The Follow-Up Should Depend on What They Did With Email One
Most PPC agency sequences treat follow-ups as reminders: the same teardown offer, re-sent with "just bumping this." But after the first email goes out, your list has already split into three different audiences. The prospect who clicked your audit link is half-sold. The prospect who never opened never saw the offer at all. The prospect who opened but didn't click read it and wasn't moved. Sending all three the same touch two wastes the one thing the first email earned you — information.
Woodpecker's condition-based campaigns are built for exactly this split. An if-clicked path can route the half-sold prospect straight to a booking ask. A not-opened path can re-run the subject line, because for that segment the subject is the only thing that failed. And the opened-but-didn't-click path can escalate to the sharpest thing a PPC agency owns: one specific number for what the prospect's account is wasting.
Woodpecker is where those paths live. ColdRelay is the infrastructure underneath — the secondary domains, mailboxes, and dedicated IPs Woodpecker actually sends from. This guide covers how to wire the two together and build follow-ups that escalate on behavior instead of repeating on a timer.
Why Run Woodpecker on ColdRelay Infrastructure
Woodpecker is a sending and sequencing platform — it sends from whatever mailboxes you connect to it. It doesn't provision the domains or guarantee the deliverability of the mailboxes themselves; that's the infrastructure layer's job.
That's where ColdRelay fits. Instead of standing up workspace seats and hand-configuring DNS across a handful of domains, you order dedicated mailboxes on isolated Azure tenants with dedicated IPs, fully DNS-configured (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and ready in about an hour. There's no warmup waiting period before you can send — warmup runs continuously as part of each mailbox's send budget — so a condition-based campaign you design this morning can be live this afternoon.
The pairing is additive, not competitive: ColdRelay is the infrastructure, Woodpecker is the sequencing layer on top. You keep Woodpecker's condition-based paths, A/B testing, timezone-aware delivery, and per-campaign deliverability monitoring — you just point them at mailboxes built to land. For behavior-branched campaigns the infrastructure matters more than usual: every branch fires on an open or a click, and an email sitting in spam produces neither. Bad placement doesn't just lose a send — it starves the entire decision tree of the signals it routes on.
Visit Woodpecker →Connecting ColdRelay Mailboxes to Woodpecker
Provision mailboxes on ColdRelay
Order secondary domains adjacent to your agency brand — never the domain you use for client reporting and account access. ColdRelay supports 100-150 mailboxes per domain; branched campaigns run well at 50-100 mailboxes on 1-2 domains, since the leverage comes from routing prospects correctly, not from raw volume. Everything provisions on isolated Azure tenants with dedicated IPs in about an hour, with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC already configured.
Connect the mailboxes in Woodpecker's email account settings
Export your mailbox credentials from the ColdRelay dashboard, then add each account in Woodpecker via SMTP/IMAP under its email account settings. Each ColdRelay mailbox connects as its own sender so Woodpecker can distribute campaign sends across the pool with its human-like sending intervals — randomized gaps between sends that ColdRelay's per-mailbox budget pairs with naturally.
Cap daily sends to match the ColdRelay budget
Set each connected account's daily sending limit to 2 outbound emails per day, mirroring ColdRelay's per-mailbox budget of 4 sends/day total — 2 outbound + 2 warmup. ColdRelay's warmup runs continuously on its own; Woodpecker only needs to handle the outbound half. At that budget, a 75-mailbox pool gives the campaign 150 sends/day spread across every branch.
Build the condition-based campaign with three follow-up paths
In Woodpecker's campaign editor, open with the teardown offer email, then add condition steps that split on behavior. The if-clicked path goes straight to a short booking ask with two proposed times. The not-opened path re-sends with a new subject line — run Woodpecker's A/B testing on that step so the sharper subject is chosen by data, not taste. The opened-but-not-clicked path delivers one specific wasted-spend figure for the prospect's account as touch three. Three audiences, three different next emails, one campaign.
Turn on timezone delivery and watch per-campaign deliverability
Enable Woodpecker's timezone-aware delivery so each prospect's emails — including every branch — arrive in their local working morning rather than your office hours; a booking ask that lands at 9am gets answered, one that lands at 11pm gets buried. Then keep an eye on Woodpecker's per-campaign deliverability monitoring alongside ColdRelay's dashboard: if open rates sag on one branch, you'll see it at the campaign level before it costs you a week of sends.
The PPC Agency Woodpecker Playbook
Treat the click as a raised hand — and ask for the meeting immediately
A prospect who clicked through to your audit material has already self-qualified harder than any list filter could. The worst response to that signal is two more nurture emails. Route the if-clicked path straight to a two-sentence booking ask — "you looked at the teardown; want me to walk you through the fixes Thursday or Friday?" — within a day of the click. Speed is the whole play: the click means the wasted-spend problem is on their mind right now, and a same-week call books at multiples of one proposed after the interest has cooled.
