Thoughts on Clay vs simple mail merge for proprietary outreach?

June 23, 2025

by a searcher from University of Texas at Austin in Dallas, TX, USA

I recently started my self-funded search and just finished compiling a list of ~3000 enriched companies with email, address, est revenue, etc. I'm considering the value of something like Clay to custom draft copy for the drip campaign vs just drafting the 3-5 emails I want to send and mail merging it. I'm pretty sure I'd need to go with the $350/mo Explorer plan if I did Clay so it's pretty expensive. Anyone have experience with this or put deep thought into it? Other alternatives I should consider?

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Reply by a searcher
from New York University in San Diego, CA, USA

Here's how I use it. 1. Clay => sourcing and targetted enrichment 2. Apollo => sourcing 3. Aplify => scraping Apollo lists (90% cheaper than Apollo) 4. Instantly.io => cold email campaign management *make/n8n => AI Automation workflows *OpenAI integration to create deal scorecards and personalized outreach

Reply by an intermediary
from University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI, USA

Clay is an excellent tool! Like ^redacted‌ mentioned, you will want to integrate with an email provider not tied to your domain. I would also recommend not using their "custom" draft copy - while these platforms all claim to customize email copy, they're all pretty bad and likely to end up in the Promotions Tab at best. Here are a couple of important functions while diving into Cold Email: 1) Shorter Subject Lines perform better 2) Use a separate domain for sending 3) Warmup the email sending account (there are services that do this); plan for warmup to take 1-2 weeks minimum 4) Limit the number of links in the email to 1-2 at most; more ideally there would be no links in your first email 5) Maintain CAN-SPAM compliance 6) Consider working with a marketing professional. I'm a CMO and I rarely try to tackle Cold Email myself - it's difficult even for seasoned marketers to get it right.

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