Lesson 7: Cold email evolution

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Cold email has evolved drastically. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to adapt and thrive in the new landscape.

Discover how data access, personalization, automation, and outreach strategies have changed since 2015. Learn how tools like Clay and Persana enable hyper-targeted campaigns at scale, and why spray-and-pray no longer works. If you want to stay competitive and efficient in 2025, this lesson is a must-watch.

In this lesson, you’ll learn:

• How access to deep personalisation data shifted from enterprise-only territory to affordable, no-code tools like Clay and Persana, making micro-segmentation and hyper-personalisation available to any team regardless of technical skill
• How the core infrastructure of cold email – authentication setup, prospect email sourcing, buying signals, and segmentation data – has become dramatically cheaper and easier to manage than it was even five years ago
• Why the “spray and pray” approach has become up to 27x less efficient than it once was, and how today’s winning campaigns rely on tight segmentation, buying signals, AI personalisation, and fast iteration instead
• That both large-scale and highly targeted outreach can still be profitable today, but each requires a fundamentally different mindset, skillset, and infrastructure plan – all of which will be covered in later chapters

Hi and welcome. In this lesson I will show you how cold email has changed over the years.

If you have not adapted to those changes you may be missing out.

So let me bring you up to speed!

Woodpecker has been in the cold email business since 2015. 

Back when we started, access to deep personalization data was limited or very expensive.

To access such data back then, you either had to:

• have a dedicated team full of programmers 
• or sign up with large cooperations, often locking you into yearly subscriptions

There were some early data democratizers to help access deeper personalization data.

Phantombuster is one of them and in the early days focused a lot on LinkedIn data.

Then APIFY appeared, giving you access to many scrapers that can access:

• company review data
• product listing data from sites like Amazon
• and many more highly custom data points.

In the early days these tools still required a lot of technical expertise.

They now have become more accessible but most non-technical teams still can’t utilize them properly.

Then a few years later tools like Clay started to be developed. 

Despite being founded in 2017 only a few pioneers in the field used them.

Then 2024 came and from what I saw, things exploded.

Their tool became much more accessible, 

competitors like persana.ai showed up, 

and people started to dive deeper into using them for cold emailing on a larger scale. 

Now using these tools you can access data that was typically reserved to large enterprises.

1. And You don’t have to be locked into yearly contracts
2. You don’t need a dedicated team full of programmers.
3. You don’t need to decide on just one data provider and their limitations.

Tools like Clay, Persana, and similar ones have made access to data a commodity.

The cold emailing game, in terms of personalization, is now only limited by your imagination.

So now many cold emailers feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices they have.

But you are lucky, if you follow the course I will get you up to speed.

You will learn many practical use cases on how to utilize this highly specialized data.

And in the end you will create campaigns that look like written by someone who did hours of manual research. 

Yet you will be using automations and AI.

Okay, but the data landscape is not the only thing that changed over the years.

Let’s quickfire through some of the other changes I saw happening since 2015:

Before:

• You had to manually setup authentication like SPF, DKIM, DMARC
• Sometimes for hundreds of mailboxes at a time

Now:

• Simply use Woodpecker’s Domains feature to buy domains and mailboxes in bulk
• Then let us set up everything for you in a few minutes.

Before:

• A well verified prospect email could cost you even up to $1
• And you had to limit yourself typically to one provider and their limitations.

Now:

• With Woodpecker’s Leadfinder you can access millions of prospects
• For as low as 9 cents on the dollar

• And we will pick the best providers for your list use case, automatically.

Before:

• Accessing any type of buying signals was expensive or it required highly technical teams 
• So these types of signals were not easily accessible for smaller teams and companies

Now:

• You can access many types of buying signals on demand, without expensive subscriptions
• So you can easily access job listings including their description
• You can detect who visited your website, deanonymize the visitor and reach out
• And you can scrape your prospect’s websites to personalize your emails in great depth.
• These are just a few of the signals and there are many more available. We will cover them later.

Before:

• You had to pay expensive data providers and decide on one to get basic segmentation data
• Even then you mostly got access to data like company size, industry, or funding stages.
• It helped a bit but still remained quite broad in terms of targeting.

Now:

• First of all basic segmentation data like industry, company size, etc. got much cheaper
• But the biggest change is that you can create microsegmentations that typically required hours of manual work
• Ever wanted to?
• Target eCommerce companies that sell a specific product or brand?
• Refer to someone’s podcast and what they said about a topic like you listened to it?
• Combine your value proposition with your ICPs philosophy and mission statement?
• Now you can and it can all be fully automated again for cents on the dollar. 

Before:

• You could send 500 emails a day from just one mailbox
• Even at such volumes you could have okay open rates and good reply rates
• Most markets were not oversaturated with cold emails and many of your emails landed in the inbox
• Also, Spraying and praying was actually a very effective way to get large amounts of leads

Now:

• You will struggle to send more than 50 emails from a mailbox a day
• Spray and pray has become a very inefficient approach for inexperienced senders.
• Only those that can run huge networks of email accounts pull it off, but they are starting to struggle as well
• But those that win today run campaigns that are micro segmented and use buying signals.

They also use AI smartly to personalize their emails.

And most importantly focus on fast iterations to figure out market message fit. 

To do that you need to plan your infrastructure which we will cover later in the technical chapter.

So I mentioned that spray and pray worked well a few years ago.

To prove that, I would like to share with you a bit of data on that topic. 

Some customers do large scale outreach without much personalization. 

They can make it work operationally and still drive a lot of business for their clients.

Nevertheless, from an efficiency point of view their outreach could be improved. 

Here is a customer that has always been a large scale sender in Woodpecker.

When they started with us they were able to generate a reply with 181 emails delivered. 

Nowadays, with the same approach, it takes them almost 5000 emails. 

This means their large scale approach got ~27 TIMES less efficient. 

Now, I am using this example just to show you that even if you drop this much in efficiency cold email is still profitable for this customer. 

It all depends on:

• how well you can operationalize your outreach, 
• how much margin you can accept 
• and your deal sizes. 

So even today this customer is making it work.

And Woodpecker can handle the processing needed to allow such large scale outreach. 

Also, sometimes a bit of large-scale outreach is useful.

Imagine you want to test a hypothesis with a large enough sample. 

Cold email is one of the fastest ways to do so and Woodpecker has the technical capability to handle this

With that being said if you want to do large scale outreach like this customer.

Or smaller, highly efficient outreach, I will cover both approaches in the later chapters.

Keep in mind though, both require a vastly different mindset and skillset to make them work

Now, let’s get into the next lesson  where I will compare cold email to other lead generation channels in terms of the cost per lead.
See you there!