Have you heard about email marketing? Here’s what it’s all about!

Many companies are unaware of how digital marketing works and its advantages when it comes to outlining the right strategy to achieve the company’s business objectives. It is important to remember that when establishing the work plan, we must take into consideration various factors and target markets to integrate more than one campaign. In this post we will focus mainly on what email marketing is and we will analyze from our experience two tools: Woodpecker and Lemlist.

Email marketing is a digital communication practice that aims to acquire new customers, create loyalty, increase sales and generate trust towards a service or product by companies through the sending of emails to a contact base.

In recent years, email marketing has positioned itself as a fundamental communication tool in business strategies, which also creates a meaningful and fast link with potential customers.

Today it has become the most efficient way to grow a company.

Thanks to this, specific campaigns can be created according to the needs of companies, analyzing the target they want to reach and observing at all times the results of the campaign to constantly improve it if necessary.

What are the advantages of email marketing?

One of the main advantages offered by this practice is to reach a greater number of prospects thanks to the systematic mass mailing of emails that allows the possibility to publicize (and sell) products or services.

Nowadays it is unthinkable not to have an email account and that is why email marketing has become relevant. In fact the biggest advantage is its high accessibility.

Email can be used at every stage of the customer relationship:

  • Prospecting: Search for potential customers according to target objectives.
  • Conversion: Establish a relationship with the lead and make him/her learn more about our product or service.
  • Lead nurturing: Continue sharing useful information and updating with data related to our market.
  • Loyalty generation: Become a promoter/influencer of the brand.

 

This tool is a support to help you achieve your objectives such as: to make yourself known, to position yourself as an expert or to sell your products and services.

Tools: Woodpecker and Lemlist

There are multiple tools to create email marketing campaigns, follow up on each of them and analyze the results. Our experience has led us to select two that we believe share many similarities, which will make the analysis more equo. We will start with Woodpecker, which is the platform we currently use and of which we have the most knowledge, while Lemlist, we have found to be a tool that has many similar properties and other characteristics that position it as a worthy opponent.

Woodpecker

Woodpecker was founded in 2015. It is a SaaS tracking automation and its headquarters is located in Wrocław, Poland, it has an international team of 50 people who speak 6 languages. Founders Matt and Maciej tried to create an application for entrepreneurs, so they created a simple tool that automates sending and tracking emails. The program turned out to be a success. Inspired by the results and the book “Predictable Income”, they decided to dedicate themselves to creating a cold email solution.

They focus on enabling all B2B companies to connect with their ideal customers. They offer a sales automation tool to send cold emails and follow-ups automatically from their own inbox.

The process is simple:

  1. Connect the mailbox to Woodpecker.
  2. Import a .csv file with a list of prospects.
  3. Create a personalized copy of the opening message and a couple of follow-up messages.
  4. Set the delivery time.
  5. Click “Send” and Woodpecker will send you the emails.
  6. Start the conversation only with those who are interested.

They place strong emphasis on email delivery and security.

In itself, Woodpecker is a tool that stands out mainly for the possibility of sending unlimited emails as well as the number of prospects. You can perform database imports (.csv) or dashboards for agencies that have to manage lead generation for many customers at the same time. For this very reason, it is very convenient to have all customers in one place.

In addition it is proposed to comply with all GDPR requirements related to privacy protection of our application users, website and blog visitors, as well as email list subscribers.

But most importantly, they made a GDPR-inspired feature update: GDPR encryption of prospect data.

Regarding their rates, these are their monthly plans by customer type and company size.

Pro tip: when migrating from one email marketing platform to another, first do it with your best contacts, the ones who constantly open and click (those who interact) on your emails and start sending messages only to them. In this way, you will gradually transfer your “reputation” from one marketing platform to another and you will not have to re-promote your account from scratch. After a while, you can migrate the rest of the mailing list.

Lemlist

Lemlist was founded in 2018 by three entrepreneurs; Guillaume, Vianney and Francois, who decided to create a tool that would not only make email outreach personalized, but also more human and warm. Their team is currently composed of 5 members, which allows assistance and contact to be managed directly, forming bonds with each of them.

