Instantly AI Review: The Best AI Email Outreach Tool

Instantly is a wonderful service to send scalable and deliverable cold emails. With AI optimizations, automation, warmup features, and deliverability & campaign analytics, Instantly might just be your next emailing software.

Justin Gluska

Updated April 29, 2024

Instantly.ai campaign overview

Instantly.ai campaign overview

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Whether you’re working on scaling your digital agency or looking to start one, you're going to have to send emails at some point. We've recognized the massive power cold emails have after landing our first client because of them a few years ago. After one worked, we never looked back. Growing an agency is really hard work. On top of the work you have to do to design websites, produce copy, and run social campaigns, you always have to focus on growing the business while you work inside the business.

After varying levels of success with email-sending tools, we stumbled upon Instantly. Instantly AI is an email outreach automation platform that allows you to scale and optimize your email campaigns. With the ability to send a massive amount of monthly emails with an unlimited number of email accounts, you finally have access to a tool that gives you complete control over the cold email process.

Instantly is the best cold email software our agency has used by far. Other tools limit you to a few accounts (or make you pay for each of them) and complicate the warming process, which can be incredibly limiting & tiresome. Other tools also don't include great analytics, bounce protection, or have a friendly user interface.

With Instantly comes an unprecedented level of control over your outreach, enabling you to customize everything to maximize conversions. With their automatic warm-up feature, AI-driven analytics, and powerful A/Z testing capabilities, the hardest thing you'll have to do is actually create your campaigns! No more unnecessary stress. Upload your email lists, configure domains and messages, and let the software do the rest. Over the next few minutes, we'll give you our honest review of Instantly, highlighting both the good and bad, and showcase how it's helped us scale our agency faster in 3 weeks than in the previous 3 years.

Why Use Instantly?

There are so many email outreach tools I wouldn't even be able to list 10% of them if I tried. We used to use Lemlist but stopped as you were limited by one email per user (and had to pay monthly for each additional). The tool itself was ok, but we were trying to scale faster & actually liked keeping money in our bank account. There are other tools like MixMax and Reply.io but again, we don't like the limited mailbox capabilities coming with them.

We also bumped into the founders Reio and Nils on Twitter and we were quite surprised to see they were practically building the tool in public, asking the community for feedback, and highlighting client success stories. Starting at $37 a month, their growth plan is cheaper than many other alternatives on the market.

Their Hypergrowth plan allows you to send 125,000 monthly emails, warm up unlimited domains, A/Z test campaigns, and unlock priority support – truthfully this is everything you need to scale. It's been about 5 months of using the tool now & after running our new campaign (with multiple domains sending multiple emails a day) we tripled our client count in 3 weeks. Of course this is based on your copy & email lists, but the power to send emails across multiple domains helped us 5-10x our sending volume. It worked so well that we recently purchased the yearly plan – we really don't see ourselves switching to any other software in the near future.

Yearly plan for Instantly

This isn't an overview of how to configure & scale email campaigns with Instantly, but we just wanted to be transparent with the success we've had. Of course email success is representative of the copy you send & people you send to, but splitting 8000 emails across 20+ domains has saved us hours of time & hundreds if not thousands of dollars in new domains & email accounts.

Campaign performance for instantly

Instantly's Best Features

There are very little negatives we could say about Instantly. Besides a few UI/UX quirks, most of the issues we have are simply due to the novelty of the product. Lack of third party integrations, support, and further advanced email features will probably be added with time. Props to the development team, it seems like they tried to take all the great features of current market email tools & combine them into a product without carrying over the negatives.

PROS

CONS

  • Unlimited Domain+email connections included

  • Send emails from any email provider

  • Automated email warmup feature (can be disabled)

  • Gradually scale email sending

  • Set delivery limit, schedules, & more per campaign

  • Automatic follow ups & smart step sequences

  • Email bounce detection & powerful analytics

  • Team member support

  • GDPR compliant

  • No current lifetime deal

  • Reletively new software, so more advanced features are rolling out with time

You can (and likely should) use tools like Apollo.io to find and filter ideal customer profiles (ICP) and generate CSV files for upload into Instantly.

Instantly Pricing

Unfortunately, there's no longer a lifetime deal available, but pricing remains extremely competitive to industry competitors with their Growth plan starting at $37 & Hypergrowth at $97 a month. If you want to send more than 125,000 monthly emails, or upload more than 25,000 contacts you'd have to pay for the Light Speed plan, at $358 a month.

Lemlist is probably the biggest Instantly competitor, and its basic plan starts at $59 per user each month. Instantly is a lot more affordable, especially for more diversified email sending.

