Beyond Email: Multichannel Features Ranked for Your Next Cold Email Sender

Cold email outreach has been the go-to sales prospecting method for years. 

But collectively, all of us contributed to what we’d call an “email gold rush effect.” When a channel delivers a strong ROI, everyone tries to claim a piece of it.

And that’s how we’re in the situation we’re in today. And it’s also why the stakes are higher than ever.

This doesn’t mean that email outreach is dying. It’s just becoming harder to rely on. With email inboxes oversaturated, it’s better to spread your sales efforts across multiple touchpoints.

Why cold email outreach underperforms

So what’s holding back cold email outreach performance? 

Sales teams encounter three main issues.

Overloaded recipient inboxes

It’s ridiculously easy to accidentally subscribe to emails.

For example, you register for a webinar, and when you agree to terms and conditions, you accidentally check a box, or you don’t notice a checked box that subscribes you to promo emails.

Some companies don’t even ask if you want to subscribe. They just send emails automatically until you opt out.

And that’s partly how we got here. Your leads wake up to over 100 or even 500 frustrating notification badges on their screens. Your genuinely helpful offer risks being buried under a mass of advertising clutter.

Boring message templates

What sounded fresh and relevant a couple of years ago may now sound trite. Everyone says the same things, and you’ve got just a handful of characters in the subject line to break through the noise.

This is why you need to make your message stand out.

Email deliverability blockers

Overloaded inboxes and boring emails assume that your email at least reaches the recipient’s inbox. But even that’s getting harder to guarantee.

Worldwide, people sent and received more than 330 billion emails daily in 2022. By 2026, this number may reach almost 400 billion. Email providers are breathing down bulk senders’ necks by thoroughly filtering spam and preventing email spoofing (when scammers send fake emails using trusted domains to trick people). Gmail’s AI, for instance, blocks around 15 billion emails every day.

If you don’t set up the three main email security protocols (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) correctly, your carefully crafted B2B sales outreach campaign might be delivered with a spam warning message or might never reach your prospects at all. 

You have to practice proper email domain warmup, too, so that neither your recipients nor their email providers perceive you as a spammer.

Why multichannel outreach matters for sales today

Multichannel marketing campaigns yield 31% lower acquisition costs per prospect, compared to single-channel approaches. And companies that use lead nurturing to its fullest potential see 50% more SQLs while spending 33% less.

Why is that?

Multiple channels create more opportunities for engagement

When email alone fails to get a response, a LinkedIn connection request or comment on a lead’s post might be more effective. Each additional channel gives you another way to get noticed and start conversations.

Multiple channels make for better marketing funnels

Once your B2B cold outreach engages prospects, multichannel nurturing takes over.

Imagine that someone downloads your lead magnet and subscribes to your newsletter. The next week, your email lands in their inbox with useful insights and a link to your LinkedIn page for more content.

If they’re intrigued enough to click through and follow your company or personal page updates. They’ll see your posts in their LinkedIn feed regularly.

You can build your marketing funnel using several channels, including emails, LinkedIn, text messaging, and cold calls, to gradually guide your prospects from the awareness stage to the bottom of the funnel.

When they’re ready to make a decision, your solution is already top of mind.

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More data points help you identify conversion-ready leads

Email engagement signals are more basic than signals from other channels: open rates, click-through rates, and click map. These signals tell you if someone is engaged, but not much about their level of interest or intent.

But with website analytics, you can see not only page views but also time spent on specific pages, as well as content downloads.

Add LinkedIn to your strategy, and you can monitor if your lead viewed your profile after you sent a connection request or commented on your recent LinkedIn post.

And this is your time to strike when the iron is hot. If you reach out when a lead’s interest is at its peak, you have a much higher chance of conversion. At the same time, you save time and budget since you pursue prospects with higher buying intent.

To get the most out of multichannel outreach, you have to reconsider your automation processes. If you previously used only email marketing software, you’ll need additional integrations.

Or you can rely on a comprehensive B2B sales automation platform with built-in features that run your multichannel campaigns from a single dashboard. You just need to choose the best platform for your specific needs.

Multichannel features to look for

Each AI-based cold outreach software comes with its own set of multichannel features. Below, we point out the must-have functionality for each channel (including email).

