Woodpecker Cold Email 2023 Review: Personalization at Scale

Discover the power of cold emailing - the ultimate strategy to reach out to potential customers and partners. By crafting personalized and compelling cold emails, you can increase your conversion rates compared to social media marketing. However, the key to success lies in the content of your email and the email marketing tool you choose to use.

Say goodbye to overpriced & confusing email marketing tools. That's why today we wanted to review Woodpecker – the ultimate cold email tool that embodies creativity, perseverance, and communication - all represented by the woodpecker bird. With Woodpecker, you can effortlessly connect with your audience and achieve your goals (MORE SALES!)

What Is Woodpecker?

Woodpecker is a user-friendly cold email platform designed to streamline communication for B2B companies seeking prospective customers and business partners. As a user of Woodpecker, you'll find it to be an incredibly intuitive cold email tool that greatly helps your company connect with potential clients and partners. With Woodpecker, you'll be able to create personalized and relevant email sequences, ensuring your emails are delivered straight to your recipient's main inbox. You'll find Woodpecker invaluable in maintaining ongoing conversations with your contacts.

Who Should Use Woodpecker?

Although Woodpecker's main clients are B2B companies, their services expand way beyond them. No matter what industry you're in, if you want to attract more clients or partners, you need to send cold emails. Some use cases of users that could greatly benefit from Woodpecker are

• A B2B company looking to establish connections and foster relationships with prospective customers and business partners.
• A sales team aiming to increase outreach efficiency and personalize cold emails for better engagement.
• A freelancer or consultant seeking new clients and opportunities by expanding their professional network.
• A startup founder aiming to generate leads, partnerships, or funding for their business venture.
• A digital marketing agency pursuing collaboration opportunities and acquiring new clients through targeted email campaigns.
• A non-profit organization striving to establish partnerships, attract donors, or raise awareness through effective communication strategies.

Woodpecker Key Features

Cold Email Personalization

Say goodbye to sending generic emails with Woodpecker’s cold email personalization feature. Now, you can send emails straight from your chosen mailbox, so your prospects receive them right in their Inbox instead of getting lost in the Promotions tab. With the ability to edit custom fields, your emails will feel like you sent them manually. There’s a few ways of customizing your emails to make them stand out, but once you figure out the formula you’re golden

Email Verification

With their partnership with Bouncer, you can rest assured that your email list is verified in real time before sending your emails. Invalid email addresses are then separated.

Bouncer checks the email addresses in real time to ensure they're valid. It differentiates between existing and potentially non-existent addresses. If an email address passes Bouncer's verification, your email is sent; otherwise, if it's incorrect or non-existent, Bouncer prevents it from being delivered.

This not only reduces your bounce rate but also boosts your deliverability, ensuring that your emails reach the right people every time.

Bounce Shield 

Woodpecker's Bounce Shield feature protects your reputation and prevents prospects from blocking you. By automatically detecting your sending volume, it stops you from exceeding the email provider's limit, making sure that you're never blacklisted. And the best part? Bounce Shield is always ON, so you don't have to do anything.

Built-in and Native Integrations

Woodpecker understands the value of your time, which is why you can seamlessly integrate with your favorite tools and apps. Whether it's Google, LinkedIn, HubSpot, Hunter, Office 365, Slack, WordPress, Zapier, or Zoom, Woodpecker got you covered. And with API keys, you can create your own customized integrations with less effort.

A/B Testing

Woodpecker’s A/B Testing allows you to test up to five different versions of your cold emails in a single campaign. This awesome feature gives you an idea of which version works best to increase your positive response rates. Although unlikely, if you don’t want to split-test your campaign, you have the option to turn off this feature (unfortunately, A/B testing does cost an extra $10 a month).

Follow-Up Automation

Instead of manually following up with unresponsive prospects, let Woodpecker's Follow-up Automation feature do the job for you. With unlimited follow-up emails that can be sent sequentially, you can rest easy knowing that your leads won't fall through. You can also customize each follow-up to make them more personalized. Make sure to send follow ups until a potential client tells you they’re not interested!

Easy Deliverability Monitoring

No more guessing games when monitoring your campaigns, you'll get an entire suite of monitoring. Now, you can stay on top of your email campaigns with easy-to-read stats on delivery rates, open rates, and response rates. View the status of all your campaigns, including warm-up emails, in a graphical presentation or individually. 

Email Signature Generator

Impress your prospects from the get-go with Woodpecker's Email Signature Generator. Choose from six attractive templates and add your photo, social media accounts, and text links. This flexible email signature generator saves you time with every email you create. If you need to make changes, editing or changing your signature is a breeze.

Woodpecker Calls for Android

With just a quick download of Woodpecker Calls from the Google Play Store, you can set up a personalized email campaign right from your Android device. Their mobile app gives you the power to view and manage your prospect list, all while making calls from your own phone number - no matter where you are. They don't seem to have anything for iOS devices, and I couldn't find any information regarding if that was coming soon.

