Smartlead Review. Best in class tool for email campaigns
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I'm heading 11 projects at Thyleads. Thyleads Pvt Ltd is a lead generation and demand generation company. We use Smartlead extensively in our day to day life. We use it for sending bulk emails to our potential leads/prospects. Sometimes use it for responding to inbound emails. Sending bulk emails with accuracy and spam filters is a challenge for agencies like us. We rely heavily on our emails landing in the inbox not to in the spambox. Email warms and connections to outlook is taken care by Smartlead. I have been using Smartlead from past 2 years in my org. and we have seen 70-80% accuracy in emails landing in inbox. This number is above average compared to other tools. I can schedule campaigns, check and dowload the status of the campaign, run dynamic fields in the campaign; these are some of the use cases I work on daily basis.
Pros
- Create Email campaigns- For sending Bulk emails, I create email campaigns and add list of prospects/leads to reach out. Add mailbox for sending emails.
- Email tagging/ categorization: when a lead replies, I can tag the response as OOO, interested, follow up etc. based on the response received. This has made my life easier as I dont have to login again and again to check the response.
- Response directly from the Smartlead dashboard. I have integrated grammarly however, Smartlead suggest replies based on the response from the lead. With one-click I can respond to the prospect.
- I can do A/B test in the email campaigns and choose which email to be sent in 2nd or 3rd sequence or vice a versa.
Cons
- Suggestion in the automatic replies. This could be more enhanced, if claude is integrated, it could have given more decent reponses rather than generic ones.
- Some lead responses land in untracked replies. I have responded to one of the prospect after 40 days while checking untracked replies.
- Every month 1-2 days, Smartlead is out of service, no email responses, no slack integration operational, then we have to check with support and it suggest to check again later. This shouldn't happen as we rely heavily on our responses.
- with slack integration, Smartlead should mention the email Id from which the response is received. there are times when I receive a slack pop up but dont see in Smartlead dashboard
Return on Investment
- Smartlead is an easy-to-understand tool. I have given a day training to my peer and he/she started creating campaigns and sending emails therefore, yes it did impact my cost and time spend during training and user adoption.
- I would again say mostly positive happened the day we onboarded Smartlead. The tools gives us the complete picture of our email senquence and performance on the project level.
- If I would have got more detailed reporting such as campaign wise OOO, or no replies on the dasboard itself. For such reports I have to download the sheet. If I get more numbers, reports it would help me to identify where are the grey areas I can work upon
Usability
Alternatives Considered
Mailshake, Instantly, Salesloft and Apollo.io
Other Software Used
HeyReach, Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Canva, Zoho Payroll, Slack, Fireflies.ai
