Meet the Maker Mary Siewierska
from Woodpecker

Hi Stuart. I’m the Content Marketing Specialist at Woodpecker.

I help run Woodpecker’s blog and I handle social media channels, where I advise people on scaling cold email campaigns.

Woodpecker is here to help sales reps generate more leads for their businesses. Our tool is really easy to use. Just upload a list of contacts, write an email sequence, put some personalization snippets in it and hit “Send”.

I joined the startup two years ago, but it has been running since 2015.

The guys started a totally different project. They were sending cold emails to validate it. Eventually, they discovered there’s a gap in the market for a tool like Woodpecker and they decided to pivot. And we’ve been growing ever since.

For me, terrible cold emails are those who are poorly targeted, awfully impersonal and get to my inbox at the wrong moments. Woodpecker tries to give its users the power to do the opposite of that.

It sends emails from the user’s mailbox with their sending settings to make a 1-to-1 conversation out of it. Plus, users can put basic snippets, or mail merge fields — depending on your vocab, with standard personalisation like {{First name}} or {{Company}}, but also they can use advanced snippets and insert even whole sentences inside an email template.

Furthermore, they can plan all emails in the sequence. We’ve recently done some research and found out that the number of emails doesn’t matter as much as their frequency. That’s a very useful info, isn’t it? Many people on the Internet are obsessed with the numbers, but we need to pay closer attention to the time windows between the messages. And Woodpecker allows you to set a schedule for all emails in the sequence.

From day one, we’ve been listening closely to what our users are telling us in order to develop the tool that allows them to reach out to and follow up on prospects without sending leaflet-like messages.

The greatest challenge in our field is email deliverability. We try to solve it in two ways. We do our best to educate cold email senders about deliverability and its intricate vocabulary like SPF, DKIM, blacklist. We’re running a series of webinars to help them with setting up their cold email campaigns and we work on some additional materials, such as ebooks or checklists. We try to make sure it’s easy for them to plan out the sending so they avoid getting on the blacklist. Same goes for email verification. We verify all the emails for free. We try to keep them safe.

Woodpecker is a very specific in what it allows you to do, and that is to get into direct conversation with your prospective customers and keep them interested.

Nowadays, people’s attention is very fleeting. Some talk shop on Facebook or LinkedIn. So we’re planning to develop the tool in a way that will allow its users to create advanced follow-up sequences across more than just one platform. But I’m sure email is here to stay for a long time. Marketing research backs it up.

Talk to users, a lot. It seems to work for us.

Well, speaking of digital marketing tools, I love Buffer for automating social media posts. Like we at Woodpecker, they try to do the best they can in a small sphere that is social media automation.

Our website is a great place to find out more about Woodpecker (get a free 30-day trial with Surges). But if you want to brush up on your cold email know-how, I encourage you to read our blog at blog.woodpecker.co — it’s a treasure trove of knowledge.