Mailshake Review 2024: Pros, Cons, Ratings

When looking for a sales engagement tool, Mailshake is one of the many promising options available.

With the ability to generate leads, send personalized outreach campaigns, and give data on performance, many sales teams wonder if it’s the right investment for their business.

This post will give a detailed review of everything you need to know to make an informed decision for your company.

What is Mailshake

Mailshake is a sales engagement platform designed specifically to help sales teams with cold outreach.

It allows you to send personalized emails in bulk, schedule automated follow-ups, and manage all your outreach activities from a central dashboard.

This streamlines the sales process, saves time, and helps you connect with more qualified leads.

Mailshake overview

After reviewing this software, we can deduce that Mailshake is a great tool for sales teams that want to carry out more calls than messages.

While you can send out basic email sequences and limited LinkedIn outreach, Mailshake doesn't offer advanced customization and personalization capabilities.

You also cannot test the waters with a free plan or free trial. So you have to be willing to commit to an annual plan to find out if it's the right fit for your current needs.

Mailshake Features Breakdown

Mailshake has some very interesting features that make it stand out.

1. Email outreach and sequence builder

The Mailshake sequence builder allows you to set automated sequences for emails and messages.

Similar to other sequence builders, you can send follow-up messages by setting criteria like waiting periods. For follow-up emails, you can stop the sequence when a prospect responds.

However, if you’d like to send regular Drip campaigns, that option is available and it’ll always come in as a new email as opposed to a continuation of the previous one. So it won’t stop even after a prospect responds.

Another cool feature is that you can send emails based on what link the prospect clicks.

For example, if they click on a link to register for a webinar, you can send them a follow-up email to remind them of the webinar.

Most importantly, there’s an A/B testing feature that ensures you figure out what variation of your messages works best.

You can send up to 10 variations in one sequence. Simply tap on the A/B testing icon when building a campaign or sequence.

You also don’t need to start creating the variations from scratch and you get extensive reports on the performance of each one.

2. LinkedIn automation

This software has a Chrome browser extension that allows you to automate LinkedIn outreach tasks like viewing profiles and sending connection requests and messages.

The way to activate this is by adding a LinkedIn automation task when building a sequence.

Like every other task, when the prospect gets to that stage, they’ll get the LinkedIn action. You can send up to 10 LinkedIn messages per day and 70 per week. This prevents any issues with your LinkedIn account like being blocked or suspended.

3. Mailshake dialer for cold calls

This feature gives you unlimited VOIP calls to the US and Canada.

International calls are also possible at relatively inexpensive rates.

Start by enabling the dialer from your account settings and adding a phone number your calls will originate from.

Here, you can also choose to record all your calls automatically.

Once this is set up, you can place calls to your prospects and choose an option depending on the outcome of the call.

You can also leave notes to give more insights.

In the dialer section of your dashboard, you can find all recordings, call reports, and history.

4. Analytics and metrics

The extensive reporting feature allows you to track the regular engagement metrics like opens, clicks, and replies for the emails you send.

Here, you can customize the period and type of data you want to see - very similar to Google Analytics.

There’s the productivity report for bigger teams where you track the number of leads won, lost, contacted prospects and so much more.

We also like that you can see the performance of your A/B testing or overall sequence to know what particular section of your sequence is converting best.

For sales teams that would prefer to make cold calls, you can track the number of calls, their disposition, voicemails left and so much more. The reporting is more extensive than other sales engagement apps out there.

5. Lead catcher and tracking

You don’t actually gather your leads at this point. The way it works is that you’ll reach out to a bulk lead and depending on what action they take, you can then proceed to qualify them as a lead.

This however means that you have to do the lead qualification yourself.

So for example, if you get a reply to an email, you can then qualify that as a lead.

The lead catcher would then move them to a separate pipeline where you can follow up with them.

The best part about this feature is that Mailshake helps you qualify whether the lead is hot, warm, or cold depending on how they engage with your communications.

Hot being the most engaged and cold being no engagement at all.

So your lead dashboard would look something like this ⬇️

To sum up, it’s great for sales teams that prefer to place calls, send email sequences, and occasionally send LinkedIn outreach as well.

It’s also a great option for teams that enjoy robust reporting.

Mailshake’s Pricing

Mailshake offers three pricing plans with different sets of features:

Pricing does decrease a bit when billed annually.