Email

Although email remains the backbone of B2B cold outreach, we need to make it work better. The following features will up your email outreach game:

• Deliverability tools: Your B2B sales platform vendor should offer proper email authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) to establish sender credibility and provide verified contact data to decrease bounce rates. In addition, it should allow you to run an ongoing email domain warmup and include cooldown periods between campaigns.
• Email sequence logic: This is an essential email automation feature. For instance, if a lead doesn’t reply to your first email, the system should follow up in a few days with more details. If a prospect visits your pricing page several times, it should trigger another sequence, perhaps offering a demo. You predefine scenarios based on your leads’ engagement, and then the platform must execute a sequence on autopilot.
• Personalization at scale: While the quantity of emails you send matters, it means nothing without quality. You need an AI tool that gleans data, like your leads’ company data, recent industry news, the prospect’s social media activity, and their website behavior, from all available sources to craft a personally relevant, catchy message.
• Configurable messaging: When you send personalized emails, make sure they don’t sound like AI-generated copy that uses numerous weasel words. Your AI tool should be easily configurable to match your tone of voice and your prospects’ specific context.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has advanced search filters to find and reach out to qualified decision makers. Thus, it’s a must-have B2B sales outreach channel, and your platform must include robust LinkedIn functionality:

• Native LinkedIn tasks: Your cold email sender should allow you to handle key LinkedIn tasks directly, such as sending connection requests with custom notes, sending and replying to messages, and preferably, tracking leads’ interactions with your LinkedIn profile content.
• Profile scraping and enrichment: Your sales platform should pull data from LinkedIn to build detailed prospect profiles and keep them updated.
• LinkedIn message sequences: Like with email sequences, your tool should automate creating and running multi-step workflows. For example, it should be able to send a connection request, wait for acceptance, and then trigger a welcome message sequence (again, personalized, based on the prospect’s background).

Phone calls 

You’ve likely heard that cold calling doesn’t make sense anymore, because you can send multiple emails in a single click, whereas cold calling happens one call at a time.

Still, we wouldn’t ditch this channel. The main reason to include cold calling in your B2B sales outreach strategy is that it’s the only channel where you can immediately receive your prospect’s feedback. Plus, cold calls positively impact email reply rates and can almost double them.

Your reps must master the cold calling game (and this means not dialing any available leads’ phone numbers, hoping for the best). When Gong analyzed three million cold calls, they found that with just one hour of cold calling daily, top-quartile reps booked 18 meetings per month.

To succeed with cold calling, you should first get access to a proven and GDPR-compliant database of phone numbers for the decision-makers you pursue.

Along with a rich database, pay attention to the following features:

• Click-to-call functionality: For the highest convenience, use cold outreach software with in-app calling so you can dial leads directly from a dashboard.
• Voice message drops: These are prerecorded voice messages you can use if your lead doesn’t answer your call.
• Automated call logging in CRMs: This feature logs important call data directly into your CRM for further analysis.
• Call script generation and CRM syncing: Solutions like AiSDR come with a robust cold script generation feature that syncs with CRM data to generate a personalized script with the lead’s name and other information. 

Text messages

Text messages are another important channel to use alongside emails. Of businesses that use text messaging to approach leads, 98% consider themselves successful at digital marketing, compared to 80% of those that don’t use this channel.

If you’re ready to join that 98%, you should look for the following messaging functionality in your cold email sender:

• Native or API-based SMS messaging: Your platform should have either built-in SMS capabilities or integrate with communication automation tools like Twilio.
• Compliance features (opt-outs, country filters): Make sure your system handles opt-outs automatically, complies with regulations like the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and GDPR, and can filter which countries it sends messages to, to prevent sending messages where they’re not allowed.

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Webhooks & API flexibility

APIs let different tools share data and communicate with each other on demand; webhooks (event-driven APIs) go further and automatically initiate an action based on a particular trigger. For example, when a prospect fills out a form on your website, a webhook can automatically send that lead data to your CRM and trigger a welcome email sequence.

While not outreach channels themselves, webhooks and APIs are what actually make automated multichannel outreach work. 

You’ll want to look for the following in your sales automation software:

• Triggered sequences based on CRM updates and buyer intent signals: With the help of webhooks, your platform should automatically launch outreach sequences when specific events happen. For instance, when you change a lead’s status from “prospect” to “qualified” in your CRM, or when prospects visit pricing pages multiple times, the platform should reach out to the prospect.
• Integrations with leading CRMs and Zapier: These are essential integrations to pay attention to. For instance, most sales tools easily integrate with HubSpot (but be sure to prioritize two-way integration over one-way sync so data moves in both directions). Zapier allows you to connect your cold email sender with thousands of other business tools with no need for custom development.

