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AI Sales
Instantly.ai Full Review: All You Need To Know [2024]
lemlist team
July 25, 2024
|
7 min. read
lemlist team
LAST UPDATED
July 24, 2024
READING TIME
7 min.
Contrary to popular belief…
Sending cold emails is still an effective way to grow your business.
However, you’ll need dedicated cold email software to empower your teams to handle high-volume campaigns.
This review explores Instantly.ai—a modern and feature-rich cold emailing solution.
We’ll analyze Instantly.ai’s cold emailing capabilities and how to use them effectively to grow your business.
Instantly.io overview
Instantly is a fairly new player in the cold email space. It’s a competent cold email sending tool with access to:
Lead Finder
Lead Management
Analytics
Unibox features
AI-driven analytics
A/Z testing (many variables as opposed to A/B testing)
Templates to automate email sending.
However, one its best features is email warm-up.
What is email warm-up?
Email warm-up aims to ensure high deliverability and improves your sender reputation. For modern email outreach, email warm-up is essential because it’s harder than ever to land in your audience’s inbox.
For whom is Instantly.ai?
Instantly is a good option if you’re a digital agency or a small business looking to grow their business through cold emails. It offers good value-for-money plans and lets you try out their product before purchasing.
It’s not for everyone, though, especially for enterprises that send thousands of emails per day. Its lack of integration also makes it unfavorable for businesses that use third-party services.
Features
Instantly is a feature-rich cold emailing tool.
It offers just the right mix of features rather than offering everything to the user and overwhelming them.
Lead finder
Campaigns
Unibox and CRM
Tracking and analytics
Lead management
Unlimited email accounts
Unlimited warmups
Inbox rotation
Email verification
Cold email catalyst
Private community access
Let's go through the key features below to better understand what Instantly.ai can do for you:
Lead Finder
Lead Finder is an essential Instantly feature.
It solves a main challenge of cold email, i.e. finding relevant and accurate leads. According to Instantly, they verify leads’ information themselves rather than relying on 3rd party tools.
To make lead finding easier, you can use Lead Finder’s filters. These filters include:
Job Titles
Industry
Employees
Revenue
Domains
News
…and more
Since you can apply multiple filters, narrowing down your search and finding leads worth pursuing becomes easy.
So, to search for CEOs in the United States in the Computer & Electronics, you’ll need to set three filters, as shown in the image below.
You can keep adding more filters to fine-tune your search. Instantly Leads Finder also offers an Enrichment feature that lets you upload a list of people and enrich their contact info.
You can also search leads with keywords such as agency, streamers, etc. And, if you’re not sure about the keyword or the filter to apply, all you need to do is use their clone clients feature that shows similar prospects.
According to Instantly, they have a vast database of 160 million contacts. That’s a significant database.
Lead Finder is the core Instantly feature, however, it is not available in the free version.
Also, there are export limits of 1000/month and 10K/month for the Growth Leads and Hyperleads packages (their leads packages).
Campaigns
Instantly is keen to give you all the necessary features in a single place.
One such feature is Campaigns, where you set up leads, sequences, and schedules to reach your target audience and continue growing your leads.
The Campaign UI is straightforward.
To get started, create a new campaign and name it accordingly. Once done, you’ll get a clean set of options, including adding leads, adding sequences for emails, or setting a schedule for email sending.
Users can also access Options to tweak the campaign according to their needs.
If you’re an advanced user, you can also check out advanced options to further optimize your campaign, such as:
A/Z testing to auto-optimize
Setting a limit to max new leads
Setting up CC and BCC to your emails
I found the Instantly Campaign feature self-sufficient for most users. It offers decent automation options (such as scheduling) and options to customize the Campaign, making it flexible for most use cases.
The Campaign and Lead Finder feature work together.
For instance, you can easily send leads to specific campaigns. Also, the "evergreen campaign" option keeps sending leads to the campaigns based on your Lead Finder parameters.
In short, Instantly's Campaign is a good fit for most users.
Unibox and CRM
Instantly makes it easy with Unibox to reply to all your email accounts and campaigns.
Sending all your cold emails from one account can lead to some deliverability issues, so you’ll need to use the inbox rotation feature and spread the load over multiple accounts.
It is common for cold email experts to use multiple emails to scale their campaigns. However, this leads to a challenge to handle replies from all the email accounts. This is where Unibox comes in, as it provides a centralized place to handle all the replies from multiple email accounts.
In conjunction with Unibox, you also get Instantly’s Warmup feature. As Instantly is a tool where you send mass emails, you’ll need to warm up your email address so that the chances of it landing in spam are reduced -- increasing sending reputation.
Instantly also added the CRM (Customer relationship management) feature.
It enables you to manage workflows for your campaigns.
Once you get a response, you can create a work card on the CRM showing the value of each deal. It offers motivation to work towards changing the leads to customers. The CRM lets you reply to your leads and move them to the next stage of the workflow.
