Woodpecker vs. Lemlist vs. Instantly: Which Outreach Tool Should You Choose?
Cold outreach is an essential aspect of an online marketing campaign to reach your target audience and make them your customer. Cold outreach tools help streamline the process and scale outreach efforts.
But how do you choose the right tool for you?
This blog post will compare three popular cold email outreach tools: Woodpecker, Lemlist, and Instantly. We'll look at their pricing models, automated rules, analytics and reporting, tracking of clickthrough links, and integrations with other platforms.
Woodpecker vs. Lemlist vs. Instantly: Basic Functionalities and Target Customers
Both Woodpecker and Instantly cater to similar kinds of target customers:
Individuals
Agencies
B2B sales executives
Business owners
Marketers,
Cold outreach companies looking to scale their cold emailing efforts
On the other hand, Lemlist is more of an end-to-end sales prospecting tool that helps mainly business owners, entrepreneurs, marketers, and individuals target more channels than just email.
Woodpecker makes it easy to manage multiple emails from multiple domains. Lemlist, however, is most focussed on helping sales reps do multi-channel prospecting with one or two email accounts.
Instantly’s flexible pricing plan and warmup feature are its user favorites (G2 reviews). It doesn’t charge per email account or inbox, but by the contacts you have on your list and the total emails you send every month.
All three platforms also offer some level of customization for their designs (such as color schemes) which can help make your email look more professional and targeted.
Email Warmup
All three tools have warmup features allowing users to increase the deliverability of their emails and build a good reputation for their domain.
Lemlist’s Lemwarm is the most talked about feature—however, users have to pay extra to use it, which can be a deal breaker.
Instantly offers unlimited warmup that ensures high email deliverability.
Woodpecker’s recovery function caters to companies that have multiple outreach email addresses. It helps recover poorly managed email accounts or domains and clean up the sender reputation.
Community Support
Lemlist’s community is another added advantage with the price you pay. They have a 20000-member group on Facebook where people constantly talk about the software, share their experiences, pose questions, etc.
Instantly too, offers a Facebook community where the team talks passionately about their product and puts out a lot of helpful content for its users.
Similarly, Woodpecker has an academy that helps people learn cold outreach best practices and implement them in their strategy.
Woodpecker vs. Lemlist vs. Instantly: Pricing
The pricing for both Woodpecker and Lemlist are fairly similar.
Woodpecker’s pricing can go up to $64 per month just for email outreach, while Lemlist offers better features at similar prices. Woodpecker is a more suitable choice if you are using multiple emails for multiple clients and you’re a digital marketing agency or a cold email outreach company.
However, if you look at it from the value per price perspective, the $99 per month plan of Lemlist gives you way more features than Woodpecker and full-fledged prospecting, along with high-end cold email outreach features.
Instantly start their plans from $37. However, their custom pricing plan makes it easy to pay for the features you actually want to use and get a better deal.
Its cost depends on the following:
How many contacts you want to reach out to each month
Whether or not you need access to multiple devices
How many emails you send each month
Both Woodpecker and Lemlist are expanding their capabilities to support LinkedIn prospecting and cold calling. However, the Woodpecker calls app is a great differentiator if you don’t have your phone calling set up for cold calling prospects.
Tracking Link Clickthroughs
Tracking clickthrough of links inside an email is critical for any email marketing campaign and one that can really help you improve your outreach results.
Woodpecker tracks the clicks on hyperlinks, whereas Lemlist does not. With Woodpecker, we can see whether or not people are opening our emails, clicking on links within the email, and even how many times they open the same email.
Lemlist does not track click-through rates on its platform because it sends out all emails immediately without any tracking or optimization capabilities.
Instantly also tracks clickthrough rates for all your emails and opens and unsubscribe rates, but it doesn’t have its own tracking system built into its platform as Woodpecker does.
Additionally, you can use another third-party tool called Mixpanel with Instantly to track your email opens and clicks on links within an email.
Instantly’s Dynamic Link Tracking
Instantly instead goes one step further than other platforms by offering dynamic tracking of link clicks within the subject line of an email.
This means that if someone opens up their inbox and sees your message, Instantly will automatically show how many people have clicked through from a particular email–without having to click on anything.
The only downside here is that this feature doesn’t work outside of inboxes (i.e., social media posts), so it may require more time spent adding links manually across multiple channels rather than just one thing at once via Lemlist or Woodpecker.
Analytics and Reporting
All three tools have analytics built in, so you can see how your emails perform. Woodpecker has the most detailed analytics, with a visual breakdown of which recipients opened and clicked on your emails and how many times they've done so.
This level of detail allows you to optimize your campaigns based on what works best for each recipient (and even individual subscribers within the same group).
The downside of this detailing is that it makes the interface more clunky than Lemlist or Instantly.
It also takes longer to get used to since more features are available.
However, suppose you're looking for detailed feedback about what's working with your marketing efforts and which tactics need additional work. In that case, you’ll want to check out this feature.
Lemlist's analytics are more basic but useful for understanding what's working and what isn't. Lemlist has the most straightforward user interface—you can easily view reports and stats, and campaign data from the dashboard.
Instantly doesn't have an analytic feature built into its platform—though it does offer a paid service called “Smart Inbox” that allows you to track engagement metrics like open rate, reply rate, and unsubscribe rate.
Automation
Automation is a must for a salesperson using outbound email to reach their target audience. While Lemlist and Instantly offer the most basic features (i.e., the ability to schedule emails at specific times), they are lacking compared to Woodpecker’s advanced conditional automation features.
Automating Conditional Triggers with Woodpecker
With Woodpecker, you can set up an “if/then” statement. This way, if someone opens your email but doesn't reply within 24 hours or if they don't open it at all by that time, they will receive another email until they respond or until you stop sending them emails altogether.
It helps ensure you're not wasting your time with people who don't want what you have to offer—they'll either buy from you or go away!
These rules are automated through Woodpecker's software platform rather than manually checking for appropriate conditions.
It helps save time for everyone involved in cold outreach efforts across teams.
Integrations with Third-Party Apps
With integrations, you can connect your prospecting tool with other tools in your sales stack and deliver personalized outreach to prospects without leaving your inbox.
Woodpecker and Lemlist offer many integrations, while Instantly doesn’t have any in the basic plan. However, Instantly allows you to export contacts into an Excel spreadsheet.
Woodpecker has way more integrations than Lemlist, which is mostly for enterprises or companies that specifically do cold outreach.
Lemlist has its own email marketing tool, which could be considered an integration, and many integrations with tools like SalesforceIQ and MailChimp.
Instantly has only four integrations: Zendesk, AWeber, Google Apps, and Buffer.
Which Cold Outreach Tool Should You Choose?
The choice depends on your preferences and sales goals. If you manage multiple email accounts, Woodpecker seems like the perfect choice. And if you want more control over the features you need and want an affordable solution that helps you scale your outreach efforts, Instantly is your answer.
Lemlist, on the other hand, helps you scale your overall sales efforts and helps target leads on multiple platforms. (Alternatively, if you’re looking for an affordable solution that offers just as much as Lemlist, consider adding Super Send to your tech stack and watch your customers grow!)
However, remember that these tools are not magic pills for cold outreach—they're still only as effective as the person using them. Build a robust outreach strategy and follow proper cold outreach practices for the best results!