Instantly vs Apollo: Are they the right fit?

So obviously choosing between both of them can be a hard task, which is why we’ve compiled a comparison of both tools to help you reach a decision quicker.

Instantly overview

Instantly.ai is a sales engagement and automation platform. Essentially it’s an all-in-one platform where you can carry out all of your outreach efforts to gain more clients.

Instantly offers many features that will help you grow your business.

• In automated outreach, you can send multi-step email campaigns with automated follow-ups, set to be sent with predetermined triggers. You’ll receive task reminders and handle responses automatically with Instantly.
• Your emails can be personalized and tailored to your recipients to improve your reply rates. You can either start your messages from scratch or use the predetermined templates, personalizing them as much as you want to fit your brand.
• Regarding lead generation, Instantly offers a lead database with 160M contacts at your disposal. Aside from the lead database, you can also import lead lists from LinkedIn and other platforms and segment them.
• Instantly integrates with email services and popular CRMs, such as Salesforce or HubSpot.
• Thanks to Instantly’s analytics and reporting you will be able to track your KPIs and analyze how your campaigns are doing in terms of CTRs, open rates, reply rates, and overall effectiveness. You will also be able to assess where to adjust to make sure you’re reaching your full outreach potential, including A/B testing.

Apollo overview

Apollo.io is a go-to-market sales engagement platform, that focuses on lead generation, sales engagement, and CRM. Compared to Instantly, Apollo has a larger suite of features to streamline your sales process, some of them including:

• An extensive lead database with +275M contacts and a wide variety of search filters to track down your ideal buyers. Aside from the lead database, you can import and enrich additional contact data, such as email addresses, phone numbers, social profiles, and company data.
• Apollo allows you to automate your outreach with personalized messages, scheduled email sequences, and pre-built templates.
• With Apollo, you can automate your tasks such bulgaria telemarketing as lead nurturing, follow-up reminders, and data entries, or create custom workflows. Aside from task automation, you can facilitate team management by supporting lead sharing, insights, campaign results, and team task management.
• Apollo offers solid integrations with popular CRMs and other platforms such as Salesloft, or Outreach, among many others.
• Apollo offers strong and flexible reporting and analytics using Apollo’s pre-built reports or by creating custom dashboards. You can also choose conversational analytics to enhance your team’s performance.

Features

Although Instantly and Apollo have many features, we’re going to analyze the most necessary ones when building your outreach strategy.

Personalization

In Instantly.ai, you can access the personalization feature “Variables” only after importing your leads.

When you upload the CSV with your leads list, make sure you’ve added your desired variables in columns.

Once you start crafting your email you can include step-by-step guide to adding gifs to your campaigns Instantly vs Apollo the variable in the copy and the subject line.

Bear in mind that if your variables haven’t been added to the list, you will not be able to include them later on in your email copy.

Some of the variables available in Instantly.ai are:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Company Name
• Website, etc

This is a simple but very effective form of personalization.

Although you can include images in your emails by china lists adding the custom variable  {{imageURL}}, these images cannot be personalized.

For Apollo, on the other hand, we can find 3 types of dynamic variables you can include in your manual email copies to add a high-level personalization:

• Basic variables like {{first_name}}, {{last_name}}, {{company}}, {{title}}, {{now_weekday}}, etc.
• Custom variables that you can create.
• And advanced variables that use conditions like {{#if first_name}}”text to show only if dynamic variable exists”{{#endif}}, etc.

Bear in mind, that if you wish to choose the option “Personalize with AI” you can only choose the manual emails, not automatic emails.

With Apollo’s AI, you can also include icebreakers by adding the variable {{apollo_ai_personalized_opener}}. Apollo will then take information from your leads to create personalized icebreakers in your email copies.

Warmup and deliverability

Having a warmup and deliverability feature built into your cold outreach software can really help tip the scales.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how good or AI-generated your email copies are if they aren’t landing in your leads’ main inboxes. With a good and automated warm-up feature you can save yourself many headaches!

In this regard, we prefer Instantly as it has a dedicated warm-up feature, whereas Apollo only offers a small email Ramp-up.

Instantly recently added a new pricing category named “Sending & Warm up”, this is dedicated not only to sending your email campaigns, but sending campaigns that work. Instantly offer +550,000 real email accounts for automated email warm-up.

You can connect unlimited accounts and keep warming them, however you wish to do so with customizable options.

With Instantly’s deliverabilty dashboard you’ll be able to track and monitor where your emails are landing.

On the other hand, Apollo currently lacks an actual warm-up feature. Nontheless, you can still prepare your email account for your campaigns with the Ibox Ram-Up, although it may take a bit more work.

The biggest downside of the Ramp-Up is that. It can take up to two weeks. And during this time your schedules could be slowed down quite a bit.

However, you can monitor the status of the Ramp-up at any time as well as your mailbox health, a very useful feature to know where you need to make adjustments regarding deliverability.

Buyer intent signals

Reaching your leads when they are ready to buy your product or service is crucial to ensure your success. So having a tool that can provide insights into your leads’ buyer intent can be a real asset.

In this regard, Instantly only offer filters in the database (which we will discuss earlier on), so the start here is Apollo.

Apollo send you alerts via Slack, email, or in Apollo’s control center when buying intent signals are detected. This feature ensures that there are little to no cracks in your campaigns, and allow you to save time with extensive research or emails sent at the wrong time.