Tracking and Analytics
Instantly’s analytics feature helps you understand how your campaigns perform over time. It gives you insight into various email and campaign metrics, including emails sent, opens, replies, or link tracking.
All their reports are in UTC, which might be convenient or inconvenient depending on how you like to work.
Despite some customers complaining about the lack of detail in Instantly’s analytics, I found their analytics and tracking sufficient. It gives insight into your overall cold email effort and analytics on the campaign level.
Lead Management
Lead management Instantly gives you the ability to manage your leads. You can create lists solely or based on campaigns.
Its AI prompt feature gives you access to the Template Hub, which contains useful automated actions to ease your lead management effort. For example, you can use the “Company Name Cleanup” template to clean up the company name before sending emails.
Similarly, you can use the “General unique opening sentence” to write unique opening one-liners for cold emails.
All in all, Instantly’s lead management is good but there's room for improvement.
Even with AI prompts and the ability to manage lists, it lacks some key features that would be nice to have -- such as calendar and email queue additions.
What is Instantly missing?
Instantly is a promising and useful cold email solution. However, it could be better. Some of its drawbacks include:
Limited lead management features
Lack of advanced features
Lack of multichannel acquisition features
Lack of native integrations to data sources
Documentation can be improved to help users
No proper mobile support
Lack of visual builder
Before jumping to any conclusions, you need to consider the software age and value for money. As a relatively new solution, it offers decent features at good value.
Instantly.ai pricing and value for money
Instantly uses a freemium model for its customers. It divides its plans into two main categories:
Sending & Warmup
Leads
Sending & Warmup
These plans are great for customers who want cold email solutions for sending and warming features. You get to choose between three plans:
Growth
Hypergrowth
LightSpeed
Starts at $37 per month
Starts at $97 per month
Starts at $358 per month
It provides access to unlimited email accounts, unlimited email warmups, 1000 uploaded contacts, and 5000 emails monthly.
It offers everything Growth plans offer plus 25000 uploaded contacts, 100K emails monthly, and premium live support.
This plan offers everything in HyperGrowth plus 100K uploaded contacts and 500K emails monthly
If you go for the yearly plan, you can save up to 20% per year. Before you choose any of the plans, try the free plan.
Leads
If you want to utilize the lead features Instantly, then choose between:
Growth Leads: It starts at $47 per month with 1000 verified leads monthly, advanced filters, enrichment, and keywords.
Supersonic Leads: This plan starts at $97 per month with everything included in the Growth Leads plan, plus 4500 verified monthly leads instead of 1000.
HyperLeads: It is a more expensive plan, starting at $197 per month with 10K verified leads monthly and everything in the previous plans.
Light speed: Everything in Hyperleads and 25,000 verified leads/month.
Again, on yearly plans, there’s a 20% discount:
What customers are saying about Instantly
Instantly has overwhelmingly positive reviews.
One verified customer praised Instantly for how they managed to simplify email outreach:
While another customer showed their appreciation for Instantly’s support team:
But as with any app or service, it’s not only rainbows and butterflies.
A recent customer expressed their frustration at the amount of bugs they encountered:
Another dissatisfied customer complained about the poor deliverability they got on emails sent out with Instantly:
Instantly.ai Ratings
Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
G2 - 4.9/5 (2,691 reviews)
Trustpilot - 4.5/5 (305 reviews)
Pros and cons
✅Pros
Warming and Sending features
A/B testing
AI-driven analytics
AI prompts for easy templating
Automated email warmup feature
❌ Cons
Limited lead management features
Lacks advanced features as it is new to the market
No multichannel acquisition features
Lack of native integrations to data sources
So, is Instantly worth it?
Yes, it is. However, the removal of its lifetime deal surely will be missed.
To get a better perspective of its value, you need to take a look at competitors' pricing. Its growth and hyper growth plans offer value for money.
Instantly vs lemlist
Instantly.ai is a robust cold email software.
Despite its age, it offers valuable features for agencies, marketers, and businesses who want a compact tool to search and manage leads, manage campaigns, and transform them into real customers.
Although Instantly has a pretty solid lead database, lemlist offers a database with +450 million leads, so you can carry out your lead sourcing in bulk and an 80% accurate Email Finder and Verifier.
Instantly, with its good warmup features, provides a high email deliverability rate.
lemlist on the other hand, offers free access to lemwarm, a specified tool to boost your deliverability, warm up your emails, and monitor your outreach activities.
While Instantly AI-driven analytics and template modules also make automation accessible throughout the whole cold emailing process, lemlist offers a full AI campaign generator with which you can highly personalize all of your emails, generate icebreakers and create complete sequences.
Instantly’s pricing model is good. However, it can become confusing as they offer different plans for Warming & Sending and Leads.
Despite its value for money, enterprises looking for large-scale cold emailing might find Instantly limiting.
lemlist, on the other hand is perfect for scaling your personalized cold email campaigns, plus:
It offers straightforward pricing plans ⬇️
There’s a 20% discount on yearly plans, and a 10% discount on quarterly plans.
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