
Lemlist vs Smartlead: Comparing the two cold email marketing software
When it comes to acquiring new customers, cold email marketing continues to be one of the most effective acquisition methods for SaaS companies. An effective cold emailing campaign has a fair chance of generating growth and providing an excellent ROI.
Utilizing cold email programs correctly can assist you to increase the net number of conversations you have per month. And you can practically automate 99% of your outbound lead generation process if you utilize the right tools. Although sending & most importantly, delivering cold emails into inboxes might be difficult, there are now plenty of cold email services available to help you out. Hence, there’s a need to be wise while selecting the best tool to assist you with every step of the cold emailing process, from personalization to follow-ups to analytics.
In this article, we will analyze the top two cold email marketing software to help you determine which is ideal for your business.
What are cold emails?
A cold email is an unsolicited email sent as part of a demand generation campaign to showcase your brand to someone who is not aware of you and also not actively looking out for you. This is an interruptive way to communicate with business contacts and hence, you would want to avoid spamming them.
Cold emails broaden your reach to your potential leads anywhere on the map. It is a polite and constant process of converting cold prospects into a customer base. These emails are intended to establish a relationship with your potential buyer and drive them down the sales funnel.
Difference between Cold Email & Marketing Email
Each part of email marketing has a unique function and should be adapted to meet its objectives. If we consider email marketing as a pipeline, then cold emails would be at the top of the funnel, while marketing emails would be in the intermittent and bottom parts of the funnel. Let’s dive a bit deeper into the difference between these two kinds of emails.
A cold email is aimed at those who either have absolutely no idea of what you do or have not yet engaged with your business. It is the preliminary step of lead generation and the initial step in guiding prospects through the sales funnel.
Marketing emails, on the other hand, are directed at a particular audience set who have previously connected with your business and signed in to get emails from you. They are warmer leads that want to discover more about your business.
Context | Cold Emails | Marketing Emails |
Target Audience | New Prospects | Existing Customers |
Main Objectives | Introduce your brand, interact, and lead to more conversations. | Inform about the recent additions to your brand, establish brand confidence, and convert leads |
Benefits | a. Increases the reach of your brand b. Expands your contact list c. Brings individuals into your sales funnel. d. Converts clients who are currently utilizing competitor solutions. | a. Build a sense of confidence between your organization and your contacts b. Gives information on how customers interact with your company and service. c. Marketing-qualified leads are converted into sales-qualified leads. d. Aids in the conversion of leads to customers |
What are Email Marketing Tools?
Email marketing tools help organizations to develop and manage email lists, classify the lists where emails are to be sent, and track subscriber replies. Such tools are used to create & deliver personalized emails. These tools are used by marketers to create, send, test, enhance, and evaluate email campaigns.
Let’s through the benefits and purpose of Email Marketing Tools-
A. Optimizations of emails.
B. Creating email reports.
C. Sending cold or marketing emails.
D. Measuring different email metrics.
F. Email creation and designing.
What is the difference between Lemlist vs Smartlead?
Both Lemlist and Smartlead are excellent cold email marketing platforms. Smartlead is a relatively new player in this sector, but it has some unique features to offer that can bring a positive change in cold email marketing. Lemlist, on the other hand, has been in the market for quite some time and is trusted by hundreds of individuals. They know what they’re doing, and collaborating with them will give you a sense of security.
In this post, we will examine the benefits and drawbacks of Lemlist and Smartlead to decide which is more beneficial to your organization and when!
1. Inbox Rotation
Cold emailers utilize inbox rotation to automatically send campaigns from several inboxes instead of delivering the entire campaign from one inbox. This decreases the likelihood of your emails being marked as spam and allows you to send more emails each day.
You can use the inbox rotation option in Smartlead. You may add numerous domains and distribute leads among various email accounts. Smartlead also allows you to completely automate the inbox rotation process. But, with Lemlist, you can only launch one cold email campaign from a single account. Only once that campaign has ended should you create a new sequence from that account.


2. Building Multichannel Outbound Sequences
A multichannel sequence is a method of connecting with prospects across two or more channels (like via cold emails, cold calls, LinkedIn, etc). This has the potential to accelerate your growth if applied effectively.
Lemlist can assist you in building multi-channel sequences. You may use Lemlist to not only send cold emails but also communicate with potential prospects on LinkedIn. You may build a sequence in which you introduce yourself to your potential prospects by sending them LinkedIn invites and messaging them there. Once they are a bit familiar with you, you can start sending them cold emails. This raises the likelihood of them opening and responding to your emails. All of this is possible with only one platform, Lemlist.
But, Smartlead does not allow you to design multichannel outbound sequences. With Smartlead, you can just send cold emails to potential leads and not communicate with them on any other platform.


