Smartlead Vs. Folderly Vs. Mailshake: Which is Best for Sales Engagement?

Reaching out to potential customers through cold emails is an excellent way to find leads and boost sales. Cold emails are a vital component of the sales engagement process, which involves initiating and maintaining interactions with prospects to nurture them through the sales funnel.

With so many sales engagement tools available in the market, how do you choose the right one for your needs? This article focuses on three popular sales engagement platforms: Smartlead, Folderly, and Mailshake. These tools streamline and enhance cold email outreach efforts, making connecting with prospects easier.

So, let's explore these sales engagement tools in detail and find the perfect solution for your cold email outreach needs.

Overview: Smartlead Vs. Folderly Vs. Mailshake

What is Smartlead?

Smartlead is a robust sales engagement platform tailored for high-volume lead generation efforts. It offers advanced email automation and deliverability capabilities, making it a go-to choice for businesses aiming to reach a broad audience efficiently.

One of Smartlead's key strengths is its ability to automate the entire campaign creation process, from crafting compelling email content to scheduling and sending messages to targeted leads. Automating these tasks saves valuable time and resources while maintaining consistency and effectiveness in your outreach efforts.

The comprehensive lead management tools offered by Smartlead allow users to organize and track leads effectively. This feature streamlines the lead nurturing process, ensuring that no potential opportunity falls through the cracks.

Smartlead strongly emphasizes optimizing email deliverability. With built-in tools and features designed to maximize inbox placement rates and minimize the risk of emails ending in spam folders, businesses can rest assured that their messages reach their intended recipients.

Here are the key strengths of Smartlead:

• Unmatched Deliverability: Smartlead prioritizes email deliverability with features like unique IP servers per campaign, unlimited warmups, and AI-powered "natural conversations'' that mimic human interaction. It even offers tools to protect your sender reputation by removing emails from spam folders and masking warmup emails.
• Lead Generation Automation: This tool uses a robust API to automate your entire lead generation process. It allows you to create and manage campaigns and leads and streamline outreach workflows. It also offers an extensive library of email templates, helping you get started quickly.
• Scalable Cold Email Automation: Smartlead offers unlimited sender accounts, one-click campaign creation with mailbox auto-rotation, and the ability to integrate with channels beyond email, such as LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and Twitter. You can also set up custom triggers and sub-sequences based on lead behavior for a more personalized approach.
• Seamless LinkedIn Integration: Smartlead integrates with LinkedIn, allowing you to automate connection requests, send messages, visit profiles, and manage all interactions from a central location.
• Sales Engagement: The master inbox provides a unified platform for managing and responding to all conversations. Track key metrics like open rates, click-throughs, and replies to analyze campaign performance and optimize your outreach strategy. Additionally, Smartlead offers auto-mailbox rotation and a white-label experience to streamline sales team workflows.
• Integration With HubSpot & other third-party tools: Smartlead stands out for its seamless integration with leading CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platforms like HubSpot and other third-party tools commonly used in sales and marketing workflows. This integration capability enables you to synchronize your lead generation efforts with your existing CRM systems, streamlining data management and ensuring a cohesive approach to customer relationship management. Connecting Smartlead with HubSpot and other third-party tools allows you to enjoy the benefits of centralized data storage, real-time updates, and enhanced collaboration across teams.

What is Folderly?

Folderly is a specialized platform dedicated to optimizing email deliverability, a critical aspect of successful email marketing campaigns. Its primary focus is to ensure that emails reach their intended recipients' inboxes and avoid being flagged as spam. Folderly achieves this by offering a range of innovative features designed to monitor and enhance deliverability rates.

One of Folderly's standout features is its automated warmup functionality. This feature gradually increases the sending volume of email accounts, mimicking natural email behavior and avoiding sudden spikes that could trigger spam filters. By progressively building sender reputation, Folderly helps businesses establish trust with email service providers, improving the chances of their emails being delivered to recipients' primary inboxes.

Folderly provides spam trigger-checking tools that analyze email content for elements that might trigger spam filters. This proactive approach enables users to identify and address potential issues before sending out emails, minimizing the risk of messages being flagged as spam.