If you search for a comprehensive cold email sender that supports multichannel campaigns, you’ll likely come across the following leading B2B sales solutions.

Best cold email tools that offer more than email

Here are some of the top multichannel outreach tools you can use to power your cold messaging. 

AiSDR

AiSDR is a virtual SDR agent designed to automate numerous routine tasks for human SDRs. It supports sales teams across each stage of the sales funnel, from prospecting using its own database to booking meetings.

Although AiSDR doesn’t provide in-app calling, it generates call scripts in HubSpot that you can use verbatim or as talking points to guide the conversation.

This is how AiSDR beats other solutions:

• High configurability: You can configure AiSDR to speak in your tone of voice, then craft and send your recipients personalized, human-like messages with just a few clicks.
• Deepest native two-way HubSpot integration: Connect your CRM and update lead data to and from HubSpot, as well as use custom CRM properties.
• Dedicated GTM engineer: AiSDR not only helps with initial setup, but your GTM engineer also assists with sales personas, A/B tests, lookalike campaigns, and more.
• Sequence builder: AiSDR allows all users to build outreach sequences how they want them from scratch. You can layer in intent signals from different sources and engage prospects across multiple channels.
• AI Strategist: If you’re not sure where to begin, AiSDR’s AI Strategist will create 5 tailored outreach strategies based on your website. All you need to do is drop your website into AiSDR.

Instantly

Instantly is a sales engagement and lead intelligence platform with a database of over 450 million contacts you can use to find and enrich your prospect lists. It comes with one master inbox for emails, calls, and SMS messages to keep everything centralized.

Although Instantly doesn’t offer native integration with LinkedIn, you can still connect its cold email sender with LinkedIn via Zapier.

Unlike many other tools, Instantly offers:

• Separate pricing packages for different tasks: Choose between Outreach, SuperSearch, and CRM and pay only for the features you need.
• A private Facebook community with 40,000 participants: Communicate with other entrepreneurs to share your experience and find better ways to engage prospects and close deals.

Lemlist

Lemlist is a prospecting tool for multichannel outreach. Like Instantly, its database has over 450 million contacts, and the platform allows you to manage lead replies from multiple channels in one inbox.

Here’s what differentiates Lemlist from other solutions:

• LinkedIn voice message feature: Record a voice message to send to multiple prospects, or create a custom message for a particular lead. Then track their engagement.
• Advanced scenarios: Use this feature to adjust your B2B sales outreach sequences to specific scenarios (for instance, if your prospect doesn’t accept your LinkedIn invite within three days, you can contact them via email instead).

Smartlead

Smartlead is cold emailing software, and unlike the solutions above, it specifically focuses on outreach. The platform doesn’t come with its own database, but it has native integrations with sales software like Clay and ListKit.

Along with email outreach, Smartlead can send text messages from its interface. However, it doesn’t support LinkedIn or phone call outreach.

While this may not be the most comprehensive solution, you can still benefit from Smartlead’s features:

• Sender reputation protection: With conventional warmup methods, sender mailboxes don’t yet have a positive reputation, so some emails may be sent to spam. Smartlead automatically sends and opens emails, moves them from the spam folder, responds to them, simulating real-world interactions, and adds individual tags to “mask” warmup letters and prevent spam detection. Together, this guarantees that inboxes not only get warmed up, but your early emails actually reach recipients right from the start.
• Whitelabeling your domain: Marketing agencies can rebrand Smartlead’s platform under their own domain, so clients see it as a proprietary tool rather than a third-party service.

Outreach

Outreach is an AI-based sales execution platform that provides separate AI agents for different use cases: prospecting, forecasting and planning sales, managing deals, coaching sales reps, and retaining and expanding deals.

Outreach offers a texting feature (currently in beta) for US and Canadian numbers. Making and receiving calls are available via Outreach’s mobile app.

What makes Outreach a strong B2B sales solution:

• Workflow-first sales intelligence: Outreach learns your team’s actual work process so that its AI can determine what slows your reps down and provide recommendations to speed things along.
• Built for every team: Outreach was designed to serve all the different teams that drive revenue: sales managers, sales development, account executives, revenue operations, and customer success managers.

Salesloft

Salesloft is a revenue orchestration platform with functionality similar to that of Outreach: It also comes with AI agents to automate sales workflows.

