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There are hundreds of cold email platforms out there. But most aren’t built with lead generation agencies in mind.
As an agency, you need a tool that excels at the fundamentals of cold outreach — personalization, automation, high deliverability. But you also have specific requirements that don’t apply to regular outreach pros, like agency-friendly pricing and client collaboration.
That’s why we’ve scoured the market to bring you a definitive list of the best cold email software for lead gen agencies, taking into account:
Key benefits for agencies
Agency pricing
Agency user feedback
Let’s get into it…
9 Essential Cold Emailing Software Features for Lead Gen Agencies
Before we dive into our list of the top platforms, let’s consider the key outreach capabilities that lead gen agencies need to consistently deliver results for clients:
Superior Deliverability
It’s simple: the more emails you send that land in your prospects’ primary inboxes, the more opens, replies, and leads you’ll generate. And with bulk email senders having to comply with strict rules around spam rates, you simply can’t afford for your cold email campaigns to end up in the spam folder.
For that reason, we rate email deliverability as the #1 factor for choosing any outreach tool.
That’s doubly true for lead gen agencies, which have challenging targets to hit and multiple clients to handle.
Learn more: Ultimate Guide To Cold Email Deliverability
Smooth Collaboration
Regular outreach professionals often work alone or as part of a small team, so they have limited collaboration requirements.
Agencies are totally different. With multiple reps working on each client, you need a cold email solution that’s truly collaborative.
That means full transparency over who performed which actions. And absolutely no sharing login details!
Personalization At Scale
Did you know that personalized emails see 26% higher open rates? Or that emails with personalized body copy have a 32.7% better response rate?
All of which means that advanced personalization features are a non-negotiable when choosing cold email software for lead gen agencies.
Specifically, you need a platform that makes it easy to create email sequences that feel personalized to individual users. Because simply mentioning the recipient’s first name in the subject line just won’t cut it any more.
Learn more: Cold Email Personalization: The Complete Guide
Built-In Automation
Given that 55% of cold outreach campaign replies come from follow-up emails, it’s essential that your cold email solution features all the necessary out-of-the-box automations.
That way, you can build automated cold email campaigns incorporating multiple follow-up steps (potentially spanning several different communication channels).
You’ll also want to automate things like:
Email scheduling
Sentiment analysis
Automatic inbox replacement
Because there are only so many hours in the working day, and you want your reps to spend them on high-value tasks.
Learn more: How To Master Automated Lead Generation
Native Integrations
Chances are, your lead gen agency relies on a bunch of different SaaS solutions. CRM; deliverability monitoring; meeting scheduling; the list goes on.
You need your cold email tool to play nice with all those different platforms — ideally via native integrations.
Learn more: B2B Lead Generation: The Best CRM Integrations for 2024
Advanced Analytics
You might be sending thousands of cold emails a day for dozens of different clients. In which case you’re generating a whole heap of data — and you need your cold email tool to make sense of it all.
In short, you need an advanced analytics solution to track your outreach efforts across key metrics like…
Open rates
Click rates
Reply rates
…while also letting you dig deeper to understand which campaigns, sequences, and emails are driving the best results.
Learn more: What Are the Best B2B Cold Email Analytics Tools?
Agency Dashboard
Similarly, with so much data at your fingertips and so many clients to manage, you need your cold email outreach software to provide an at-a-glance view of performance.
If your chosen solution doesn’t have a dedicated agency dashboard, checking each client’s results becomes a major time-sink. And time is a precious commodity at any agency!
Client Portal
Some cold email platforms allow you to add clients as guests so they can check results whenever they like.
This is fine if you’re only handling a small number of clients. But managing access across dozens of different accounts can be a major headache.
That’s why we recommend choosing a solution that lets you create client portals with custom dashboards for each client.
Scalable Pricing
Sure, you want your cold email outreach tool to provide a ton of advanced features.
But money matters in agency land, so it needs scalable pricing, too.
Avoid platforms that charge ever-higher sums for adding more leads or unified inboxes. Instead, you want a tool that offers a simple, flat charge per client.
That way, there’ll never be any surprises when it’s time to pay your invoice.
7 Best Cold Emailing Tools for Lead Gen Agencies
QuickMail
Key Benefits for Agencies
High deliverability: QuickMail offers a whole suite of deliverability-boosting features. Think inbox rotation, Deliverability AI, blacklist monitoring, MX bounce protection, text-only messages, unsubscribe headers, and more.
Built-in collaboration: Every QuickMail plan lets you add unlimited team members at no extra cost, with no need to share logins. And our searchable audit logs track every activity back to the person who performed it for easy management and accountability.
Scalable pricing: There are no surprises with QuickMail’s pricing — simply upgrade to a higher plan if you need more inboxes or email sends (more on pricing in the next section…).
Sophisticated personalization: Personalize every aspect of your emails and test multiple variations simultaneously to see what works best for your client’s ideal prospect.
Out-of-the-box automations: As standard, QuickMail makes it easy to build automated outreach sequences spanning email, LinkedIn, SMS, and cold calling. Plus our Deliverability AI feature automatically sends emails from your top-performing accounts.
