Is Woodpecker the right email outreach tool for you?

This Woodpecker review will help you decide if Woodpecker is a good fit for your email requirements. I’ll also highlight three great Woodpecker alternatives that can address all your email outreach needs. And you can also check out our top 7 cold email software solutions.

Here’s what this article contains:

(Click on the links to jump to a specific section)

• • What Is Woodpecker Email?
  • The Key Features of Woodpecker
  • Three Drawbacks of Woodpecker Email
  • Three Great Woodpecker Alternatives to Try
    (includes key features, pros, cons, pricing and customer ratings)
    • GMass
    • Bananatag
    • Hubspot Sales

Let’s get started.

What Is Woodpecker Email?

Woodpecker.co is an email marketing automation tool that lets you send emails and follow-ups from Gmail and Outlook. It’s chiefly used by B2B companies to personalize, automate, and track their outbound sales campaigns easily.

The Key Features of Woodpecker:

Here’s a closer look at some of Woodpecker’s key features:

1. Powerful Email Tracking

Woodpecker automatically tracks the various email metrics of your marketing and sales emails. It measures different stats, such as:

• Open Rate – the percentage of email IDs that opened your email.
• Click-through Rate – the percentage of people who clicked at least one link in your email.
• Sent – the number of emails that were sent.
• Delivered – the number of IDs that received your email, and more.

You can also manually mark your campaign replies as interested, maybe later, or uninterested. Woodpecker then analyzes this to calculate the number of positive responses you’ve received for a specific campaign.

This helps you identify which email templates, subject lines, and links are giving you the best results. You can then tailor upcoming campaign messages accordingly to boost your conversions!

2. Cold Email Personalization

Woodpecker lets you add custom fields and snippets to give your mass cold emails a personal touch. This helps you edit each email on a person-by-person basis, making emails unique and personalized for each recipient.

Woodpecker automatically adds recipient details like:

• Their first name.
• Their company’s name.
• The part of a prospect’s website or blog you liked the most.
• The reason you decided to reach out to them, and more.

For added flexibility, Woodpecker even lets you import your contact data as CSV files for quick personalization.

3. Efficient Follow-ups with Email Automation

Woodpecker helps you send powerful automated follow-ups for your cold email campaigns. As these follow-ups are part of the same email thread, your clients will always have the context — even if they have not responded to your first email.

The tool automatically stops sending these follow-ups if it detects an auto-reply from the recipient. You can then choose to resume the sequence manually or not.

4. Simple Campaign Scheduling

Woodpecker lets you schedule all your emails and follow-ups in advance. This allows you to plan your emails and send them when and as required.

It lets you set a custom date and time within a chosen time zone to schedule your emails. As the tool automatically sends them when the time arrives, you won’t have to be online when they go out.

Three Drawbacks of Woodpecker Email

While Woodpecker is a good email marketing tool, it isn’t a perfect product.
Here are some of its drawbacks:

1. You Can’t Send Email Attachments

Woodpecker doesn’t let you add email attachments to your mass emails.

This can be a big issue when you want to send emails with documents such as presentations, white papers, or even proposals. As you can’t add attachments to your emails, you’re limiting the level of engagement you have with your prospects.

Additionally, email trackers that support attachments give you tons of helpful insights into your prospect interactions, such as:

• The hours they spend on your documents.
• The sections of the file in which they’re most interested.
• If they’re forwarding or downloading your attachments.

If you use Woodpecker, you won’t be able to measure any of this. 

2. Woodpecker Works As a Separate Inbox

Another problem with Woodpecker is that it’s not embedded within your Gmail or Outlook inbox. Instead, it functions as a separate inbox altogether.

This may not be an issue for some users, but I’d rather have my email software work within my inbox.

Why do I prefer that?

• I won’t have to open a separate dashboard or interface to monitor my email engagement.
• The tool can categorize all my campaign replies, follow-ups, and reports under different labels right inside my inbox.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an option with Woodpecker.
If you use it, you’re going to have to juggle between tabs and inboxes to manage your emails.

3. It’s Expensive

The Woodpecker app prices its cold email plans starting at $29/month… but that’s for 500 connected prospects and 2,000 stores prospects. Once you start wanting to email larger lists, the price goes up significantly:

The cold email plan offers automated email, analytics, and teamwork features. It does not include API access (or Zapier usage); that costs another $20/month.

