Categories: Entreprenuers

About the ESP

Sendlane positions itself as a specialized email and SMS marketing platform built specifically for e-commerce businesses. Founded in 2013 by Jimmy Kim, Zak Meftah, and Anik Singal, the platform was created with the vision that e-commerce marketers need dedicated tools designed around their specific workflows and revenue generation goals.

While Sendlane markets itself heavily as an e-commerce specialist, hands-on testing of the interface reveals that this specialization isn’t as pronounced as their marketing suggests. The platform offers a fairly standard email marketing experience that doesn’t differ dramatically from general-purpose ESPs. The e-commerce focus appears to be more about marketing positioning than truly unique functionality.

The platform does integrate email and SMS marketing in a single interface, which Sendlane highlights as a key differentiator. However, this integration comes at a premium price point that puts it out of reach for many smaller e-commerce operations, who might get better overall value from more affordable platforms that excel at email fundamentals and can be integrated with separate SMS tools if needed.

Onboarding Process

Sendlane provides a structured onboarding experience that reflects its e-commerce focus. New users are guided through a setup process that prioritizes connecting their online store, importing existing customer data, and establishing key tracking capabilities.

The platform offers different levels of onboarding assistance based on plan tier. All users receive guided setup through in-app tutorials and documentation, while higher-tier customers receive white-glove onboarding with dedicated specialists. This personalized approach includes assistance with migration from other platforms, custom integration setup, and initial automation configuration.

For e-commerce businesses with established customer databases, Sendlane offers data migration services to ensure a smooth transition without disrupting ongoing marketing efforts. The onboarding process emphasizes getting the essential e-commerce tracking and automation in place before expanding to more advanced features.

Ease of Use

Sendlane’s interface stands out as one of the most polished and intuitive in the ESP market. The dashboard features a sleek, visually appealing design with a smooth, modern feel that makes navigation enjoyable. The UI offers exceptional clarity and organization, with thoughtful attention to detail throughout the experience.

In testing, the platform provides one of the most pleasant user experiences among email marketing platforms, with intuitive controls and well-designed workflows. The interface feels “buttery smooth” in terms of polish and responsiveness while working within a screen.

However, this smoothness is somewhat compromised by noticeable loading times when switching between different sections of the platform. These multi-second delays when navigating between screens detract from the otherwise premium feel of the interface.

The platform seems designed with non-technical marketers in mind, using plain language rather than technical jargon and providing contextual help throughout. This approach means e-commerce teams can quickly implement essential marketing functions without extensive training, though some of the more advanced features do require deeper platform knowledge.

Broadcast Feature

Sendlane’s broadcast capabilities (which they call “Campaigns”) are built around the needs of e-commerce marketers. The campaign creation process follows a logical workflow:

  1. Select your audience: Choose from your subscriber lists or use the multivariable segmentation feature to target specific customer groups based on behavior, purchase history, or engagement metrics.
  2. Create your content: Use the drag-and-drop editor to design your email, with special e-commerce elements like product blocks, coupon codes, and dynamic content sections that can change based on customer data.
  3. Configure settings: Set up campaign details including sender information, subject lines with A/B testing options, preheader text, and delivery timing.
  4. Review and launch: Preview your campaign across different devices, run spam checks, and either schedule or immediately send your campaign.

The broadcast interface includes e-commerce-specific features, such as the ability to pull product information from connected stores, automatically generate product recommendation sections, and include dynamic coupon codes.

Like most modern ESPs, Sendlane includes behavioral targeting capabilities that connect to website tracking to trigger campaigns based on specific activities such as product page views or cart interactions. Sendlane markets this standard functionality under their “Beacon” branding, but it’s fundamentally the same event tracking capability available on other platforms. 

The main difference is that Sendlane’s implementation may require less manual configuration once your store is connected – a convenience that contributes to their premium pricing.

Autoresponder/Automation Feature

Automation is where Sendlane attempts to differentiate itself for e-commerce businesses. The platform offers a visual automation builder with a flowchart interface similar to what you’ll find in most modern ESPs, including more affordable options like Emercury.

