Instantly

What is Instantly?

Instantly is a cold email outreach platform designed to help sales teams, founders, and agencies send personalised email sequences at scale while maintaining high deliverability. Its defining feature is the ability to connect unlimited email accounts on all paid plans — a meaningful advantage over tools that charge per seat or per inbox.

The platform handles the two biggest challenges in cold email: deliverability and personalisation. For deliverability, Instantly runs an automated warm-up service that sends and receives emails between accounts in its network to build sender reputation before you launch your real campaigns. For personalisation, its AI personalisation feature generates unique opening lines for each prospect based on their LinkedIn profile, company information, or other data you provide — making each email feel handwritten even at a thousand-person scale.

Instantly is aimed at the segment between "send cold emails manually" and "enterprise sales engagement platform". It's more capable and scalable than doing outreach from Gmail, and significantly cheaper than tools like Outreach or Salesloft. That makes it the default choice for early-stage B2B companies and agencies running outreach for clients.

Who is it for?

• B2B founders and sales reps booking meetings through cold outreach as their primary acquisition channel
• Growth agencies running outreach campaigns for multiple clients with separate inboxes
• Recruiters reaching out to passive candidates at volume
• Affiliate and partnership teams finding and approaching potential partners
• Anyone who has tried cold email from their personal Gmail account and hit deliverability or reply-rate walls

Key features

• Unlimited email accounts: connect as many Google Workspace, Outlook, or custom SMTP inboxes as you want
• Automated warm-up: Instantly's warm-up network builds sender reputation for new inboxes automatically
• Campaign sequences: write multi-step email sequences with delay logic, condition branches, and A/B test variants
• AI personalisation: generate unique personalised first lines per prospect using LinkedIn or custom data
• Unibox: a unified inbox that shows all campaign replies across all connected email accounts in one feed
• Analytics: open rate, reply rate, positive reply rate, opportunity rate — broken down per campaign and per step
• Lead finder (add-on): built-in B2B contact database to source prospects without a separate tool
• Integrations: connects to Clay, Apollo, HubSpot, Zapier, and other tools in the outreach stack

Step-by-step setup

1. Go to instantly.ai and start your account — choose a plan (Growth at $37/month is suitable for most early-stage use cases)
2. Purchase sending domains: buy 3–5 domains similar to your main domain (e.g., if you're acme.com, buy tryacme.com, getacme.com) — use Namecheap or Cloudflare
3. Set up Google Workspace or Outlook accounts on each new domain (aim for 2–3 inboxes per domain)
4. Connect your inboxes in Instantly under Email Accounts > Add Account. Authenticate via OAuth or SMTP
5. Enable warm-up for every new inbox. Warm up for at least 2–3 weeks before sending real campaigns — do not skip this step
6. Build your lead list: import a CSV of prospects with name, email, company, and any personalisation fields, or use the built-in lead finder
7. Create a campaign: write your email sequence (3 steps is a good starting point), set delays between steps (3–5 days), and upload your lead list
8. Set sending limits: start at 20–30 emails per inbox per day; increase gradually over several weeks
9. Monitor the Unibox daily for replies and move interested prospects to your CRM manually or via Zapier

Tips for getting the most out of it

• Domain hygiene is everything. If you burn your sending domains by sending too much too fast, your emails go to spam and your campaigns fail. Always warm up for at least 2 weeks, start low, and increase volume slowly.
• Write shorter emails. Most high-performing cold emails are under 80 words. Short emails feel human; long ones feel like marketing. Aim for one problem, one outcome, one CTA.
• Use Claude to draft your sequences. Write your ideal ICP, your value proposition, and the action you want the prospect to take. Ask Claude to write a 3-step sequence. Iterate from there rather than starting from a blank page.
• Test one variable at a time. Instantly's A/B testing lets you test subject lines and email bodies. Test subject lines first (biggest impact on open rate), then test your CTA once open rates are acceptable.
• Respond to replies within minutes. The warm response to an interested reply is as important as the cold outreach itself. Check the Unibox at least twice a day and respond fast — interest decays quickly.