9+ Best AI Cold Email Software for Lead Gen (2023)

One of the most popular ways to find more prospective clients is by using cold email software for lead generation.

Cold email software makes it easy for you to:

• Generate leads
• Get more sales appointments
• Find new clients
• Build new relationships
• SEO link building
• And more!

However, cold email software is just a TOOL. And a TOOL is only good if you use it the right way.

In other words, to get results from cold email lead generation or any other lead generation technique, you need the right lead generation strategy.

So, before reading the rest of this article, watch my FREE Masterclass training which explains the best lead generation strategy to get high-quality sales appointments each month with your ideal clients on autopilot.

How can you find the best cold email software?

To find the best cold email software you need to consider a few factors:

• Cost: How much does it cost?
• Features: What can you do?
• Ease of use: How easy is it to use?
• Effectiveness: Does it work well?

The best cold email software will have a balance of all of these factors.

The best cold email software and tools (summary)

If you’re short on time, here is a summary of the top cold email software and tools for generating leads in your business:

• Saleshandy (best all-in-one solution)
• Hunter.io (best free cold email tool)
• Meet Alfred (best for LinkedIn cold email outreach)
• Respona (best for SEO link building)
• InboxPro (cheapest option)
• Woodpecker (best for agencies doing cold email for clients)
• Hoppy Copy (best for writing cold email copy with AI)

Using cold email is just one of many ways you can generate leads.

Watch my free Masterclass training for my top lead generation strategies if your goal is to get high-quality monthly sales appointments on autopilot.

What is the best cold email software?

Here are 10+ top cold email outreach software solutions specifically for lead generation:

1. Saleshandy

Best all-in-one solution

What I like about Saleshandy is that it’s an affordable, all-in-one cold email sales automation platform. And I love using all-in-one funnel builders!

With Saleshandy, you can easily create cold email templates, automate your email outreach campaigns, and track all your emails in one place.

Saleshandy Key features:

• LinkedIn prospecting: Find and add leads directly from LinkedIn
• Email warm-up: Build your email reputation score with gradual email ramp up
• High deliverability: Includes features such as “Bounce Guard” and “Email health score” to improve email deliverability
• AI Writing assistance: Get help writing cold emails that are likely to convert
• Advanced Email sequences: Create automated email follow-up sequences with behavioral rules
• Email tracking: Know when prospects open and click on emails
• Split testing: see what cold emails convert best

Saleshandy Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Easy to use
• Lots of features
• Low cost
• Advanced email personalization
• High email deliverability rate
• A / B testing
• LinkedIn email finder
• Free templates & training

Cons:

• No free plan (but they do have 14-day free trial)

Saleshandy Pricing

Pricing starts from $29/month per user, which includes everything you need to run cold email campaigns (unlimited emails, unlimited prospects, unlimited sequences, a/b email testing and more).

Click here to get a free Saleshandy trial.

Saleshandy final thoughts

In my opinion, Saleshandy is the leading cold email outreach software for lead generation. If you’re looking for an easy-to-use ALL-IN-ONE tool with many affordable features, then Saleshandy would be my number one recommendation.

2. Hunter

Best free version

Hunter is a fast and lightweight cold email tool that you can use to find millions of verified b2b company email addresses in seconds.

To use Hunter, you only need to type in a company website, and Hunter will find the email addresses for relevant people at that company.

Best of all, Hunter is free to use!

You can still use all the paid account features even if you have a free account. This means you can automate your cold outreach for free. The only cap is that you can add up to 500 recipients per campaign (while, of course, with paid plans, you can add more).

Hunter Key Features:

• Domain search: Find the emails of people from any domain name
• Email verification: Make sure the emails are real
• Email finder: This is great for finding decision-makers or key people in a company
• Personalize cold email out campaigns: to increase the chances your email gets read and responded to
• Email tracking: see whether people open or click on links in your email

Hunter Pros & Cons

Pros:

• Has a very generous free plan (better than other tools on this list)
• Email address accuracy is very high
• Free web browser extension
• Integrate it with other software and applications
• Easy to use with its very clean and user-friendly interface

Cons:

• Can only send cold email (doesn’t have extra non-email outreach features like some other tools on this list)

Hunter Pricing

Hunter’s cold email tool has very generous free plans compared to other cold email outreach tools. This makes it an excellent tool to try out at no cost and see for yourself what it’s like.

