Cold email outreach is a crucial sales technique for B2B companies, but effective campaigns have many challenges. High open rates with low response rates are common obstacles, with the average cold email campaign only seeing between 10-25% of prospects that actually reply to a cold email campaign. 

The best cold emails grip recipients because of how personalized they are– generic email blasts often go unread or deleted. At worst, your domain could get blocked by your email service provider. 

Without the right software tools, sales and marketing teams cannot identify their best-performing campaigns, optimal contact strategies, accurate email validation, and highest-converting messages. Marketers need a scalable platform that helps them craft personalized cold emails, protects their domain, increases response rates, and provides robust analytics. 

In this article, we compare two popular cold outreach tools that companies use for email marketing campaigns: Apollo.io and Lemlist. 

High-level comparison between Apollo.io vs. Lemlist 

First, let’s start with a high-level comparison between the leading cold email marketing platforms on the market today. While the three platforms share some core features, there are some differences to consider: 

Features and Benefits

Apollo.io 

Lemlist

QuickMail 

Send personalized emails

✅

✅

✅

A/B Testing

✅

✅

✅

Easy UI

✅

✅

✅

Inbox rotation

❌

✅Pay per inbox

✅

Automated LinkedIn Outreach

❌

✅As a paid add-on

✅

Native cold calling integration

❌

✅

✅

AI Reply categorization

❌

✅

✅

Unlimited team members

❌Pay per user

❌Pay per user

✅

Unlimited monthly email sends

❌

❌

✅

Included CRM

❌

❌

✅

Advanced campaign analytics

❌

❌

✅

Affordable pricing

❌

❌

✅

Email Verification Integrations

❌

❌

✅

99.99% Uptime 

❌

❌

✅

As cold email software platforms, Apollo.io, Lemlist, and QuickMail all provide various advanced integrations and major CRM integration, along with other additional features. Apollo.io uses Zapier integrations for the majority of its app integrations.  Lemlist and QuickMail build seamless integrations into their platform directly while also supporting Zapier integrations. 

These integrations are necessary to support the sales cycle and measure the effectiveness of drip campaigns while tracking qualified leads and active leads.

What is Apollo.io?

Apollo.io is a sales engagement and marketing platform used by businesses for lead generation, email outreach, and analytics. It provides features to find contacts (primarily their email accounts), create automated nurture email sequences, email outreach stats, and more. Apollo.io is best known for its contact database, boasting over 260 million contacts in 60 million companies. They also integrate with most customer relationship managers (CRMs) directly or through Zapier integration. 

Who is Apollo.io Best For?

Apollo is best suited for B2B companies that want an all-in-one platform to streamline their sales processes. While their platform does not allow robust customization or personalization, it is great for automated and generic cold email outreach.   

However, Apollo has received mixed reviews from users regarding its ease of use, flexibility, and reliability. Some common complaints are that the UI is clunky, workflows can't be customized enough, or there are limitations to cold email outreach and campaign management. Some users report that glitches happen too frequently.

Apollo.io is a great option for users who are new to prospecting, anyone who needs to track down contact information, and for enterprise companies with large databases of contacts. Often, sales and marketing teams that need complex, automated, and generic sales workflows find a lot of assistance with Apollo.io. 

The platform is great for businesses focused primarily on generic lead generation and finding contact information for individuals in companies. 

What's Missing from Apollo.io?

A cursory look through user reviews on G2 and Capterra will show you that while Apollo.io does provide quite a lot of functionality, it is lacking in several areas: 

  • Intuitive user interface  

  • Flexible customization of workflows

  • Reliable deliverability and uptime

  • Helpful, hands-on customer support

Here are some user reviews worth considering from Capterra: 

And a note on their customer service from G2: 


Apollo.io Pros and Cons

Pros 

Cons

Robust features for finding and enriching contact data

Some users report upwards of 30-40% of contact data is inaccurate 

Generic workflow automation with basic dynamic variables 

Unable to easily add customized personal touch to campaigns at scale

Strong analytics and reporting that informs sales which campaigns and messaging are the most effective

Limited visibility into email campaign performance

Integrates with many common business apps

Frequent bugs and glitches 

Multiple uses: emails, social media, phone calls, task management, etc.