Growth

Best for smaller marketing campaigns

$37/month

  • Unlimited Email Accounts

  • Unlimited Email Warmup

  • 1,000 Email Contacts

  • 5,000 Emails Per Month

  • Advanced Sequencing & Scheduling

  • Email & Account Analytics

  • Reputation Protection & Bounce Detection

  • General Support Tickets

Hypergrowth

Best for consistent, high-quantity campaigns

$97/month

  • Everything in Growth

  • Advanced Warmup Capabilities

  • 25,000 Email Contacts

  • 100,000 Emails Per Month

  • Invite Team Members

  • Unibox and Advanced Features

  • Global Block List

  • A-Z Testing

While it may lack some advanced features compared to other recruiting software, it offers the best value for its price, especially for small companies looking to scale their email outreach on a limited budget.

Who Is Instantly Made For?

B2B sales representatives - Instantly can assist sales representatives automate their cold email campaigns, enabling them to reach many potential customers in far less time.

Business & agency owners - By automating their cold email marketing, Instantly can help business owners save time and money. This can free up time for other crucial responsibilities like business management or concentrating on different marketing strategies.

Marketers - Marketing experts can utilize Instantly to effectively send cold email campaigns to a huge number of prospective customers. Ideally, marketers would be able to run more campaigns in the same amount of time using Instantly compared to other software

Online retailers - By reaching a larger number of potential customers in a shorter amount of time, Instantly can help increase the visibility and sales of an e-commerce business. Its clever warmup procedure can also help keep emails out of the spam folder, increasing the chances that they will be seen and acted upon by potential buyers.

Our Personal Thoughts

Great software doesn't always need to reinvent the wheel. Some of the best tools I've ever used simply enhance the experience and remove the negative qualities of the tools predecessor. It seems like that's the case with Instantly. Again, how creative does an email sending software actually need to be? It really doesn't. Instantly checks nearly all the boxes off for a B2B prospecting software. Combining high deliverability rates with optimized campaigns & master copy skills will ultimately lead to you 100x'ing your investment on the product. We rushed to purchase the yearly plan when we saw the Black Friday promotion last November and think that was one of our top investments of the year. It has a very fair monthly price for the features it offers and potential return it can provide to a company.

Instantly.ai splash screen from website homepage

Some users have expressed concerns about Instantly's user interface and contact management system, which may not be as intuitive or centralized as other alternative platforms (beyond Lemlist).

Instantly Vs Lemlist

The biggest competitor of Instantly is Lemlist. Lemlist provides many of the same features Instantly offers, but is a lot more costly to scale sending. We used Lemlist for about half a year before switching over to Instantly as it just wasn't sufficient enough. Their best feature was lemwarm, allowing us to warm up our domains to maximize the daily send rate. We switched over to send campaigns with them after having success with the warming process, but stopped after the software became buggy, inconvenient, and simply not scalable enough based on their pricing. I do miss their colorful UI features though!

Many users also report lemlist has a terrible support network, although we never ran into these issues when we used it. A lot of users claim they've disputed sketchy charges as it was hard to manage their account. Additionally, their support is aimed at giving customers refunds rather than improving and fixing what customers are upset about.

The founders of Instantly literally build & advise in public:

We put together a chart highlighting the biggest differences between Instantly and Lemlist. Both have their advantages and suit better audiences. They also have fairly different pricing structures.

Instantly

Lemlist

  • 4.8 stars with 60 reviews

  • $39/per month *unlimited email accounts

  • Works well with small to medium sized businesses

  • Limited to 5000 emails per month

  • 4.2 stars with 116 reviews

  • $59/per email/per month

  • Better for freelancers/small businesses

  • Limited to 500 emails per day

Final Thoughts

As mentioned before, the actual quality of your cold emails come from within – your ability to craft and run proper campaigns. But why should you have to stress about deliverability, pricing, and connivence when you're trying to grow your business? You shouldn't.

Instantly still has room for improvement in terms of analytics, campaign management, and A/B testing capabilities. However, despite these limitations, it remains a cost-effective solution for businesses with smaller budgets.

There is no doubting the sheer awesomeness of Instantly. With the assistance of its AI delivery optimizations, follow-ups, and integrated reputation management, in just a few hours you'll see an increase in the effectiveness of your campaigns & decrease in stress levels. Have you used Instantly before? What are your thoughts on it compared to other tools? Regardless of what you use, we hope this helped you, best of luck & happy emailing!

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Written by Justin Gluska

Justin is the founder of Gold Penguin, a business technology blog that helps people start, grow, and scale their business using AI. The world is changing and he believes it's best to make use of the new technology that is starting to change the world. If it can help you make more money or save you time, he'll write about it!

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