Been lurking here a while and wanted to share something useful since this sub has helped me a lot
i ran cold email for a B2B SaaS doing outbound to SMB founders. Tried four different setups for personalization at scale:
Manual research + GPT 4 - Best quality, completely unsustainable past 30 emails/day
Clay and instantly - Powerful but the setup time and maintenance killed me. Not great if you're not technical.
Tario - AI native, no setup, handles the lead research and personalization and follow ups in one place. Took some tweaking to get the tone right but now I barely touch it.
lemlist sequences - Easy to use, personalization felt shallow after a while
reply rates across all four were honestly similar (8-14%) when the targeting was good. The only noticeable difference was time, I went from 3+ hours per day to under 45 mins.
So, the tool mattered less than my ICP clarity and offer. But if you're spending too much time on manual work, there are better options now than there were even a year ago