You’re on the lookout for the best cold email software and think lemlist might be it?

We get it. If you’re doing cold outreach every day, the software you use will play a huge role in your success (or failure). Low open rates, templates that feel too generic, being ghosted by your prospects—these are all factors that fuel frustration, and you need an outreach tool that can address these frustrations.

In this article, we’ll see if lemlist can live up to the expectations with a definitive, no-fluff lemlist review. The idea is to slice through the noise to analyze each feature, every advantage, and every downside. By the time you get to the end, you’ll have a solid idea of whether lemlist is the right tool for you.

A Quick Overview

Here is what lemlist offers at a first glance.

lemlist FeatureWhat You Can Do With It
Multichannel SequencesReach prospects through emails, LinkedIn and cold calling to increase response rates and book more meetings.
B2B Lead DatabaseAccess a list of 450M+ verified B2B contacts to find and reach decision-makers faster.
Smart EnrichmentGet your leads’ verified emails and phone numbers, ensuring your messages are delivered and get replies.
Personalization at ScaleUse AI variables to send highly personalized messages to thousands of prospects without manual effort, boosting engagement and replies.
AI SequencesCreate ultra-targeted multichannel campaigns within seconds.
Email Warmup and DeliverabilityAvoid the spam folder and reach inboxes.
Advanced ConditionsAutomate outreach based on prospect behavior to send the right message at the right time.
Unified InboxManage all prospect replies from email, LinkedIn, and other channels in one place for faster follow-ups.
Tracking & TestingMeasure outreach performance and optimize campaigns with data-driven insights and A/B testing.
IntegrationsConnect with your CRM and other tools to streamline workflows and keep prospect data up to date.

But What Is lemlist?

lemlist is your AI-powered sales engagement and automation platform. To put it briefly, it makes your bulk messages feel like they were manually written.

And that’s important because generic emails belong in the trash. lemlist is for people who want their messages to hit home, not just hit inboxes.

lemlist’s Top Features

Let’s see how this tool brings value to your cold outreach efforts.

1. Multichannel Sequences

Your prospects aren’t just checking their emails—they’re active across multiple platforms. So why limit yourself to one channel?

In fact, a multichannel prospecting strategy can double reply rates. This is why lemlist allows you to connect with your leads via email, LinkedIn, and calls. The tool especially stands out with its automatic steps for LinkedIn actions since other tools only let you create manual tasks for these.

Multichannel sequence example from lemlist

You can create sequences and automate follow-ups like in the campaign example above. Simply tell the tool where and when you want to reach out to your prospects and it will schedule everything for you.

The automatic steps include emails, cold calls, LinkedIn invitations, profile visits, chat messages, and even voice messages, allowing you to stand out in your communication with your prospects.

Automatic steps from the lemlist dashboard

Not sure about which sequence to create? You can choose from a library of cold outreach templates or let AI generate your campaigns for you (but more on that later).

Option to create sequences with templates or with AI

2. B2B Lead Database

Prospecting is that manual part of your day-to-day that consumes time. This is because qualified leads don’t just grow on trees. You need extensive research, accurate data, details about your prospect’s industry, job title, company and more.

Here, lemlist’s sales lead database offers more than 450M leads through which you can slice and dice with advanced filtering to find your ideal prospects.

lemlist's lead database showing 183k leads when filtered to job title HR manager and company hiring globally

The filters give you various criteria like location, job title, seniority, company size, etc. This data is refreshed every 30 days so you have accurate information about your leads at your fingertips.

3. Smart Enrichment

Of course, getting accurate information about your leads’ company, position or location details is one half of the story (or even less). Because without contact details like email addresses or phone numbers, you can’t reach out to them. In fact, B2B sales reps lose about 27.3% of their time attempting to contact unreachable leads.

You can overcome this problem with help from lemlist’s Email Finder and Verifier (or phone number finder if you are looking to do a bit of cold calling).

A screenshot showing a list of enriched leads from lemlist's database with deliverable email addresses and phone numbers

A provider can usually get you email addresses with a 30-60% find rate. lemlist’s email finder tool increases this to 80% using a method called waterfall enrichment. This entails going through multiple providers instead of one when searching for an email address.

For example, lemlist will first look at data from Dropcontact, and if the email address it finds there is invalid, it will search Prospeo. Let’s say the email address it gets from Prospeo is risky. It will then search Icypeas. The idea is that it will move from one provider to another until it finds a valid email address.

An image showing how lemlist's waterfall enrichment works

You can try out the tool’s free version to get a feel for how easy finding email addresses can be. All you need is the first name, last name and company name of your lead.

4. Personalization at Scale

Don’t expect to receive replies from your prospects if you are sending generic messages. The cold outreach landscape is simply too competitive and your prospects are likely receiving communication from multiple sales reps. You need to stand out.