Their plans come with a free trial (no credit card needed).

Three Great Woodpecker Email Alternatives to Try

While Woodpecker is a powerful tool, there are some drawbacks to using it.
To help you solve those issues, here are three great Woodpecker alternatives:

1. GMass

GMass is a powerful email marketing software that lets you run marketing campaigns from your Gmail inbox. Its mighty mass mailing capabilities have made it a popular email tracker used by employees from Google and Uber to social media giants like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

GMass lets you:

• Automatically track your email campaign metrics.
• Quickly send emails and marketing campaigns to tons of prospects and customers.
• Automatically personalize mass emails on a person-by-person basis.
• Easily schedule emails in advance.

What’s more?
You can instantly get started with GMass — just download the Chrome add-on, enter your email ID to sign-up, and you’re done!

It’s that easy!

Here’s a closer look at some of its key features:

A) Advanced Email Analytics and Mail Merge Reports

GMass’ Campaign Report is auto-generated after you send each email campaign. It highlights all the core marketing statistics you need to analyze your email engagement.

However, unlike Woodpecker, GMass places your campaign reports right inside your Gmail inbox. You won’t have to open a separate interface to use them; all reports can be easily accessed from the Gmail sidebar!

Here’s what your GMass Campaign Report contains:

1. Total Recipients:
   The total number of email addresses to which you sent your email campaign.
2. Unique Opens:
   The total number of unique email IDs that opened your email. Note: GMass tracks only unique opens to give you clear email stats. If someone opens your email a second or third time, it won’t show up on your report to artificially inflate the number of opens.
3. Didn’t Open:
   The total number of recipients that didn’t open your email.
4. Unique Clicks:
   The total number of unique IDs that clicked at least one link in your email.
5. Replies:
   The total number of recipients that replied to your email.
6. Unsubscribes:
   The total number of recipients that unsubscribed from your emails.
7. Bounces:
   The total number of emails that were undelivered because the address was invalid.
8. Rejections because your Gmail account is over-limit:
   The total number of email IDs that didn’t receive your email because Gmail limited the sending ability of your account.
9. Blocks:
   The total number of emails that were undelivered because the address marked your account as spam.

For detailed information on GMass’ reports, click here.

B) Email Follow-Up Automation

Most email marketers have to follow-up on their campaign emails.

But what if you have to follow-up on hundreds of replies?
You can’t do that manually!

Don’t worry, GMass can help you.

It automates the process of sending follow-ups with up to eight stages of follow-ups (one step further than Woodpecker).

You can even customize everything about these follow-ups, such as:

• The trigger for sending follow-ups.
  For example, you can set GMass to send a welcome email automatically the instant someone signs up for your newsletter. 
• The number of follow-up emails each person receives.
• The time gaps between follow-ups.
• The content of your follow-up email messages.

You can click here for more information on this feature.

C) Powerful Email Personalization

Email personalization is the perfect way to engage your customers effectively.

Think about it.

With what are you more likely to engage?
A generic marketing email?
Or one that’s specifically tailored to you and your needs?

For example, if you send cold emails for a webinar invitation, adding each recipient’s name will boost your attendance rates.

However, when you have hundreds of emails, manually personalizing each one will take you forever!

Luckily, GMass supports automatic email personalization to help you with this.

It gives you features like:

• Auto First-Name Detection and Entry – GMass auto-detects a person’s first name from their email ID and adds it to each email addressed to that person.
• Add personalized blocks of text – you can customize entire paragraphs of your email message on a person-by-person basis.
• Add customized links, images – you can include personalized links, e-commerce URLs, and photos for each email recipient.

And while these benefits are helpful for marketing campaigns, they can also be invaluable for other uses, such as club management or job searches.

D) Automatic Reply Management

Your email campaign will probably receive tons of replies, bounces, and blocks.
How do you sort through all this information quickly to identify the responses that matter most?

GMass can automatically organize all your campaign responses under the Reports label of your Gmail inbox.

It categorizes responses as:

• Bounces – emails that were undelivered because the recipients’ address was invalid.
• Replies – responses where the recipient actually clicked the “Reply” button (unlike autoresponders, which send a reply from a machine rather than a human).
• Delays – messages that were delayed because the recipient is currently unreachable.

This way, it’s easy for you to identify your most important responses and deal with any issues in your outbound sales campaigns.

