That’s when I started reading up on different email outreach tools. One name kept popping up, Lemlist. At first, I was skeptical. I’ve read plenty of glowing reviews before, only to be disappointed. But Lemlist stood out because of its strong focus on personalization, automation, and deliverability. It claimed to do more than just send emails, it promised to help build real connections.
A few months ago, I hit a wall with my cold email strategy. I was sending out dozens of emails a day, but barely getting any responses. My open rates were average at best, and follow-ups were a manual nightmare. I knew I needed a smarter way to run my outreach, something that could help me personalize at scale without spending hours in my inbox.
This Lemlist review is based on my own experience using the platform to run cold outreach campaigns for my business. If you’re wondering whether it’s worth the investment, keep reading. I’ll walk you through exactly what worked for me, what didn’t, and whether it might be the right fit for you too.
Table of Contents
What is Lemlist & Who is It For?
Lemlist is a cold email outreach platform designed to help individuals and businesses connect with leads in a more personal and efficient way. It combines email automation, follow-up sequences, and unique personalization features like dynamic images and videos, all aimed at improving your chances of getting a reply.
What makes Lemlist stand out from traditional email tools is its focus on deliverability and engagement. It doesn’t just let you send mass emails. Instead, it gives you the tools to make each message feel tailored, even when you’re reaching out to hundreds of contacts at once.
Lemlist is ideal for sales teams, recruiters, agencies, and entrepreneurs who rely on cold outreach to generate leads or close deals. Whether you’re a solo freelancer trying to land new clients or part of a growing startup looking to scale your outreach, Lemlist offers flexibility and functionality to support different use cases
My Setup Experience: Onboarding, UI & First Campaign
Getting started with Lemlist was surprisingly straightforward. After creating my account, I was guided through a clear onboarding flow that helped me connect my email provider, verify my domain, and enable Lemwarm, their email warm-up tool. It felt like Lemlist really understood the common technical hurdles that come with cold outreach and made them easy to navigate, even for someone who’s not very tech-savvy.
User Interface: Clean, Intuitive, and Beginner-Friendly
The first thing I noticed after logging into the dashboard was how clean and organized the interface looked. Unlike some outreach tools that feel clunky or outdated, Lemlist’s UI is modern and user-friendly. The sidebar neatly breaks down everything into simple sections: Campaigns, Prospects, Emails, Settings, and Lemwarm.
Within each section, the layout is easy to follow. For example, when creating an email sequence, you’re taken step-by-step through writing your emails, adding delays between messages, and selecting conditions for follow-ups. It felt a lot like building a workflow, but without the usual complexity.
Even better, Lemlist offers helpful tooltips and short video walkthroughs at nearly every step. This was especially useful during my first campaign setup when I wasn’t yet confident in what sequence settings would work best.
Launching My First Campaign: Easy, Yet Powerful
To create my first campaign, I started by uploading a list of prospects via CSV. Mapping the fields (like name, company, and email) was simple, and I appreciated that I could preview how the variables would look in each email. From there, I began building my sequence.
Lemlist allows you to create multi-step campaigns with a mix of emails, follow-ups, and delays in between. I kept it simple, three emails spaced out over 10 days, but even with that, the platform made it easy to personalize each message. I used dynamic variables for first name and company, and I experimented with one of Lemlist’s image personalization templates. It was impressive how quickly I could customize an image to include the recipient’s name and logo, something I’d never been able to do with other tools.
After finalizing the content, Lemlist ran a deliverability check and gave me a green light. I scheduled the campaign to go out the next morning, and the tool handled everything automatically from there.
First Impressions
From a setup and usability perspective, Lemlist made a strong first impression. It felt like a tool designed not just for marketers or sales pros, but for anyone who wants to build meaningful connections through cold email. In this Lemlist review, I’ll share more about how the campaign actually performed, but the user experience alone was enough to make me feel confident in continuing with it.
Personalization & Automation: Powerful Features in Action
One of the biggest reasons I chose Lemlist over other cold email tools was its promise of deep personalization combined with automation. I wasn’t just looking to send bulk emails. I wanted my messages to feel personal and relevant, even if I was contacting hundreds of people at once. Lemlist delivered on that.
Personalization That Goes Beyond First Names
Most tools let you insert basic variables like {first_name} or {company}, but Lemlist takes it further with image and video personalization. In my first campaign, I tested one of their dynamic image templates. It automatically added the recipient’s name and company logo to a photo I uploaded, creating a visual that looked like it was made just for them.
What surprised me most was how easy this was to set up. I didn’t need any design skills or external software. I just selected a template, uploaded my base image, and mapped the variables from my contact list. Within minutes, I had a customized image that added a personal touch to every email.