Here’s how lemlist allows you to do that with personalization features.

AI variables

AI variables dig into data points like industry, job title and recent social media moves to craft intro lines that hit the mark with your leads.

lemlist already has a library of prompts that you can copy and paste into your custom variables. You can use them to:

  • Clean data like job titles and company names;
  • Segment your leads;
  • Create hyper-personalized messages like engaging P.S. lines and icebreakers.

Example:

Screenshot of engaging PS linee created by an AI variable

Text variables

These are dynamic texts that insert specific information about the recipient.

Example:

Hey {{firstName}},

Is {{companyName}} also struggling with {{painPoint}}?

Liquid syntax

This allows for conditional logic so the tool inserts content based on the information you have about the recipient.

Example:

{% if job_title contains ‘Manager’ %} As a manager, you understand the importance of…{% else %} I wanted to reach out because… {% endif %}

Personalized images and videos

You can integrate text variables and liquid syntax into images and videos as well. We have found these to be effective in increasing reply rates.

Example:

Example of personalized image in cold email

5. AI Sequences

Remember those multichannel sequences? They’re great, but creating them from scratch with all the steps and follow-ups will be complicated and feel like manual work.

lemlist has a feature that lets AI create them for you. And it’s pretty straightforward. The AI sequence generator gets you to fill in a simple paragraph that explains what you do and why you are reaching out.

Screenshot of the AI sequence generator

Once you have filled this in with the necessary information, you can click to generate your campaign, and let AI do its magic.

Example of an AI generated sequence

6. Email Warmup and Deliverability

Of course, all your personalization and outreach efforts will go to waste if your message never reaches your prospect’s inbox.

Here, lemlist offers a comprehensive solution using email warmup and inbox rotation.

Inbox rotation allows you to rotate between different email addresses when sending your emails so you are not contacting too many people from any one address. The added advantage is that you can reach out to more leads in your campaign.

As for email warmup, you have lemlist’s internal tool, lemwarm, which comes as part of a subscription plan to lemlist.

Screenshot of the lemwarm dashboard

lemwarm automatically sends and receives emails from a highly qualified network of 10,000 users in a human way. This helps build up your sender reputation and keeps your emails out of spam.

The tool also monitors your technical setup, tracks spam folder placements, and measures your deliverability score, all aimed at ensuring your emails reach their intended destination.

7. Advanced Conditions

Once you start setting up your outreach sequences, you’ll realize some sequences work better if they proceed differently depending on your leads’ actions. This is where lemlist’s advanced conditions come in.

Let’s take the example of one of our multichannel outreach templates. If your lead is active on LinkedIn, you will want to send an invite and continue the communication through LinkedIn chat. However, if they don’t accept your invite, you’ll have to follow up with emails instead.

lemlist allows you to easily schedule your campaign to plan for such a scenario.

Example of an advanced condition in an outreach sequence

8. Unified Inbox

Handling many multichannel campaigns simultaneously can lead to missed or lost messages. To solve this issue, lemlist has incorporated a Unified Inbox.

This means you can view and answer any message from any channel in one unique inbox.

Screenshot of lemlist's unified inbox

Here, you also get your leads marked as Interested or Uninterested by lemlist’s AI so you can relocate your efforts to the most promising deals.

9. Tracking & Testing

If you’re not tracking or testing your outreach efforts, you’re simply guessing. And guessing is not going to increase your reply rates or book you more meetings. You need to have a good understanding of what’s working and what’s not working to optimize your strategy.

With lemlist, you get a visual snapshot of your key activities and results including open rates, reply rates, unsubscribe rates, and so on.

Graph showing lead funnel over time along with bar charts showing an overview of the lead funnel from lemlist's analytics dashboard

You can customize the dashboard by adding widgets, headings and text. The widgets give you a range of analytics from lead analysis to email performance, call activity analysis, best time to call, etc.

They are also highly interactive with filtering and sorting options. You can review your outreach strategy by looking at global stats and data based on sender, campaign, channel or lead actions.

But performance tracking isn’t the only weapon you have in your arsenal to optimize your outreach. You can also do cold email A/B testing. This option not only allows you to test between two different emails but also lets you test entire sequences.

Screenshot of an outreach sequence A/B test

The way it works is simple. You create a sequence A and a sequence B, and lemlist automatically splits your lead list into two groups, sending them different sequences.

While your campaign is running, you get analytics from your A/B test to see which sequence or email has better metrics.

Metrics showing the result of an outreach sequence A/B test

If you have a clear winner like in the A/B test example above, you can choose that email or sequence to continue the campaign.

