features below:

• Email Finder: Find any corporate email address by typing in the person’s full name and company domain name.
• Email Verifier: Verify a certain number of email addresses for an appropriately scaled price (e.g., 50,000 emails for $150).
• Bulk Lead Data Enrichment: Gather additional information about a number of leads so you can more easily personalize your cold emails.
• Integrations: Integrate VoilaNorbert with your chosen email outreach tools via Zapier or an API.

VoilaNorbert domain search

Hunter is an accurate email finder tool that enables salespeople to find email addresses in various ways. B2B sellers can type in a domain name and find all of the associated professional email addresses. Or they can use the email finder feature and search a specific person’s name and company domain name — a process you can also do in bulk for your whole prospecting list. Best of all, Hunter automatically verifies email addresses as it reveals them.

Hunter Pricing

Hunter's pricing tiers are listed below:

• Free: 25 searches per month
• Starter: $34 per month (500 searches per month)
• Growth: $69 per month (2,500 searches per month)
• Pro: $139 per month (10,000 searches per month)
• Business: $279 per month (30,000 searches per month)

Hunter Key Features

Check out Hunter's key features below:

• Domain Search: Reveal all the email addresses associated with a website in seconds.
• Email Finder: Find a single person’s email if you have their full name and company domain.
• Bulk Email Finder: Upload a file listing full names and their domains, and Hunter will find all of their email addresses, if available.
• Email Verification: Hunter tells you if an email address is verified, and if it’s not, it provides a confidence score.

Hunter 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.

DeBounce

Clearout

Mailfloss

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

Clearout is a verification service that cleans email lists in real time by detecting faulty addresses across your tech stack (CRM, marketing automation, etc.). Thanks to its third-party integrations with tools like MailChimp and Salesforce, you can easily check your list for invalid or non-operational addresses within the tool before initiating a campaign. Clearout also offers a bulk verification, which takes in an email list, analyzes it, and cleans it up.

Clearout Pricing

Clearout's pricing tiers are listed below:

• Annual Subscription:
  • 5,000 to 50,000 Verifications: $23.20 to $68 per month
  • 100,000 to 1,000,000 Verifications: $88 to $720 per month
  • 5 Million Verifications: $3,600 per month
• Pay-As-You-Go Plan:
  • 3,000 to 100,000 Verifications: $21 to $350
  • 250,000 to 500,000 Verifications: $625 to $850
  • 1 Million Verifications: $1,100
• Over 5 Million Verifications: Call for quote
• Free Credits: 100 free verifications

Clearout Key Features

Check out Clearout's key features below:

• Website Integration via Clearout APIs: When a lead submits a web form with their email address, Clearout will verify it immediately.
• Bulk Email Verification: Upload an XLSX or CSV file of email addresses and Clearout will check the list for bad addresses and provide stats for the hard bounces, soft bounces, catch-all, spam, and more.
• Instant Verification: Check the validity of email addresses while in another platform such as your email marketing software.
• Spam Trap Detection: Clearout’s multi-leveled algorithm will tell you the probability that an email address is a spam trap.

Clearout email verification stats

Mailfloss is a “set it and forget it” email verification tool that every day automatically removes invalid email addresses in the email provider you connect with their system; the software will even fix typos for you. Setup takes one minute and a few clicks, and the service supports 32 popular email service providers, including HubSpot, Campaign Monitor, and MailChimp. This tool is ideal for those who want to know that their lists are clean without lifting a finger.

Mailfloss Pricing

Mailfloss's pricing tiers are listed below:

• Annual Subscription:
  • Launch Lite: $14.17 per month
  • Launch Business: $40.83 per month 
  • Launch Pro: $166.67 per month
• Pay-As-You-Go Plan:
  • 1,000 to 50,000 Verifications: $4.00 to $80
  • 100,000 to 1 Million Verifications: $150 to $600
  • 2.5 Million Verifications: $1,300
• Free Trial: 7 days

Mailfloss Key Features

Check out Mailfloss's key features below:

• Automatic Daily Cleanup: Connect your email provider and have Clearout check your email list daily for invalid email addresses.
• Decay Protection: Mailfloss protects your email list from going stale by detecting decayed email addresses every month.
• Automation Preferences: Mailfloss offer various ways to deal with invalid addresses including auto-unsubscribing, typo fixing, auto-removing, and auto-tagging.
• Detailed Analytics and Stats: Use search, filter, and sort features to dig into the stats and better understand the quality of your email lists and the effectiveness of the service.

