Reply.io is a multichannel sales engagement platform that helps sales and marketing teams close more deals through inbound and outbound multichannel sequences. It’s one of the leaders in the sales engagement industry, known for its wide range of features that can aid just about any sales process.
In this Reply.io review, we take a detailed look at this sales engagement platform to show its pros, cons, and possible concerns someone might have before purchasing.
What is Reply.io?
Reply.io is a multi-channel sales engagement platform for in-house sales teams and agencies, helping them reach out to potential customers via emails, phone, SMS and social media.
Businesses should automate their inbound and outbound sales communications with one tool that covers all channels. With its seamless integration options, robust API, and modern AI tools used in the sales process, sales teams may greatly benefit from using this tool in 2024.
Reply.io is known for its broad feature set, as well as the issues users have when trying to learn those features inside and out, but more on that later.
All the features in Reply.io you should know about
If you want to crush your sales quota with personalized email templates and more, you’ll want to know more about each of the features that Reply.io offers.
B2B lead database
If you don’t have lists of leads to get started with, Reply.io can supply their own, at the cost of spending credits. The B2B lead database has over 85 million contacts, allowing you to find new contacts you can reach out to based on your requirements.
Additionally, it integrates with CRMs natively, so you can plug the data from the database directly in your own system. The Google Chrome extension also helps if you want to scrape data directly from websites such as LinkedIn.
If you have existing lead lists, you can enrich them and make each touchpoint personal with relevant details for individual recipients.
Getting valid email addresses
The email validation process means going through email addresses to check if they exist, if they can receive emails, if they are not known spam traps, double entries in your lists, or temporary addresses. Using only valid email addresses ensures that your cold outreach efforts produce better results.
Within Reply.io, you can purchase credits for validation, at $5 for 1,000 emails. While this is not a lot of money if you want to build targeted prospect lists, there are other providers that offer this feature for free.
Multichannel sequences
If email is your main channel for outreach campaigns and you’re not looking to get potential clients through other channels, then Reply.io might be a bit much for you.
This tool lets you reach out to contacts using:
- email campaigns
- SMS
- Social media networks like LinkedIn
- Calls through VoIP services
For example, you can schedule meetings by connecting through email and then follow up using a phone call or text message.
On top of this, Reply.io offers social automation, so you don’t have to manually send messages and follow-ups. On your behalf, Reply.io can send connection requests, and messages, visit profiles of potential leads, and much more.
If you’re after a tool that offers multichannel engagement, Reply.io goes beyond up-close and personal emails. However, as we’ll learn in a second, setting these sequences up can take individual users a lot of time, to the point of diminishing returns.
Ease of use
If you take a look at just about any Reply.io review online, you’ll notice that the most common complaints are about the ease of use.
As the tool is pretty complex (multiple communication channels), most sales agencies and sales departments struggle with onboarding. Figuring out which feature does what and where will be one of your most time consuming tasks in Reply.io.
Once you do find out where things are, getting your first campaigns up and running is going to take even more time, so you may have to reach out to the support team, but more on that in a second.
Reply.io allows for multiple accounts and various communication channels, which gives your sales team many options. The problem is, there is no centralized dashboard. As a result, you’ll often confuse mailboxes and recipients, especially if you have multiple members in your outbound sales team, each with their own accounts.
There is no such thing as a user-friendly interface, and for agencies using multiple channels, organizing everything can become hectic.
And once you get past the setup of your email campaigns, you’ll find that many of the features can glitch out randomly, be it the syncing with third party mail servers, the inability to save your email campaigns, or the integrations breaking.
Calls directly from Reply.io
For sales teams that want to go beyond email, you can make calls by clicking on your Reply.io leads. Directly from the browser, you can reach out with one of the many great features.
For example, you can get a local presence to make it seem like you have a number in the USA or Canada. You can make international calls as well as record, store, and share phone conversations.
One thing that Reply.io does not mention is that each of these features costs extra. For example, just the ability to make phone calls costs $29 per user, and you have to pay for each phone number too. Every minute of conversation costs money too, and so does each SMS you send out.
This may not be a problem for someone who wants a one-size-fits-all sales engagement tool. However, if you already have a VoIP phone service that works really well but does not integrate with Reply.io, you just might be forced to make a difficult choice of what to keep.
Jason AI
Like many other sales tools nowadays, Reply.io has its own ChatGPT-based bot and it’s called Jason AI. Jason can help you get in touch with potential leads, respond to their emails and handle negative responses.