The paid plans are also very competitive compared to other cold email tools.

Hunter final thoughts

Overall, Hunter is one of the best cold email outreach tools. It’s great for beginners and experts alike.

I’d highly recommend you try Hunter for free to see for yourself how well it works.

3. MeetAlfred

Even though MeetAlfred is primarily a LinkedIn lead generation tool, it is still a very good cold email outreach tool as well. I recommend using Meet Alfred when combining both LinkedIn & cold email outreach together and if you want to automate your lead generation as much as possible.

Meet Alfred Key features:

• Multi-channel marketing: Automatically connect to potential customers on LinkedIn, email and Twitter using the same tool
• LinkedIn Lead CRM: Manage your LinkedIn leads and contacts through Meet Alfred’s built-in CRM features
• Messaging Inbox: You can reply to LinkedIn messages directly from within Meet Alfred’s software (this is helpful when using LinkedIn with teams because you don’t have to share your LinkedIn login info with anyone else)
• LinkedIn InMail features: Send additional messages to potential customers using LinkedIn InMail
• Works on the cloud: Unlike other LinkedIn automation tools, you don’t need to download any software for this to work

One of the unique features Meet Alfred has compared to other cold email tools is its built-in multi-channel marketing campaign features. This means you can contact leads through multiple channels including cold email marketing, Twitter marketing, LinkedIn and even cold calling.

Tip: If you want to stand out with the images in your email outreach, why not try using an AI image generator? AI image generated images can help you quickly create unique photos for your emails in seconds.

Meet Alfred Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Integrates well with LinkedIn and other social media platforms
• Send personalized emails and LinkedIn messages
• Great for teams because everything is on the cloud

Cons:

• Email marketing features are not as vast as other cold email tools

Meet Alfred Pricing

Meet Alfred pricing starts from $49/month and includes a 33% discount if you pay yearly.

Meet Alfred final thoughts

From my experience, Meet Alfred is a great tool if you want to combine cold email marketing with LinkedIn lead generation and social media marketing.

I’ve used Meet Alfred for a long time and as long as you have the right lead generation strategy in the first place, you can get great results from this lead generation tool.

Click here to get a free Meet Alfred 14-day trial.

4. Respona

Best for agencies looking to do link building, PR & sales outreach

Respona is an all-in-one blogger outreach platform outfitted with all of the necessary tools to set up and launch an email campaign of any kind, be it for link building, digital PR, marketing, or even sales.

It’s integrated with Google’s search engine for streamlined prospecting and pulls metrics like Domain Rating and Ahrefs Rank directly from Ahrefs.

An easy-to-use email finder is also included, making it extremely easy to find the right person’s contact information without relying on other tools.

Respona’s intuitive interface guides you through every step of creating and launching your outreach campaigns and keeps track of your performance and the status of your conversations with each prospect.

The tool will be especially useful to link builders, as it was initially used to help Visme scale their link building outreach efforts, helping the website gain over 2 million organic visitors monthly.

Respona Key Features:

• Automated email outreach: scheduling, follow-ups, and even spreading campaigns over several senders.
• Great for prospecting and finding contact information: has its own search engine (powered by Google, Moz, and Listen Notes) for finding link building/digital PR/podcast booking opportunities, extracting backlinks in bulk, and a built-in contact finder and verifier.
• Deep personalization: comes with an AI-powered article summarizer for quick but meaningful personalization. 
• Built-in analytics and reporting: review performance on an individual or entire team level, manage all your inboxes in a centralized shared inbox, and review your relationship status with every single one of your contacts.

Respona Pros & Cons

Pros:

• Clean, user-friendly UI
• Streamlined campaign flow
• All the functionality to launch and track an email outreach campaign of any kind, in one place
• 14-day, no-credit card free trial
• Integrations with other tools (Ahrefs, Semrush, Snov, Hunter, etc.)
• Personalize emails using AI

Cons:

• No free plan

Respona Pricing

The standard plan (includes one sender email and 5000 contact lookup credits) starts at $99/month. 

But the real value lies in the Unlimited plan priced at $399/mo with as many sender emails as you need, and 600,000 lookup credits, refreshed every 12 months.

Respona Final Thoughts

A solid tool in every outreach specialist’s toolkit, vital for any email outreach – link building, digital PR, podcast booking, marketing, or even sales. 

The standard plan can be a bit pricey for single users, so Respona is best suited for agencies leveraging the unlimited plan.