Non-openers get a new subject line, never a bump
For the segment that never opened, nothing about your offer failed — they never saw it. The only variable worth changing is the subject line, so the not-opened branch should re-send the same teardown offer under a sharper subject, with Woodpecker's A/B testing splitting two candidates on that step. Test the dimension, not the wording: a curiosity subject ("your Google Ads account, question") against a stakes subject ("the search term eating your budget") teaches you something about the segment; two synonyms of the same idea teach you nothing.
Openers who didn't click get exactly one number
The opened-but-didn't-click prospect read your offer and decided it wasn't worth a click — which means generic urgency won't move them, but specificity might. Make touch three on this branch a single concrete figure: "roughly $4,300/month of your spend is going to search terms with zero conversions — happy to show you which ones." One number, sourced from what's publicly visible about their ads, with the methodology held back for the call. Resist the urge to stack three statistics; the email's entire job is to make ignoring it feel expensive.
Let each branch report its own economics
Because Woodpecker tracks performance per step and per condition path, you can read each branch as its own funnel: what percentage of clickers book from the direct ask, how much open-rate the re-subjected send recovers, how many number-led touches convert readers into repliers. Those three rates tell you where next month's effort goes — sharper teardown links if clicks are scarce, better subject pairs if the not-opened pool stays big, tighter wasted-spend research if the number email underperforms. The branch data is the agency's own ROAS report, applied to its outbound.
Typical PPC Agency Outbound Benchmarks (Woodpecker + ColdRelay)
| Metric | Benchmark | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Inbox placement rate | 95%+ | Dedicated IPs and isolated tenants outperform shared Google/Microsoft pools |
| Booking-ask reply rate on the if-clicked branch | 15-25% | Clickers are self-qualified; a same-week direct ask converts a large share |
| Open recovery from re-subjected sends to non-openers | +8-12 pts | A genuinely different subject angle, A/B tested, re-reaches part of the unopened pool |
| Outbound capacity per mailbox | 2/day | 4 sends/day total per mailbox — 2 outbound + 2 warmup |
| Time to first campaign | Same day | ~60 minutes to provision, plus condition-path setup in Woodpecker |
What It Costs: Woodpecker + ColdRelay
You pay per mailbox per month for the infrastructure, with volume tiers that drop as you scale (see the table below). DNS, dedicated IPs, and isolated Azure tenants are included.
Woodpecker is billed separately on its own subscription for condition-based campaigns, A/B testing, timezone delivery, deliverability monitoring, and the agency panel — priced per its current plans.
Infrastructure cost scales with mailbox count; Woodpecker's cost scales with slots and plan tier. Branched campaigns make the math efficient — because each prospect gets the right next email instead of three generic bumps, agencies typically book more calls per send, which means the mailbox pool works harder before it needs to grow.
| Mailboxes | ColdRelay price / mailbox / month |
|---|---|
| 1–199 | $1.00 |
| 200–999 | $0.85 |
| 1,000–4,999 | $0.70 |
| 5,000+ | $0.55 |
Each mailbox sends 4 emails per day — 2 outbound to prospects + 2 warmup. ColdRelay provisions mailboxes on isolated Azure tenants with dedicated IPs; Woodpecker handles the sending, sequencing, and inbox rotation on top.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does ColdRelay replace Woodpecker?
No. They're complementary layers doing different jobs. Woodpecker handles sequencing — condition-based follow-up paths, A/B testing, timezone-aware delivery, and reply detection. ColdRelay provides the underlying domains, mailboxes, and dedicated IPs that Woodpecker sends from. You use them together: infrastructure below, sending software on top.
Do condition-based branches use up extra mailbox capacity?
No. The branches decide which email a prospect receives next, not how many emails get sent — each prospect still moves through one path, one touch at a time. The per-mailbox budget stays the same: 4 sends/day total, split 2 outbound + 2 warmup. A branched campaign and a linear one consume identical capacity; the branched one just spends it on better-targeted touches.
Do I need a warmup period before launching a Woodpecker campaign?
No. ColdRelay mailboxes run continuous warmup — 2 warmup sends/day per mailbox as part of the 4/day budget — so there's no waiting period before sending. Don't stack additional warmup inside Woodpecker on top of it; point Woodpecker at outbound sends only and let the infrastructure layer handle reputation.
We also run cold email for clients — can this stack handle that?
Yes. Woodpecker's agency panel lets you manage each client's campaigns in its own workspace, and on the infrastructure side you provision a separate ColdRelay mailbox pool per client on its own secondary domains. Each client's sending reputation stays isolated — on its own domains, dedicated IPs, and isolated Azure tenants — so one client's aggressive campaign can never drag down another's deliverability, or your own new-business outreach.