Folderly is suitable for:

• Improved Sender Score & Open Rates: Folderly can help enhance your sender score by employing advanced algorithms and focusing on "positive interactions." A good sender score translates to higher email open rates for your campaigns.
• Automated Warm-up & Spam Prevention: Folderly automates the email warmup process, ensuring a smooth sending ramp-up. Additionally, the built-in spam trigger checker identifies potential red flags in your email content before you hit send, minimizing the risk of landing in spam folders.
• Seamless Integrations: Whether you use a CRM, ESP, or marketing automation platform, Folderly integrates effortlessly, streamlining your workflow and data management.

What is Mailshake?

Mailshake is a dynamic and versatile sales engagement platform that serves as a one-stop solution for businesses seeking to streamline their outreach efforts and drive sales. At its core, Mailshake offers advanced cold email automation capabilities, allowing you to automate sending out personalized emails to targeted prospects. This automation feature saves time and ensures consistency and efficiency in outreach campaigns.

One of Mailshake's key strengths is its robust personalization features. Users can customize email content with recipient-specific details, such as name, company, or recent interactions, enhancing the relevance and effectiveness of their messages. Businesses can increase engagement rates and foster meaningful connections with prospects by tailoring emails to individual recipients.

Mailshake facilitates team collaboration with features like shared email templates, real-time campaign monitoring, and activity tracking.

Mailshake is suitable for:

• Omnichannel Outreach: Reach prospects across multiple channels. Mailshake integrates with LinkedIn, allowing you to send connection requests and messages and visit profiles alongside your email outreach.
• Automated Follow-ups & Templates: Set automated follow-up sequences to nurture leads and improve engagement. Mailshake also provides a library of customizable email templates to jumpstart your campaigns.
• Streamlined Campaign Management: Easily add recipients individually or in bulk, manage campaigns efficiently, and track critical metrics like opens, clicks, and replies.
• Automated Warm-Up Tool: The built-in warmup tool helps improve your sender score by automatically simulating positive email interactions (opens, replies, etc.).
• Deliverability Monitoring & Optimization: Analyze your sender score and identify potential issues. Mailshake also offers tools to check your domain's DKIM, SPF, and DMARC records for optimal email deliverability.

Feature Comparison: Smartlead vs. Folderly vs. Mailshake

Selecting the ideal sales engagement tool depends on your specific needs. We have listed particular features and compared how each tool stacks up across various functionalities:

1. Personalization

• Smartlead: Offers basic to advanced text variable personalization for names, companies, and other details within emails. It is integrated with a leading AI personalization tool - Clay, thus helping you get additional benefits.
• Folderly: Lacks built-in personalization features.
• Mailshake: Depending on the plan, it prioritizes personalization with text variables and potentially custom landing pages or video personalization.

2. Deliverability

• Smartlead: Emphasizes email deliverability with unique IP servers, unlimited warmups, AI-powered "natural conversations," spam removal from sent emails, and warmup email masking.
• Folderly: Specializes in deliverability optimization through features like an automated warmup, spam trigger checking, and SPF generation.
• Mailshake: Provides a warmup tool, deliverability monitoring, and domain record checks.

3. Email Automation

• Smartlead: Offers a powerful cold emailing API for automating campaign creation lead nurturing with email sequences and outreach workflows.
• Folderly: Limited email automation functionalities.
• Mailshake: Provides functionalities for scheduling and automating email sequences.

4. Sales Engagement Features

• Smartlead: Includes a master inbox for managing communication, tracking key metrics, and auto-mailbox rotation for sales teams. Offers a white-label experience.
• Folderly: Limited sales engagement features beyond basic functionalities.
• Mailshake: Provides functionalities like lead assignment, tracking progress within teams, and real-time data analytics to optimize outreach.

5. Omnichannel Outreach

• Smartlead: Integrates with LinkedIn for connection requests and messaging alongside email outreach (limited compared to others).
• Folderly: Lacks features for omnichannel outreach.
• Mailshake: Integrates with LinkedIn for connection requests, messages, and profile visits, enabling omnichannel outreach.

6. Team Collaboration & Scalability

• Smartlead: Offers auto-mailbox rotation and a white-label experience for streamlined team workflows.
• Folderly: Limited team collaboration features.
• Mailshake: Provides functionalities for sales team collaboration with features like lead assignment and tracking progress within teams.

