Today, we’re looking at Sender email marketing. More specifically, we’re examining its features, pricing, customer service, and more to help you decide whether Sender is the right tool for you.
That means if you’re a start-up, small business, or sole trader looking for simple email marketing, Sender could be the solution for you. It’s user-friendly, covers all critical features, and comes with an incredibly generous free plan.
For more advanced email marketers, Sender's a difficult recommendation. It lacks many sophisticated features that email pros would likely want from an email marketing platform. For example, there's no A/B testing, and tools like segmentation are severely limited.
There's lots to cover, so let's jump to it!
What is Sender?
Since 2012, Sender's email marketing service has promised its users the ability to easily create beautiful email newsletters.
It's a scalable solution boasting ecommerce tools, an intuitive email editor, plenty of customizable email templates, and flexible pricing options. Plus, Sender keeps things simple on the website, which is always a good indicator of the company's emphasis on ease of use and user-friendliness.
Sender Features
Now that we've covered the basics, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of Sender's features suite:
Newsletters and Email Editor
Let’s start with perhaps the most crucial consideration where email marketing campaigns are concerned. How intuitive and flexible is Sender’s email editor?
Sender offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface so you can easily add and edit your newsletter content. In addition, you can choose from a range of newsletter templates to get started and customize every aspect of the email.
You can drag and drop plenty of content elements into your emails, including text, images, and video. In addition, you can personalize your newsletter’s subject line and body to include subscriber information, like, for instance, their name.
Sender’s email editor also offers intelligent product handling for eCommerce – a pretty neat feature for any online store owner! This empowers you to add products into the body of the email with just a few clicks.
In addition, Sender integrates with major eCommerce platforms – just paste the product URL from your connected store. It will load in the image, description, price, and more. Handy, right?
Similarly, you can also insert videos into emails by pasting YouTube URLs or links from other popular video-sharing sites.
You'll also benefit from a built-in image editor, which you can use to adjust the size of your images. You can also retouch them in your browser, rotate, cut, filter them, and add text and frames.
And finally, the email builder allows you to insert HTML snippets and upload custom templates in HTML format.
Grow Your Audience
Sender provides a range of tools to help manage and grow your subscriber list. For example, you can create popup subscription forms and embed them on your website and landing pages to encourage visitors to sign up for your newsletter. You can even customize these forms to match your web design to ensure cohesive branding.
Plus, you can insert custom fields to collect specific details about subscribers. This comes in handy if you're looking to personalize your emails to generate a better connection with your audience. For instance, you can ask for data like their location, date of birth, names, and more.
Sender makes email list segmentation a breeze. You can group customers and readers based on their profile info, reading patterns, and other criteria.
You can even add multiple conditions and build segments that require subscribers to match all requirements. In addition, you have access to Sender's “and” and “or” segmentation functionality, enabling more granular contact organization.
For example, you could segment customers based on whether they've failed to open an email yet “and” were sourced from a contact form on your website.
That said, while the “and” and “or” method of segmentation is functional, it isn't as advanced as some users might like. For instance, you can’t add your own custom tags to segments. As such, you're limited to the pre-configured tagging options provided by Sender.
Email Marketing Automation
Sender comes with email automation functionality, even with its free plan! This includes automated welcome emails, transactional emails, abandoned cart emails for your online store, happy birthday wishes, follow-up emails, and regular newsletters. In addition, you can create simple and intuitive workflows based on email segments triggered by specific actions.
Analytics and Reports
To get an insight into your email campaign's performance, Sender Email Marketing provides meaningful analytics and reporting, including the following metrics:
- Open rates and click-tracking: Here, you can see who opened your emails, clicked the links in the email body, and more.
- Date and time analysis: Find out when the majority of your subscribers are awake and actively checking their emails. With this info to hand, you can then schedule your campaigns for optimum engagement.
- Click mapping: See which links and buttons interest subscribers the most.
- Subscriber profiles: All email activity (clicks, opens, links) are saved to the subscriber's profile, so you can easily distinguish who's engaging with your campaigns.
Sender also integrates with Google Analytics to gather extra information about your website. You'll also get a clearer insight into how your newsletters influence website traffic.
