MailShake Alternative: How Emelia is Better

As an email marketer, you probably would have heard about MailShake sales outreach tool. MailShake is a popular cold email outreach tool that offers various cold emailing solutions to businesses. However, it is not without its cons.

One of the biggest issues that sales teams have with using MailShake is their pricing plans, that it is very cost prohibitive. The monthly cost of the platform is $58 – and that is only if you connect a single email address to it, that's what they call "per user". Every time you connect to another email address, you got to multiply that cost, so like some other tools, when you want to scale your email outreach their pricing plans became too expensive.

As an organization, you probably do not rely on a single domain or email address – you might have several or even dozens. If you consider this, you can well imagine how costly it can get if you use MailShake.

Some email marketers might even be willing to pay the high cost of the platform if they are assured they get value-adding features. However, although MailShake is a good automated mail outreach tool, it does not offer all the functionalities that email marketers value, and on the other hand it has some gadget features that complexify the platform and make you loose time when you want to launch campaigns.

In this guide, we will compare the various features and pricing of MailShake and Emelia, another highly popular cold email software tool, and find out which platform offers you the most benefit.

But first, let us look at the background of both these software tools.

MailShake is a sales engagement and emailing software tool that offers commercial automated solutions for businesses. The company was started by Sujan Patel, Bob Senoff, and Colin Mathews in 2015 and can help the sales team send cold emails, engage prospects on social media, and perform multi-platform exchanges. 

Emelia is an excellent MailShake alternative since the platform offers amazing features for cold emailing at a fraction of the cost of MailShake. The software is highly intuitive with a short learning curve and comes with detailed analytics solutions, the ability to connect to multiple email addresses in a single dashboard, and other advanced functionalities.

The platform is fully automated, which means users can work on their cold email campaigns faster. It comes with state-of-the-art functions which allow marketers to work in optimal conditions, get higher returns, and improve their business performance – all for a very low cost.

The only way to find out which software is better is to list down the key features and the benefits they offer. So without further ado, let’s get to it.

Simplicity: Launch your outreach campaigns faster

While using Mailshake, we often felt encumbered by extraneous features and intricate settings, diminishing our productivity. What once was a simple cold email outreach tool has evolved into a "sales engagement platform", verging on CRM software.

In contrast, Emelia champions simplicity and user-friendliness. It's an ideal choice for those eager to swiftly grasp a cold emailing platform and launch outreach campaigns—in as little as three minutes.

All of Emelia's settings are consolidated on one page, eliminating the need to wade through a convoluted interface. This design enables users to configure their cold outreach settings promptly and effortlessly.

Emelia's platform is adaptable, ensuring smooth access even on compact mobile devices. Its intuitive interface features easy-to-use navigation buttons. Users can readily monitor campaign metrics—like bounce, open rates, click rates, and more—on the go. This user-centric approach is precisely why Emelia stands out as a top-tier Mailshake alternative for the best sales teams around the world who want key features for email outreach without loosing times on unneccary features and settings.

Multi-sender tool: Send personalized mass emails

Emelia’s is one of the rare cold email outreach tool that allows marketers really scale their email marketing campaigns thanks to his multi sender feature, to create faster and more personalized cold email campaigns and ensure a high deliverability rate. The platform allows marketers to connect dozens or even a hundred email addresses, all within a single dashboard. As such, marketers can access them instantly and use them simultaneously.

The platform comes with various packages that can be scaled up.  The best part is that if an email address is disconnected from the platform, its tasks will be distributed to the other connected mailboxes on the dashboard.

Each mailbox has is own custom tracking domain, and his own signature, like this your can really scale easily, on one campaign, if you wish to do so.

In contrast, MailShake does not have a similar tool. The platform does allow users to connect many mailboxes; however, it does not offer a multi-sender feature like Emelia does. And with their pricing plans it would be complicated or very very expensive to connect that much email accounts.

Pricing plans

One of the biggest factors that set Emelia apart from other cold email outreach tools is its industry-low pricing plans. The platform only charges $20 a month per email address. If you want to connect 10 emails, the platform will charge you only $110 per month. For 100 connected emails, the platform will charge you only $900. And they also don't have a trial free plan.

