If you want to focus on simple, straightforward cold email campaigns, then Woodpecker might be the best option for you. Headquartered in the city of Wrocław in western Poland, Woodpecker is designed to help users reach out to (and engage with) leads, across various channels.

It helps companies grow and increase their bottom lines, by helping them build valuable business relationships. One of its main advantages is its simple and easy-to-understand user-interface.

• Simple and Straightforward

It forgoes many of the bells-and-whistles of other cold outreach platforms in favor of a more streamlined approach, with almost singular focus on cold email outreach. Woodpecker also offers a whopping 15-day free trial – along with 150 free cold emails – to help users figure out the tool before they have to make a single payment.

Woodpecker also has a huge archive of video and text-based tutorials, on how to make the best use of their platform for cold emailing success. The moment you log into their website, you will be presented with a 5-minute quick-start guide. Apart from this, you will have access to a huge library of in-depth blogs about the logistics of running a cold email campaign with high conversion rates.

Before you start building your cold email campaign, you have to connect your business email account to Woodpecker. Once the email account is connected, you can then go to your dashboard and create a new campaign. The Woodpecker dashboard has a sparse and simple design, to keep your focus where it needs to be – on your cold email copy. 

• Building a Campaign

At the top of the campaign page, you will have to give it a name and select the email address that will be used to launch the cold outreach campaign. You can add this address to the ‘from’ field.

Next, you will come down to the content field. You will have to choose a subject line and the basic cold email template, which will be sent unchanged to all the recipients.

• Customization Options

The cool thing about Woodpecker, however, is that it allows for vast amounts of personalization. Once you’ve chosen your basic email template, you can customize it using Woodpecker’s many snippets and field replacement tags.

Using the Woodpecker snippets, you can customize any part of the cold email you want. You can have custom first lines, first paragraphs, or custom CTAs. And this is apart from the usual customization options that most cold outreach automation tools offer, such as first and last names, job title, company name, etc.

Therefore, Woodpecker is the tool of choice for marketers who are highly focused on personalized cold email campaigns, as their primary lead generation strategy. If you have a limited pool of potential clients and customers, and want to reach them and build lasting relationships with them via email, then Woodpecker is without doubt the right tool for you.

• Scheduling Features

Another important benefit of Woodpecker is that it offers extensive scheduling features. Using Woodpecker, you can decide on the number of cold emails to be sent per day; the window of time when the emails will be sent each day; the days of the week on which emails are to be sent; and the minimum sending delays between individual emails. 

In fact, Woodpecker is one of the only cold email automation platforms that mimics human behavior when sending out emails. You can set up a minimum sending delay between emails.

For instance, if you have scheduled 50 emails to be sent on a given day, you can set it up so that the emails are sent at intervals of 30 seconds, one minute, or two minutes. This is how a human being would normally send out emails, instead of shooting out bursts of 5-10 emails per second.  

Woodpecker is also well aware of its international user base, and eager to service their needs. It tells you your location and time zone, as well as the time zone of your recipients.

So, if you’re based in Europe, but are building a cold email campaign for prospects based in the US, then you can easily set it up so that the emails will be sent at 6pm, US Eastern Time. You don’t have to calculate the time differences in your head to decide which is the best time to send emails to international prospects.

• Follow-Up Emails

To create a follow-up email, you simply have to scroll to the bottom of your campaign page and click on the tab that says ‘Add Email’.

Now, you’ll have to decide whether to continue with the original subject line or choose a new one for your follow-up email. You can also schedule when the follow-up emails will go out. For instance, you can set it up so that a follow-up email is sent exactly two days after the original cold email.

You can also set it up so that the follow up email will be sent as soon as a prospect replies to the original cold email, clicks on a link, or performs any other pre-determined task.

Woodpecker also allows you to decide whether you want the follow-up email to appear in the same thread as the original email, or to start a new email thread.

• Importing an Email List

Woodpecker allows you to import email lists in the form of CSV as well as XLSX files. The importing process is quite intuitive, and simply requires you to upload the relevant file from your computer to your campaign dashboard on Woodpecker. If you want to learn how to scrape the email addresses of your prospects for the email list, click here. 

Once you’ve uploaded the CSV file containing the email list, Woodpecker will ask you weather you want to update your contacts on the platform. In the next page, you will be asked to match the data in the CSV file with the available fields on Woodpecker.

On this page, you will have to ensure that each email address on your list is aligned with the right first name, last name, job title, custom first line, etc. Once this is done, simply click on the ‘Import’ button at the bottom of the page.

• Email Verification

Once the email list has been imported, Woodpecker will tell you how many new email addresses have been imported, how many of them are duplicates (if any), and how many have errors or are invalid.

Woodpecker will also provide you with a list of all the newly-imported email addresses, along with their current status (active/bounced/invalid/replied), the associated first and last names, and all the other data needed for customization.

You can then choose to add this email list to your campaign, preview your email, or send a test email. After this, you can either start your cold email campaign by clicking ‘Send’, or save it as a draft.

• Statistics

Once the cold email campaign is underway, Woodpecker will provide you with a dashboard with all relevant data, statistics, and information.

On your campaign dashboard, you will be able to see how many prospects received your cold email, how many of them opened the email, how many replied to it, clicked on a link, or unsubscribed.

The dashboard will also tell you if any of your emails bounced or if any were sent to invalid addresses. From your main dashboard, you can also choose to pause, stop, or edit the campaign whenever you need.

• Pricing

Woodpecker offers three plans. These are the Start Up Plan for individual marketers and smaller teams (at $39 per month), the Team PRO Plan for advanced features and bigger teams (at $44 per month), and the Unlimited Plan, which offers custom integrations for custom pricing, according to your business needs.

Unless you run a big B2B agency, the Start Up plan should be enough to cover your prospecting needs, especially when you first start using Woodpecker.