Complex UI, and difficult to learn and navigate

AI chatbot support on demand with email support available as necessary 

Impersonal customer support, long delays 

What is Lemlist?

Lemlist is a cold email platform focused specifically on cold outbound email campaigns. It provides automation to personalize and send high-volume cold emails while optimizing deliverability. Lemlist provides email automation to support the sales cycle, cold outreach stats, and offers Zapier integration. There is also the option for direct CRM integration to Hubspot and Pipedrive. 

Who is Lemlist Best For? 

Lemlist is good for small sales teams, lead-generation-focused groups like sales development representatives (SDRs) and business development representatives (BDRS), and other roles focused primarily on cold outreach. 

Lemlist may be a worthwhile consideration for companies just starting out. However, concerns around their platform’s reliability mean that any company looking for cold email outreach and campaign management at scale should look for another option.

What’s Missing from Lemlist?  

Similar to Apollo.io, users have reported glitchy behavior while being underwhelmed by the customer service they’ve experienced. Like Apollo, both cold email software platforms get mixed reviews from users regarding their usability and reliability.

Some major gaps users point out in Lemlist are:

  •  Support for complex, multi-step workflows  

  •  Robust deliverability monitoring and inbox placement tools

  •  Quality customer support

Here’s a review from G2 that is thematically similar to many other similar reviews: 

Lemlist Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

A/B testing capabilities

Low deliverability compared to competitors

Strong email personalization and segmentation 


Very limited workflow customization  

Easy to get started with basic workflows

Unresponsive customer support

Intuitive UI, easy to understand

Multiple complaints about buggy performance


QuickMail: The Best Tool For Your Email Marketing Campaigns

The best cold outreach is personalized and always changing. Generic automation doesn’t work as effectively anymore. It’s not just about tracking down the right email addresses. 

That’s where cold outreach solutions like QuickMail come in: high-volume personalization that boosts open rates while centralizing conversations with prospects for organized sales follow-up. QuickMail helps sales and marketing professionals with sales processes. We'll help you save time and energy.

QuickMail is an effective tool, built to automate every kind of outreach. It’s a powerful hub of lead generation for your sales teams. With a reliable platform, strong customer support, included CRM features and full integrations, and a high degree of personalization, QuickMail combines the core strengths of Apollo.io and Lemlist tools while overcoming their major weaknesses.    

As an outbound sales engagement platform, QuickMail’s UI, workflows, custom fields, custom email sequences and analytics empower small-to-medium sized B2B businesses. Whether you’ve just started your company or you’re scaling up quickly, our platform will help you optimize your prospecting workflows. 

Key Benefits of Using QuickMail

1. The Email Outreach Tool Guaranteed to Increase Deliverability  

Ready to send cold emails your prospects will actually read? 

QuickMail obsesses over deliverability and inbox placement, ensuring your emails get to the right people and valid email addresses every time. As you scale, you don’t have to sacrifice open rates for high-volume. The deliverability tools, metrics, and resources help ensure 95% of your outbound emails are delivered to your prospects. 

  • Connect multiple inboxes and use QuickMail’s inbox rotation to spread out emails to stay under anti-spamming policies 

  • Free native auto-warmer integration with MailFlow.io

  • Free domain and blacklist monitoring

  • QuickMail uses Google-approved sending API that mimics a human cadence

  • Utilize real-time deliverability scores for every inbox on unlimited campaigns 

  • Works with any email provider or email client 

  • Untraceable email footprint email service providers can’t block

“The deliverability in QuickMail is amazing. We are getting 40-80% open rates & response rates and booking more meetings than we can handle." 

- Matthew F. B2B Marketer, G2 Review

 2. Easy-to-Use and Customizable Workflows  

Tired of clunky UI and complex workflows that don’t deliver what they promise? It’s time to experience cold emails with personal touch at scale. 

