Smartlead Review: Swiss Army Knife for Email Deliverability [2024 ]

Are you pouring time and effort into outbound emailing only to have your hard work end up in the spam folder?

Do you feel like you’re in a losing battle with maintaining your domain reputation? You’re not alone. These issues plague many businesses trying to connect with a wider audience.

As email providers continue implementing stricter spam policies, I delved deep into the intricacies of email deliverability practices. One tool that was recommended multiple times is Smartlead.

In this Smartlead Review, we will take an in-depth look at how it addresses these challenges, offering a more efficient way to reach out to your audience without risking your domain reputation.

What is Smartlead?

Smartlead is an AI-powered tool designed to streamline and enhance your email outreach efforts. It’s especially useful in today’s digital landscape, where email spam policies are becoming stricter.

Smartlead helps you to build multi-channel outreach campaigns as well as implement deliverability best practices, ensuring your cold emails don’t end up being blocked.

Why it caught my attention

• Comprehensive Outbound Strategy: Smartlead offers robust campaign creation AND deliverability features, covering your outbound strategy holistically.
  
• User-friendly Design: Built by outbound experts, its intuitive interface is easy to navigate.
  
• Unique Pricing: Offers unlimited email accounts for a monthly subscription, enabling scalable cold email campaigns

Product Features

Let’s look into the key feature that sets Smartlead apart from other sales automation tools in the market.

Campaign Features

Let’s start with the basics. The campaigns feature lets you schedule and send automated multi-channel messages to your prospects like more leading platforms do.

Importing leads is as simple as uploading a CSV file or integrating it with your CRM. Once your contacts are in, building email sequences is straightforward, and you can create multiple variants in each sequence step for effective A/B testing.

The editor provides all the necessary formatting options along with a handy template feature.

An excellent standout is the spintax feature. This tool allows you to automatically change salutations or adjust them based on variables like time—meaning your emails can automatically open with “Good morning” or “Good evening,” depending on when they’re sent.

Helping you bring in an additional layer of personalization and humanization.

Auto-Rotating Email Accounts

If you’re doing outreach and are worried about daily email limits or damaging your email reputation, this feature is worth looking into. You can bulk upload multiple domains and select which ones you want to use for auto rotation.

From there, Smartlead does all the heavy lifting. It automatically rotates your campaign across these domains – prospect A gets their emails from Domain A, prospect B from Domain B, and so on.

It’s all automated, meaning there’s no need for any manual intervention on your part. Quite a nifty feature, if you ask me.

AI Warmups

This feature is designed to defend your cold emailing efforts and help drive predictable revenue.

It does this by gradually increasing the number of emails sent, which can help avoid spam filters and build a positive reputation with Email Service Providers.

Smartlead does this by emulating human-like sending behaviors with randomized patterns and using unique identifiers to cloak warmup emails, thus sidestepping automation parsers.

If you have an existing email account, it’s recommended to let it warm up for at least two weeks. Aim for a 2-3 month warmup for a new domain.

Moreover, Smartlead allows you to warm up multiple email accounts simultaneously and automatically matches your leads’ mailbox provider with yours. So, you can forget about manual MX record matching to boost delivery.

Unified Master Inbox

This is a game-changer for those managing multiple domains. Instead of juggling numerous mailboxes and wasting time searching for replies, Smartlead centralizes all your emails in one place.

Moreover, you can create your own categories and tag replies, making it easy to filter replies by intent. Think of it as building your own mini-CRM.

Follow-up Automation

This feature helps you eliminate some of the manual work by building sequences to auto-handle any lead response based on specific keywords.

Whether a lead responds with “Out of Office”, “Not Interested”, or “Interested”, you automated these follow ups completely.

Customized White Labeling 

This feature is targeted toward agencies or individual service providers. The white labeling feature lets you provide clients with a bespoke email platform under your brand.

You can even create your own domain. Your clients can access reports and campaigns and even reply from the master inbox.

It’s a great way to enhance your brand reputation and differentiate yourself from competitors. Plus, you can build your pricing packages independently and offer them to your clients.

API & Integrations

Smartlead’s webhook and API infrastructure lets you communicate with many products in the market.

Not many out-of-the-box integrations are yet offered, but you can use Zapier, Make, N8N to push or pull data between Smartlead and your existing stack. Native integrations to Hubspot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, etc seem to be on the roadmap.

Smartlead Pricing

Smartwriter has standard subscription plans. Each plan has a different number of active leads to work and emails to send per month.

