Mailshake

If anyone is trying to find potential leads by building relationships with their customers, I can't recommend 'Mailshake' enough! At The Big Phone Store, we use Mailshake. It allows you to personalise each email you send to your customers so that you can include a first name, last name and even a topic that is specific to that customer. It essentially gives you the tools that you need in order to send huge amounts of emails that are all personalised.

The pro's of Mailshake include their lead catcher (A tool where Mailshake will detect which replies are leads and then allow you to assign people to them). You can also 'clean' your contact's email addresses to get rid of any emails that are very likely to bounce back and not be delivered to the intended recipient.

The con's of Mailshake is mainly the amount of emails you can send - but this is not a fault of Mailshake as it uses your own email domain to determine how many emails can be sent on a daily basis (If your email address is fairly new and you don't send many emails, then you will only be able to send around 10 emails per day until you have built your 'reputation').

At Viva Flavor, we use Mailshake exclusively on Viva Flavor for the site's email marketing.

Pros & Cons

It's very simple to use, with clear step by step instructions for creating your first campaign. It's a great starting point in particular for those who haven't previously spent a lot of time on their email marketing.

You can run multiple campaigns at the same time, track bounce / open / response rates, and tweak your templates based on ongoing campaign performance. There are more advanced services out there, but for most entrepreneurs and small business owners it's an excellent all-in-one package.

If there's one negative I've encountered so far it's that Mailshake's list-cleaning service for cold outreach isn't the best. I recommend cleaning your prospect list using another service like ZeroBounce or NeverBounce to check for invalid addresses, and before uploading your data

This will keep your bounce rate lower and your overall deliverability in the black. It's not a big extra investment, but it's great value in the long-run..

Here at MyAudioPlanet.com, we use Mailshake to automate all of your email outreach campaigns when looking for other websites to collaborate with. 

The Mailshake software integrates with our existing email server (GSuite) and that then opens up a whole range of advanced features including mail merge, automated scheduled sending, automated follow-up messages, tracking and much more. 

Example, we use the mail merge feature to import a CSV file of our prospects' contacts with fields for email address, name, website URL and other details about the prospect. We then write a single email message and pull in those fields via variables so that the email message for each prospect is personalized dynamically without us having to do any copy or pasting or any manual work. 

Mailshake then enables us to schedule the sending of those personalized emails to our list of contacts over several days, making sure to space them out over the day and limiting the number of messages sent per day soas not to be flagged for spam.  

We have also configured an automated follow-up message (also personalized) which is sent to all contacts who have not replied after 5 days.We use this to reiterate our original proposal and also to propose an alternative kind of collaboration.  At First we were hesitant about sending these follow up messages but we have been pleasantly surprised to see how effective they were in getting a response,often a very positive one leading to a collaboration. 

There are 2 options for tracking (but I don’t recommend either of them): 

1) Track opens –This uses an invisible tracking pixel in the message and when the pixel is“viewed”, it counts as an open. My advice is don’t track opens. Those tracking pixels can be seen by email servers and they can cause an email to be blocked. 

2) Track clicks – If There are any links in the email message for which you want to track clicks,Mailshake will replace the links with specially coded URLs. Again, my advice is don't do this. If people mouse over the links, they’ll see some very weird-looking URLs that won’t fill them with confidence and they won’t click and probably won’t reply to you. Just keep your original URLs and forget the tracking. Keep it simple. 

The whole campaign takes a few hours to set everything up, but after that, the software will work on autopilot for several days, or even weeks, sending out personalized emails and follow-up messages while you're working on other stuff. It’s a huge time saver. 

Pros

- Send personalized emails efficiently using the mail merge feature.

- Save time with the automated email scheduler.

- The ability to send automated follow-up messages to contacts who haven’t replied after x number of days.

Cons

- It takes quite a bit of time at the start to learn how to use it and set things up correctly.

- There are tracking options but they can cause deliverability and low click-through issues.

- Quite expensive (Currently $59 per month per user) 

At Wealth Awesome, we use MailShake, the best email marketing software to earn leads via cold email outreach.

Pros:

• Personalization: Personalization is a crucial point when it comes to email outreach. You can send a personalized email at scale and gives you complete control and makes cold email tasks less time-consuming.

• Amazing Dashboard: Marketers managing lots of email marketing campaigns simultaneously. They do not have much time to look more in-depth. Mailshake has an excellent dashboard where you can get all insights of campaigns such as open rate, sent rate, reply rate, clicks rate in just one click.

• 3rd Party Integrations:  Mailshake offers you integration with your favorite tool to add to your workflow by automating another part of the process. It supports integration with Slack, Zapier, Google Analytics, Trello, Pipedrive, MailChimp, and many more.

Cons:

• No Live Chat: MailShake doesn't have a live chat option. If you have any questions, you have to send an email on their support email id and wait for a reply. They will reply within 1-2 days.

• Not Offering Free Trial: MailShake does not have a free trial option. They should have to give a free trial to check out how it works and see whether it will be helpful to users.