Despite the rise of social media and other digital marketing channels, cold email remains one of the most effective ways to connect with potential customers, clients, and partners. 

However, cold emailing comes with its own set of challenges. Crafting personalized messages, managing large contact lists, and ensuring deliverability can be time-consuming and complex. In addition, the sheer volume of emails people receive — an average of 121 a day — can make it hard to cut through the noise. 

That's where cold email software comes in. These tools can help your sales team streamline the cold email process, improve efficiency, and help you book sales calls and meetings.

In this article, we'll share seven of the best cold email platforms for sales teams. By the end, you'll understand their key features, strengths, and use cases, and you'll be able to decide which tool might best suit your needs.

What is cold email software?

Cold email refers to emailing someone you've had no prior contact with. Cold email software is designed to help salespeople create, distribute, and track cold emails. By using cold email software, sales and marketing teams can reach prospects more efficiently and effectively.

What are the best cold email platforms?

Now that you know what cold email software is and how it can benefit your sales team, let's look at the seven best cold email platforms available today.

1. Superhuman

Superhuman is the fastest email experience ever made. Fly through your inbox twice as fast, respond two days sooner, and save more than four hours every single week.

Features like Auto Summarize provide a one-line summary above every conversation, updating instantly as new emails arrive. Plus, Auto Reminders remind you if you don't hear back on an external email — that way, you never forget to follow up.

Instant Event can create an event, complete with title, description, location, attendees, and date and time, taken directly from your email. No more back and forth or copy and paste — turn cold emails into meetings.

WithShared Conversations & Team Comments, sales teams can move faster and collaborate more effectively, with no risk that internal comments leak. Similarly, Shared Drafts let you share the full context of an entire conversation with managers, executives, and your wider team.

Snippets let you insert phrases, paragraphs, or whole emails with keyboard commands, while Team Snippets ensure everyone has immediate access to existing workflows, best practices, and important documents.

Superhuman also works wherever you do — on Android and iOS devices, as well as Windows and Mac computers. Sign up for Superhuman today.

2. Outreach

Outreach emphasizes sales strategy and outcomes. Its AI capabilities include generative account research, predictive revenue forecasting, and smart deal assistance. Outreach also provides sentiment analysis, auto-generated follow-ups, and real-time conversation intelligence. 

For sales teams seeking an all-in-one platform to boost win rates and hit quotas, Outreach can be a strong contender.

3. Apollo.io

Apollo.io is an AI-powered sales solution with features for cold email outreach and lead generation. Its intelligent contact and account search capabilities — coupled with AI-driven workflows — streamline the prospecting and outreach process.

Plus, Apollo.io provides sales engagement and deal management tools, creating an end-to-end platform for sales teams.

4. Woodpecker

Woodpecker is a specialized cold email outreach tool for streamlining and optimizing email campaigns. Its standout features include condition-based campaigns and personalization at scale, allowing sales teams to create highly targeted and customized outreach efforts. 

Woodpecker offers free email verification and warm-up services to improve deliverability, a crucial aspect of successful cold emails. Additionally, the platform's adaptive sending and inbox rotation features help sales teams avoid exceeding sending limits and maintain a healthy sender reputation.

5. Lemlist

Lemlist is a powerful cold email platform designed to maximize outreach effectiveness. Its advanced personalization features — including automatically adding LinkedIn profile pictures to emails — take customization to the next level. 

Lemlist's built-in warm-up tool, lemwarm, can optimize email deliverability by gradually increasing sending volume. The service also offers multichannel outreach capabilities, including automated LinkedIn connection requests and follow-ups. 

6. Mailshake

Like Lemlist, Mailshake provides a unified platform for managing email and LinkedIn outreach campaigns. This multi-channel approach sets it apart from traditional email tools, allowing sales teams to engage prospects across different platforms without switching applications. 

Mailshake's design emphasizes efficient prospect engagement, providing tools tailored for cold outreach. The platform's focus on simplicity and efficacy helps sales team create, send, and track personalized campaigns at scale.

7. Hunter.io

Finally, Hunter.io is a specialized tool designed for email discovery and verification. Its standout features include a powerful email finder and verifier, which helps sales teams locate and confirm email addresses with high accuracy.

The platform also offers multi-channel prospecting capabilities, allowing sales teams to find leads across sites like LinkedIn. The software also provides a dedicated cold email campaign feature, enabling users to send personalized messages at scale and track performance metrics.

The bottom line

While these cold email software platforms offer targeted solutions for outreach campaigns, Superhuman keeps deals moving — it's the most productive email app ever made, saving sales teams four hours per person every single week.. 

Sign up for Superhuman today.