Starter $29 user/month:

• Mail accounts from any provider
• Automated email sequences
• 1,500 email sends per month
• 50 free data finder credits
• Unlimited warmup
• A/B Testing
• AI email writing with SHAKEspeare

Email Outreach $59 user/month:

All of Starter, plus:

• Email personalization
• Advanced scheduling & throttling
• Respond to leads (Lead Catcher)
• Salesforce / Pipedrive / Hubspot
• 1,000+ integrations via Zapier
• Prospects view
• 5k list-cleaning credits monthly
• 5k recipients per campaign
• Browser extension
• Email template management

> Sales Engagement $99 user/month:

All of Outreach, plus:

• 5 email addresses
• 5 phone numbers
• Power phone dialer
• LinkedIn automation
• Lead temperature
• 10k list-cleaning credits monthly
• 2,500 data finder credits monthly
• 10k recipients per campaign
• Includes UNLIMITED free dialer minutes to North American phone numbers
• Phone scripts
• Account level view & organization
• Create custom tasks
• Priority support

Ratings, Pros, and Cons

Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

G2 4.7/5 (259 reviews) | Capterra 4.6/5 (113 reviews)

✅ Pros

• Unlimited cold calls and call recording feature
• Intuitive sequences with follow-ups and drip campaigns
• A/B testing feature
• Excellent team support and courses on their email academy
• LinkedIn request and message automation are available
• High deliverability rates
• You can have a prospect in more than one sequence at a time
• They recommend changes to email content to increase deliverability

❌ Cons

• ‍Limited emails and LinkedIn messages per day
• Limited customization – there are not many options to change how things look or work‍
• You cannot send out follow-up messages based on other actions outside of clicks
• No option for bulk contact deletion or email clean-up feature
• No refunds even when you cancel your subscription early
• No free plan or free trial‍
• Can be too complex for beginners
• Some users have trouble uploading leads correctly and mapping contact details
• Limited analytics
• You also cannot upload lists for bulk deletes when cleaning up your data

Mailshake vs lemlist

lemlist offers more advanced multichannel features than Mailshake to boost your outreach x4.

With lemlist, you can create multichannel sequences and subsequences based on each prospect’s interactions with your campaign, boosting your outreach results up to four times.

You can streamline processes, send personalized emails, manage follow-ups, and perform other sales processes on a centralized platform.

1. Personalization

lemlist: Offers advanced personalization features like personalized images, videos, and landing pages within emails. This can significantly increase engagement compared to standard text-based emails.

Mailshake: Provides basic personalization features like inserting recipient names and company details.

2. Deliverability and automation:

lemlist: Employs a specific sending algorithm and features like lemwarm to improve email deliverability and ensure your outreach lands in inboxes, not spam folders. Offers advanced automation options for conditional follow-ups based on recipient behavior.

Mailshake: Relies on standard email-sending methods and might face deliverability challenges for bulk emails. Automation features are more basic compared to lemlist.

3. User interface and features:

lemlist: Known for its user-friendly interface with a drag-and-drop editor for building email sequences. Offers additional features like built-in analytics and A/B testing for optimizing campaigns.

Mailshake: The interface might be less intuitive, and customization options could be more limited. May lack some advanced features like A/B testing found in Lemlist.

Overall, lemlist caters to businesses that prioritize highly personalized outreach with strong deliverability and advanced automation. Mailshake might be suitable for those who need basic cold email sending with limited personalization.

lemlist has lead generation functionality. So if you don’t have any leads to begin with, it’s the best tool to start with. You get verified emails from people who fit into your ideal users.

In addition to the high deliverability lemlist offers, it gives you a generous 14-day free trial. This allows you to know the full extent of the software along with whether it’s the best fit for your needs.

Here’s a table comparing the features and prices of Mailshake vs. lemlist:

Other alternatives to Mailshake

Apollo

Apollo is a great option for sales teams that prefer robust analytics and reporting.

It has features that allow you to score your leads and focus on those with better prospects. The best part is that you get a free plan with limited features to try out.

However, the only major downside is that you can’t add dynamic content to your emails. So this might be a limitation if you want to focus solely on email engagement.

Outreach

Outreach is an AI-enabled sales tool that combines your inbound and outbound leads and automates engagement tasks with AI.

It also seamlessly integrates with other tools like Hubspot and Salesforce.

The learning curve, however, is the biggest issue with this tool.

The pricing model is also not transparent. It is very similar to Mailshake as you get a quote based on your needs and team.

Reply

This tool also uses AI to find leads and engage them until they convert.

You can book calls on the platform, qualify leads, generate email templates, and craft complex sequences all with AI.

There are more than five pricing plans available starting from $60 per month.

Final Verdict

Mailshake is a great sales engagement tool especially if you’re a large team that focuses on cold calling.

You should go for it if you don’t mind committing to a new tool for at least a year. It might end up being just what you need.

However, if you’re more risk-averse and need a tool with more lead-generation functionality, we recommend lemlist as the better alternative to Mailshake.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is Mailshake used for?

Mailshake is used to send cold emails at scale, and track your team's opens, replies, and click metrics on one dashboard. You can also automate multichannel outreach campaigns across three channels including email, phone, and social.

Is Mailshake legit?

Mailshake is legit. It's a great sales engagement tool especially if you're a large team that focuses on cold calling.

How many emails can I send with Mailshake?

Mailshake limits sending via SMTP to 1,000 emails/day.

How does Mailshake charge you?

Mailshake charges for the upcoming billing period. If you sign up on April 1st, your credit card will be charged on April 1st for your use of Mailshake depending on the billing period (monthly or annual).