MailShake

What Is Mailshake?

Mailshake is a sales engagement and email outreach tool that allows you to send automated cold emails from G Suite and Gmail.

Mailshake integrates with your email account to help you schedule, organize, and personalize your email campaigns in just a few steps.

Screenshot of Mailshake Dashboard

Since it is merely an outreach software, you need to have your own lists of prospects and contacts ready before you start using it. But trust me, you don’t need a separate tool for that.

Cold email outreach can feel like a huge waste of time if you don’t do it right. Creating an effective outreach campaign will increase your response rate and allow you to attract more clients and make solid connections.

What I love about Mailshake is that it is extremely easy to use, and it gives you full control over your campaigns, while also helping you come up with the best solution.

Without a tool like this, sending personalized cold emails can be extremely time-consuming and frustrating, especially if you’re sending hundreds of emails regularly.

And don’t even get me started on follow-ups and how manually tracking your responses will become a real-life nightmare. Once you’re done with your cold emailing, it is impossible to tell who took some sort of action. Who opened your email, read it, and clicked on the links.

Thankfully, Mailshake keeps track of everything and displays it all on a single dashboard. You can create different campaigns and work with different lists.

If you’re not sure what message to write, Mailshake provides a bunch of fully customizable templates and guides you through the whole outreach process. All you have to do is follow the steps.

How To Use Mailshake?

Step 1: Create a New Campaign

Screenshot of Step 1: Create a New Campaign

The first thing you need to do before clicking on the ‘plus’ button to create your new campaign is to download your spreadsheet with all your information in google sheets.

Note: you must download it as a CSV file, which means ‘comma-separated values.’ It is not possible to import data straight from google sheets, as Mailshake doesn’t support them.

Be smart when you name your columns since that’s what Mailshake is going to use as text replacement references. Name, email, and company would be a good place to start.

Choose a name for your campaign and drop your list of recipients. The system will ask you to help it understand the information by selecting the name of the column that matches each field.

If your list is too long, it will take several minutes to import all of the contacts, so you might wanna go make yourself a coffee or take your cigarette break.

Step 2: Compose Your Emails

Am I the only one who hates writing emails? It can be so annoying. I never know if I am coming off as too informal or too distant.

If you also struggle with this, this tool’s got your back. Mailshake offers a pretty decent set of templates. You can check out some of them on their blog.

Click on the ‘insert button’ to access the text replacements that you need. You can also just remember the name of the column and insert it between curly brackets.

Acreenshot of Step 2: Compose Your Emails

You can also include as many links as you want and go over each contact to personalize emails even further.

Let’s not forget about the replies. Select how many days you want to wait after the initial email and under what conditions (like if you haven’t heard back from the recipient).

Screenshot of Mailshake Replies Tab

You can add as many replies as you want. Usually, two replies are enough.

You might also want to add a drip email and an extra email if someone clicks on your links. This means that the recipient is interested in what you’re offering. Those are your potential clients, you don’t want to ignore them.

Step 3: Preview And Edit Your Campaign

Once your outreach emails are ready, you can go over them and make as many changes as you want. You can preview every single email with the text replacements in place.

The best part is that you can edit them individually. You can edit the text, add or remove replies, pause certain elements, and block out specific days or times.

Say you know some of your contacts in real life, and you want to include additional comments; all you have to do is browse through your campaign list and edit the ones that you want.

Step 4: Send Your Campaign

You can schedule your campaign to be sent at a specific time and date or send it right away. You can also select if you want to track the opens or the link clicks.

Screenshot of Mailshake's Step 4: Send Your Campaign

With the advanced options, you can choose to send your campaign in smaller batches.

Once you click next, Mailshake is going to show you one last preview to make sure everything is correct, and then it will take a couple of minutes for the campaign to be finally sent to all of the recipients.

Step 5: Analyze Your Results

From the overview tab, you will be able to easily visualize how your cold outreach campaign is doing. This is one of the reasons why so many email marketers love Mailshake.

Screenshot of Mailshake's Overview tab

Scrolling down a bit you will be able to check out the recent activity, which is a line-by-line display of the actions that have been taken.

Who opened your email, who clicked on the links, and who replied.

You can click on each contact to check out the entire history. All of the actions they took, every reply, and pending emails.

This will allow you to decide what worked and what didn’t, and update your campaigns accordingly. Don’t forget that you can edit any aspect of your campaigns at any time, even when they are still ongoing.

The real game-changer here is hands down the lead catcher feature. It is smart enough to find the replies that are promising and collect them all in one place for you to classify them.

You can reply, ignore, or assign to another team member who might have a better answer.

Mailshake Features

Drip Campaigns

Let’s first talk about what drip campaigns are. They consist of several emails sent one by one over time.

They are only meant to stop if the recipient replies to one of them, but you can also pause them whenever you want. If the recipient takes some sort of action such as clicking on a link, a different email referring specifically to that action will be sent.

