Reply.io
Starts at $70 per user per month
Pros
- Excellent user interface
- Built in email finder and voice calling features with multichannel sequences
- Lots of useful templates
- Fantastic support documentation and resources
Cons
- Slightly more expensive than other cold emailing tools
Cold emailing has stood its ground as one of the best channels of outbound sales even after so many new channels popping up in the recent past.
Irrespective of your type of business, whether it is an SMB, small or enterprise-level sales team, marketing or media agency, cold emailing is mighty effective if done right.
Apart from having a good email copy and a process to bring in high-quality leads, using a good cold emailing tool is absolutely imperative and the core of an effective cold emailing campaign.
Although there are so many SaaS tools in the market for cold emailing, Reply.io is easily one of the most well known. Is it really the best for cold emailing? Let's find out in this review.
Sign up & Onboarding
Once the sign up is completed with your work email, the first thing to do is to connect your email for sending the emails. Gmail, Outlook365, and Exchange are the email clients that are supported.
You can also use a custom SMTP and an IMAP set up to send and receive emails respectively by entering the details like SMTP & IMAP Port, SMTP & IMAP Host, etc.
You can get this information from your email hosting provider. Free Gmail accounts cannot be linked which is quite understandable considering the limitations.
After the email is set up for sending and receiving emails, you can add your teammates right during the initial onboarding process or skip it and add them later.
The initial onboarding process is very impressive in Reply with many video tutorials displayed explaining some of the newest added or most important features.
Build your first cold email campaign with Reply.io for free
I even got an onboarding call from one of the representatives from Reply which is really rare among the SaaS companies which do not exclusively serve the enterprise-level customers.
Sequences
The ease of building effective outbound sequences is one of the best features in Reply.io.
You can either set up the sequences by choosing from the available templates or build one from scratch.
Some of the available template sequences include,
- Trial to customer sequence for SaaS products - Conversion of trial customers to paying ones with targeted engagement.
- Outbound cold outreach - General outbound sequence for targeted cold emailing.
- Inbound leads sequence for SaaS products - Conversion of inbound leads into trials and paying customers.
- Recruiting - For HR & Recruitment teams to hire more effectively.
- Educational and prevent churn - Engaging with customers to make them understand the value of your product or service to keep them continuing as loyal customers.
You can also build custom templates for your specific use case and save it as templates that can be accessed by any of your teammates.
This is very useful for medium to large sales teams as the outbound sequences and the tone of pitch can be uniform across all the sales development representatives.
Additionally, one of the highlighting features of Reply.io is the multichannel sequences. You can essentially build sequences that consist of emails, calls, and tasks.
For example, you can build a sequence consisting of two emails speed across a week, and then a call with even the call script logged in to the sequence and then a task of sending an appointment request, Linkedin request, etc.
Multi-channel sequences help a lot in two ways,
- It results in higher reply and conversion rates as the prospect is targeted across various channels reducing the chances of rejection,
- It keeps all the outreach planning & communication within a single tool making it incredibly easy for the sales team to stay focused and never miss a task or a lead.
Cloud Calls
Reply.io has an in-built caller which lets you make calls to your leads and prospects right within the tool.
The calling feature can be individually enabled or disabled for each team member. You can rent a phone number in Reply.io for $1 per month in the case of the US & Canada.
The pricing for enabling the calling feature is $20 per user per month. Call rates depend on the country you are calling and charged per minute along with a connection cost.
Another very useful feature is the ability to take notes during the call to save the important points for further reference in the future.
After the conversation is completed, you can mark the contact as Called, Opted out, or To call depending on whether your goal of the conversation is achieved or not.
Calls can also be recorded to listen later for reference. Recordings can be set to be on always and allowed to be listened only by the team owner or by everyone in the team.
It is also possible to use a custom caller ID or Local Dial that lets you call from a number matching with your prospects' location.
Chrome Extension
You get two very useful chrome extensions with any paid plans of Reply.io at no additional cost.
The first one is an extension to find or scrape emails from LinkedIn profiles to build a list of highly targeted prospects.
The second a Gmail Extension is called for Name2Email which lets you find the emails of your target prospects by just typing out the name and domain.
It is the attention to such details and the additional features that make Reply.io stand out from other cold emailing tools.
Pricing
Reply.io has three pricing categories namely Individual, Business, Enterprise, with Enterprise being the custom plan designed for specific large companies.
The Individual category comes with three plans depending on the number of contacts you can reach per month.
- 1000 contacts per month - $70 per month per user,
- 3000 contacts per month - $90 per month per user,
- Unlimited contacts per month - $120 per month per user.