Seamless integrations: QuickMail has native integrations with HubSpot and Pipedrive, plus various other outreach-related tools (like email verification software and workflow management solutions). And we offer a Zapier integration on all plans.
Send-day attribution: Our advanced analytics suite tracks your activity back to the day an email was sent, helping you track the impact of every campaign change and stay on top of deliverability.
Agency dashboard: Instantly check performance across all your clients from a single view.
Client portal: Build a dedicated, white-labeled portal for each client, featuring customized dashboards based on their goals and priorities.
Agency Pricing
Our standard pricing is designed for sales teams doing outreach for themselves, rather than for lead gen agencies.
That’s why we’ve introduced new agency plans with transparent, flat fees per client that make it more affordable to grow, scale, and send at the volume you need to hit your KPIs.
Each agency plan includes unlimited inboxes and a full suite of agency features so you have all the tools you need to get more replies for your clients.
They also come fully loaded so there’s no need to add to your costs when it comes to adding more leads or team members.
Curious if QuickMail might be the right fit for your agency? Speak to us to learn about our agency plans.
What Do Users Say?
“A lot of other tools we previously explored feel more complicated because they aren’t designed for agencies. QuickMail has agency-friendly features built-in.”
John Karsant, Lead Gen Agency Founder/CEO
Learn more: QuickMail: The Outreach Software for Serious Lead Gen Agencies
Smartlead
Key Benefits for Agencies
Automation: Create fully automated cold email campaigns by using the API to drip-feed leads and manage meeting bookings.
Sentiment analysis: Automatically categorize leads based on contextual reply sentiment, with multiple categories to match your lead’s intent.
Follow-up sequences: Create follow-up reminders so you never miss an opportunity and build sequences based on lead behavior.
Collaboration: Add your entire sales and marketing team to Smartlead and analyze individual team member performance via the dashboard.
Agency Pricing
Smartlead doesn’t have a dedicated agency plan, but describes its Custom Plan as “perfect for lead gen agencies”.
Custom Plan pricing starts at $174 per month, plus an additional $29 monthly fee per client. This plan starts with only 30,000 leads. For each additional 30k leads there’s an add-on charge.
While the pricing seems affordable, costs start growing quickly as you grow your clients and lists.
Common Challenges
Smartlead is pretty new to the cold email marketing software space, and users still report a few teething problems…
*Quote from unaffiliated agency owner, March 2024
The platform’s built-in auto-warmer is reportedly a pool of primarily custom SMTP inboxes. This means your warm-up emails aren’t being sent with Google or Outlook and the warm-up isn’t effective to increase deliverability with leads who host their emails in those platforms. Plus Smartlead isn’t Google-accredited — both of which are big red flags for deliverability.
When it comes to reporting, Smartlead forces you to filter by client every time you want to narrow your view.
You can’t manually create prospects, only upload them via CSV. Also, prospects can’t be verified within the platform or bulk-added to new campaigns.
Smartlead has no native integrations whatsoever. So you’ll have to rely on Zapier for everything, which is expensive and glitchy when sending emails at scale.
Learn more: Smartlead vs QuickMail: Features, Pricing, and Performance
Instantly
Key Benefits for Agencies
Account warmup: Instantly’s automated deliverability network is designed to avoid spam filters and improve your sender reputation. However, it’s worth noting that the platform’s built-in auto-warmer is reportedly a pool of primarily custom SMTP inboxes. This means your warm-up emails aren’t being sent with Google or Outlook and the warm-up isn’t as effective as other tools.
Scalability: Technically, you can add unlimited email accounts. But there’s a trade-off — Instantly offers lower monthly email volumes than a lot of outreach platforms, which is a big problem for agencies.
Automation: Build personalized, automated campaigns using variables, sequences, and smart scheduling.
Agency Pricing
There’s no dedicated agency price plan at Instantly, so you’ll have to choose one of the standard Sending & Warmup plans.
Most agencies will need to choose the Light Speed plan, priced at $358 per month. Even then, you’ll still have to cope with a limit of 500,000 monthly emails and 100,000 uploaded contacts, which won’t cut it for larger agencies.
Common Challenges
Reply detection only works on direct responses, so if a B2B contact replies in a new thread, their email won’t be pulled in.
Instantly lacks team oversight tools like an audit log, which is a major barrier to effective collaboration.
You need to create a separate workspace for every client account.
Limited reporting, with metrics limited to account/campaign-level stats on emails sent, opens, replies, and opportunities.
“When Avadel moved to Instantly, our meeting booking numbers got chopped by 95%. It was a disaster and we lost a lot of clients because of it.”
Dave Valentine, CEO of Avadel
Learn more: Instantly vs QuickMail: Features, Pricing, and Performance
Lemlist
Key Benefits for Agencies
Personalization: Personalize sequences at scale using custom text variables, images, and dynamic landing pages.
Automation: Create automated sequences that are personalized based on how individual prospects interact with the previous sequence step.
Engagement: Build multichannel outreach sequences combining email, LinkedIn, and phone calls.
Integrations: Lemlist integrates with various CRMs, data enrichment tools, and workflow management platforms.