E-commerce Convenience at a Premium:

Sendlane does provide some convenient e-commerce-specific conditions in its automation builder, such as:

  • “Average order value” conditions
  • “Customer lifetime value” checks
  • Product purchase history filters

While these built-in conditions are convenient, they essentially represent pre-built custom fields that you could create yourself in other platforms. The premium price effectively pays for this convenience rather than unique functionality.

An interesting feature is the ability to check if a user is currently going through another specific automation as a condition. While useful, this too could be replicated in other platforms by simply having automations apply and remove tags at their start and end points.

Standard Triggers You’d Expect:

  • Purchase events (first purchase, repeat purchase)
  • Cart abandonment
  • Basic email engagement (opens, clicks)
  • Tag application or removal
  • List membership changes

These triggers don’t differ substantially from what’s available in more affordable platforms, despite Sendlane’s significantly higher price point. Though the e-commerce ones are more convenient than on other platforms, because they require no setup aside from the initial store connection. You’re essentially paying a premium for convenience.

Basic Action Types:

  • Send email message
  • Send SMS message (requires additional subscription)
  • Apply or remove tags
  • Move between lists
  • Update custom fields
  • Wait periods
  • Basic conditional splitting

Sendlane offers approximately 50 pre-built automation templates, which primarily consist of variations on a few basic workflows (welcome series, abandoned cart, etc.) that experienced marketers could easily create themselves in any automation platform.

What Sendlane markets as “Beacon” tracking technology is essentially standard event tracking functionality available in most modern ESPs, just with more convenient implementation and e-commerce-focused branding. 

The underlying capability to track website behavior and trigger messages based on user actions is not unique to Sendlane, though their implementation may save setup time for marketers who don’t want to configure these connections manually.

Templates

Sendlane provides a moderate library of email templates (approximately 40+) specifically designed for e-commerce marketing scenarios. While this is a smaller collection than some competitors offer, the templates are highly relevant to online retail needs:

  • Welcome series templates
  • Promotional campaign designs
  • Abandoned cart recovery templates
  • Post-purchase follow-up layouts
  • Product announcement designs
  • Customer loyalty templates
  • Review solicitation emails

All templates are mobile-responsive and customizable through the drag-and-drop editor. The designs follow modern e-commerce email practices with clean layouts, prominent call-to-action buttons, and space for product imagery.

For merchants who need completely custom designs, Sendlane offers HTML import capabilities and a code editor for those with technical expertise. The platform also allows you to save your own custom templates for reuse across campaigns and automations.

Email Template Editor

Sendlane provides two main approaches to creating email content, both housed under a unified email creation experience:

HTML WYSIWYG Editor:

Sendlane provides a code editor for users who prefer to work directly with HTML. This editor includes:

  • Syntax highlighting for easier code reading
  • Preview functionality to check your design
  • Responsive testing to ensure mobile compatibility
  • The ability to switch between code and visual editing modes

While the code editor gives technical users full control over email design, it’s not the primary focus of the platform, which emphasizes the drag-and-drop builder for most users.

Drag and Drop Editor:

Sendlane’s drag-and-drop editor is the primary tool for creating email content. The editor provides a straightforward interface with:

  • Content blocks that can be easily arranged with drag-and-drop functionality
  • Product blocks and pricing tables for showcasing merchandise
  • Personalization options including basic merge tags and conditional content
  • Mobile preview and testing capabilities
  • Image hosting and basic editing tools
  • Social media integration buttons
  • Custom HTML block option for advanced customization

The editor can pull product information directly from connected e-commerce platforms, which streamlines the creation of product-focused emails. While this integration is convenient, it’s worth noting that many ESPs offer similar store connections – Sendlane’s implementation is more about “out of the box” convenience than unique functionality.

Sendlane’s editor includes content blocks that can display different content based on subscriber data or behavior, allowing for personalization beyond simple name insertion – a feature available in various forms on most modern ESPs.