You can try Respona’s 14-day free trial before making any purchases as well.

5. InboxPro

InboxPro is a transformative suite of tools designed to supercharge your Gmail experience and drastically improve productivity.

It’s your AI-powered email assistant, complete with calendar scheduling, tracking, templates, follow-ups, and email analytics – all under one roof.

InboxPro Key features:

• AI-Powered Email Assistant: Compose perfect emails effortlessly with the power of GPT-3.
• Email Summarizer: Save time by getting the TLDR version of your lengthy emails.
• Email Tracking: Stay informed on who’s opening your emails and clicking your links.
• Email Templates: Streamline your communication with pre-designed and personalized email templates.
• Professional Signature Templates: Keep your emails professional and consistent with signature templates.
• Calendar Scheduling: Share your availability with ease and schedule meetings efficiently.
• Automated Follow-up Sequences: Never miss a lead with automated follow-ups that keep the conversation going.
• Email Activity Analytics: Get valuable insights with visualized email activity statistics and improve your email usage.

InboxPro Pricing

InboxPro offers highly competitive pricing, beginning at a mere $24/month per user. This package comes fully equipped with everything you need to revolutionize your email productivity and management. From unlimited emails to limitless prospects and sequences, the power is truly in your hands.

Click here to get a free InboxPro trial.

Final Thoughts

InboxPro is, without a doubt, a revolutionary tool that aims to redefine how we perceive and utilize Gmail. By combining the power of AI and a wide range of productivity features, it makes email management a breeze.

Its commitment to continuous improvement and user-friendly design makes it a must-have extension for anyone seeking to optimize their email usage and improve their daily workflow.

Try InboxPro and experience a whole new level of efficiency in your Gmail today!

6. Woodpecker

Best for Sales, Marketing & Lead Generation Agencies

Woodpecker is a cold email outreach tool that helps you verify and send personalized cold emails at scale.

I’ve found that WoodPecker is especially useful for agencies or larger sales teams because of its built-in sales CRM features. I used WoodPecker a lot in the early days of my business, and it was especially helpful when building up new strategic partners.

One great thing about Woodpecker is that it allows you to manage multiple cold email campaigns simultaneously.

How does Woodpecker use AI?

Woodpecker has a unique feature that allows you to use AI to send personalized videos via cold email at scale.

You can learn more about this feature after signing up to their free trial. It’s currently in BETA, so you may need to reach out to support once you’re on the free trial so they can activate it for you to test out.

Woodpecker Key features:

• White-label: Customize this tool with your own branding. Then use this email tool to generate leads and sales for your agency clients.
• Sales CRM: Organize and prioritize leads that are generated from cold email
• Email Finder: Find the right email address for any prospect with just a few clicks
• Email Verifier: Verify the accuracy of email addresses before you send your emails
• Cold Email Templates: Create personalized cold email templates for your outreach campaigns
• Email Tracking: Know when prospects open and click on your emails
• Agency features: Generate leads for your own marketing agency or your clients

Woodpecker Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• Lots of features, including a sales CRM & email finder tool
• Advanced personalization options with artificial intelligence
• Sales CRM features built-in
• Agency features built-in
• Great for managing multiple cold email campaigns from multiple people

Cons:

• A bit pricier compared to other cold email outreach tools

Woodpecker Pricing

Woodpecker pricing starts from $44/month, allowing you to contact up to 1,500 prospects monthly. But they also have an “unlimited” option which allows you to email an unlimited number of people each month for an extra $10/month ($54/month in total).

Woodpecker final thoughts

Overall, Woodpecker is a great cold email outreach platform for larger teams or marketing agencies wanting to generate many sales at scale.

Click here to try Woodpecker for free!

7. Hoppy Copy

Best for cold email copywriting

It’s easy to find software to send your cold emails, but what about writing them? How do you manage and streamline that process?

That’s where Hoppy Copy can help.

When crafting a cold email, there are several important factors to consider, including:

• Personalization
• Clear and Compelling Subject Line
• Concise and Focused Message
• Personalized Value Proposition
• Call to Action (CTA)
• As well as Professional and Polished Writing

That’s a lot to think about when creating a cold emailing strategy.

Hopy Copy aims to fix this because, unlike other AI copywriting tools, Hoppy Copy has been specifically trained to write high-converting emails. This makes it a great tool when combined with other cold email marketing tools on this list.