Agency Pricing
Lemlist doesn’t publish pricing information for lead gen agencies (or any businesses with 10+ users). In our book, that’s never a good sign when it comes to affordability. For reference, the platform’s top-tier non-agency plan costs $159 per user per month.
Common Challenges
Lemlist’s per-seat pricing model gets real expensive, real fast for all but the smallest agencies.
Some Lemlist users have reported regularly encountering bugs when using the platform.
Lemlist adds a bunch of messy html to emails, which can hamper deliverability.
Email replies aren’t categorized by client or campaign, which is a headache for agency users.
Woodpecker
Key Benefits for Agencies
Agency dashboard: All client accounts can be managed via a single panel, where everything you need is only a click away.
Deliverability monitoring: Woodpecker offers 24/7 email deliverability monitoring across all client accounts. Plus you can export the results as a pdf to share with clients.
Client portal: Give clients access to reports via a dedicated, white-labeled app featuring your domain and branding.
Integrations: Woodpecker integrates with CRMs, prospecting platforms, email verification tools, and more.
Agency Pricing
At first glance, Woodpecker’s agency pricing looks affordable, starting at $29 per month, plus a flat monthly fee of $27 per client. However, this basic plan only includes 500 contacted prospects, 2,000 stored prospects, and 8,000 monthly emails — nowhere near enough for lead gen agencies.
And those prices scale up real fast. For instance, you’ll have to pay $395 per month (plus $27 per client per month) for 25,000 contacted prospects, 100,000 stored prospects, and up to 400,000 emails.
Common Challenges
Woodpecker’s email warmup tool doesn’t work for Gmail, which makes it kind of pointless.
Replies can’t be triaged or assigned to a team member, so effective collaboration is a real challenge.
Reporting is pretty limited, with no send-day attribution, positive reply rate reports, or unsubscribe insights.
You can only test a limited number of email variants at once, making it harder to figure out what works for your clients’ audiences.
Sentiment analysis is pretty basic too, only marking replies as positive, negative, or neutral.
Reply.io
Key Benefits for Agencies
Few limits: Reply.io’s agency plan promises unlimited mailboxes, clients, contact storage, warmup, and users. However, as we explain in the pricing section, it’s not totally clear how much it’ll cost you.
Manage access: Set roles and permissions to control what information team members and clients can access.
Reporting: Access reports on emails, calls, tasks, account performance, and meetings booked. Data can be segmented by client and team member.
Automation: Build sequences using if-then logic to create personalized user journeys comprising dozens of trigger events and conditions.
Agency Pricing
Reply.io isn’t super transparent about agency pricing. Its agency plan starts from $166 per month (billed annually), but the number of active contacts is described as “adjustable”. So we’d expect mid-to-large agencies to be paying significantly more than that.
Common Challenges
Reply.io lacks a centralized dashboard, making it hard to monitor performance across multiple client accounts.
The platform doesn't have the most user-friendly interface. It’s way too easy to send from the wrong email address or add contact lists to the wrong account.
There are limited customization options for reports, so your clients may not be able to access the data they need.
Reply.io isn’t especially user-friendly, with lots of users complaining about setup complexities — even after running through the lengthy onboarding process.
Learn more: Reply.io vs QuickMail: Features, Pricing, and Performance
Saleshandy
Key Benefits for Agencies
Agency portal: Saleshandy’s dedicated portal for agencies lets you manage multiple accounts from a single interface. For an unspecified additional cost, you can embed your own logo and brand assets.
View-only client access: Give clients access to campaign performance data whenever they need it, with no risk of them interfering with ongoing sequences.
Collaboration: Add unlimited clients and team members to your agency portal.
Personalization: Use Saleshandy’s mail merge to personalize emails with custom fields and templates.
Automation: Build multi-step email sequences with automated follow-ups.
Agency Pricing
Saleshandy doesn’t do agency-specific pricing.
All but the tiniest agencies will have to choose the Outreach Scale Plus plan, which starts at $299 per month for 100,000 total prospects and 300,000 monthly emails.
If you need 500,000 prospects, you’ll be paying a cool $1,499 per month. Any more than that and you’ll have to contact Saleshandy for a custom quote.
Common Challenges
Some Saleshandy users report deliverability issues and damage to their sender reputation after switching to the platform.
Unified inbox functionality is limited, with no ability to reply from other inboxes or assign replies.
Saleshandy lacks some basic integrations. For instance, you can’t import prospects from Google Drive.
Learn more: Saleshandy vs QuickMail: Features, Pricing, and Performance
Choose the #1 Cold Email Tool for Your Lead Gen Agency
Some of the tools in our roundup offer a ton of agency-friendly functionality, but with fundamentally unscalable pricing models that climb through the roof when you need to add more inboxes or prospects.
Others have sensible per-client pricing, but lack essentials like agency dashboards, client portals, and advanced analytics.
Only one cold email tool does it all: QuickMail.
With QuickMail, our pricing scales with your agency, and you get all the core features you need right out of the box.
Want to see why we’re the #1 choice for serious lead gen agencies? Book your QuickMail demo today.