3. Warming Up of Cold Emails –
An email warm-up is a process of gradually increasing your email-sending flow rate. Your email address must be warmed up before you can establish a solid reputation. A warmed-up email can regularly send and receive messages.
In Lemlist, warm-up is done through a separate platform, that is, ‘Lemwarm’. Even if you are a Lemlist user, you must purchase an additional subscription to access all of Lemwarm’s features (which is obviously on paid basis). The benefit here is that even if you don’t want to sign up for Lemlist, you can use a Lemwarm subscription separately to warm up your emails.
On the other hand, in Smartlead you have a unified platform to warm up your emails and also send your cold emails from. You are not required to sign-up on any other platform or pay extra to get all warming-up features. However, this also means you can only use Smartlead warm-up if you take a Smartlead subscription.
In Lemlist, the optimal spam is to warm up your emails in 1 month, however, in Smartlead the warm-up cycle is of 2 weeks only. But, there is a much lower chance of your email account being blocked by Google if you warm up your email in Lemwarm compared to Smartlead warm-up.


4. Master Inbox
You have a master inbox in Smartlead where you can see a unified view of all the emails you send (from all accounts) and the replies you receive from your potential leads. However, in Lemlist, you must log into each of your email accounts in order to see the sent emails or replies. This obviously consumes a significant amount of your time and reduces the speed that you seek.

5. Integration of Webhooks
Webhook is a means of enabling information to be shared between two distinct platforms or web services. Webhooks are used in conjunction with event-based triggers. Whenever a particular event takes place in one web application, the webhook sends real-time alerts to the other web apps.
Weebhook integration is a relatively simple process in Lemlist. You only need to ‘Add Webhook’ to your account level to get started. This webhook will be triggered for any campaign launched from any of your email addresses registered in Lemlist. However, in Smartlead, you must configure webhooks every time you create a campaign.
6. Leads Uploading and Enrollment in Other Campaigns
There are various ways to upload leads to a campaign in Lemlist. Leads may be imported from CSV files, emails, CRM, LinkedIn, APIs, and other sources. In Smartlead, however, you can only import a lead list from a CSV file.
Both Lemlist and Smartlead can eliminate any duplicate leads that are present in any campaign when you import a lead list. If any of the leads are ‘out of office’ and have not seen your email, Smartlead will allow you to enrol them in any other campaign. In order for them to get your email when they are available. This functionality, however, is not accessible in Lemlist.
7. Account Creation via Bulk Upload
It is a time-consuming task to set up all of your accounts in such Email Marketing Tools one by one. Nevertheless, in Smartlead, you may bulk upload all of your accounts’ information using an Excel file. This functionality, however, is not accessible in Lemlist. You have to manually upload all of the information for each and every account here.

8. Pricing
The price plans offered by Lemlist and Smartlead differ significantly. Lemlist cost depends on the number of seats or accounts you register on their product. But, with Smartlead, it is based on the number of active leads and emails generated each month.
Lemlist offers two price options:
1. Email Outreach – At $50 per seat/month, send tailored cold email marketing campaigns at scale.
2. Sales Engagement – Improve your outcomes by incorporating numerous channels into your sales prospecting for $83 per seat/month.

Smartlead offers three price plans:
1. Basic Plan – At $39/month, you can get 2000 active leads and 6000 emails
2. Popular Plan – At $79 per month, you can get 10,000 active leads and 40,000 emails.
3. Pro Plan – At $94 per month, you can get 30,000 active leads and 1,50,000 emails.

How to Select the Best Email Marketing Tool for Your Company?
Which email marketing solution is best for your team is determined by your company’s demands and goals. Let’s go through some factors for selecting the best tool for you:
A. You should analyse the number of emails that you’d be sending each day from such cold email automation tools and see whether it matches or is close to what you’re looking for at a certain price point.
B. You need to think about how easily and effortlessly you can import prospect data from your existing platform to the cold email marketing tool of your choice
C. Another important thing to consider is if the tool you are choosing can integrate with your existing CRM and the rest of the Martech stack.
Even with all of these considerations, you may encounter additional challenges in setting up cold email automation and selecting the right email marketing tool for your organization. Speak with our cold email marketing professional to get the clarity that you need!