A tool like Clay or Instantly is a great choice for a sales and marketing ad campaign. If you’re considering one or the other, which should you pick? Clay and Instantly both have their strengths and weaknesses. A good understanding of those will help you choose the best tool for your business.
Clay: A Data-Driven Approach to Outreach
If you’re a highly data-centric business that runs on very granular information, Clay is probably right for you. That’s because it’s very good at aggregating and cleansing, then enriching, a wide variety of data streams into single customer views that you can use to develop very hyper-personalized outreach campaigns. Clay’s ability to automate all this is the big selling point. In a business context, that makes it hugely valuable for the kind of complex, data-rich operations that have to churn through huge amounts of data.
Why Go with Clay?
- Data Enrichment: Clay brings all your data into one place from any available source and enriches your contacts with analytic and intent layers to know who to call, when to call, and what offer to make to get a response.
- Improved Sales: With a holistic view of your customer, you can make decisions about more effective outreach and personalize communication to drive conversion and revenue.
- Customization: If your target market can be split into geographies or demographic clusters that require tailored messaging based on deep insights, the platform needs to have the capacity to customize content to communicate to each.
- Smooth, Seamless Integration: Clay sits alongside everything else in your technology stack with no disruption. You can bring it in without friction and use it to make the tools you already own more productive.
Things to Keep in Mind:
- Complexity: Clay’s depth of well-crafted features might be a bit overwhelming for small teams or companies with simple data needs. The depth of features might make for a slightly steep learning curve compared with other tools.
- Price: Clay has a lot going for it in terms of features, but it also has a higher price point than some other options. Make sure that it fits with your budget and with the needs of your company.
Instantly: Your Go-To for Email Campaigns
If you’re running an email-based business, Instantly should already be on your radar. Not only does it send the emails for your campaigns, but its advanced deliverability features also help ensure that they’re actually opened, which is the final and most important step in any email marketing campaign. When you’re aware that your emails won’t get tossed into the spam folder, it keeps them in front of your audience at all times.
Why Choose Instantly?
- Scalability: Instantly allows you to scale up your email campaigns rapidly to meet your hyperscale emailing needs. For example, you can send a high number of emails without worrying about capacity.
- Advanced Deliverability: Instantly guarantees world-class email deliverability immediately. All emails are guaranteed to reach your recipients’ inboxes and not their junk folder. Good deliverability becomes essential if you want your email marketing to keep working.
- Intuitive Interface: Instantly provides a user-friendly interface. As soon as you open up the site and are set for an email campaign, you won’t get lost. Even if this is your first time running an email campaign, you won’t have to stress yourself. You can learn quickly, begin running it in minutes, and then start tracking.
Things to Keep in Mind:
- Point Features: Instantly is a fine tool for email outreach, but it is essentially a single point feature. If your business does anything other than email outreach, it is unlikely Instantly will be your go-to service for structuring your online identity. If you use Instantly for outreach, you’ll likely need another point feature for each additional function you want to access.
- Learning Curve: The interface is intuitive, but there is a learning curve, especially for the advanced deliverability features that Mailchimp offers. You’ll be happiest if you take your time and let yourself get up to speed on its many features.
Which Tool Works for You?
Is it Clay, or is it Instantly? The answer to this question should depend on what you are trying to do with your business. If you care about data quality, personalization, and campaigns that touch millions of people, you should go with Clay. If you care about whether your email is getting delivered at all—let alone opened—in large-volume campaigns, you should go with Instantly.
You’re not right or wrong; you’re just using different tools. For those who want to apply what they learn for better data-targeted outreach, they’ll want one. For others who want to improve email deliverability, they’ll want another. Most importantly, you should choose whatever will help you achieve your business-level objectives. That way, your marketing can hit the stratosphere.
