Thinking of using Instantly.ai for your sales outreach? We can help you out. In this Instantly.ai review, we’ll take a close look at its features, usability, and value for money to help you decide if it’s the right tool for your business.
We’ll share our experiences and insights to help you make an informed decision.
Whether you’re an experienced sales professional or a business owner looking to improve your sales outreach, this Instantly.ai review aims to equip you with the knowledge to determine if Instantly.ai is the right tool for you.
Let’s start the Instantly.ai review with a quick overview of the tool.
Instantly.ai review: An overview of the tool
Instantly.ai offers a range of features designed to enhance and streamline B2B sales processes. These include lead generation, email warmup, campaign management, a unified inbox, CRM, and analytics. This tool is designed to help businesses identify potential leads, improve email deliverability, manage email campaigns, consolidate conversations, simplify customer relationship management, and make data-driven decisions.
The significance of Instantly.ai in the B2B sales landscape is considerable. In a digital age where effective sales outreach is crucial, Instantly.ai equips businesses with the tools they need to connect with potential clients efficiently. Its comprehensive feature set allows businesses to manage their sales outreach efforts from one platform, reducing the need for multiple tools and simplifying the sales process.
Instantly.ai features
Now that you know about the features Instantly has for sales automation.
1. B2B Lead Finder
Instantly.ai provides a B2B leads database for helping you in searching SQLs faster. Here’s how it works:
Automated Search: Instantly.ai searches through vast databases, social networks, and websites to find individuals and companies relevant to your business.
Custom Filters: You can tailor your search criteria based on industry, location, job titles, and other parameters.
Contact Information: Once it identifies promising leads, it provides contact details such as emails, phone numbers etc., making it easy for you to reach out.
2. Email Warmup
Instantly provides automated and unlimited email warmups for boosting email deliverability.
Sender Reputation: Instantly.ai maintains a warmup pool of over 200,000 real human accounts that interact positively with your emails to build up your sender reputation.
Automated Process: With a single click, Instantly enables you to run automated warmup process for all your sending accounts.
3. Campaigns
Instantly.ai provides automated campaign facilities. They help you to run targeted, efficient email campaigns.
Smart Scheduling: Users can use variables, message sequences, and intelligent scheduling to maximize deliverability and response rates.
Zapier Integration: You can connect other third party tools seamlessly for advanced automations with zapier integration.
Inbox Rotation: Instead of separate campaigns for each account, you can use inbox rotation to rotate emails across accounts naturally.
4. Unibox
Unibox is a centrally managed master inbox feature provided by instantly.ai. It streamlines communication, ensuring no lead falls through the cracks.
Unified Inbox: With unified inbox feature you can manage all your campaign replies from a single place.
Lead Management: Users can mark leads as positive or negative, forward or respond to book meetings, and close deals—all from one simple interface.
5. CRM
Instantly.ai offers some CRM related features that help users stay organized and build stronger relationships with the prospects.
Lead Tracking: Keep tabs on interactions, follow-ups, and deal stages.
Notes and Tags: Add context to each lead for personalized communication.
Pipeline Visualization: Helps you see where each lead stands in your sales process.
6. Reporting and Analytics
Instantly.ai provides actionable insights that help users make informed decisions and fine tune their sales strategies.
Open Rates: Understand how many of your emails are being opened by the prospects from each campaign.
Conversion Metrics: Track leads from initial contact to conversion.
Click through Rates: Track how many of your links are being clicked by the prospects
Campaign Effectiveness: Optimize based on real data.
Instantly.ai review: Pros and Cons
So, you got the idea finally on the main features offered by Instantly.ai. Now let’s look at some of the pros and cons of Instantly.ai for sales outreach.
Pros of Instantly.ai
- Unlimited sender accounts – Instantly lets you connect unlimited sending email accounts. It helps you send emails in higher volume and also reduces the chance of lowering your sender reputation.
- Extensive B2B lead database – Instantly.ai provides a vast database of B2B leads for helping you connect the right people your business can serve.
- Optimal time-based sending – Instantly lets you schedule and send time-based emails based on your prospects’ time zones for optimal email open rates.
Cons of Instantly.ai
- Lack of multichannel outreach – Instantly.ai currently doesn’t have any multichannel sending capabilities. Users miss the chance of engaging prospects via top channels such as LinkedIn, Calling, Whatsapp and text messages.
- High price – The pricing is high for instantly.ai for an email automation software. There are other instantly.ai alternatives that offer similar and same features at a lower cost.