Here’s why you might like Salesloft:

• A complete revenue workflow solution: Salesloft unifies activities, like pipeline analytics, prospect outreach, and deal management, so your revenue teams can all work using the same data.
• Largest integration ecosystem: Take advantage of integrations with over 180 other tools, like Salesforce, 6sense, and DocuSign.

Reply

Reply is an AI-based sales outreach and cold email platform that provides access to over one billion contacts worldwide. While the cold outreach software does support multichannel conversations, each channel comes as an add-on at an extra cost.

Reply stands out thanks to the following functionality:

• Name2Email Chrome extension: Find anyone’s email address instantly right from Gmail by simply entering their name and company domain.
• Automated PR & SEO outreach: Run personalized email campaigns that reach out to media outlets and bloggers to boost your SEO rankings.

Future-proof your multichannel outreach: What to ask vendors

While you can get a sense of what tools to prioritize based on what vendors say on their websites, it’s always better to call and dig deeper to get specific details. Here are some questions you might want to ask.

What’s the latency and configurability of your sequence triggers?

The best answer to this question is “short latency” and “high configurability.” Ideally, sequences should launch immediately after a certain event happens (if particular time frames aren’t specified, like in two days after a lead magnet download). 

As for configurability, some platforms only trigger sequences for basic actions, like email opens. Better platforms let you configure more complex triggers, like CRM updates and website behavior patterns, and even combinations of multiple triggers. The best option is when the cold email sender supports custom webhook configurations.

How do you handle LinkedIn API compliance?

Automated LinkedIn outreach always carries risks. For example, LinkedIn might temporarily limit connection requests and messages if you reach a certain threshold. In a worst case scenario, your account could get temporarily suspended.

Despite this, many platforms include automated LinkedIn outreach. But they differ in their degree of automation. Your vendor should adhere to all of LinkedIn’s limits for sending messages and connection requests within specific time periods.

AiSDR implements such limits, and in eight months of offering a LinkedIn outreach feature, not a single client account was suspended.

In addition, look for platforms that let you choose between fully automated outreach or semi-automated workflows. For example, a tool can create drafts for you to review and then send them manually.

How often do you improve your AI models and release new features?

The majority of AI sales solutions rely on popular models like GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4, or Llama, but the LLM choice is just one piece of the puzzle.

It also matters how vendors train their AI models for sales-specific tasks and how often they improve them with new data, like industry-specific language and email patterns that drive conversions.

The same goes for new features. Your provider must stay on top of new developments in the AI sales market and release software updates at least as frequently with competitors, or preferably ahead of them.

For example, AiSDR makes more than 10 software updates each day to improve stability, boost performance, and ship new features.

By comparison, some platforms are lucky to have one update a week. This allows us to give a competitive edge to our clients.

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Best practices for multichannel success

Your choice of the cold email sender certainly influences your sales strategy’s success, but it doesn’t define it completely. What’s equally important is how you use your platform.

Here are some tips to help you derive maximum benefit from your automated multichannel B2B sales outreach.

Use warmed-up lookalike domains to avoid reputation damage to the main domain

A lookalike domain is a variation of your core business domain that you create specifically for B2B cold outreach. For example, while our main domain is aisdr.com, our lookalike domains might be aisdr.co or aisdrteam.com.

Email providers would treat your cousin domains as different senders, which helps protect the core business domain that you use for other critical operations, like customer support emails, billing notifications, and internal communications. At the same time, people will still recognize who’s contacting them.

Don’t blast every channel at once

Contacting your prospect via email, LinkedIn, and text message simultaneously and then calling them the next day won’t make a good first impression. The best approach is to build a sequence that gradually involves each new channel at subsequent stages. 

For example:

Prospect visits a pricing page → Automated email about pricing/ROI → Prospect visits the page again but doesn’t respond to email → LinkedIn connection request → LinkedIn message on request acceptance

Prioritize channel flow based on audience

How you build your channel flow depends on your audience. Prospects regularly using LinkedIn are more likely to respond there. But if they don’t use social media much, try reaching out through email or a phone call first. Then, see what gets the best response and go from there.

Monitor channel health

LinkedIn has pretty strict rules about using automation tools, whereas email is vulnerable to deliverability issues. And if you use SMS marketing, you need to make sure you comply with TCPA.

Remember to check whether your approach is actually helping you. Track your metrics closely. If you notice a drop in response rates and an increase in spam complaints or account warnings, it might be time to adjust your approach.