List Management

Sendlane’s approach to list management is centered around what they call the “Audience Hub.” However, in testing, it appears to be more limited than their marketing suggests:

Contact Organization:

  • Standard list-based organization
  • Tag-based segmentation for more flexible grouping
  • Limited custom fields (only text and date types supported)
  • Automatic handling of unsubscribes and bounces
  • Contact source tracking

Segmentation Capabilities:

Sendlane markets its “Multivariable Segmentation” as a powerful feature, but hands-on testing reveals it’s comparable to what most ESPs offer:

  • Basic demographic information (which just means custom fields you create yourself)
  • Limited e-commerce data without store connection (basic “last product seen” and “last added to cart” with date filters)
  • Standard email engagement filters (last opened, last clicked)
  • Website browsing data that requires tracking implementation

The segmentation system does support combining conditions with both “AND” and “OR” logic, but this is standard in most modern ESPs. Despite the marketing language, the segmentation capabilities don’t appear substantially different from more affordable platforms.

When connected to an e-commerce platform, Sendlane does offer convenient pre-built segments based on purchase data. This convenience saves setup time but represents a workflow improvement rather than unique functionality that couldn’t be recreated elsewhere.

Contact Acquisition:

  • Form builder for creating opt-in forms (not prominently featured in marketing materials)
  • Landing page capabilities
  • API for custom integration
  • E-commerce platform integrations

Data Management:

  • Standard list cleaning and management tools
  • Duplicate handling
  • Bounce processing
  • Compliance tools

In practice, Sendlane’s list management capabilities appear to be fairly standard rather than revolutionary, with some notable limitations like restricted custom field types that might constrain more advanced segmentation needs.

Analytics

Sendlane’s analytics and reporting are heavily focused on e-commerce metrics, with an emphasis on revenue attribution. While this focus may appear valuable at first glance, a deeper examination reveals some limitations.

Dashboard Overview:

The main dashboard provides standard information about:

  • Revenue generated from campaigns and automations
  • List growth and engagement
  • Delivery performance metrics
  • Campaign performance comparison

However, the dashboard prioritizes flashy revenue numbers over deliverability insights that platforms like Emercury emphasize. Without solid deliverability, revenue tracking becomes meaningless.

Campaign Analytics:

Individual campaign reports offer expected metrics:

  • Standard metrics (opens, clicks, unsubscribes)
  • Revenue attribution
  • Geographic and device breakdown
  • Link performance analysis

But these reports lack the depth of deliverability analytics that platforms like Emercury provide, such as domain-specific performance tracking and detailed bounce analysis. These fundamental metrics have more impact on campaign success than the surface-level metrics Sendlane emphasizes.

E-Commerce Metrics That Miss The Point:

Sendlane highlights e-commerce-specific metrics:

  • Average order value influenced by campaigns
  • Revenue per subscriber
  • Revenue per email sent

These metrics create an illusion of sophistication but don’t address the core issue many e-commerce businesses face: getting emails delivered to the inbox in the first place. Platforms like Emercury focus on deliverability first, knowing that even basic campaigns will drive more revenue if they actually reach customers.

Automation Analytics With Limited Context:

The automation analytics track expected metrics:

  • Entry and exit rates
  • Conversion rates
  • Revenue generated

But these lack context without comparative benchmarks or actionable insights. Many users report finding these metrics interesting but struggle to translate them into actual campaign improvements.

The analytics interface appears designed to impress with revenue attribution rather than provide the actionable deliverability insights that truly drive email marketing success. For most e-commerce businesses, Emercury’s more practical, deliverability-focused analytics would likely generate better campaign improvements and ultimately higher ROI.

Support

Sendlane emphasizes customer support as a key differentiator, providing multiple support channels across all plan tiers:

Support Channels:

  • 24/7/365 customer support via chat and email
  • Phone support during business hours
  • Dedicated Slack channels for enterprise clients

Support Resources:

  • Extensive knowledge base
  • Video tutorial library
  • Regular webinars and training sessions
  • E-commerce marketing guides

Tiered Support Structure:

  • Professional Plan: Access to 24/7/365 customer support
  • Enterprise Plan: Adds dedicated Customer Success Manager and personal Slack channel
  • Enterprise Plus: Adds proactive deliverability monitoring, program reviews up to twice monthly, and direct access to deliverability resources

The quality of Sendlane’s support is particularly valuable for e-commerce businesses that rely on timely assistance during critical sales periods like holidays or product launches.

