In 2014, Emailoctopus was launched with the mission to help anyone grow their audience with email while helping them save money. It unabashedly positions itself as an alternative to Mailchimp but at less than half the price.
Emailoctopus can slash its prices since it uses Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES) instead of building and sending emails through its own infrastructure, even without trading off deliverability and scalability.
As you’d expect from an email marketing service, it provides a drag-and-drop editor to design your emails, templates, subscriber management, and reports.
At the time of writing, it boasts a customer-base of over 54’000. For a small team of 8, it’s quite a feat. Even more so, when you know that it’s growing organically without taking on any capital. It’s headquartered in London, UK.
- Pros and cons of Emailoctopus
- Who is Emailoctopus for?
- Emailoctopus user interface
- Campaigns
- Sign up forms and landing pages
- List management, segmentation, and personalisation
- Automation
- Emailoctopus integrations
- Emailoctopus reporting
- Support
- Pricing
- EmailOctopus and EmailOctopus connect
- Is Emailoctopus right for you?
Pros and cons of Emailoctopus
Emailoctopus is a browser-based email marketing service with a simple interface. If you’re mailing list contains less than 2500 subscribers and you send less than 10’000 emails per month, you can enjoy their forever free plan.
Pros
- Free forever plan that also includes automation which is not a common custom
- Landing pages are available on all plans
- Email and land page templates are modern and mobile ready
- Affordable pricing
- Great support that usually responds within minutes for all plans, even the free one
- Intuitive and uncluttered interface
- Unsubscribed contacts don’t count in the pricing
Cons
- Basic automation
- Basic list management and segmentation
Who is Emailoctopus for?
This email marketing service will appeal to anyone who wants to nurture and grow their audience through email marketing, whether you’re a blogger or running an ecommerce store.
With its simple interface, you don’t need technical skills and will have set up an account ready to send campaigns within minutes.
Emailoctopus user interface
Maybe its interface can be counted as the second point to why Emailoctopus sets itself as a Mailchimp alternative. It has a lovely simple interface in which you can get your task done in almost no time. Every element is clearly labelled and there are no strange icons that leave you scratching your head.
Campaigns
You can create a regular or an automated campaign. You only need 3 steps to set up a new campaign:
- Set up the basics
- Choose a template and customise it
- Send or schedule it
Sign up forms and landing pages
You want to grow your mailing list and Emailoctopus helps you with sign-up forms and landing pages to capture email addresses.
You can add embedded sign-up forms to any existing website be it a self-hosted website or one created by a website builder as long as you can add custom code.
An interesting alternative is to create a landing page that you can share on your socials or your other communication. The landing page is hosted by Emailoctopus so you don’t worry about having your own domain and set it up. Currently, it has 5 templates that you can customise with the drag-and-drop editor which behaves in the same way as for the email templates.
If you’re working with WordPress, you’ll have to install the Emailoctopus plugin.
Very practical is the signup form tool that Emailoctopus includes so that you don’t need to hunt for another software puzzle in your marketing stack. You need subscription forms to build your email list. You can create 5 kinds of opt-in forms and they can be easily integrated with any website with the provided code or by integrating it with a plugin.
List management, segmentation, and personalisation
Not only can you capture new emails with sign-up forms but you can also import existing subscribers. Once you have a sizeable mailing list, you want to segment your list for your marketing purposes and automation.
You can add custom fields and also use the built-in fields of Emailoctopus.
To segment your list, you can add tags and custom fields. The segments are also used for automation workflows. Frustratingly, you can inspect the contacts in the different segments you’ve created. Emailoctopus only shows how many contacts are in a given segment. You also can’t sort your list in any way as you may be used to coming from other mail automation providers.
Automation
Emailoctopus sees its automation more as drip or auto-responder. With this feature, you can email automatically, based on when a user made a specific action. Unlike other marketing providers, this feature is not limited only to certain subscription plans but is available to all.
Emailoctopus integrations
As mentioned under signup forms, Emailoctopus provides a plugin so you can use it directly with your WordPress installation. For more integrations, connect it to the “Swiss Army knife” Zapier.
Emailoctopus reporting
Under the reports section, you will important data about your campaign such as
- Opened
- Clicked
- Unsubscribed
- Bounced (hard and soft)
- Complained (marked as spam)
- Did not open
- Did not click
If you’ve enabled “Google Analytics link tracking” when you set up a new campaign you can also monitor how your campaign fared in Google Analytics.
Support
Wherever you are on Emailoctopus’ website or if you’re working in the dashboard, you’ll always find the help icon in the lower right-hand corner. It houses the help centre as well as the chat support. The support team answers usually with hours and competently.
Pricing
Emailoctopus bases its pricing both on how many contacts you have and how many emails you send per month. Nonetheless, it gives you a lot of bang for your buck.
EmailOctopus and EmailOctopus connect
Actually, EmailOctopus offers two kinds of email marketing services. The second one is called EmailOctopus connect. This platform requires technical skills as it integrates directly with Amazon’s Simple Email Service and you need to have an Amazon web service account to be able to use it.
EmailOctopus connect is targeting advanced marketing specialists who also have technical skills so that they can follow technical instructions.
This review only touches EmailOctopus which is designed for everyone.
Is Emailoctopus right for you?
Emailoctopus is a place to start with email marketing. The free account is generous and will help you build an email list without upfront costs. If you’re on a shoestring budget, no matter what size of business you’re running, EmailOctopus is for you.
If you want email marketing with basic automation, it’s also a good choice.
If you need advanced marketing options such as automation with conditional steps, you’ll be happier with other options such as Moosend.
Original post here: Emailoctopus review
No comments:
Post a Comment