- Lack of sufficient direct integration – Instantly lacks direct integration with major softwares and third party tools. Also, some users report about the integration failures with CRMs using Instantly.
- Expensive add-ons – One of the core features of Instantly , lead finder is not free and usually comes as an add-on.
Instantly.ai review: User experience with the platform
Now let’s take a look at what some of the users are saying about Instantly.ai.
Overall rating of Instantly.ai on G2 is 4.9/5 which is one of the highest among the B2B SaaS tools listed in G2.
In this Instantly.ai review, we’ll be only considering G2 Crowd as the trusted source of software review.
Here are some of the most recent Instantly.ai reviews based on verified profiles and organic sources.
While the rating may look top-notch coupled with the majority of positive reviews, there are some serious cons that instantly users have frequently reported. This includes:
- Minimal API integration for working with large set of sales softwares
- Regular malfunctioning and glitches that hamper sales productivity
- Customer response delays and questionable customer responses
- Sudden drops in email deliverability numbers of users with little to no change in the outreach strategy
- Not so helpful blocklist feature for newly added leads to the campaign
Instantly.ai review: plans and pricing
Now to the next step in our Instantly.ai review, Instantly pricing.
Based on the services it provides, Instantly offers 2 plans with segmented pricing such as –
- Sending and warmup
- Leads
Let’s check them out in detail below.
1. Sending and warmup
For email sending and warm-up, they have 3 plans and pricings as shown below.
| Growth Plan | Hypergrowth Plan | Lightspeed plan |
| Starts @ $37/month | Starts @ $97/month | Starts @ $358/month |
| Unlimited sender emails | Unlimited sender emails | Unlimited sender emails |
| Unlimited email warmup | Unlimited email warmup | Unlimited email warmup |
| 5000 monthly emails | 100 000 monthly emails | 500 000 monthly emails |
2. Leads
For B2B verified leads, they provide 3 plans and pricing as shown below.
| Growth Plan | Hypergrowth Plan | Lightspeed Plan |
| Starts @ $47/month | Starts @ $197/month | Starts @ $492/month |
| 1000 monthly verified leads | 10,000 monthly verified leads | 25,000 monthly verified leads |
| Pay for verified leads only | Pay for verified leads only | Pay for verified leads only |
| Enrichment + domain search | Enrichment + domain search | Enrichment + domain search |
| Keywords + lookalike domains | Keywords + lookalike domains | Keywords + lookalike domains |
| Advanced filters | Advanced filters | Advanced filters |
Best Instantly.ai alternative for B2B Sales – SmartReach.io
Since you have been looking for the detailed review of Instantly.ai, here’s something that will surely help you out in your B2B sales outreach.
SmartReach is one of the best Instantly.ai alternatives in the market for sales outreach automation. It is better than Instantly.ai in terms of features, pricing and UI.
What is SmartReach.io ?
SmartReach is AI-enabled Sales engagement platform built to automate and scale sales outreach using multiple channels such as email, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, Calling and text messages.
What makes SmartReach the No. 1 Instantly alternative?
Well, in short everything including its UI, security, features, support !
But that may not be very convincing to you.
So, here’s a detailed list of features that SmartReach provides for sales outreach.
▶ ️Prospect Finder: With SmartReach’s prospect finder tool ProspectDaddy, find important prospect information such as email, LinkedIn URL etc. of your prospects directly from LinkedIn.
▶ AI Content Generator: Generate engaging and personalized email copies with lots of customization criteria using SmartReach Content AI.
▶ Multichannel Outreach: Run automated and semi-automated campaigns on top channels such as LinkedIn, email, Whatsapp, calling and text messages.
▶ Shared Inbox: One common inbox for all your campaign responses. Access and reply to all the different campaign replies. Avoid delayed responses. Bring transparency and collaboration with shared inbox.
▶ Meeting Scheduler: With SmartReach meeting scheduler tool, send automated and personalized meeting links to the prospects. Integrate it with popular calendar tools like Microsoft and Google Calendars. Set-up 1:1, round-robin meetings effectively.
▶ SmartReach CRM: Manage leads, track communications and streamline sales process using SmartReach CRM tool. Change the dynamics of relationship management for your business.
▶ Inbox rotation: Add unlimited sender emails to your campaigns with the help of inbox rotation feature. It lets you manage sending high volume of emails without affecting your sender reputation.
▶ Opportunities Pipeline: Using the opportunities pipeline report, you can get detailed information about your sales pipeline status. Additionally, you can predict your pipeline revenue.