7. Master Inbox

• Smartlead: Streamlines email communication with its Master Inbox. This central hub connects all your mailboxes for easy management. Automate lead follow-ups and leverage features like AI lead categorization and real-time replies for increased efficiency.
• Folderly: While Folderly excels in email deliverability, it lacks a centralized communication management system like Smartlead's Master Inbox.
• Mailshake: It does offer some capabilities to integrate the platform with other CRMs and inbox management tools; however, there is no dedicated built-in feature for the same.

8. Automated Email Follow-ups

• Smartlead: Streamline your follow-up workflow with Email Follow-Up Automation. This feature ensures consistent and timely communication with leads throughout the sales cycle by automatically sending follow-up emails to prospects.
• Folderly: Like Mailshake, Folderly prioritizes email deliverability but does not offer dedicated tools for automating follow-up sequences as Smartlead does. This can disadvantage those who need a system to maintain consistent outreach.
• Mailshake: Similar to Folderly, Mailshake focuses on email deliverability but lacks dedicated follow-up automation features like Smartlead. You'll need to manually manage your follow-up sequences, potentially leading to inconsistencies and missed opportunities.

Heads up: We made our best effort to present accurate features, but some might be offered under different names, require additional requests, or be available through integrations with other tools. For the most up-to-date information, visit each platform's website or contact them directly.

Pricing: Smartlead Vs. Folderly Vs. Mailshake

Smartlead Pricing

Smartlead offers tiered plans catering to different team sizes and needs:

• Basic: $34/month (2,000 active leads, 6,000 emails/month)
• Popular: $66/month (10,000 active leads, 40,000 emails/month)
• Pro: $79/month (increased limits on leads and emails, custom CRM integration)
• Custom: For agencies and large teams (contact Smartlead for details; supports up to 2 million leads)

You can also avail a 14-day free trial.

Folderly Pricing

Unlike the others, Folderly focuses on per-mailbox pricing:

• Individual: $96/mailbox/month
• Team (10-24 mailboxes): $72/mailbox/month
• Team (25-99 mailboxes): $56/mailbox/month
• Enterprise (100+ mailboxes): Contact Folderly for a custom quote

Mailshake Pricing

Mailshake offers several plans with varying features and sending limits:

• Starter: $29/month (1,500 emails/month, AI email writing with SHAKEspeare)
• Email Outreach: $59/month
• Sales Engagement: $99/month

The yearly pricing is shown in the picture below.

Key Considerations:

• ‍Team Size: Smartlead's per-user pricing might be more cost-effective than Folderly's per-mailbox structure if you have a large team.‍
• Email Volume: Mailshake offers accessible and affordable plans for low-volume senders, while Smartlead and Folderly are more suited to high-volume outreach.‍
• Features: When comparing plans across platforms, consider the specific features you need, such as follow-up automation or CRM integrations.

Choosing the Right Tool: Final Verdict

Finding the perfect sales engagement platform is like finding the winning formula – it depends on your needs. But let's face it: in the high-octane world of lead generation, Smartlead emerges as a clear frontrunner. Here's why:

Built for Volume & Efficiency: Smartlead crushes high-volume lead generation with its powerful cold emailing API and automated lead nurturing sequences.  No more manual outreach drudgery – just focus on closing deals.

Deliverability Dominator: Smartlead doesn't gamble with your emails landing in spam folders. Features like unique IP servers and warmup emails guarantee your messages reach the right inboxes.

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: Smartlead empowers team collaboration with seamless functionality and offers a white-label experience for a unified brand image.

Value-Packed Pricing: Starting at just  $33/month (with stellar 4.8-star G2 user ratings), Smartlead delivers exceptional value for your investment.

Learning Curve Consideration: While Folderly might be easier to navigate initially, Smartlead's powerful features may require a slightly steeper learning curve. But remember, the payoff in efficiency and results is well worth the investment.

The Final Takeaway

The best sales engagement tool should be an extension of your team, not a hindrance. Smartlead's automation, deliverability focus, team-friendly features, and competitive pricing make it a champion in the sales engagement arena.  Don't settle for anything less. Explore our free trial and experience the Smartlead difference firsthand!