Pricing

Sendlane has revised its pricing structure to a volume-based model, with support tiers tied to specific email volume thresholds:

Email Volume-Based Pricing:

  • 500,000 emails per month: $500 (Professional support)
  • 600,000 emails per month: $650 (Professional support)
  • 800,000 emails per month: $800 (Professional support)
  • 1,000,000 emails per month: $950 (Enterprise support)
  • [Other options above 1 Million] (Enterprise Support)
  • 6,000,000+ emails per month: (Enterprise Plus support)

The pricing scales linearly as you increase email volume, with all core platform features included regardless of volume. However, support and service levels increase at specific thresholds.

Support Tiers Based on Email Volume:

  • Professional (Up to 999,999 emails/month):
    • Access to 24/7/365 customer support
    • Assisted onboarding support
  • Enterprise (1,000,000+ emails/month):
    • Everything in Professional
    • White-glove, custom onboarding
    • Dedicated Customer Support
    • Personal Slack channel
    • Monthly program reviews
    • Proactive deliverability monitoring
    • Migration assistance
  • Enterprise Plus (6,000,000+ emails/month):
    • Everything in Enterprise
    • Program reviews up to 2x per month
    • Direct line to in-house deliverability resources
    • Optional Dedicated IP
    • Enhanced migration and integration services

Note that dedicated support services are exclusively available for customers who commit to annual contracts.

Sendlane positions itself firmly in the premium pricing tier of email marketing platforms. At $500/month for 500,000 emails, it is significantly more expensive than alternatives like Emercury, which offers 500,000 emails per month at approximately $275.

The platform advertises “unlimited contacts,” which can be misleading since you’re effectively limited by how many emails you can send to those contacts each month. If you have a large database but can only email a fraction of them monthly due to volume limitations, the “unlimited contacts” benefit becomes less valuable.

SMS marketing requires an additional subscription beyond the base email marketing costs, despite being marketed as part of Sendlane’s unified approach. This effectively increases the total investment required to utilize the platform’s multi-channel capabilities.

Sendlane offers a 60-day free trial without requiring a credit card, giving potential customers ample time to evaluate whether the premium pricing is justified by the platform’s convenience features, polished interface, and support offerings.

Pros

Outstanding User Interface

Sendlane offers arguably the most polished and intuitive user interface among email marketing platforms. The sleek, modern design creates an enjoyable user experience that makes everyday marketing tasks feel more pleasant and efficient.

E-Commerce Convenience Features

The platform offers convenient pre-built conditions and workflows specifically for e-commerce businesses. Features like built-in “average order value” conditions and “customer lifetime value” checks save time compared to creating these as custom implementations on other platforms.

Advanced Automation Conditions

Unique conditions like checking if a subscriber is currently in another specific automation workflow add helpful flexibility to campaign design. This allows for more sophisticated customer journey mapping without complex workarounds.

Multi-Channel Capabilities

The unified approach to email and SMS marketing allows e-commerce businesses to coordinate messaging across both channels through a single interface. This creates opportunities for more cohesive customer communication and cross-channel strategies.

Comprehensive Support

Sendlane’s emphasis on 24/7 support ensures that help is available whenever issues arise, which is particularly important for e-commerce businesses that operate around the clock. Higher-tier plans offer dedicated support resources that can provide strategic guidance beyond basic troubleshooting.

Cons

Prohibitive Pricing

With a starting price around $600/month, Sendlane positions itself in the premium tier of email marketing platforms – more than double what you’d pay for comparable sending volume on platforms like Emercury ($275/month). This pricing structure effectively excludes small to mid-sized e-commerce businesses and forces them to look elsewhere, regardless of the platform’s “convenience-first” features.

Limited Custom Field Types

Despite marketing advanced segmentation capabilities, Sendlane only supports text and date custom fields. This significant limitation restricts the types of data you can collect and use for segmentation, especially compared to platforms that support numeric fields, dropdowns, multi-select options, and other field types.

Marketing vs. Reality Gap

Testing reveals a noticeable gap between Sendlane’s marketing claims and actual platform capabilities. Features that are marketed as specialized for e-commerce appear to be standard capabilities found in most modern ESPs, just with e-commerce-focused terminology.