Hoppy Copy Features to help you with your cold emailing:

• 50+ AI email templates to start generating unique emails.
• Advanced Notion-style Editor where you can make edits to copy on the fly (add CTAs, Emojis, Tone etc.)
• Spam check to ensure your emails land in the inbox
• Multiple Docs & Project Folders
• Grammarly Integration
• Collaborate with colleagues & clients with Workspaces
• Simple UI

Remember that crafting effective cold emails requires a balance between personalization, professionalism, and value proposition.

If you can tailor your approach to the specific recipient and demonstrate a genuine interest in building a mutually beneficial relationship, then your campaign will likely be more successful.

The problem is… This personalization normally takes a lot of time. But if you leverage Hoppy Copy’s AI, what used to take hours, now only takes a few minutes.

And that’s why users are loving what Hoppy Copy can do!

Click here to try Hoppy Copy for free!

8. Snov.io

Snov.io is a powerful cold email outreach platform that helps you find and verify email addresses of prospects, create personalized cold emails, and track all your email activity in one place.

Snov.io Key features:

• Email Finder: Find the right email address for any prospect with just a few clicks
• Email Verifier: Verify the accuracy of email addresses before you send your emails
• Cold Email Templates: Create personalized cold email templates for your outreach campaigns
• Email Tracking: Know when prospects open and click on your emails
• LinkedHelper 2 Direct Integration

One of the unique features that I like from Snov.io is its built-in integration with Linked Helper 2.

You can use Snov.io and Linked Helper 2 to send more than 100 LinkedIn invites each week because LinkedIn allows you to add more than 100 connections each week IF you know their email address (which Snov.io helps you find automatically).

Snov.io Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Easy-to-use email finder & verifier tool
• A large number of verified email addresses in their database
• Affordable plans
• Email drip campaigns
• 14-day free trial (no credit card required)

Cons:

• No free plan
• Basic features are only available on the highest-priced plan

Snov.io Pricing

Pricing starts from $39/month, which includes 1,000 credits and 5,000 unique recipients. Credits can be used to find or verify email addresses.

Click here to get a free Snov trial.

Snov.io final thoughts

Overall, Snov.io is a great cold email outreach platform with a user-friendly interface. It’s especially helpful if you want to find and verify email addresses of people on LinkedIn.

9. Yesware

Yesware’s email tracking is a great way to keep track of your emails. You can see when your emails are opened, how often they are opened, and where your recipients are located.

This is a great way to stay on top of your email marketing campaign and ensure your messages get through to your recipients.

Yesware Key features:

YesWare is an excellent tool for sales teams who need to track their emails when doing cold email marketing.

• Email tracking: YesWare allows you to see when someone opens your email, how many times they open the email, if someone clicks on a link, or even forwards it to someone else.
• Link tracking: See when your links are clicked and how many times they have been clicked
• Location tracking: See where someone is based when they open your emails

Yesware Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• More advanced email tracking features compared to other cold email tools
• Simple to use software with an easy-to-use interface
• Inexpensive compared to other cold email platforms
• Allows you to track when email attachments are opened (not a lot of other sales outreach tools have this feature)
• Great for personalized cold email campaigns
• Can be used when sending sales proposals to leads
• Cheaper than other cold emailing software

Cons:

• Not as automated compared to other cold email marketing software

Yesware Pricing

Pricing for YesWare starts at $19/month or less if you pay yearly. However, you’ll need to upgrade to the $45/month package to remove the “YesWare” branding.

Yesware Final Thoughts

YesWare is a great cold email outreach tool if your sales team wants to send out more personalized emails. The real-time email tracking tools and notifications are also very helpful so you know the best time to follow up with leads.

10. Reply.io

Reply.io is an excellent tool for sales and marketing teams. It allows you to automate your email outreach and is especially helpful for outbound sales, account-based marketing and for link-building campaigns.

Reply.io Key features:

One of Reply.io’s key features is the AI email assistant.

The reply.io AI email assistant helps you write cold emails that are likely to receive a response.

They do this by analyzing your cold emails and looking at the following:

• Subject length
• Word count
• Question count
• Reading level
• Positivity

It then gives your email a “score” on whether someone will likely respond to one of your cold emails.

This can help you significantly improve your cold emails (especially if you’re new to cold emailing).

