One of the pillars in modern marketing is sending emails. Hence there are many email marketing providers and they all seem to compete along the dimensions
- Volume of emails vs costs
- Number of subscribers vs costs
To distinguish themselves from one another, they may have more or fewer features or perhaps better customer support.
Now, what if you don’t want to compromise between volume and cost? You also don’t want to compromise on the important features for email marketing or easy to use interface. If that describes your requirement list, take a look at Bigmailer.
at very reasonable prices
It allows you to create, send, and manage your campaigns. It supports all the major email campaign types
- Newsletter
- Automation
- Drip
- Autoresponder
As well as set up and send transactional mails at very reasonable prices. The reason that Bigmailer passes on its operating costs to you. As its infrastructure uses Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES), it can maintain low operating costs.
Pros and cons of Bigmailer
As a cloud-based email marketing tool, you access Bigmailer via your browser to create and manage your campaigns. You can consolidate all your email marketing activities since it also lets you send transactional emails.
Pros
- No credit card required at signup
- Intuitive interface with which you can do your own design easily
- Forever free plan
- Very reasonable pricing
- Sending emails from your own domains can reduce your risk of triggering spam filters
- You can manage multiple brands
- Collaborate with your team members
Cons
- Limited integrations
- Basic automation (more like autoresponders, really)
- Basic list management (contact list just shows the email address)
- Basic reporting
Who is Bigmailer for?
As long as you know that you need to connect your Bigmailer account to Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES) and may need a wee bit of technical knowledge, Bigmailer is suited for everyone, who’s responsible for marketing and wants to optimise their marketing ROI.
If you have a marking agency or are simply managing high-volume campaigns be it as an email marking consulting or a marketing manager you love to see that you can manage multiple brands and assets in Bigmailer.
No matter the size of your business, if you have large marketing teams and/or many products and are looking for a top-notch email marketing tool but at a reasonable price, Bigmailer is a good place to start.
If you have a large team, you can invite your team members to work with you.
Bigmailer user interface
From initial signup to integration and use of the software, everything is well-thought-out in Bigmailer (except list management). It has an intuitive and easy-to-use interface which lets you do the job at hand without hassle. Everything is clearly labelled and nothing is hidden behind strange cryptic icons.
Campaigns
Bigmailer has grouped the “typical” email campaigns into “Marketing/Bulk Campaigns”. These are
- One-time updates
- Newsletters
- Announcements
- Promotions
It has separated out RSS campaigns which automatically send out emails whenever you’ve added a new blog post or article and the RSS feed of your website updates.
The third type of campaign is to send transactional mails. These are typically when a user resets a password or bought a product from your site and you’re sending a confirmation mail or updating the user that their order was shipped.
Although transactional mails are often overlooked, they’re important in the customer journey. Especially when a user is expecting order confirmation or shipping updates, you have the opportunity to build a relationship with them. Hence, you also want to design this part of the user journey to reflect your brand.
The last type of campaign is automations. We’ll be checking out automation more in-depth below.
For this review, we’ll be taking a look at a typical email campaign. Not following industry standards, you find all you need to create a campaign on one page. So, there’s no need to backtrack and jump between the steps, you find all you need on that one page. How the page is set up may look too simple for some, but for myself, I find it very refreshing and can get a campaign set up in almost no time.
The email builder is a simple drag-and-drop editor. You can also write an HTML email with a WYSIWYG editor.
Signup forms
No serious email marketing tool is complete without signup forms. How can you grow your list without signup forms? Bigmailer lets you create forms that you then can add as HTML anywhere, where you can add custom code. By default, the forms are unstyled, so you need to know some HTML and CSS to style your form.
List management, segmentation, and personalisation
Bigmailer comes with a contact management tool with built-in list segmentation. To be able to send targeted messages to the right audience at the right, you want to divide up your list into smaller groups.
Although the segmentation tool is is powerful and it’s easy to create segments, viewing and managing the contacts in the list is not on the same high standards as the rest of the interface.
Automation
Email automation is probably to the wrong word. It’s more accurate to say drip or autoresponder. You can only set up triggers and set delays, and then send an email. You can chain several of these steps to create an email sequence.
Bigmailer integrations
Other than Zapier, Bigmailer also provides integration with Integromat and Pabbly Connect.
Bigmailer reporting
To give you an idea of how your campaigns are performing, the list of your campaigns show you
- Sent
- Open
- Click
- Click To Open Rate (CTOR)
To drill down, you have to open the Reports section. This will show you also
- Date Sent
- Hard Bounces
- Soft Bounces and Complaints
If you want more analytics, you need to integrate your campaign with Google Analytics, but you need some coding skills to set it up or feel comfortable with messing around in the code.
Support
All paid plans come with live chat support. If you’re on the free plan, you can contact chat support within the first 30 days. The support team is responsive and helpful. You can also access the self-help resources. These are how-tos, technical and API documentation.
Pricing
The plans are based on contacts per month and if you’re on the free plan also how many mails you send per month. Since Bigmailer is focused on agencies or marketing teams, you can also add more users with the higher plans.
Is Bigmailer right for you?
If you’re focused on ROI, you’ve got 2 ways to optimise:
- More revenue
- Lower expenses
Bigmailer helps you with lowering your expenses. It has very affordable prices, especially the free plan is generous and will help you manage your campaigns without upfront costs.
If you’re running a marketing agency or a marketing consultant who offers managed email marketing services you have the option to white label the service.
On the other hand, if you need more than autoresponders or your automations also need conditional steps, you’d be happier with a “traditional” email marketing service. Take a look at Moosend, and if you need fullstack marketing automation Engagebay.
If you liked this review about Bigmailer and are looking for more tips and tricks to optimise your marketing activities, join our newsletter.
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