Salesforge vs Mailchimp: Best Tool for Cold Outreach 2024

Salesforge is an AI-powered sales engagement platform that helps sales teams boost their email outreach efforts. Its sequence builder allows users to create personalized email campaigns at scale, with support for multiple languages.

Key features of the sequence builder:

• AI-driven email warm-up: Improves email deliverability by gradually increasing the volume of emails sent from a new mailbox.
• Email validation: Verifies email addresses to maintain a clean contact list and minimize bounces.
• Multi-language support: Enables the creation of localized email campaigns for global audiences.
• Centralized mailbox management: Allows users to manage multiple mailboxes from a single interface, streamlining campaign management.

Salesforge's unique capabilities, such as AI email warm-up and multi-language support, set it apart from other sales engagement tools. These features help users create effective email campaigns while ensuring high deliverability and low bounce rates.

Mailchimp, a popular email marketing platform, offers a user-friendly interface for creating and sending email campaigns. While originally designed for marketing emails, some users have adapted it for cold outreach as well.

Key features of Mailchimp's campaign creation:

• Drag-and-drop email builder: Easily create and format emails using simple drag-and-drop tools, making it accessible for users with limited design or coding experience.
• Extensive template library: Choose from a wide range of pre-designed templates categorized by email purpose, industry, and style, saving time and effort in the email creation process.
• Branded templates: Maintain brand consistency by creating and saving custom branded email templates for future use.
• Responsive design: Mailchimp's templates are optimized for various devices and screen sizes, ensuring that emails look great on desktop, tablet, and mobile.

Salesforge provides features to help improve email deliverability and avoid spam filters, ensuring that your sales emails reach their intended recipients. The platform supports multiple mailboxes, email warming, and rate limiting to maintain a positive sender reputation.

• Multiple mailboxes: Set up and manage multiple email accounts within Salesforge, allowing you to distribute your outreach across different domains and IP addresses. This helps avoid triggering spam filters due to high email volume from a single source.
• Email warming: Gradually increase the volume of emails sent from new accounts over time, establishing a positive sender reputation with email providers. Salesforge automates this process, warming up your mailboxes to improve deliverability.
• Rate limiting: Control the number of emails sent per mailbox within a given time frame to stay within the limits set by email providers. This prevents your accounts from being flagged as potential spam sources due to excessive sending.

Reddit users discuss various strategies for improving email deliverability, with some considering Salesforge as a solution:

😐 "You need ESP matching, which providers like Salesforge provide." - r/Emailmarketing

👍 "Don't use subdomains, use top-level domains as your secondary domains for best deliverability." - r/Entrepreneur

Mailchimp prioritizes email deliverability by adhering to best practices and offering tools to help users maintain a strong sender reputation. While it doesn't provide email warming services, Mailchimp focuses on ensuring that emails reach subscribers' inboxes through domain authentication and compliance with industry standards.

• Domain authentication: Mailchimp allows users to verify and authenticate their custom email domains, which helps establish trust with email providers and improves deliverability.
• Compliance with best practices: The platform follows strict guidelines to maintain its reputation as a trusted email service provider, reducing the risk of emails being flagged as spam.
• Subscriber engagement tracking: Mailchimp provides detailed analytics on email performance, including open rates, click rates, and unsubscribe rates, enabling users to monitor engagement and maintain a healthy subscriber list.

It's important to note that Mailchimp is designed for sending emails to opted-in subscribers rather than cold outreach. The lack of email warming features underscores this focus on engaging with existing audiences who have consented to receive marketing communications.

Salesforge offers powerful personalization options for email sequences, allowing you to tailor your outreach to each lead. With a combination of custom variables and AI-generated content, you can create highly targeted and engaging emails that resonate with your prospects.

Key personalization features:

• Custom variables: Easily insert lead-specific data like name, company, or other custom fields into your emails.
• AI-powered content generation: Let Salesforge's AI assist in writing personalized email content based on your input.
• Fallback templates: Create default content to use when AI generation fails or lead data is missing.
• Preview emails: See how your personalized emails will look before sending them out.

Mailchimp provides several options to personalize your email campaigns based on your audience's information. You can use custom fields and merge tags to tailor your content to each recipient.

• Audience fields: Manage the fields available to your audience's signup forms, such as email address, name, phone number, and birthday. These fields can be set as required or optional.
• Merge tags: Insert personalized content into your emails using merge tags. For example, *|FNAME|* or *|MERGE0|* can be used to include the recipient's first name.
• Custom default values: Set default values for merge tags to avoid blank spaces in case the information is missing for some recipients.
• Audience groups: Create groups within your audience to further segment and personalize your campaigns based on specific interests or preferences.

Salesforge's AI-powered email generation feature allows users to create personalized emails at scale, with the ability to choose from a variety of tonalities to match their desired communication style. This powerful tool helps streamline the email creation process while maintaining a human touch.