In contrast, MailShake is much more expensive than Emelia. The platform charges $58 per month for a single connected email account which is almost three times the price that Emelia charges.

For 10 email addresses, you will need to pay $580, and for 100 email addresses, you will have to pay a whopping $5,800 a month.

Our pricing plans are made for larger sales teams or lead generation agencies who wants to enhance their ROI.

Want to try Emelia for free? It is that way -> here

Bounce Reducer

One major feature that sets Emelia apart from other cold email software tools is its bounce reducer function. The process is simple. When an email marketer adds their emailing lists to Emelia for cold email campaigns, Emelia first runs it through an email verification process.

In this step, the platform filters out invalid, bad, or spam email addresses and adds them to a blocklist. Once the emailing list is clean and has only valid email addresses, Emelia will start the cold email campaign.

This process is crucial for the success of your cold email outreach campaign as it ensures low hard bounce rates. This means your sender reputation and email deliverability also remain positive.

MailShake is a great email software tool, but when it comes to bounce reduction, it does not have a similar tool to Emelia.

Spintext

For the success of cold email campaigns, every message needs to be unique. This is where Spintext functionality from Emelia comes in.

Spintext is a revolutionary feature that can help marketers create several versions of the same message. This means that if you are sending an email to thousands of users, every single email will have different wording without changing the gist of the message.

This feature is extremely useful to prevent your emails from coming off as spam to Google, spam filters, and smart algorithms since every single message is unique – which is not something that spammers typically do.

Here's how your email would look like when you've added spintext

It used to be a pain to create in all those variations, now you can use GPT4 to do it for you !

On the other hand, MailShake does not have any such feature. The platform can send out thousands of emails in one go, but they all essentially have the same text, which can trigger spam filters. This means using MailShake can result in a higher likelihood of bounces or getting your message landed in the spam folder or a blocklist. This can damage your sender reputation. That's an other reason why Emelia is a great Mailshake alternative.

Mail + x Minutes

The Mail + X Minutes is a very unique and valuable feature that is rarely offered by cold emailing software and other Mailshake alternative. However, Emelia.io offers this tool as part of its package at a very low cost. You can pretend you forgot something in your previous email, to look more legit.

In comparison, rare Mailshake alternatives offer this functionnality for your follow up emails.

Customer support : Done in-house

One thing that separate Emelia from other Mailshake alternatives is our dedicated customer support that can help sales teams and growth marketers with advices, as we run cold email campaigns since years.

• Automated follow ups emails.

• Schedule campaigns in advance.

• Connect with third party apps and other sales tools thanks to Zapier, Make or n8n

• Email tracking: Click and opening

• Save your own email templates

• Add as many custom variables to personalized emails as you wish

As you can see, Emelia has several advantages over MailShake. The platform offers tools like bounce reducer, Spintext, multi-sender tool, Mail + X Minutes, etc. all for a very low price – without compromising the quality.

This is the reason why Emelia is becoming a so popular mailshake alternative among global email marketers and sales teams.

Interested in using Emelia for your cold email marketing efforts? Reach out to us today at https://emelia.io/ to choose a package or try us with a free trial.

Want a tour of Emelia ? Watch this demo to see how to launch your future campaigns.

Strategies to Enhance Email Reach and Uphold a Positive Sender Reputation.

Like any email outreach tool, Emelia boasts a statistics feature, and rightfully so, it's crucial. This provides insights into who has opened your email and which links they've clicked. Using trackers in cold emails to gauge engagement is indeed enticing. However, there's a catch: email deliverability.

Looking ahead in the future, there's a possibility that email tracking may need to be phased out from campaigns. Interestingly, not using a tracker might actually bolster your email's chances of reaching its destination without issues.

Certain email systems are wary of tracking mechanisms, potentially flagging your message as spam. Hence, opting out of tracking might enhance delivery, even though we might sacrifice some insight into user behavior.

We get it, tracking is desirable, and we're on the same page. But if you decide to go down that route, it's crucial to have a dedicated tracking domain. Let's dive into that next.

Email providers favor consistency between the sending and tracking domains.