E) Easy Email Scheduling

Sending emails at the right time is a surefire way to maximize engagement.
Ideally, you’ll need to send your campaigns when your recipients are most likely to check their inbox.

How do you ensure that your emails always reach your recipients at the right time?
By scheduling them in advance.

With GMass, you can easily schedule your marketing emails.
Compose your email, schedule it, and the tool automatically sends it out at the specified time.

It’s that simple!

If there’s any change in schedule, you can always reschedule your emails from the Gmail Drafts folder. Simply edit the date and time, and GMass will send it then.

Pros

• User-friendly interface.
• Can quickly integrate with your Gmail inbox.
• Can create email lists instantly with Gmail account searches.
• Supports downloading your campaign reports as CSV files.
• Can easily import contact list from a Google Sheets file.
• Can send email attachments.
• Connect it with Zapier to automate email sequences.
• Available as a powerful Gmail add-on for Android devices.
• Powerful Salesforce integration.
• Active customer support team.

Cons

• The desktop version works only with Google Chrome.
• GMass works only with Gmail and G-Suite accounts.

Pricing

GMass has three pricing plans:

• Individual:
  • Standard: $25/month
  • Premium: $35/month
  • Professional: $55/month
• Team:
  • Professional: starts at $145/month for a group of 5 and includes all features.

Customer Ratings

• Capterra – 5/5 (270+ reviews)
• G2 Crowd – 4.8/5 (290+ reviews)

2. Bananatag

Bananatag is an email automation tool that works with Gmail and Outlook. It gives you detailed analytics to break down your campaign’s engagement.

Key Features

• Sleek drag-and-drop interface.
• Real-time email open and link click notifications.
• Powerful schedule and snooze feature to manage emails effectively.
• Email attachment tracking to see how recipients use your attachments.
• Reports that can be exported as CSV or XLS files.
• Can sync data to various CRM software like Pipedrive, Salesforce, and Zoho.

Pros

• User-friendly interface.
• Can create custom email templates.
• Gives you detailed insights into your email deliverability.
• Track emails on mobile devices without using an app.
• Available as Chrome and Firefox extensions.

Cons

• Notifications come in as separate emails. This can clutter your inbox if there’s a large mailing list.
• The tool doesn’t work for company email addresses (email IDs that end in @company.com).
• The free version only tracks five emails per day.

Pricing

Bananatag is available in three pricing plans:

• Free: automated email open tracking for up to five emails/day.
• Pro: $12.50/month – track up to 100 emails/day with link tracking, detailed reports, and scheduling features.
• Team: $25/month per user – includes Pro + track up to 200 emails/day + team management features.

Customer Ratings

• Capterra – 5/5 (6 reviews)
• G2 Crowd – 4/5 (20+ reviews)

3. Hubspot Sales

Hubspot Sales is a powerful cold email outreach tool that helps you track and engage your leads in real-time. It also helps you create email templates to save tons of time when composing emails.

Key Features

• Real-time notifications for lead engagements.
• Can easily import contact details to personalize emails.
• Built-in activity stream that logs the email interactions of your clients and customers.
• Predictive lead scoring to help you prioritize potential clients.
• Detailed and customizable email reports.
• Seamless Salesforce integration.

Pros

• Powerful lead nurturing features.
• Can automate the activities of your sales team.
• Can schedule emails and follow-ups in advance.
• IMAP integration support.
• Works with email providers like Gmail and Outlook.

Cons

• Initial set up can be complicated for novices.
• No mass emailing features. You can build an email sequence, but you need to hit the send button for each email.
• Their paid plans with additional features can be costly.

Pricing

Hubspot Sales comes in two pricing schemes:

• Professional: $450/month – includes Starter + sales automation for 300 workflows + Salesforce integration.
• Enterprise: $1500/month – includes Professional with sales automation for 500 workflows + lead generation and team management + API access.

Customer Ratings

• Capterra – 4.5/5 (2000+ reviews)
• G2 Crowd – 4.3 /5 (600+ reviews)

Conclusion

While Woodpecker is a good email service, it isn’t a perfect solution. It’s expensive, can’t handle attachments, and forces you to switch between inboxes for your reports.

Why settle for that when there are better tools available?

While all three tools on the list are powerful, GMass has several advantages. It gives you powerful cold emailing and tracking features at a fraction of the cost! So why not download the Chrome extension today and try it out?