Credit-Based Pricing Obfuscation

The credit-based pricing model makes it difficult to compare costs directly with subscriber-based platforms and can lead to unexpected expenses as your sending needs change. The “unlimited contacts” marketing claim becomes meaningless when you’re strictly limited by credits.

SMS Marketing Bait-and-Switch

Despite heavily marketing its unified email and SMS approach, SMS capabilities require a separate subscription with its own credit system, effectively doubling costs for businesses that want to use the platform as advertised.

E-commerce Integration Dependency

Many of the platform’s most marketed features appear to require integration with an e-commerce platform to function. This creates a significant barrier to evaluating the platform’s full capabilities during a trial period and may limit functionality for businesses with custom or non-standard e-commerce setups. In other words, you have to set up an entire demo store just to properly test out the marketed functionality.

Final words

After thoroughly examining Sendlane and testing its interface, there’s a significant gap between the platform’s premium pricing and the actual value it delivers. While Sendlane offers an exceptionally polished and intuitive user interface – perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing among ESPs – this polish is somewhat undermined by noticeable loading delays when navigating between sections.

The platform’s main value proposition appears to be convenience for e-commerce businesses, with pre-built conditions and workflows that save time but don’t necessarily provide unique functionality. Features like e-commerce-specific automation conditions (average order value, lifetime value) and the ability to check if users are in other automations are convenient but could be replicated in other platforms with custom fields and strategic tagging.

This convenience comes at an extraordinary premium – starting at $600/month for functionality that’s largely available on platforms like Emercury at less than half the cost ($275/month). For most businesses, this price difference is difficult to justify based solely on convenience and interface polish.

The platform’s limitations become apparent upon closer inspection. Custom fields are restricted to just text and date types, severely limiting data collection and segmentation capabilities. The segmentation system, while marketed with impressive terminology, offers standard filtering options comparable to most modern ESPs.

Particularly concerning is how many of Sendlane’s marketed e-commerce features require integration with an e-commerce platform to function at all. This creates an evaluation barrier and may explain the unusually long 60-day free trial – it likely takes significant time and technical effort to implement these integrations before users can assess the platform’s actual value.

The unified email and SMS marketing approach loses its appeal when you discover SMS requires a separate subscription with its own credit system, effectively doubling costs. Most e-commerce businesses would likely find better value using a dedicated email platform and integrating with a separate SMS solution if needed.

While Sendlane might appeal to large enterprise e-commerce businesses with substantial marketing budgets who value its polished interface and convenience features, the vast majority of online retailers would likely be better served by more affordable platforms that provide excellent core email marketing functionality without the premium price tag. The substantial difference in cost could be better invested in other aspects of your marketing strategy or simply in sending more emails to more customers.

 

About the ESP

Aweber presents itself as the veteran email service provider, which is actually true, as they have been around since 1998. While this implies reliability and stability, it also often manifests in many aspects of the platform feeling dated. 

To combat this perception Aweber try to position themselves as the kind of service that focuses on the core features and focuses on reliability over feature overwhelm.

However, they find themselves in a very weird position when they remove really crucial features from the basic plan (tracking, analytics, severely limited automation), yet give you access to web push notifications and landing pages.

Unlike other platforms in the same “reliability over features” category, with Aweber the basic plan seems purposefully limited. This is further made clear by the fact that they impose Aweber branding on all of your communications as a paying lite customer.

This creates a situation where the lite plan feels more like a paid trial than a fully functional service tier, especially when compared to platforms like Emercury that offer substantially more features in their free plan in exchange for said branding in emails.

Onboarding Process

Aweber offers a straightforward onboarding experience. What stands out is their emphasis on education during onboarding, with access to live webinars and video tutorials. However, users on the lite plan may find themselves learning about features they can’t actually use without upgrading.

Ease of Use

Aweber’s interface is designed with simplicity in mind, making it relatively approachable for beginners. In fact, it might just be the most straightforward platform we’ve ever seen. 

This is an interesting contrast to other platforms which can cause the beginner a massive sense of overwhelm. Aweber is the exact opposite. Even an absolute beginner is likely to feel a sense of underwhelm. It just feels too easy, too simple.

