Which cold emailing platforms can you connect to your branded email address?

Don’t use mainstream email marketing platforms for cold outreach!

Before we dive into today’s topic, let me make a very important point: even if you’re legally allowed to send prospection emails to B2B professional email addresses (not personal email addresses), you can’t use mainstream email marketing platforms such as Brevo (SendinBlue), Mailchimp, Mailerlite or Mailjet to do it.

Those platforms only allow you to broadcast messages to optin contacts, not to B2B prospects. You risk having your account suspended if you’re engaging in cold outreach on those platforms.

So if your Sales Team wants to explore cold outreach prospection, they should pick a proper cold emailing platform.

The most popular ones on the market are Reply, Mailshake, Hunter, Lemlist, Woodpecker and the service embedded in the Apollo.io lead generation suite.

Which emails can you connect to a cold emailing platform?

Some cold emailing platforms only allow you to connect a gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook or Microsoft 365 Business email address (which can be a branded email if you’re using Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 Business).

Hunter Campaigns for instance gives you those 4 options.

But what if you’re not using one of those premium services (Google Workspace / Microsoft 365)?

Which cold emailing platform should use to connect a branded email (e.g. [email protected]) configured via another provider?

I’ve set up a series of emails using Zoho, which is one of the cheapest quality solutions on the market (from £0.8 per email per month) and after some research I considered two options to use those emails for cold outreach purposes: Lemlist and Woodpecker.

What’s the best choice among the leading cold emailing platforms?

I selected Woodpecker for the following reasons:

The basic plan (without A/B testing and API access) is very affordable: from $39 per month ($32/m with an annual contract) for 1500 active contacts (= enlisted in a campaign), incl. systematic email verification before sending the message (to avoid excessive bounces) and email warm up (great to improve email deliverability).

Lemlist starts at $59 per seat per month ($50 on an annual basis). Depending on the features you need, you can use one or the other.

It’s very easy to add any professional email address to Woodpecker as long as it grants you IMAP access.
Follow this link for the Zoho-related tutorial. Here’s the link to the procedure for Lemlist.

Be aware that both platforms will limit your email broadcasts to 20 to 50 emails per day in the early phase of your campaign to ensure deliverability.