Key aspects of Salesforge's AI email generation:

• Customizable tonality: Choose from options like playful, hilarious, formal, curious, urgent, appreciative, and more to match your brand voice.
• Personalization credits: Users start with 10 personalization credits, with new preview generation costing credits while regeneration is free.
• Fallback template: A fallback template must be set to use the AI generation feature.
• Limited preview: AI previews are only generated for the first 5 contacts in a sequence, with the rest generated once the sequence is started.

Mailchimp's AI-powered content generation feature helps users create engaging email and social media content with ease. By providing a content type and brief description, the AI tool generates text tailored to your needs, saving time and effort in crafting effective messaging.

• Customizable content types: Select from various content types like paragraphs, listicles, and stories to match your desired format.
• Personalized output: Provide a short description of your topic or theme, and the AI will generate unique content aligned with your input.
• Multi-channel support: Create content for both email campaigns and social media posts, streamlining your content creation process across multiple channels.

Salesforge does not provide built-in lead enrichment capabilities, instead relying on integrations with third-party tools to gather additional data on contacts and accounts. This approach requires users to leverage external services to access buyer signals and other information that can help personalize outreach and prioritize leads.

Key aspects of Salesforge's contact enrichment:

• Reliance on integrations: Salesforge connects with tools like Apollo.io, Findymail, and Builtwith to source enrichment data.
• Manual effort required: Users must set up and manage these integrations themselves, adding extra steps to the workflow.
• Potential for data inconsistencies: Relying on multiple external sources may lead to varying data quality and completeness across different tools.

Mailchimp does not offer native data enrichment capabilities within its platform. To gather additional information about leads, such as buyer signals or other relevant data points, users must rely on integrations with external tools.

While Mailchimp provides a robust set of features for email marketing and automation, the lack of built-in data enrichment functionality may be a drawback for some users who require a more comprehensive view of their leads without the need for third-party integrations.

To access lead enrichment features, Mailchimp users can explore the platform's extensive library of integrations, which includes various data providers and sales intelligence tools. However, this approach may require additional setup and costs compared to platforms that offer native data enrichment capabilities.

Salesforge provides AI-powered email generation capabilities within its sequences, allowing users to automatically generate personalized emails based on prospect information from LinkedIn profiles, websites, or a combination of both.

• LinkedIn profile: Salesforge can pull relevant data from a prospect's LinkedIn profile to generate tailored email content.
• Website: The AI can also gather information from a prospect's website to craft personalized emails.
• LinkedIn + website: For maximum personalization, Salesforge can combine data from both LinkedIn and the prospect's website to generate highly targeted email content.

By leveraging AI and prospect data from multiple sources, Salesforge enables users to create personalized email sequences at scale, saving time while still maintaining a high level of customization for each recipient.

Mailchimp, primarily an email marketing and automation platform, offers limited social media functionality compared to dedicated sales engagement tools. While it does not provide lead enrichment capabilities through social media, it does allow for some basic social media integration and management.

Key aspects of Mailchimp's social media features:

• Social media cross-posting: Share email campaigns across connected social media accounts for increased visibility
• Ad management: Create and manage social media ads within the Mailchimp platform
• No lead enrichment: Unable to gather additional lead information from social media profiles for sales purposes

While Mailchimp's social media capabilities may be suitable for businesses primarily focused on marketing efforts, its lack of lead enrichment features may limit its usefulness for sales teams looking to leverage social media data for prospecting and engagement.

Salesforge provides straightforward pricing with two plans: Pro at $48/month and Growth at $96/month, both billed monthly. Annual billing is available with 2 months free. The key differences between the plans are:

• Active Contacts: Pro includes 1,000 while Growth offers 10,000
• Emails/Month: 5,000 for Pro and 50,000 for Growth
• Email Personalization Credits/Month: 100 in Pro vs 1,000 in Growth
• Users: Pro is limited to 1 user while Growth supports unlimited users

Both plans include core features like unlimited mailboxes, Primebox, unlimited email warm up, smart inbox rotation, and more. A 7-day free trial is available for the Growth plan, though it has limited inclusions compared to the full paid plan.

Getting started with either plan is simple, with the ability to sign up and get started directly from the pricing page without needing to contact sales. The transparent pricing model and ability to start a trial make it easy to evaluate Salesforge for your needs.

Mailchimp provides a range of pricing options to suit different business needs, from a free plan for those just getting started to more advanced paid plans with additional features and higher sending limits.

• Free plan: Includes basic features for up to 1,000 contacts and 1 audience, with email support for the first 30 days.
• Essentials plan: Starting at $13/month, this plan offers core email marketing features, testing, and scheduling for up to 5,000 contacts and 3 audiences.
• Standard plan: At $20/month, this plan adds advanced audience insights, custom templates, and optimization tools for up to 6,000 contacts and 5 audiences.
• Premium plan: The highest tier at $350/month includes unlimited contacts, advanced segmentation, multivariate testing, and priority support.

All paid plans are based on a monthly billing model, with the price increasing as contact or email sending limits are exceeded. Users can easily upgrade or downgrade their plan directly from their account dashboard without needing to contact sales.