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Yesware: Review, Competitors, and Alternatives

Sujan Patel

Sujan Patel is the founder of Mailshake, a sales engagement software used by 38,000 sales and marketing professionals. He has over 15 years of marketing experience and has led the digital marketing strategy for companies like Salesforce, Mint, Intuit and many other Fortune 500 caliber companies.

Read more articles by Sujan Patel →

• February 3, 2020

Yesware is a Gmail and Office365 extension that bills itself as an “All-In-One Toolkit for sales professionals.” Essentially, it’s a plug-in for popular email applications that aims to make it easier to perform cold outreach, follow up with leads, and schedule meetings.

Unlike other email tools, Yesware allows you to do all this without having to leave your preferred email application. This makes it very easy, but also less flexible and powerful than other similar tools.

You can try Yesware for free, but after the trial period, you will have to upgrade to a paid plan. Pricing starts at $15/month for an annual plan and goes up to $85/month.

While Yesware can be used for many different applications, it’s specifically designed for cold emailing, cold calling, follow-up emails, and B2B sales.

Yesware Core Features

Yesware’s features can be divided into six main categories:

• Email tracking: Yesware provides a real-time activity feed that lets you see when someone opens one of your emails, clicks a link, or views an attachment. This can help you make better-informed decisions about when to follow up.
• Prospecting campaigns: Yesware helps you plan out your outreach campaigns with automation features. You can use the tool to schedule follow up emails in advance, along with phone calls, LinkedIn mails, and other custom follow ups.
• Meeting scheduler: With Yesware, you can streamline your meeting scheduling process. Instead of discussing a time to meet, you can simply send your prospects a link to your calendar and let them select a time that you have available.
• Email templates: Yesware provides a library of templates for common interactions, like follow ups, call confirmations, and quotes. You can also create your own templates or make changes to the built-in templates. This can help you save time when sending out large amounts of similarly worded emails during outreach campaigns.
• Insights and Analytics: With Yesware, you can track the performance of your emails and see how they are improving or worsening over time. This can help you identify strengths and weaknesses to make your future emails better.
• Integrations: Yesware integrates with LinkedIn and Salesforce. You can autosync your activity on Salesforce and InMails on LinkedIn along with several other features on each platform.

Who Yesware Is For

Yesware is designed for both teams and individuals that want to improve their sales process and make it more efficient. The tool has features that will be useful for anyone in any type of sales role.

Additionally, certain features, like email tracking and templates, can be useful even for people who aren’t involved with sales but who need to send out mass emails.

Overall, it’s a useful general business tool, but it will be most valuable to individual salespeople and sales teams.

What People Don’t Like About Yesware

Overall, customers seem to enjoy Yesware. It currently has a 4.5/5-star rating on G2 and a 4.2/5-star rating on Capterra. However, users still have a fair amount of complaints about the tool.

One issue with Yesware is that it’s only available as a Gmail or Outlook extension. While there is a separate app where you can set up campaigns outside of the Gmail or Outlook UI, there’s no option for a completely standalone desktop app. This reduces flexibility and can also make your inbox look a bit cluttered.

Plus, there is currently no way to use Yesware on your mofbile device. With so many people doing business on the go, this can be a major problem, and several reviewers have commented on this important oversight.

Finally, some users also report annoying bugs and glitches. Some of these are fairly minor, but one user mentioned that email tracking doesn’t work properly because it registers emails as read even when they were only opened by the receiver’s firewall or antivirus software. When customers do have issues, there are also some complaints with Yesware’s lack of accessible human customer support.

Mailshake: Your Yesware Alternative

Yesware is a great light-weight tool to help with tasks related to managing and sending emails from your inbox.

However, if you’re trying to send larger campaigns to many recipients, Mailshake is a much better option for several reasons:

• Mailshake is a standalone web app dedicated to making it easy to perform personalized outreach at scale
• Mailshake integrates with more of your tech stack
• Mailshake customer success is available whenever you need it to help you with the platform and with your cold outreach strategy in general

More features for bulk campaigns

As an app that’s separate from your Gmail or Outlook inbox, Mailshake has a number of advantages over Yesware.

First, you can manage and reply to leads from within Mailshake with Lead Catcher. This allows you to keep the work you do on outreach campaigns separate from your inbox. It also helps you stay focused on just the folks who reply and are interested in your offer, and easily get rid of autoresponders, bounces, unsubscribes, and folks who aren’t interested.

Additionally, Mailshake keeps your campaigns on track by:

1. Identifying out-of-office auto-responses
2. Blacklisting emails that bounce, so you don’t accidentally email them again
3. Blacklisting folks who unsubscribe by catching people who reply with phrases like “remove me” or “unsubscribe”

Mailshake also helps reduce your bounce rate by identifying emails that are likely to bounce, before you send your campaign, and giving you the option to remove them from your campaign.

Finally, you can improve the results on your campaigns by A/B testing subject lines, body copy, and even entire sequences.

The bottom line is that Mailshake is a platform dedicated to automating your cold outreach. Yesware has some features that help you do that as well, but is missing some core functionality that makes Mailshake much more powerful.

More direct and 3rd party integrations

Yesware has a few key direct integrations, but is missing many more that make it difficult to make Yesware a part of your tech stack.

First, Yesware does not integrate with Zapier. That means that the only integrations they have are the few tools that they integrate directly with. Mailshake integrates with Zapier, which means you can connect Mailshake to thousands of apps, even if we don’t have a direct integration.

The only CRM that Yesware integrates directly with is Salesforce, and that’s only for customers on the Enterprise plan. Mailshake directly integrates with Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive, all of which are available to any Mailshake customer on any plan.

Mailshake also directly integrates with two other popular sales tools: Calendly and Vidyard. Our direct Calendly integration allows you to connect lead tracking within Mailshake to when a prospect books a meeting with your Calendly link.

Our direct integration with Vidyard allows you to embed videos into Mailshake campaigns and track when people click and watch the video.

Mailshake’s native and 3rd party integrations make it a much better option for most salespeople and business owners who already have a set of tools that are a part of their process.

Best-in-class customer support

A quick check of Mailshake’s G2 reviews will show one thing: our customer support and success teams are the best in the industry.

We host twice-weekly office hours, available to any customer, to hop on and get their questions answered about the Mailshake product, or their outreach strategy.

For customers on our annual or sales engagement plans, we offer a one-hour, one-on-one onboarding session with our customer success team to help you get your account set up and your strategy off the ground.

We give specific feedback on campaign copy to maximize deliverability and engagement, and work with 3rd parties to provide professional copywriting and campaign strategy support.

Mailshake is easy to use, but cold outreach is hard to master. Our customer success team is there every step of the way to make sure you’re getting the most out of the platform and the best results possible.

The Bottom Line

Yesware is a great product for people looking for a lightweight inbox add-on and early stage email automation.

For most people, however, Mailshake:

• Has much more powerful mail merge features
• Integrates with your whole tech stack
• Offers best-in-class customer success

Click here to book a demo or sign up today.