What Can I Get From Woodpecker’s Free Trial?

So, what's great about woodpecker is it doesn't hurt you at all to try. Once you sign up for the 30-day free trial, you can enjoy a range of benefits. This includes personalized email campaigns, A/B testing, and email deliverability monitoring. You'll get 30-day or 500 cold emails trial, whichever comes first. You also don't need a credit card to sign up!

How Much Does Woodpecker Cost?

If you decide to upgrade to a premium account, you have the option to choose 1,500, 6,000, or unlimited number of prospects to contact per month. While I've noticed baseline pricing is more affordable than tools like Instantly, you still have to pay per email account you add (not something they charge for)

Woodpecker Monthly Costs

• 1,500 Prospects - $39/month
• 6,000 Prospects - $44/month
• Unlimited Prospects - $49/month

Woodpecker Monthly Add-ons: 

• A/B Testing – Add $10
• API Keys and Integration – Add $5
• Agency – Add $5

How to Use Woodpecker (Step-by-Step)

1. After signing up, you will be directed to your dashboard. Here, you can easily connect with your email provider.

2. You can add your prospects in three different ways:

• by importing a file (Accepted formats: UTF-8 CSV, XLS, XLSX)
• manually (if you only have a few prospects to add)
• Integration (native and built-in)

3. Go back to the Campaigns tab and click Add Campaign.

4. Write or create your email signature using one of the six templates available.

5. Add email sign-off such as Regards, Best Regards, and Kind regards.

6. Style your email signature by adding your social media accounts, and changing font type and size. You can also add a link text such as “Unsubscribe” and “Click here.”

7. To add or edit your email signature, go to General Settings > Signature, and type or paste your signature. Don’t forget to click Save Changes.

8. Create your cold email campaign. Set the day and time you want it to be sent. If you need help with email copywriting, we have a few tips in our guide to emailing coaches.

9. To use the A/B testing feature, create 5 versions of your email to test which one will have a higher response rate. Just make sure that the A/B testing toggle is ON.

10. Scroll down and choose if you want to make a follow-up. If the recipient has not responded after the number of days you set, you can mark him/her as non-responsive.

11. Once your prospect has responded, the follow-up sequence will automatically stop. You can now communicate using the Inbox tab or directly through your assigned email.

You can edit your email campaigns by going to the Campaigns tab. Here, you can also see their status, including: 

• the number of prospects that received your email
• the number of times they were delivered
• the percent of your prospects opened them
• the percent your emails that received a response
• the interest level they created

You can also monitor the status of your email campaigns through a interactive & friendly charts.

Woodpecker Pros and Cons

Woodpecker Alternatives

We've used Woodpecker in the past to configure some campaigns & we have some friends currently using them. For our agency, we've been using Instantly for what feels like forever now and honestly don't see ourselves switching anytime soon.

Instantly AI

Released in June 2021, Instantly AI is an email outreach automation platform with almost? the same features as Woodpecker. They have over 10,000 users and are sending over 5 million daily emails, pretty awesome for launching 2 years ago.

Instantly is great since they don't charge you per email account. It's pricer to start but for scaling & rapid sending, this is going to be your affordable choice. They do have similar features:

• Free trial 14 days, 250 emails
• Single price for unlimited email accounts
• Personalized cold email templates
• Simplified, automated cold email outreach
• Email warm-ups
• A/Z Testing (Test as many variations as you can)
• Unlimited follow-ups
• Campaign and Account Analytics comparison

Cons

• Less integrations
• A bit pricier ($37 for base plan)
• No unlimited contacts offer
• No custom email signature feature

Yesware

Yesware has been helping businesses, account managers, and sales professionals with email outreach since 2010. Packed with powerful tools, this multi-awarded company claims to have over 6,000 companies as users and has installed over 1.4 million gmail and outlook emails.

Pros

• Free trial 14 days, no credit card required
• A very basic "free forever” account
• Gmail Chrome extension
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Salesforce integration
• Multi-channel, unlimited campaigns
• Meeting scheduler
• Automated follow-ups
• Time-saving email templates
• Annual plans offer a 23% discount

Cons

• More complicated to configure & use
• Pro and Premium plans lack some essential features

Final Thoughts

Truly, Woodpecker's email automation software boasts cutting-edge features to effortlessly craft and send your cold emails at scale. Its advanced sending and customization capabilities will let you optimize email campaigns to captivate your next target audience

If you're on the edge, I recommend testing out their free trial. You don't need to input a credit card so there's absolutely no risk associated with it. If you like the tool, I would upgrade to a paid plan and scale more as your sending grows. Despite a few minor flaws, the tool should get credit for its user-friendliness and functionality!

As a reliable tool, Woodpecker provides all the essentials for executing successful cold email campaigns, with its value continually growing due to constant evolution. Try them out today! Have you used Woodpecker before? What are your thoughts? Drop a comment below to let us know!