State of the cold email stack

I recently went down the rabbit hole of spinning up my cold email strategy. There's a lot of posts on this forum where people point out how important it is to personalize. I still felt the need to have a prospecting engine. I wanted a process that was as automated as possible.

The amount of SaaS solutions for cold email overwhelmed me. I thought I'd share my findings.

I noticed that a stack could come in two flavors.

1. Separate services chained together
   The majority of services seemed to align with this kind of stack. Pricing comes from entry level tiers. Based on my trials of the competitors, this would be the stack I'd recommend.

CaptainData - $50 - scrape LinkedIn data in a format that works for Hunter, et al (i.e. first name + last name + company domain)
Hunter - $50 - Email finder
Smartreach - $25 - Campaign manager

2. All in one
   Both of these services offer ways to accomplish all three steps of the stack above.

Snov.io - $40
Smartreach.io - $25

I decided to go with smartreach.io. It's simple. I also had a bad deliverability experience when I tried Snov. Smartreach deliverability seems to be great so far.

I didn't mention email servers in the post yet.

I need to dig in to my email server selection. I use Google Workspace which has some known issues with different spam filters (SORBS). It seems like Mailgun would be the ideal alternative from my initial research.

Hope it helps! I tried pretty much everything out there. If you have questions, let's talk about it!