▶ Reports and Analytics: Find detailed and insightful reports and analytics relating to every stage of your sales pipeline. Leverage deal grid report, hot prospect report and many more amazing reports to take data-driven business decisions.
▶ Integrations and Workflows: Connect all your favourite CRMs such as Hubspot, Pipoedrive, Zoho natively with SmartReach. Add any other third party sales tools using Zapier integration and API key.
Instantly.ai v/s SmartReach.io: Which one should you choose?
So far you have learnt about the features of both Instantly.ai and SmartReach.io.
Now it’s decision time.
You have to wisely select the one that –
✅ serves all your sales outreach needs
✅ has a better pricing,
✅ has a responsive customer support
✅ easy to learn and adopt platform
✅ has few or minimal technical glitches (for every SaaS tool, it will be there)
To make your decision making even easier, I have head-to-head compared both Instantly and SmartReach based on a few critical factors.
#1 Lead Generation Capabilities
Instantly.ai provides a large database of B2B lead information helping users find pre-vetted sales qualified leads.
But there are two types of risks associated with this type of B2B leads.
1) A large number of these leads can be unverified and outdated which may damage your sender reputation.
2) Your competitors are also buying leads from the same platform and chances are you are all reaching out to the same decision makers offering similar solutions. It creates tough competition and can hamper your conversion.
To tackle this problem, SmartReach introduced ProspectDaddy which directly provides leads information from LinkedIn. The emails, LinkedIn URL etc. you get are more updated and current. Thus, it keeps your email deliverability and conversion in check.
#2 Personalized communication
Instantly provides a basic level of personalization for email copies using features like merge tags, AI generated subject lines, manual subject lines etc.
SmartReach offers hyper-personalization for your email copies using features like merge tags, AI generated subject lines, manual subject lines, conditional merge tags, Spintax and more.
Effectively SmartReach covers all the personalization features of Instantly,ai + more personalization features for sending targeted cold emails at scale with full automation.
#3 Sales cadence
With Instantly.ai you can only set up sales cadence based on a single channel via email.
With the tighter restrictions in spam and privacy policies by major email providers such as Google, Microsoft etc. you may not effectively scale up your cold outreach campaigns on budget. Plus, you miss out on more engaging channels such as Whatsapp, LinkedIn or calling where B2B decision makers frequently interact for daily communication.
SmartReach provides AI-enabled automated and semi-automated outreach campaigns for all the top channels including LinkedIn, email, Whatsapp, calling and text messages. It helps you engage your prospects via multiple channels thus creating higher response rates and conversion.
#4 Integration with other tools
Instantly currently provides few native integration. Most of the integrations they provide are via a third party tool like Zapier.
It may not be suitable for the medium to large sales teams that use CRMs such as Hubspot or Salesforce that want bi-directional data-sync with added security.
On the contrary, SmartReach provides native integration with popular CRMs (Zoho, Hubspot, Pipedrive, Salesforce and more), calendar tools and other sales software. Plus, users can use Zapier and API keys to integrate with any other sales software. This provides more flexibility to the sales teams of all sizes to manage their customer relationships.
#5 Pricing
The cheapest plan of Instantly.ai (growth plan) starts at $30/month which provides access to email only campaigns.
Whereas, SmartReach provides the same plan with more features at $29/month.
Also, with just an additional $9, you get access to a sales engagement plan at $39/month allowing scale up your sales cadences using multiple channels.
Still wondering about the ROI of SmartReach ?
Check out our case study section for more information.
Instantly.ai review: Final thoughts
To wrapp up this Instantly.ai review, it’s clear that instantly.ai has built a solid reputation for itself in terms of email automation software.
While Instantly.ai is a go-to for discovery, it’s noteworthy that sales teams often prefer SmartReach.io when it comes to outreach and engagement for B2B sales.
SmartReach.io’s specialized capabilities in ensuring email deliverability and engagement give it an edge, highlighting the importance of using the right tool for the right job.
Despite its strengths, Instantly.ai is not without its limitations. Email only outreach is a major concern for modern sales teams, especially in an era where businesses are using AI and multichannel outreach to engage and convert prospects effectively.
As you consider integrating Instantly.ai into your business toolkit, remember to weigh its features against your specific needs and budget. And while you’re at it, don’t overlook the added benefits that SmartReach.io can bring to your outreach strategies. The right combination of tools can propel your business forward, so choose with both insight and foresight.