You can assign a date, time, and conditions to each step of your drip campaigns. A few days should go by between drips so that you don’t seem too insistent.

Mailshake allows you to add as many drips as you want and fully customize each one individually.

Cold Email Templates

Cold emails can be extremely hard to write. If you don’t do it well, your email campaigns will be a total waste of time.

That is why Mailshake’s cold email templates are worth mentioning. If you’re lacking ideas, this tool can give you quite a few.

You can leave them as they are, although it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to edit them a bit to improve your cold outreach. Especially since someone else might be using a similar template.

A/B Testing

If we’re talking about outreach email campaigns, we must talk about A/B testing as well.

It consists of sending two different variations of a single campaign to two different groups of subscribers to figure out which one has the best results.

 Mailshake allows you to create up to five different variations. It will track the results of each one, analyzing aspects such as clicks, opens, replies, and bounces.

With this tool, you will be able to improve your open and click-through rates, which will help you enhance your campaign performance greatly.

Easy Email Personalization

Who doesn’t hate spam emails? They are not only useless but also annoying and sometimes even dangerous.

If you want your automated emails to be as far away as possible from the junk folder, you will have to personalize them. Naming the recipient at the beginning is a good start.

But don’t worry, there’s no need to go one by one trying to figure out how to make each email unique. Mailshake can easily extract the details of each recipient from the CSV file you uploaded. Fields such as name, company, and website can be added as text replacement anywhere in the message.

Adding any sort of reference or personal details to the body of the email will make it look way more authentic and catch the recipient’s attention.

Automated Follow-Ups

Most online entrepreneurs often make the mistake of focusing entirely on the initial email and ignoring the ones that will come next.

But guess what! Studies have shown that most sales result from follow-ups. No one decides to buy something online so spontaneously. Quite the opposite, actually. We need to be persuaded.

What’s more, on average we say ‘no’ four times before we end up buying. You might want to think twice before giving up on a potential client, as it might be too early.

Fortunately, Mailshake makes it quite easy to schedule follow-up emails that belong to an original thread. Establishing this correlation will make them seem more relevant and attract more clicks. This is super helpful and it is one of the things that make this such a great tool for sales professionals.

Pros and Cons of Mailshake

What I Like About Mailshake?

It Is Extremely Easy to Use

I have to admit that I was impressed by how clean the interface is. Straightforward, user-friendly, and intuitive. If it is your first time using a tool for your cold outreach campaigns my best advice would be to watch a tutorial first, but I assure you it won’t take you longer than half an hour to understand how everything works.

Great Customer Support

You can have the best software in the world, but if you don’t offer great support your users will still be disappointed. That’s why the Mailshake support team deserves a special mention. They are happy to walk you through every single aspect of the platform and help you if you get stuck.

Helps You Save Time

Having all of your data in one dashboard is really helpful when it comes to speeding up the outreach process. You don’t need to be jumping from one software to another, or browsing through thousands of emails trying not to overlook the important ones.

What I Don’t Like About Mailshake?

Separate User Interface from the G Suite

Mailshake offers great integrations and works with your Gmail account pretty efficiently, but it does not share the interface, which can be annoying and distracting. Plus, getting familiar with a new interface is time-consuming and implies an effort no one likes to make.

It Is Not the Most Affordable Software

If you need to work with sales teams you can end up paying over $1,000 just for an email outreach tool. Since Mailshake uses a user-based system, each team member means a lot more money. This is an extremely important point to consider before buying.

It Is Only Meant for Cold Email Outreach

This tool doesn’t help you collect email lists of any kind. You can’t use it without your own list of contacts in the right format, which can be a real bummer if you were expecting it to figure out your entire email marketing strategy for you.

Mailshake Pricing

It offers two subscription plans starting at $59. Each user can link one email address, and the number of emails that can be sent per day is limited.

Choosing one plan or the other will depend on how big you need your campaigns to be. The Email Outreach plan allows you to include up to 5,000 recipients per campaign, while the Sales Engagement plan supports 10,000.

Additionally, depending on your email provider, your number of emails per day will be limited. Gmail allows 500 emails a day, while Microsoft allows 1,000.

A cool thing about Mailshake’s pricing plans is that they have a 30-day guarantee period, which means you have a whole month to test the tool and ask for a refund if it doesn’t meet your expectations.

Check out for Mailshakes’s pricing & current deals.

Final Thoughts

Unlike other software, Mailshake is quite intuitive and easy to use, making it the perfect ally for beginners and individuals. If you put it to good use, it has the potential to take your email automation to the next level.

It might not be the best choice for modern sales teams due to the elevated price, although it does offer valuable features for companies, such as the lead catcher and the possibility to assign certain team members to certain replies, depending on their areas of expertise.

That being said, I would give it a great overall rating. It is hard to picture a scenario where Mailshake would fail to do the job. What better way to make your cold email outreach more efficient than with an efficient email automation tool?