Instantly is easily the most prominent cold outreach platform out there, even when competitors compile the lists. From the outside looking in, the platform is a pretty dominant all-in-one cold outreach tool focused on sales engagement and lead intelligence. But is that just smoke and mirrors, or does it really smoke the competition where it matters?
We’ve done the work and put together an honest Instantly.ai review based on what we think makes a complete cold outreach platform. At the end, we’ll give our honest verdict on whether Instantly really does dominate the market or if it’s all hype, and you can come to your own conclusions too.
What Makes A Complete Cold Outreach Platform?
Modern cold outreach is a multi-step process with a lot of nuance, and a platform needs to offer a range of major and minor features to dominate the competition. The main factors we consider essential for cold outreach are:
- Lead generation: You can’t have cold outreach without a way to get leads, and while tons of great cold outreach tools don’t offer lead gen functions, the top pick should address this need.
- Deliverability: Outreach only counts if it actually reaches your prospects, so a truly dominant platform needs to guarantee that your message consistently reaches your leads.
- Outreach: A cold outreach platform has to have solid outreach features. This goes without saying, so the focus here should be on how easy it makes outreach for users, how effective it is at helping get more responses, and how it works at scale.
- IT Factor: Doing everything well makes you a good, competitive option. To really dominate, a platform needs to offer something exceptional to really get over the finish line and claim that distinction.
In this article, we’ll go over each of these facets of Instantly’s cold outreach suite and decide whether or not it deserves to dominate the conversation and (by extension) the cold outreach space.
Lead Generation
Instantly’s lead generation abilities are top of the line, and we were impressed right from the jump. The platform gives users three broad prospecting tools that
B2B Database
Instantly features a massive B2B database with more than 450 million leads, all pre-verified and ready to export. The coverage is great, with professionals from every field and industry across the globe. Some prospecting tools act as aggregators, pulling in massive lead databases from multiple external sources. We found that Instantly, however, maintains this database externally to guarantee accurate, up-to-date lead data.
Supersearch
When you have a massive amount of data, you need a way to find what you’re looking for. Instantly has Supersearch, which makes finding your ideal leads almost effortless. It combines AI-powered natural language search with a range of neat filters and features. We searched for companies by location and even filtered most of them by requesting to see only recently funded B2B leads.
Instantly also allows for leads to be imported directly into your campaigns and existing leads in all the common formats.
Website Visitors
The last function Instantly offers for prospecting is gathering warm leads by logging B2B leads that are already looking at your company’s or campaign’s website. As an add-on, Instantly detects and logs website visits from B2B leads or company accounts, adding them to your outreach campaigns or even pushing them to your team on Slack for instant outreach.
Deliverability
Instantly’s deliverability toolkit is one of the most thorough we’ve ever gotten our hands on, but that’s barely doing it justice. We highlighted three broad features the platform offered to give us peace of mind that outreach would reach leads.
Multi-Layer Verification
Instantly’s leads all come pre-verified, and that same verification is available for leads from other sources. This multi-layer verification covers syntax and format checks, domain and MX records, SMTP mailbox testing, multiple risk screens, and much more. This exhaustive process already eliminates a ton of deliverability issues. It also flags catch-all domains, so anyone can decide what they want to do with them based on their campaign needs.
Email Warming
Instantly has 24/7 email warming built in, and takes it a step further with Slow Ramp. This toggleable feature switches the automated email warming system from regular tactics to a more measured, stalled approach. This mimics how a real person would send emails, making it undetectable by automated flagging programs from your ISP. In that sense, Instantly literally lets you eat your cake and have it too.
Inbox Placement
The final tool at the end of the line is inbox placement tests. Instantly offers unlimited, automated inbox placement testing that gives proactive insights so you can stop deliverability problems before they even pop up.
After the extensive verification and email warming, we didn’t really see a need for this, but it will absolutely appeal to heavy users like agencies.
Outreach
Outreach is the main event, and no one expected the platform to fall short here. It’s beyond solid, but as we said at the start, that’s a no-brainer. What really hit home is how easy it made crafting and sending email outreach at scale.
Instantly gives you one-click outreach, sending emails to all your leads at once. The platform lets you add unlimited emails to help you meet your quotas effortlessly. There are also done-for-you accounts available, with as many high-quality US IP Google email addresses as you need.
There’s a ton of personalization for your outreach, too. With both manual personalization and AI-driven features like an AI content writer, spam checker, spintax generator, and more, we definitely see Instantly driving serious response rate boosts for agencies and marketing teams.
CRM
As a bonus, Instantly even features a full-featured CRM tool for managing leads and building pipelines. You get a master inbox to manage conversations across email accounts and campaigns. Your account also includes unlimited seats to suit teams of any size, making it great for agencies. Importantly, the CRM also gives you access to two new outreach channels: calls and SMS messages right from the browser interface. Instantly also features integrations with Slack and other productivity apps that our team loves.
The IT Factor: AI Copilot
With such solid features across the board, it’s almost overkill that Instantly still augments everything with AI assistance. AI Copilot is basically ChatGPT for outreach and sales, and it works great. We spent a long time bossing Copilot around with regular, everyday English questions and commands. In response, we got quick, accurate answers and service.
Here are the two major features that make it the decisive IT factor for Instantly:
Copilot memory: Copilot allows you to put in a URL for your business or campaign website, or upload a relevant document, then analyzes it to better understand what you’re about and work that into all AI-generated email copy and outreach material.
Copilot tasks: This feature lets you use Copilot to create custom automation for recurring tasks that you want done daily, weekly, or monthly. This is a great way to set up easy automation, and Instanly also offers custom AI agents for more complex automation setups.
What’s the Verdict?
With everything taken into consideration, it’s clear that Instantly meets all our predetermined benchmarks across all the major facets of cold outreach. It’s not perfect, but we’d be hard-pressed to find another platform that offers more value across all these parameters.
So the verdict’s in: Instantly absolutely dominates cold outreach, and the platform does it while still being accessible and affordable for pretty much everyone. Take advantage of the free trial and give Instantly a try for yourself, and we’re confident you’ll agree.
