As online retailers, your email marketing needs are different and so it’s not exactly ideal to use your run of the mill email marketing provider. You want to be able to send emails to your customers notifying them about orders, shipping updates, and other transactions. And you especially want to be able to send newsletters giving your customers a heads-up about special occasions such as Father’s Day and that you got the right present for their father.
In other words, in an ideal world, email marketing features are already included in your shopping cart application. And if not, you want a tool that’s tightly integrated with it.
That’s exactly what George Hartley and Philip Slusarski thought back in 2016. Instead of developing a marketing automation application for all businesses, Smartrmail only serves customers with online stores. Its set of tools is all about getting more sales from email marketing.
As an online store, you can automatically send welcome, abandoned cart, and thank you emails to your customers. To make things easier for you, Smartrmail has prepared workflows and templates.
Pros and cons of Smartrmail
Smartrmail is an email marketing provider that combines newsletters, email automation, forms, and SMS marketing specially designed for online retailers. It comes with features so that you can
- Recover lost sales with abandoned cart email sequence
- Send product recommendations
- An email builder with which you can drag and drop your products (or even let Smartrmail pick it for you)
- Forms to grow your email list
- Segment your list for targeted messaging
Smartrmail is a hosted solution, so you don’t have to worry about installing the software or updates.
For this review, I’m going to look at how it’s working with Woocommerce.
Pros
- Support team answers within 10 minutes
- Forever free plan for up to 1000 contacts
- Easy to use with useful features that take a lot of work off your shoulders
Cons
- You can’t do anything before you’ve connected Smartrmail to your online store
- Connecting Smartrmail with Woocommerce isn’t straightforward, on the contrary, the support team had to escalate this issue and it took a few days for the developer team to solve
Who is Smartrmail for?
When you head over to Smartrmail, you see at first glance it strives to serve merchants. It prides itself to have brought an additional $350 million in sales for online stores since its launch. You’ll also see that it works with shopping carts such as Shopify, Bigcommerce, and Woocommerce.
Smartrmail’s tight integration with the shopping cart software means that it can evaluate the past purchase history of your customers including their browsing history and email clicks. It also has insight in real time into your customers and product inventory so that it can help you segment your customers or recommend products.
Smartrmail user interface
Unfortunately, the Smartrmail plugin for Woocommerce didn’t let me register at first. And, you can’t just start without a running ecommerce store. For this review, I set up a fresh Woocommerce installation and installed the Smartrmail plugin. But for some very strange reasons, the plugin just couldn’t connect with Smartrmail.
A lengthy chat with Smartrmail support team was needed where my case even had to be escalated to the developer team. And then it still took some days to resolve the connection issue. I don’t know if it was just in my case, but it did not bode well.
If you’re lucky you’ll finally be able to create your account and Smartrmail will ask you some questions so that it can customise its settings to fit your needs.
In the guided setup, you’ll be able you set your font and colours to match your branding. If you skip the guided setup, you’re brought to Smartrmail control centre.
Smartrmail has designed its service to be useful for online merchants. Everything revolves around you increasing sales, making your customers happy for repeat buys, and recommending products your customers might find useful.
Key features
Smartrmail’s features revolve around growing an ecommerce business hence it includes features centred around emails and automations that help you increase your sales.
Tight integration with your shopping cart
Smartrmail works seamlessly with your shopping cart (as long as it is one that it supports). This means you don’t have to worry about the latest customers’ information or your product inventory. Both are synced in real time.
Thanks to its tight integration with shopping cart software, Shopify and Bigcommerce, just to name a few, Smartrmail can generate product recommendations for each of your customers.
Newsletter with product recommendations
These are not just some random products it picked out from your inventory. Since it can glean insights from the purchase behaviour of your customers, the recommendation is based on what your customers have bought or clicked on in previous emails.
Composing emails with products
Not only can you easily put together an email (or for that matter text message) without coding, you can also add your products. With adding products into your emails, I don’t mean copying and pasting images, titles, descriptions, and whatnot into your email template. Smartrmail pulls your products automatically. This means you just select the products you want to talk about in your email and it plops the description, links, and price into the content.
Automated workflows
Smartrmail has a gallery of industry best practice automation workflows to help you automate cross-sells, send wingback campaigns, encourage repeat buys, and more. You can also design a workflow specifically for your store with tits visual automation workflow editor.
Segmentation
Segmentation helps you to send the right message to your customers. You can build a segment based on past behaviour such as campaign engagement or with demographic criteria such as location. The segments are then automatically kept up to date.
Signup forms and landing pages
You can create signup forms and landing pages from scratch or speed up the process by picking a template. Designing your forms is just as easy as creating an email. If it’s a popup, you can show the form immediately or after a set time. For visitors who already signed up or who’re not interested, you can hide the form.
Smartrmail integrations
Of course, the integrations Smartrmail provides are for connecting with your shopping cart application.
Support
Smartrmail’s support team answers help requests in its chat in under 10 minutes. Although the support team is helpful and responsive, in my case with connecting Woocommerce it took days… If you don’t want to wait so long, you can always browse its help documentation.
Pricing
Smartrmail’s prices depend on the ecommerce software you’re using. You get 2 plans regardless if you’re using one of the popular ecommerce tools (Shopify etc) or Maropost. If you want to get text messages, you’ll need to add its SMS plan.
Both SMS and email plans for each of the services are based on the number of messages you plan to send per month.
Is Smartrmail right for you?
Smartrmail is a well-rounded email marketing provider with a ton of features that make your life as a merchant easier. Coupled with its friendly and responsive support team as well as reasonable pricing, Smartrmail is a no-brainer for digital merchants.
Nonetheless, connecting it can take a few chats with the support team but it will take time to help. It may also be just a one-off hiccup with connecting. But once everything is connected, you’re set to get insight into who is viewing your emails, which links got the most clicks
If you don’t run an online store, Smartrmail is not a tool for you – full stop. It can’t do anything as long as it’s not connected to a store. You’d probably be happier with an email marketing tool that just works such as MailerLite or Moosend.
Original post here: Smartrmail review
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