Screenshot showing how the user can choose the winner of an A/B test

10. Integrations

Having your outreach data scattered across platforms means you’re wasting time switching between tools and missing crucial engagement signals.

lemlist connects directly to your tool stack to sync contacts and track engagement. It logs all your activities, tasks, and messages across channels, making it easy to automate reporting and follow-ups.

You can integrate the platform with:

  • Popular CRM software like HubSpot and Salesforce through native integration;
  • Data enrichment tools like Clay and Leadfuze;
  • Cloud-based VoIP phone systems like Ringover and Aircall;
  • Workflow software like Zapier and Make which include further integration capabilities.

Check the full list of integrations to see how you can include lemlist in your existing workflows.

lemlist Tutorial

Interested in seeing the tool in action? Here’s a video that shows exactly how you can book clients using lemlist.

If you want to explore the capabilities of the tool further, visit lemlist academy and see how you find and enrich leads, avoid spam, launch campaigns, optimize and scale for better performance, and integrate with existing tools using the API.

Pricing and Plans

The subscription plans are simple and straightforward.

The free plan includes the lemlist Chrome extension, allowing you to get up to 100 emails and 25 phone numbers each month for free.

The paid plans get you more leads, along with access to email warmup (lemwarm) and your very own personalized booking page (lemcal).

Screenshot of lemlist's pricing page

If your sales team finds the amount of sending emails limited, you can purchase additional ones for $9 each. You also have the option of paying in your preferred currency (EUR, USD or GBP).

Is lemlist Worth Your Money?

The best way to find out is to try the tool for yourself, which you can do by getting a 14-day free trial.

That being said, lemlist is a sales engagement platform that goes beyond cold outreach. This means you’re not just paying for cold emails, you’re paying for leads, verified contact details, multichannel communication, personalized outreach, deliverability, performance analytics, and much more.

Let’s have a look at the advantages and downsides, as well as what users have said so far.

lemlist Pros & Cons

✅ Pros❌ Cons
Multichannel sequencingRequires initial familiarization to make the most of its capabilities
Next-level personalizationBasic plans have restricted access to advanced support
Strong AI features that save you hours of timePricing is more suitable for those who prioritize value and features over budget constraints
B2B lead database and enrichment that gets you your leads’ verified contact details
Advanced email deliverability
Native integration with major CRMs
Extensive resources for self-help and learning (outreach templates, AI prompts, etc.)
Free 14-day trial

What Customers Are Saying About lemlist

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

G2 – 4.5 (264 reviews)

Capterra – 4.6 (387 reviews)

Customers’ approach to lemlist is overwhelmingly positive. Here are the ways in which the tool has been transforming cold outreach for its users:

1. “Best Tool for Outbound Email”

A verified user who has been using the tool for more than 2 years called it the best tool for outbound email and praised its API functionalities.

Screenshot of user review titled "Best tool for Outbound Email" from Capterra

2. “A Game-Changer for Sales Teams”

A user specified being able to secure two significant sales thanks to lemlist.

Screenshot of user review titled "Lemlist - A Game-Changer for Our Sales Team in the Pharma Industry" from G2

3. “Better Than the Competitors”

A user shared how he sees lemlist as superior to competitor Instantly.

Screenshot of user review titled "It simply beats Instantly for me!" from G2

4. “Amazing Customer Service”

Another user heaped praise on lemlist’s customer service.

User review titled "Very happy with features and documentation, but blown away by amazing customer service" from G2

5. “2x Replies and 70% Savings”

Mindee was able to double reply and open rates while saving money by using lemlist. The team celebrated saving time as well as money thanks to automating tasks like lead research and manual campaign setup.

lemlist Alternatives

Popular alternatives to lemlist include:

  • Outreach — a sales engagement platform with great CRM integrations
  • Salesloft — an AI-powered tool that streamlines sales processes as well as doing cold outreach
  • Apollo — for sales engagement with a strong B2B lead database
  • Instantly — cold outreach automation with email warmup

Let’s see how they compare against each other.

ToolEntry PriceLinkedIn OutreachB2B Lead DatabaseEmail WarmupPersonalizationMultichannel InboxFree Trial
lemlistFree planText, image & video
OutreachOn requestText only
SalesloftOn requestText only
Apollo$39/monthText only
Instantly$30/monthText only

Final Verdict

Given there is hardly any functionality that it lacks, lemlist is the gold standard of cold outreach tools. Its features allow you to incorporate tried and tested methods into your outreach strategy, equipping you with everything you need to get more sales.

While the user reviews and success stories speak for themselves, there is only one thing left for you to do. Test the tool for free with a 14-day trial and find out if it’s worth the hype.

lemlist team

Your source of actionable outreach tips and strategies that will help you get replies and grow your business.