QuickMail provides intuitive workflow automation for multi-step email outreach while still allowing for flexibility and customization.

  • Let AI be your assistant. QuickMail lets you use AI for time-intensive tasks: handle unsubscribe requests, detect out-of-office responses and follow-up once prospects return. You can even start a prospect on a follow-up campaign based on their reply type. 

  • Built-in lead enrichment: curate cold email templates with custom fields, unique data, and sync seamlessly with your CRM. 

  • Highly-personalized automation: in addition to basic attributes, you can create custom attributes elevate cold emails by giving them a more natural, human touch. Both basic and custom attributes save time and energy, increasing deliverability to the email addresses in your campaigns. 

"QuickMail booked 4.2x more meetings than Lemlist, the previous outreach software we used.” - Dave V. Agency Owner

3. Manage Prospects as a Team

Ensure a prospect never falls through the cracks with QuickMail’s centralized inbox. Your team can focus on connection while QuickMail focuses on automation: 

  • Manage all replies in just one place. All emails from all prospects are detected and categorized including CC, BCC, and new threads. 

  • Monitor all conversations. Keep tabs on every lead at a glance. Your team can read, label, and triage responses without marking it ‘read.’ Team members can respond from any inbox in the account. 

  • Need help divvying up the workload? Review timestamps for every lead, and assign responses to team members so you can develop relationships naturally. 

“QuickMail helped me get the first paying clients for my business and it's still at the core of our lead generation.”

 - Maksymilian M. Head of Technology, G2 Review

4. Optimize your Strategy with Ease

How do you know whether your campaigns are working? Get more sales intelligence and positive replies by learning how prospects and ideal customers are responding to your messaging in real-time. 

  • Run unlimited A/B tests with compare campaigns. Identify the best sending days, subject lines, positioning, messaging, and CTAs. 

  • Track open rates when emails were both sent and opened to valid email addresses.

  • Use sentiment analysis to understand why prospects might unsubscribe. 

“Great for A/B testing and messaging optimization…testing & personalization capabilities enabled big performance improvements.”

- Greyson F., Entrepreneur

5. Cold Email Campaigns You Can Rely On 

QuickMail makes sure your campaigns deliver on time, all the time. Plus, you’ll never have to guess how to use the platform, how to optimize your campaign or how you can get better leads using cold email outreach software. 

  • Never miss a response. QuickMail leads the industry in reliable performance and stability as a prospecting platform with 99.99% uptime.

  • Best-in-class support. Get hands-on help within hours, not days or weeks. Talk to a human, not pre-written templates or bots. 

  • Level-up your knowledge. We’ll equip you with master courses and resources so you get the most out of QuickMail and your email campaigns. 

“Amazing support, you just feel like you want to talk to the team.” 

Alexey S., Business Development Manager

Get Started With the Best Outreach Solution Today: 

Which cold outreach software is the right one for you? It might seem hard to see the difference, at first.

While platforms like Apollo.io and Lemlist have managed to carve a niche in cold email automation, they both have limitations when it comes to personalization, deliverability guarantees, and customer support. As a result, high-performance sales teams often run into roadblocks as their outbound programs scale.

QuickMail is built to assist the sales processes of SDRs, account executives, and demand gen specialists. QuickMail combines an intuitive UI and native integrations with set-it-and-forget-it workflow automation.

With high levels of deliverability, custom fields and sequencing, seamless integrations, combined with granular analytics and attribution, sales leaders can supercharge their cold email campaigns. By determining their best-performing segments and messages, sales reps can continuously optimize outreach. Once Quickmail helps you find the secret sauce for your market, you’re ready to scale.

When evaluating cold email tools like Apollo, Lemlist, and QuickMail, the choice ultimately comes down to reliability, performance, and support. And by all accounts, QuickMail stands apart in its commitment to helping ambitious B2B brands supercharge lead generation and new revenue through cold email. 

Ready to start your first campaign? Sign up for a free 14-day trial today.