Lemlist also allows you to insert personalized text into subject lines, preview how emails look for each prospect, and even personalize links. All of these small touches helped boost open and click-through rates in a noticeable way.
Automation That Feels Natural
Building automated follow-up sequences in Lemlist was simple and flexible. I set up a three-step campaign with specific delays between each message. What I appreciated was the ability to create conditional logic, so if someone replied to the first email, the follow-ups would stop automatically. That way, I wasn’t annoying people with unnecessary messages.
The scheduling options were also helpful. I could set specific sending times, limit the number of emails sent per day, and choose to skip weekends. This made my outreach feel more human and less like a mass email blast.
Plus, Lemlist’s smart sending feature ensures that your emails go out at optimal times based on each recipient’s time zone. For someone like me running outreach across different countries, this was a major win.
Why This Matters
In cold outreach, timing and personalization are everything. Generic emails don’t get replies, but personalized ones that land in the inbox at the right time do. Lemlist gave me the tools to do just that, without spending hours every day writing individual messages.
As I continue this Lemlist review, I’ll share more about how these features actually translated into results. But from a functionality standpoint, the personalization and automation features are among the best I’ve seen in any cold email platform.
Email Deliverability & Lemwarm Results
As part of this lemlist review, I have to highlight one game-changing aspect: email deliverability. When I first started sending cold emails, I quickly realized that even the best message means nothing if it lands in a spam folder. Unfortunately, many of my initial emails were going to spam. My open rates were disappointingly low, and a few prospects even told me, “Hey, found your email in my junk folder.” I knew I had a deliverability problem on my hands, and that’s where Lemlist’s Lemwarm feature came in.
Lemwarm is Lemlist’s built-in email warm-up tool designed to boost your sender reputation automatically. In simple terms, it sends out small batches of harmless emails from your account to a network of real Lemlist users and interacts with them (think automatic replies, marking the emails as important, even pulling them out of spam). This activity makes it look to Gmail, Outlook, and other providers like people genuinely want to receive your emails. Over time, those email services start to trust your sender address more. The goal is to ensure that when you begin your actual cold outreach, your emails land in inboxes instead of getting caught in spam filters.
Setting Up Lemwarm
Setting up Lemwarm was straightforward and took me about 10 minutes. Here’s how I got it going:
- Connecting My Email: I linked my email account (a Google Workspace Gmail) to Lemlist and toggled on the Lemwarm feature. The interface guided me through each step.
- Authenticating Domain: Lemlist prompted me to fix a couple of DNS settings (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) for my sending domain. This sounded technical, but the platform provided clear instructions. I followed those to authenticate my domain, which is crucial for deliverability.
- Starting with a Low Volume: Once everything was verified, I set Lemwarm to start with a small number of emails per day (I began at 5 warm-up emails daily). Lemwarm then automatically planned to gradually increase this number each day.
- Auto Warm-Up in Action: Lemwarm began sending out these warm-up emails to other Lemlist users. I could actually see some of the warm-up interactions in my inbox. For example, a few auto-generated reply messages from the network, and notifications that some of my warm emails were marked as “important” or moved out of spam. This meant the system was doing its job simulating real engagement.
- Monitoring the Dashboard: Lemlist’s dashboard has a deliverability section where I tracked my “warm-up” progress. I kept an eye on stats like how many emails were landing in inbox vs. spam during the warm-up phase. Fortunately, I didn’t have to tweak anything after the initial setup. Lemwarm ran on autopilot from there.
(Honestly, after the initial configuration, I pretty much forgot about it and focused on other work. Lemwarm ran in the background, quietly improving my domain’s reputation.)
Results After Warming Up
Within about 2 weeks, I started noticing a real difference in my cold email campaigns. It wasn’t an overnight flip of a switch, but the trend was clear: my deliverability was improving. Here are some of the changes I observed after using Lemwarm for about a month:
- Higher Inbox Placement: Before Lemwarm, a large chunk of my emails (possibly 40–50%) were getting flagged as spam. After the warm-up period, the vast majority of my emails were hitting the inbox. I’d estimate over 85–90% inbox placement based on test emails I sent to myself and deliverability reports. Seeing only a tiny fraction end up in spam felt like a huge win.
- Open Rates Jumped: Naturally, when more emails land in inboxes, more real people open them. My open rate increased from around 30% into the 40–45% range. In other words, I went from not even a third of prospects opening my emails to almost half. That’s a significant improvement for cold outreach. It told me that Lemwarm’s reputation-boosting was paying off.