Other key features include:

• Whatsapp and SMS integration: Engage with prospects through whatsapp or via text messaging
• Multi-channel outreach: Reach out to prospects on multiple marketing channels such as email, phone, text and LinkedIn.
• Automatic email warm up: Slowly send out emails at the start to build up your domain name email reputation and trust score with email providers

Reply.io Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• Helps you write more effective cold emails through the AI email assistant feature
• Allows you to do sales outreach on multiple marketing channels
• Lots of helpful statistics to improve your cold outreach campaigns
• Easy to use interface

Cons:

• Can be pricier compared to other software that handles sales outreach campaigns

Reply.io Pricing

Reply.io pricing starts from $70/month per user for their sales engagement plan. They also have additional packages for business sales teams and agencies.

Reply.io Final Thoughts

Reply.io is best if you’re looking for a tool that will help you and your sales teams write better cold emails using AI.

11. SmartReach.io

SmartReach.io is a cold email tool which is especially good for digital marketing agencies.

SmartReach.io Key features:

• Automated email outreach: You can send automatic follow up emails at the push of a button
• Improved email deliverability: Before you send any emails, SmartReach can if previous emails were reported as spam
• Email validation: SmartReach will check to see if the email address you’re using is real or not
• Project Management: Manage campaigns for your business and your teams

SmartReach.io Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• Manage clients using this cold email tool from a single login (useful for agencies)
• Create personalized email campaigns with dynamic email content based on lots of variables
• Manage multiple email campaigns with built in project management CRM features
• Integrates with lots of other 3rd party software
• Use a primary inbox to manage all your messages in one place

Cons:

• Can sometimes have a bit more of a learning curve compared to other solutions

SmartReach.io Pricing

SmartReach.io price starts from $24/month for an individual account that can contact up to 1,000 people per month.

SmartReach.io Final Thoughts

SmartReach has similar features to other cold emailing tools. Their biggest strength and USP is probably their agency account features. The SmartReach agency account is great for agencies that want to use cold email to run lead generation campaigns for clients. which would be great for agencies that are looking to generate leads for their clients.

12. ContactOut

ContactOut is a Google chrome extension that allows you to send personalized email campaigns quickly and easily.

ContactOut key features:

• Helpful templates: Write emails quickly using a sales email template from either ContactOut, AutoKlose or another cold email tool which can be imported in
• Automatic follow up: Send multiple follow up emails to multiple people
• Data enrichment: Upload a list of LinkedIn URL’s and instantly find their job details and contact information (including personal email)
• Search portal: Find new contacts who are NOT on LinkedIn
• LinkedIn integration: As you’re browsing LinkedIn, you can easily find your LinkedIn contacts phone number and email address at the click of a button

ContactOut Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• Integrates well with Linkedin
• It’s very helpful when finding potential clients
• Allows you to search for new leads who are both on and off LinkedIn
• Very easy to use

Cons:

• Doesn’t have as many features compared to other emailing tools

ContactOut Pricing

ContactOut has a free plan for up to 40 contacts per month. The paid plan starts from $29/month for up to 100 contacts per month.

ContactOut Final Thoughts

ContactOut is an excellent cold email platform if you’re looking for a simple to use Chrome extension for LinkedIn search. The great thing about this tool is that you don’t need to be connected to people on LinkedIn to find their email and phone number.

13. Lusha

Lusha is a great cold emailing tool for running b2b lead generation cold email campaigns targeting key decision makers.

Lusha key features:

• Employee search: You can find decision makers or business owners using their built-in search tool
• Chrome extension: Quickly and easily find the contact details of people on LinkedIn, Salesforce or any other website
• Data enrichment: Upload a list of your own Salesforce data and Lusha can find additional contact information about those people

Lusha Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• Fresh and accurate data on people
• Great for b2b lead generation
• Helpful when finding contact info of decision-makers
• Easy to use

Cons:

• Doesn’t have as many features compared to other emailing tools
• More expensive than some other cold emailing tools

Lusha Pricing

Lusha has a monthly free plan for up to 5 credits (or contacts). The paid plan starts from $39/month per user and for 40 credits (or contacts) per month.

Lusha Final Thoughts

Lusha would be my recommendation if you’re using Salesforce because of its helpful integrations with that platform.

Honorable mentions

If none of the email tools above look like a good fit for you or your sales team, here are some additional cold email outreach software that you can use for lead generation (honorable mentions):

• Autoklose
• Outreach.io
• GMass

FAQs