You get 20% off when paid annually bringing the price down to $55, $70, and $90 per user per month respectively.
The Business category has 3 plans as well depending on the number of users in your team,
- Starting from 3 users - $70 per month per user,
- Starting from 5 users - $60 per month per user,
- More than 10 users - $50 per month per user.
The Business category surely gives a better value for money provided you have a team of more than 3 members.
Integrations
Reply.io natively integrates with many third-party tools including the below.
CRM
- Bullhorn CRM
- Close CRM
- Copper
- Insightly
- Nutshell
- Pipedrive
- Salesforce
- Zendesk Sell
Lead Generation
- LeadFuze
- Prospectify
Team Communication
- Slack
Recruitment & Applicant Tracking
- Workable
Automation
- Zapier
If you have a development team, Reply.io has extensive API documentation and support that could be used to integrate with any of your technology stack.
Support
Live chat support is available both on the website and also within the dashboard. It is accessible even during the free trial period which is good.
The help & support documentation is also very extensive and impressively structured as courses under Reply Academy. Easily one of the best resource to start with cold emailing and to learn using Reply.io.
There are a lot of video tutorials as well both on the website and the official YouTube channel.
Also, Reply.io has some additional free tools like Outbound sales score generator, Cold email subject line generator, etc.
Overall, the support system in Reply.io is simply fantastic, one of the high points of it when compared to every other cold emailing tool in the market.
Alternatives
Pricing - starts from $49 per month per user unlimited contacts, campaigns, and follow-ups.
Autoklose is a more affordable alternative to Reply.io that covers all the essential cold emailing features.
Some of the features that make Autoklose stand out is the built-in auto verification, real-time reporting, and email tracking.
Autoklose also has a huge database of B2B contacts across various categories. Although it costs an additional fee, it is good for enterprise sales teams to have access to a leads database inside the cold emailing tool.
Pricing - $90 per month per user per month.
Outplay is not just an efficient cold emailing tool but a multi-channel outreach solution to build an all-inclusive campaign.
With a calendar booking option built-in, you can send your emails with the calendar embedded within the emails for maximum conversions.
Additionally, it also has a worldwide dialer that lets you schedule calls easily within the dashboard.
Overall, Outplay is a fantastic feature-rich platform if you are looking for an alternative to Reply.io.
Pricing - starts from $39 per month for 1,000 credits and 1,000 unique recipients.
Snov.io is another really impressive cold emailing tool with a built-in email finder, email verification, email tracking, etc.
You can set up drip campaigns in Snov.io similar to Reply.io although calls are not available.
One feature in Snov.io that Reply.io doesn't have is the technology tracker. Additional to the emails you can also scrape the information of all the tech stack that a particular website uses.
It can be very useful for software development firms and agencies to outreach to the right prospect based on the type of software services they offer.
Pricing - starts from $40 per month per seat.
Woodpecker is a feature-packed cold emailing tool with tons of powerful features like advanced personalization, sending emails in prospect's time zone, email throttling to match human behavior, A/B testing, etc.
Similar to Reply, Woodpecker also has a good range of native integrations and API access.
Woodpecker also comes with an agency plan which is perfect for lead generation agencies. The agency plan lets you manage multiple client accounts under a single dashboard.
Pricing - starts from $67 per month for unlimited searches and leads.
ScopeLeads is a cold emailing tool designed for digital marketing agencies.
It has a database of leads specific to various niches across different locations. It is a fantastic tool for agencies offering digital marketing services to local businesses.
Pricing - starts from $49 per month for 1,000 monthly requests.
While everyone knows Hunter.io as an awesome email finding tool, it has a hidden gem as a feature called as Campaigns.
With Campaigns, you can send completely personalized cold emailing campaigns to all the contacts you got from Hunter.io.
You can connect multiple Gmail accounts to the same Hunter.io account and also get all the tracking information of your email campaigns.
Pricing - starts from $99 per month for 2,000 contacts and unlimited campaigns.
Postaga is a cold emailing tool that is designed exclusively for link building and PR outreach. It has an excellent free plan for up to 3 campaigns.
It has a built-in opportunity search feature that helps you find contacts to outreach and build links to your website.
Pricing - starts from $30 per month.
Klenty is a more affordable option with a click to call dialer option available.
Syncs with all the major CRM's including Freshsales, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zoho CRM.
Conclusion
To wrap up, Reply.io is easily one of the best if not overall the best cold emailing tool in the market.
Although it could be slightly more expensive than some of the other tools in the cold emailing space, the built-in support for voice calling, excellent templates, and the outstanding support make it worth every penny spent.
Highly recommended.