Nowadays, it takes an average of 22 days and 32 touchpoints on different devices and channels until a prospect converts into a paying customer. If you want to be where your target market is, you need to be present and communicate across multiple channels and platforms.
This means you’re probably using an email marketing service such as Aweber, and then SMS, push notifications, and chat messaging. Typically, it means for each channel a different service provider and this comes with 2 major drawbacks:
It quickly adds up to a costly sum
It’s difficult to track what’s happening across the different providers
This is where Sendpulse shines. It combines the following channels into one:
- Email marketing and automation
- Web push
- SMS
- Transactional mails
- Chatbots for Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Telegram
- Viber
Of course, you can do everything you know and expect from an email automation service such as segment your audience.
Launched in 2015 by Konstantin Makarov and Eugene Medvednikov, Sendpulse is headquartered in Ukraine with offices in Russia, Belarus, Brazil, Mexico, and Nigeria. It grew from a team of 15 to an international employee base of over 100. It’s used by over 1’300’000 customers and boasts household names such as Samsung and Swatch as clients.
Pros and cons of Sendpulse
As a cloud-based service, you access Sendpulse on your browser and pay a monthly fee. At its core, it helps you communicate with your audience through emails, SMS, chat, and push notifications. The basic tools except for SMS are free.
Sendpulse comes with an advanced feature that is not often seen with other email marketing providers: Its AI helps you optimise the click-through rates, page views, and other key metrics.
Pros
- 24/7 support for all customers
- Basic tools, including automation, are free to test and use
- Reasonable pricing
- Pricing structure grows with you
- Easy to learn and to use
- Landing page and form builder with templates
- Lives up to multi-channel with SMS, email, push notifications, chat
- Email segmentation based on behaviour
- Android and iOS app to manage your campaigns on the go
Cons
- Loading times can be slow at times
Who is Sendpulse for?
Given that you can start using its basic tools except for SMS for free, as well as that it’s one of the few email providers that provide multiple channels, Sendpulse is a good marketing automation service for small and medium businesses.
No matter if you’re an experienced marketer or a beginner, you can simply start for free and later subscribe to any plan as and when you grow.
Its marketing features appeals to both solopreneurs as well large corporations. That’s why it’s popular both with large companies such as Samsung and bloggers and small online stores alike.
Sendpulse user interface
Setting up your account is a walk in the park. You can start working without paying a penny, you don’t even need to have your credit card handy. Once you’re logged in, Sendpulse asks you a few questions to get a better grasp of what you want to do. Its interface is intuitive so that its easy to learn and makes working with it easy, also for beginners.
Campaigns
Personalisation takes a high position in Sendpulse so that you can easily tailor elements of your messaging according to the reader’s information and behaviour. The campaign builder lets you add variables and criteria to your subject line.
With the drag-and-drop editor, you can create unique and professional email templates without design or programming skills. To help you speed up the email creation, you can build templates of any of the blocks within the email as well as of the email itself or use a pre-designed template. All templates are mobile-ready so that they look nice on all kinds of screen sizes.
It doesn’t take much time to create an email campaign. It takes you 4 steps
- Information about your campaign
- Design your template and compose your message
- Campaign parameters such as analytics and language of the unsubscribe form
- Preview and send
You can use the scheduler to set the date when you want to send your campaign and also enable resend to unread to increase your email open rates.
Sign up forms and landing pages
Often, one of the steps in your marketing funnel is about capturing email addresses, and as a multi-channel marketing automation provider, this is not neglected by Sendpulse. These are the signup forms you can create
- In-line (embedded)
- Pop-up
- Floating
- Fixed
Just as important are landing pages. These are not just pages with a sign up form but you can even make a one-pager online store for one product. Your customers can order via a chatbot and payments are planned to come soon. Both sign up forms and landing pages come with a template gallery. Know that the landing pages feature is still in beta.
Of course, you’ll want to optimise your landing pages for search engines and track what’s happening. For SEO, you can add a page title, a page description, keywords, and a picture for preview. You can use any of the following for your analytics:
- Google Analytics
- Yandex Metrica
- Facebook Pixel
- Vkontakte Pixel
- Facebook Meta Tag
List management, segmentation, and personalisation
The more you know about your readers, the better you can personalise your messaging. Not only can you create segments on the fly when you build a new email campaign but you can also prepare your segments beforehand. The segmentation is dynamic, where Sendpulse automatically adds or removes contacts to segments according to their latest behaviour.
Of course, importing your contact list is a standard. You can upload a file and also import from another service.
Sendpulse offers a CRM (customer relation management) where you see exactly where a contact is in their journey.
Automation
This is where Sendpulse shines. Its automation encompasses every channel you use and you can use events to launch email, SMS, push automations and even chatbot flows for a specific contact. Of course, you can set up autoresponders, but you can also set up complex flows with conditional steps, filter contacts based on data, and much more with its visual editor. You can use automation to build
- Abandoned cart sequence
- Registration and confirmation email
- Birthday greeting
AI
The Sendpulse AI promises to make your campaigns more effective. The AI watches the behaviour of your audience, things like
- When the mail is opened
- User communication preference
- Time zone
- Previous clicks or purchases
After detecting the pattern, the AI suggests the best time and channel to communicate with a contact. However, the AI needs a lot of data points to work, so you need to send at least 10 emails to each and every contact.
A/B testing
If you don’t want to just rely on the AI to increase your key metrics, you can test sending a campaign to a set of your list and a variation to a second set. Then you study the performance of both variations to figure out the winner. In this manner, you can find which elements of your email your subscribers like the most. For example, you can find a subject line that leads to more opens.
Other marketing channels
Web push, SMS, Viber
Sometimes, people don’t open their emails, then, you’d want to have other means to reach them. You can send push messages on any topic on your site. It’s very interesting if you’re running an online store and want to show visitors special offers, or discounts.
The same can be said about SMS and Viber. If your audience is predominantly using these instead of email, it’s a no-brainer t also use them.
Chatbot
You can use a chatbot in Telegram, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook to streamline your customer support or help close sales.
Sendpulse integrations
Since its an automation provider, Sendpulse needs to work with different kinds of content management systems (CMS) and ecommerce platforms. The list of integrations include among others
- WooCommerce
- WordPress
- Drupal
- PrestaShop
- Sage
- Zapier
If you have a specific need, you can also use its REST API service to integrate it with your business software.
Support
All customers have access to a 24/7 live chat. It’s also good to see that its contact info isn’t hidden away as it’s common among many internet services. There are also a
Knowledge Base
Video tutorials
Glossary
Pricing
You’ll see that Sendpulse has separate pricing for each of its tools. In general, the pricing is based on the number of contacts you have and how many emails you’re going to send each month. You can save up to 20% if you choose to set your billing period to be semi-annual or yearly.
Is Sendpulse right for you?
Sendpulse is an outstanding option because you don’t need special training or help and it’s easy to set up, all the while offering a ton of features. Even if you’re on a shoe-string budget you can start using Sendpulse, and test out its advanced marketing features. It will power your digital marketing strategy and pay for itself when you grow.
Original post here: Sendpulse review – multi-channel marketing automation tool
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