What sets Smartlead apart is its flexibility, providing access to unlimited email and warmup accounts, regardless of the plan you choose. This means you won’t have to worry about paying extra for each individual account.

Basic Plan

You take full advantage of all features for up to 2000 active leads. 6000 emails per month. Price USD 33/Month

Popular Plan 

You take full advantage of all features for up to 10000 active leads. 40,000 emails per month + analytics. Price USD 65/Month

Pro Plan 

You take full advantage of all features for up to 30000 active Leads. 150,000 emails per month + API access and integrations. Price USD 78/Month

Smartlead Pros and Cons

Let’s examine the pros and cons of using Smartlead for your outbound strategy.

Smartlead Pros

• Comprehensive Outbound Strategy: Smartlead offers robust email campaigns creation AND deliverability features, covering your outbound strategy holistically.
  
• User-friendly Design: Built by outbound experts, its intuitive user interface is easy to navigate.
  
• Responsive Support: Known for resolving issues within an hour and constantly improving based on Smartlead reviews on G2 and other platforms.
  
• Unique Pricing: Offers unlimited mailboxes for a monthly subscription, enabling scalable cold outreach. This approach is not usually the case with other sales engagement tools.
  
• White Label Solution: Easy to brand as your own and manage multiple client accounts.

Smartlead Cons

• Native integrations: As of now, they aren’t fully developed. Currently, you need to use Zapier + webhooks to set up integrations. It’s not as seamless as it could be, but it gets the job done. However, I believe that as Smartlead continues to evolve, the integration process will become more streamlined and user-friendly.

Smartlead Alternatives

When evaluating a lead generation tool, it’s always important to compare. Here are a few alternatives to Smartlead:

• Amplemarket
• Reply
• Outplay
• Lemlist 

Personal Experience: Outbound Emailing

As someone who routinely trains sales teams to improve cold outreach to expand their pipeline, I’ve realized the growing significance of email deliverability.

Yes, creating effective sequences and crafting high-quality messages is crucial. Still, with email providers becoming increasingly strict, even a few complaints about your emails can block your domain.

If you plan on sending more than a handful of cold emails, I believe this risk can only be mitigated with AI-powered email assistants and sales automation tools.

My Experience Using Smartlead

When testing Smartlead, I found the platform to be seamless. The user-friendly interface made navigation easy, and the well-thought-out deliverability features simplified the process of improving delivery without having to dive into the technical nitty-gritty.

In addition to my own positive experience with Smartlead, I also have a number of contacts in my network who use the platform.

They’ve generally had good things to say about it, with only minor complaints related to occasional time lags while using the platform and better native integrations.

So, if you’re looking for an intuitive, effective tool to enhance your email outreach, Smartlead is definitely worth considering.

Conclusion: Should You Buy Smartlead?

In conclusion, should you invest in Smartlead? Based on my experience and observations, my answer is yes, if you’re looking for a Swiss army knife for email deliverability.

With email spam policies becoming more stringent, it’s crucial to understand and implement deliverability best practices if you want to continue using cold emailing without being blocked.

The builders of Smartlead have clearly understood this need and created a tool that simplifies the process for the rest of us, making it easy to implement and automate these practices within our own outreach strategies.

I believe that Smartlead is the top choice in the market for individuals, agencies, and early-stage startups.

However, if you’re part of a larger organization with a complex IT infrastructure, you’ll need to evaluate Smartlead in the context of its potential for integration within your existing systems.

If you meet the criteria and are as enthusiastic about this product as I am, give it a ride; testing is free of charge.

FAQ

Is Smartlead worth it?

Smartlead is definitely worth considering for individuals, agencies, and early-stage startups. Its innovative features and user-friendly interface make it a valuable sales productivity tool for enhancing outbound email strategies.

However, larger organizations with complex IT infrastructures may need to evaluate its potential for integration within their existing systems before making a decision.

How can the Smartlead help with Email Deliverability?

Smartlead offers advanced deliverability features and AI technology that help improve email delivery rates. These features include randomized sending behavior, auto-rotating email accounts, and automatically matching your leads’ mailbox provider with yours.

By implementing warm-ups and deliverability practices into your outreach strategy, you can increase the chances of your emails reaching their intended recipients’ inboxes instead of being marked as spam.

Is Smartlead legit?

Yes, Smartlead is a legitimate and reputable outbound email tool with a growing user base.

It has received positive user reviews, currently 4.8/5 from +50 Reviews on G2, and is considered a top choice in the market for outbound emailing strategies.