With Emelia, to improve your email deliverability you can establish a custom domain for each of your mailboxes. To do this, navigate to your domain's DNS zone and create a new CNAME entry. Label it as you wish, perhaps "tracking," and direct it to emelia.link.

Afterward, input tracking.yourdomain.com into Emelia. Now, your unique domain will be in charge of tracking. Although Emelia might label this as "recommended," be informed that it's STRONGLY ADVISED. It's essential!

To don't see your cold outreach efforts being toasted, your email campaigns needs to reach your target audience, not their spambox. Although we don't offer an inherent email warm-up feature, ensuring your mailbox is primed for your inaugural cold mailing campaign is pivotal.

When you roll out a fresh IP address or a new domain for your cold emails, establishing a trusted sender reputation is key. The process of "warming up" is essential for enhancing the deliverability of your outreach emails.

New sending servers are often unidentified by Internet Service Providers and might be flagged as potential spam sources. Consequently, your emails might land in spam instead of your target's main inbox.

Thus, the "warm-up" process is indispensable. Undertaking this manually requires crafting numerous emails across different providers, exchanging messages, always marking them as crucial, and removing any flagged as spam. Hats off to those who've taken on this task manually in the past—and if you're considering it, brace yourself! 🤣

Luckily, tools like Mailreach have been developed to automate the warm-up chore. Leveraging such tools ensures not only optimal deliverability but also solidifies your email address's reputation, preparing it for both the maiden and subsequent cold email campaigns. You can ask our customer support for a link for a discount at Mailreach as we are partners.

EDIT 2024: Emelia developed is own email warmup service available directly inside the platform

Many Mailshake alternatives do feature a warm-up capability, but often, it's merely an adjunct and lacks full optimization. Some warm-up utilities might even be remnants of projects that have long ceased active development. This is why, at Emelia, we champion the use of Mailreach. Dedicated solely to email warming, they continually evolve and excel in this niche.

Everything that makes your email heavy will be bad for your email deliverability. Avoid attachments or even personalized images, even if some popular Mailshake alternatives have this in their sales outreach tool to hype you, it is not cool anymore.

If you need to share visual content or files, consider linking to a secure online platform like Drive.

Email Scheduling: Distribute Your Follow-ups:

While automated follow-ups are integral to any email sequence, consecutive rapid emails might appear aggressive, prompting recipients to mark them as spam. So, ensure your follow-ups are timed judiciously to avoid overwhelming the recipient.

Restrict Links in Your Emails:

Excessive linking in your email outreach can impair your email's deliverability. Use a single clear CTA and direct your audience accordingly. Guarantee all links are secure (prefixed with "https://") and avoid URL shorteners, as they often activate spam filters.

Tailored email campaigns go beyond variables.

With a sizable audience, the allure might be to lump them all into one vast campaign. However, a more generic email copy lessens its resonance and effectiveness. The more you have personalized cold email campaigns more effective they will be.

For instance, when gathering data, consider segmenting between large and small businesses—they likely face different challenges, and your message can be tailored accordingly.

Alternatively, you could categorize by geographical location, differentiating between firms in NY and Chicago, and emphasizing in your content that you are the dedicated business developer for that region.

A message that truly resonates with its recipient amplifies its impact.

Only one call to action per email

Depending on your sales processes, your campaign can have different purposes, Maybe you want to schedule meetings, send the prospect to your landing pages, or just engage in a conversation, anyway, your email needs to have only one purpose. So if you want a reply don't add links to your email, if you want a meeting, don't push him to also visit your website, etc.

If you want to try a different call to action, do it in your follow up emails.

What do we think about multichannel campaigns?

Emelia is a sales outreach tool focused on cold emails. LinkedIn outreach is also great, we know, and many Mailshake alternatives are more like a "multichannel sales engagement platform", but our goal at Emelia is to scale your sales automation, and it is easier to scale your sales outreach with email campaigns that coupled with LinkedIn outreach, first because of the restrictions of Linkedin, and because create for examples 10 or a hundred Linkedin accounts it's a lot of work. What we suggest is to have a LinkedIn outreach for prospects you didn't find their email addresses and use software like Linked Helper which specializes in LinkedIn outreach campaigns. Don't hesitate to try their free trial.

Did you read all this? It's time to enjoy your free trial here