- Fewer Bounces and Blocks: I also noticed a drop in bounce notifications and no instances of email providers temporarily blocking my sends. Previously, I had a few scary moments where Gmail warned me or bounced messages due to suspected spam activity. After Lemwarm, those warnings disappeared. My emails were being treated as legitimate correspondence, not intrusive spam.
- Better Reply Rates: The ultimate goal of outreach is replies, and those improved too. I got more responses once Lemwarm had ramped up my trust score. It wasn’t solely because of deliverability (message content and targeting matter as well), but having emails actually reach people certainly gave me a fighting chance. In fact, one campaign’s reply rate roughly doubled after the warm-up period (from about 5-6% reply rate to around 10-12%). This was a night-and-day difference in terms of getting conversations started.
To test how much Lemwarm was contributing, I conducted a little experiment. After about 5 weeks of continuous warm-up, I paused Lemwarm for 3 days during week 6. Almost immediately, I saw a dip in my inbox placement in the daily stats, it dropped by roughly 10%. My open rates suffered a bit that week as well. That was enough evidence for me that the warm-up needed to stay on. I resumed Lemwarm, and within a couple of days my inbox placement bounced back up to around 80-85%. This experiment convinced me that consistent warming is important to maintain the results; if I let it lapse, my deliverability could backslide.
Overall, Lemlist’s Lemwarm feature delivered exactly as promised. It solved the biggest headache I had with cold email. These days I’m far less worried about whether my emails are being seen, I know they’re reaching prospects’ primary inboxes, and I can focus on writing a compelling message. For anyone reading this and struggling with emails going to spam, I can say from my experience that Lemwarm is a huge help. It took a new email account that nobody trusted and, over a short span, turned it into one that ISPs view as reputable. In the context of my lemlist review, the email deliverability boost from Lemwarm has been the standout highlight, giving me confidence that my cold outreach is actually reaching real people and not getting lost in the void.
Pricing, Support & Integrations
When choosing any outreach tool, three things matter to me: how much it costs, how helpful the support is, and whether it works well with the tools I already use. In this part of my Lemlist review, I’ll quickly break down those key points.
Pricing
Lemlist isn’t the cheapest cold email tool out there, but it offers strong value if you’re serious about outreach. There are three main pricing tiers:
- Email Pro – $55/month per user
Great for individuals or small teams focused on email campaigns. You get unlimited emails, Lemwarm (email warm-up), personalization features, and access to Lemlist’s lead database. - Multichannel – $79/month per user
Designed for growing sales teams, this plan adds LinkedIn and phone outreach, as well as more automation features and CRM integration options. - Enterprise – Custom pricing
Best for large companies that need more sending accounts, dedicated support, and advanced features.
Lemlist offers three billing options: monthly, quarterly with a 10% discount, and yearly with a 30% discount off the monthly price. The prices above are on a yearly billing option with 20% off.
If you’re just starting out, the Email Pro plan covers most essentials. But if you’re managing a team or want multi-channel outreach, the higher-tier plans might be worth it.
Support
Lemlist offers live chat and email support directly inside the platform. I’ve personally used the chat function and usually received helpful replies within an hour or two during business hours. While the support isn’t available 24/7, the team is friendly and knowledgeable. There’s also a solid library of tutorials and guides if you prefer self-help.
Integrations
Lemlist works well with popular tools like HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, and automation platforms like Zapier and Make. I connected my CRM in just a few clicks, and it was easy to import contacts and sync activity. If you’re using Slack, Lemlist can send notifications straight to your channels when someone replies. They also offer a Chrome extension to pull leads from LinkedIn, which saved me a lot of time
Final Thoughts: Is Lemlist Worth It for Your Business?
After using Lemlist for several weeks, I can confidently say it’s one of the more complete cold outreach tools I’ve tried. It combines powerful automation with standout personalization features, and the built-in deliverability tools like Lemwarm really make a difference in getting your emails seen.
What stood out the most to me was how easy it was to launch personalized, multi-step campaigns that actually felt human. The interface is clean, the automation is intuitive, and integrations with tools like HubSpot and Zapier made it fit smoothly into my workflow.
That said, Lemlist isn’t the cheapest option on the market. If you’re just starting out or only sending a handful of emails a month, it might feel like a big investment. But if cold outreach is a key part of your sales or marketing strategy—and you want to save time while increasing response rates—then the value Lemlist offers is easy to justify.
To sum up this Lemlist review:
✅ It’s ideal for small teams, agencies, or solo founders who want to scale outreach without sacrificing personalization.
✅ The deliverability tools and automation features are strong enough for serious users.
✅ And while pricing is on the higher side, the results can make it worth every cent—especially if you commit to the quarterly or yearly plans.
If outreach is a growth channel for your business, Lemlist is definitely worth considering.