Mailfloss email address typo fixer

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).

ZoomInfo

Clearbit

Datanyze

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

Clearbit is a B2B lead enrichment tool that supplies sellers with advanced data about their leads. Users can search via a lead’s email or domain address, and the software will return over 100 attributes on the person and/or their company. This intel helps sellers and marketers better qualify leads and conduct more personalized email outreach. Additionally, Clearbit can track website visitor interactions so you know what pages your leads have been checking out.

Clearbit Pricing

Clearbit's pricing tiers are listed below:

• Call for Quote
• Free Plan: 50 domain or email enrichments per month

Clearbit Key Features

Check out Clearbit's key features below:

• Lead Data Enrichment: Find crucial information about your contacts and their companies. Also, clean and update your current database.
• List Builder: Type in a domain name to generate lists of associated employees and their information.
• Web Visitor Tracker: Know who’s visiting your website so you can target them with cold email outreach and relevant content.

Clearbit data enrichment

Datanyze’s Google Chrome extension uncovers contact and company data associated with websites and social profiles as you visit them. This includes info like technographics — data about the software and tools they use. B2B sellers can also use the tool’s icebreakers feature to find out what’s occurring in the lead’s world, like recent news in their area or hot posts in their social media feed. With this intel, reps can more easily spark sales conversations with leads.

Datanyze Pricing

Datanyze's pricing tiers are listed below:

• Nyze Pro 1: $21 per month (960 credits per year)
• Nyze Pro 2: $39 per month (1,920 credits per year)
• Free Trial: 90 days with Nyze Lite (10 credits per month)

Datanyze Key Features

Check out Datanyz's key features below:

• Icebreakers: See what’s going on in the lead’s location and social world to find conversation starters.
• Technographic Data: Learn about the technology a company is using to better see how your product or service fits into the picture.
• Market Share Pages: See what’s trending in your lead’s industry.

Datanyze icebreakers

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.

Outreach

Agile CRM

ActiveCampaign

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

Agile CRM is a customer relationship management system with email marketing functionality like its email template builder, which enables sellers to use templates and canned responses when sending a cold email. Marketers can also send bulk emails, easily build campaigns, and track the engagement of recipients to see what’s working. Best of all, this software is free for up to 10 users, making it great for smaller sales or marketing teams.

Agile CRM Pricing

Agile's pricing tiers are listed below:

• Free Version: Up to 10 users
• Starter: $9.99 per user, per month
• Regular: $39.99 per user, per month
• Enterprise: $64.99 per user, per month

Agile CRM Key Features

Check out Agile's key features below:

• Two-Way Email Integrations: Send emails to leads from your email service and get lead responses logged automatically in the CRM.
• Email Template Builder: Build cold email templates you can reuse in similar outreach scenarios.
• Email Tracking: Get informative stats on lead engagement such as opens, clicks, and replies that will help you analyze your campaign or score a lead.
• Run Email Campaigns: Easily set up email campaigns with the drag-and-drop interface.

Agile CRM campaign builder

ActiveCampaign is a CRM with email marketing features like automated follow-ups and autoresponders when a lead takes a certain action like visiting a page. With the drag-and-drop editor, you can build automated campaigns that send emails based on how leads interact with other emails and your website, thereby personalizing the experience. Sales reps can also use the template library to design and save reusable individual cold email templates that work.

Cost ActiveCampaign Pricing

ActiveCampaign's pricing tiers are listed below:

• Lite: $9.00+ per month (500+ contacts)
• Plus: $49+ per month (500+ contacts)
• Professional: $149+ per month (500+ contacts)
• Enterprise: $259+ per month (500+ contacts)
• Call for Quote: Customize a plan for 50,000+ contacts

ActiveCampaign Key Features

Check out ActiveCampaign's key features below:

• Email Automation: Build email campaigns that will send the right emails to leads based on their interactions with the emails and your website.
• Targeted Emails: Group leads into segments based on numerous factors so that the right people get the cold email that relates most to their needs.
• Scheduled Emails: Salespeople can schedule emails to go out on specific dates, whether that’s a holiday, a lead’s birthday, or another special event.
• Training and Onboarding: ActiveCampaign’s team will onboard and train your team so you can most effectively use the software (available in all pricing tiers).

ActiveCampaign automated email template

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.

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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.