That said, Sender's analytics is sadly yet another feature that doesn’t go very in-depth. For instance, it doesn’t provide comprehensive user insights based on their age and location. Nor does the tool come with A/B testing, making it trickier to emails using analytical comparison.
Integrations
Like we’ve already said, Sender integrates with most major eCommerce platforms, including Magento, WordPress and WooCommerce, PrestaShop, and Cloudflare. Sender also integrates with Zapier and comes with an open API. Hence, developers have the option of creating their own custom integrations.
All in all, in comparison to some of its competitors, this is a tiny list of native integrations. Most importantly, it misses some of the most popular ecommerce platforms, like Shopify and BigCommerce. This could be a deciding factor if you work with an eCommerce platform that isn't featured on its integrations list.
Coming Soon….
Lastly, there are a few features in the making that you might look forward to. Amongst them are landing page creation, SMS marketing features, and the ability to send push notifications.
Sender Plans and Pricing
Anyone just starting out will be pleased to hear that Sender comes with a Free Forever plan. Arguably, this package might be one of the most generous free plans on the market.
You can manage up to 2,500 subscribers and send as many as 15,000 emails per month. But, best of all, all of Sender's features are included! In other words, you’re not going to have to upgrade for quite a while, providing the subscriber and email thresholds meet the needs of your small business.
From there, Sender’s pricing continues to be flexible and straightforward. You can opt for a monthly subscription, the price of which varies depending on how many subscribers you need. For example, for 5,000 subscribers, pricing starts at $11 per month, with 60,000 emails. However, 50,000 subscribers raises the cost to $120 per month, and you can send up to 600,000 emails.
If you’re unsure how many emails you'll need to send each month, instead, you can purchase pre-paid credits. If you buy credits in bulk, you'll make a saving.
Another thing worth mentioning is that you can cancel your Sender subscription at any time, as you're not bound by any contracts. Plus, there aren't any setup fees!
What about Customer Support?
If you run into an issue with Sender and need some help, here’s what's on offer:
First of all, you can explore Sender's online help center. Here you'll find an informative knowledge base and FAQs section. This should cover the most common queries and provide insightful solutions. In addition, you'll also find articles on campaign management, reports, boosting deliverability, and more.
If you want to contact Sender directly, you can do so via their contact form. A representative should follow up within 24 hours.
There's also live chat available on the website, but this requires you to similarly leave your email address and doesn’t promise immediate responses.
Finally, Sender links to its training videos on its YouTube channel. Again, there's a decent variety of tutorials demonstrating specific Sender features – but these are all very short. As such, they don’t really compare to some of the online video courses offered by some of Sender's competitors.
What are the Pros and Cons of Sender?
Now that we’ve looked at everything Sender has to offer, it’s time to come to a verdict. But, before we do that, let’s recap:
Sender Pros 👍
- Sender offers an incredibly generous free forever plan. All features are included, and you can send up to 15,000 emails per month to a generous 2,500 subscribers.
- The pricing beyond Sender's free plan is incredibly flexible, with affordable pre-paid credits and monthly, contract-free subscriptions.
- This email marketing tool keeps things basic and intuitive. It’s easy for new users to pick up and won’t overwhelm you. If you just need a simple email marketing platform, Sender does the job.
- Sender boasts some neat email editor features. You can include videos, product links, custom timers, review surveys, and you can even insert custom HTML.
Sender Cons 👎
- Many of Sender’s features are pretty basic. While they’re easy to use, they might leave more advanced users struggling to fulfill their full potential.
- A/B testing isn't available.
- Currently, you can't create landing pages. You can only embed customized subscription forms onto your existing website.
- Sender lacks many native integrations. While it covers a good range of eCommerce platforms, it misses Shopify and BigCommerce.
- Neither 24/7 support and nor phone support is provided
Final Verdict
If this provider is for you, you’d be joining customer giants like Disney, Deloitte, hp, and more. Sender email marketing gives you control over all the email marketing basics for a very affordable price.
That said, with Sender’s free forever plan, no credit card is required. So there's no reason not to check out the platform for yourself and see how you like it.
If you do, we’d love to hear back from you! Tell us all about your experience in the comments below. Or, are you considering one of Sender's competing email service providers like Brevo, Omnisend, HubSpot, Moosend, Mailerlite, Gmail, or Mailchimp?
Either way, let us know. Speak soon!
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