Their headquarters are located in Paris, so being within the European Union they must comply with the respect of privacy and the General Data Protection Act (GDPR). As part of their policies, they delete all customer information 2 months after it is inactive and if it comes directly requested to them the deletion is immediate.

This Medium article shows a little bit of the growth data of this company in the last year: 365 days of growth — from 0 to $250k ARR without funding.

Among the services offered we can find:

 

  • Cutting-edge personalization: build warmer relationships with your prospects by personalizing cold emails at scale (text, images, videos).
  • Dynamic Landing Pages: grow your pipeline by eliminating friction and adding personalized landing pages to your page.
  • Create sequences: automate follow-ups, initiate drip campaigns and increase your response rate with creative outreach automation.
  • Maximize deliverability: automatically warm up email addresses, set up your own custom tracking domain and extend sending to maximize deliverability.
  • Advanced tracking system: evaluate campaign results, measure all results and forecast growth.
  • Tags: organize your campaigns or customers through tags and generate reports with a single click.
  • A/B testing: compare copy, subject line or entire email styles to keep what works best.

It is a tool more focused on the personalization of campaigns and immediate technical support through video calls, explanatory tutorials and a chatbot in which all kinds of queries about the tool itself can be made.

It is also excellent for sending cold emails, providing all the necessary features to achieve the best results in campaigns.

As you can see in the image, they offer a very visual and intuitive dashboard in which you can visualize the performance of each of the campaigns and a simpler learning curve.

It is divided into sections with filters and menus to make it quick and easy to find what you need. Aside from personalization on campaigns, some of the features include reporting and analytics, drip campaigns, event-triggered emails, image library, A/B testing, dynamic content, template management, growth forecasting and lead tracking.

One of the limitations of this platform is that the user has the option to send a maximum of 500 emails per day from one email address.

In terms of pricing, these are Lemlist’s monthly plans by client type and company size.

Conclusions and best practices

Email marketing is a practice that allows you to approach new customers and publicize products and services. In addition, a direct communication can be established that allows to know better the target and to segment it according to the marketing objectives. It is clear that these actions must be complemented by a strategic plan and cannot be carried out in isolation.

Our team considers: “Woodpecker as a simple tool with a fast learning curve, that allows to personalize or simulate that the email comes from the client’s inbox and this is a positive thing, it also allows to attach images only with the html link and this is fantastic because this way they don’t identify it as a virus attachment.

While the negative part is in the presentation and monitoring of campaigns, it does not have a dashboard that allows us to attach campaigns, it also does not allow alerts, or plotting objectives, nor A/B testing or conditioning responses.”

Our experience with this tool has been very positive and we have obtained excellent results. Together with the Woodpecker HelloMrLead team, we have grown and have secured several leads for our clients, which is why we strongly recommend it.

 

Best practices:

Woodpecker is not the only tool you can find on the web for email marketing and it is very important that any tool you use is GDPR compliant.

Here are some of the best practices to keep in mind when conducting email marketing campaigns:

  • Unsubscribe button always at the end of the message body.
  • Warm up the account before starting the mass mailing.
  • Personalize with labels (Name, First Name, Company, Industry, etc).
  • Respect schedules and do not flood emails during non-working hours.

What is data protection (GDPR)?

If you have noticed when you receive emails you may see a message showing you the privacy policies of the services, newsletters and applications you use on the internet. But what are these regulations and what are they for?

On Friday, May 25, 2018, the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) came into force in the European Union. This law focuses on giving users more control and security over their personal data to protect them from companies that handle and process their information, so we consider it as an important element when analyzing and choosing an email marketing tool.

If a tool does not respect the GDPR, the emails will enter the SPAM folder and this will penalize the email account.

Final conclusion

In our experience Woodpecker has been the tool that has helped us achieve our goals, we have extensive knowledge that has been enriched thanks to the support team, they also have a vast experience in sending emails and tutorials to prevent emails from getting lost in the SPAM folder, we can also have complete results of our campaigns with accurate data on the emails sent. Finally, it is very important to highlight that the interface allows us to optimize the sending and make our work more efficient.