Like any bot, you can train Jason to learn about your product and offering, helping it answer the most basic customer queries. You can also tick a few boxes to help it define your target audience so that it knows which prospect to reach out to and what kind of messaging to use.
Bear in mind that Jason AI primarily works for emails and LinkedIn outreach.
Integrations
Reply.io integrates with a variety of other tools to help you save time and money on outreach efforts.
For sales teams, probably the most important ones are the CRM integrations. You can choose from: HubSpot, Zoho, Freshsales, Salesflare, Nutshell, Copper CRM, Close, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and others.
If you use other tools for contact finding and enrichment, you can connect those too. There are too many to name, but some of them include Albacross, Clearbit, Hunter.io, Lusha and many more.
If you can’t find the integration you’re looking for, you can use Zapier for a quick shortcut.
Customer support
Having efficient customer services is necessary with a complex product, and as you can see, they have their hands full. The great news is that most reviews praise Reply.io for having speedy customer support. On average, it takes just a few minutes to get a response, which is immensely valuable for new users.
They are also detailed in their responses, so if you’re struggling with building targeted prospect lists, someone from the customer support team can help out in real time.
Reply.io pricing
We have a detailed blog post on Reply.io pricing that you can check out to determine all the ins and outs of the main pricing plans. Today, we’re going to give you a basic cost rundown.
Reply has two pricing tiers, for businesses and agencies, and each one has pricing plans inside it, which kind of complicates things.
For businesses, there are four plans:
- Free
- Starter (at $49 per month)
- Professional (at $89 per month)
- Ultimate ($139 per month)
Starter and Professional are cheaper when you pay for them annually compared to monthly. The Ultimate plan can only be purchased annually.
The free plan is fairly generous, with 200 data search credits and an AI sequence generator. Email automation features are unlocked in the Starter plan, with one mailbox, 5,000 data search credits and 50 AI credits.
The main differences between the plans are in the number of mailboxes, the data search, and AI credits.
The custom agency plan starts at $166 per month, but you have to reach out to learn how much this sales engagement tool will cost you. Prices depend on the communication channels used, the number of users, and credits.
For sales teams, Reply.io may not be the cheapest choice out there, especially if they run a large number of email campaigns every month.
Who is Reply.io sales engagement platform for?
Reply.io is a capable tool with its own free database, a wide range of features, and cutting-edge AI technologies. It’s an amazing tool on its own, but it’s not for everyone.
Reply.io is a good choice for sales teams in businesses that already have a sales and outreach strategy in place and have used a sales automation tool before. Users unfamiliar with sales emails, native CRM integrations, reporting dashboards, and more, can get overwhelmed.
It’s also a solid choice for sales agencies wanting to boost their team performance with automated emails and multichannel sequences.
Reply.io is NOT a good choice for companies that are just starting with sales engagement tools and processes. It’s also not suitable for someone who wants an affordable entry into email automation.
Woodpecker – the better Reply.io alternative
Looking for a tool that simplifies email outreach and lets you hit the ground running with your cold outreach campaigns? At Woodpecker, we have all the features your sales team or agency may need to close more deals through email.
Starting off with email inbox warmup, you can rest assured that your sender reputation is safe because your account won’t look like you’re spamming. Woodpecker offers email validation, and it’s completely free to use for all of your contacts, thanks to Woodpecker’s integration with Bouncer.
Within Woodpecker, you can create and set up advanced email sequences based on triggers. This means that if a recipient opens an email, clicks through to your website or books a call, they get put into a different sequence of emails.
To make things even better, Woodpecker offers A/B testing capabilities, letting you compare two or more versions of the same email against one another.
There are plenty of ways to connect Woodpecker to your existing stack of sales tools, through webhooks, API and native integrations. For example, there are integrations with HubSpot, Pipedrive, Slack, Zapier and Calendly, among others.
Perhaps the best part about Woodpecker is the affordable and transparent pricing. At just $29 per month, you can reach out to 500 contacts with free follow-up emails and 2,000 stored contacts.
Sounds like a good deal? Grab a free trial of Woodpecker and test it out today!
Wrapping up
At this point, you were able to gain valuable insights about Reply.io, its features, user interface and pricing. If you want to do outreach campaigns and improve your sales process, Reply may seem like a great choice, but the reality is that for most sales teams, it’s too complex and expensive.
Instead, try a Reply.io alternative that is easy to use for cold outreach, has a great number of features to improve campaign performance, and can be used and understood by every team member in your company.
Grab a free trial of Woodpecker today!