Essentially, as a user you often wonder “is that it?”, and can’t tell if the lack of features and options on your screen is due to the mantra of “simplicity” or if it is because your plan is limited. This isn’t always made clear.

One such obvious example is entering the automation builder on the lite plan. It is so overly simplistic that it almost feels like you’re missing something. On the left “actions” panel you are presented with just 4 options. And on the right with the “settings” panel you see very few options, which change based on the chosen action, but always feel underwhelming.

You almost get this surreal feeling that you must be missing something as most of your screen is actually blank and unused. While most other screens in this app aren’t as extreme as the automation screen, they too give you this sense that you must be missing something. It’s not supposed be mostly an empty screen, is it?

Broadcast Feature

When we come to the broadcast screen we get a relatively simple workflow that’s largely intuitive and straightforward even if you’ve never sent an email broadcast in your life. While that might sound like a sign of really great UX craftmanship, it’s largely to do with the very limited feature set. It offers a few basic, but clear options. Check these settings, and you’re good to go.

Segmentation Options:

You have a drop down from which you can choose which segment to send to. 

  • The “Active subscribers” Segment (maintained by the system)
  • Choose one of the time-based segments (Signed up 1 day ago, 1 week ago, 1 month ago, 1 year ago)
  • Or choose one of your custom segments

The actual sending setting:

You can choose to schedule it for a certain date or send immediately.

A couple of extra features

  • An ability to check if you want it shared on X (Twitter) and Facebook
  • An option to get notified when campaign stats become available

While the interface is clean and easy to navigate, experienced email marketers may find the feature set restrictive. The process is straightforward primarily because there are fewer options to consider compared to more robust platforms.

Autoresponder/Automation Feature

Aweber’s automation builder on the lite plan is easily the most limited automation builder we have ever seen. It only gives you access to 4 actions. And this is true even if you upgrade to the higher tiers. You’re still only limited to 4 actions, though you do get one extra setting that allows you to have conditions based on opens or clicks.

If you think about it, while it is a visual drag and drop system, on the lite plan it is essentially just a visual way to build a basic linear autoresponder. On the higher plans it goes a small step beyond by letting you add or remove tags based on whether an email was opened or clicked. But still nowhere near even the simplest of automation builders from other competitors.

*-One thing to note as of writing this review. They have announced that they will be adding an ability to “split paths”. It is still in beta and not available to customers. However, if and when this is implemented, the automation builder will be closer to a true automation builder, instead of just a linear and visual representation of an autoresponder.

Templates

As one of the earliest email marketing platforms, founded in 1998, Aweber’s template library appears to reflect their long history in the industry. While they offer over 700 email templates and a selection of landing page templates, both collections seem to have retained aesthetic elements reminiscent of the early 2000s era of digital marketing, suggesting neither has evolved substantially with contemporary design trends.

The template collection includes:

  • Industry-specific email designs
  • Mobile-responsive layouts
  • Seasonal and event-based email templates
  • Landing page templates (limited to 3 on lite plan)
  • Push notification templates

While both the email and landing page templates are functional and tested for compatibility across modern browsers and email clients, their visual design often lacks the modern, minimalist aesthetics and sophisticated layouts that today’s audiences expect. The styling choices and layouts appear to be artifacts of an earlier internet era, which may not resonate with current marketing best practices or brand standards.

For businesses seeking a more contemporary look, the platform does allow users to import custom HTML templates or create their own using the drag-and-drop editor. However, users requiring modern, professional-looking email or landing page templates may need to invest additional time in customization or consider working with a designer to create custom templates that better align with current design standards.

Email Template Editor

Aweber provides two main ways to create and edit email templates:

The HTML WYSIWYG editor offers basic functionality for those who prefer to work directly with HTML code:

  • Basic HTML editing capabilities
  • Split screen preview functionality
  • Mobile responsiveness checking
  • Basic syntax highlighting
  • Support for both email and landing page content

The drag-and-drop editor emphasizes usability over complexity with features including:

  • Basic personalization options
  • Mobile preview functionality
  • Image hosting and editing tools
  • Social media integration

This is probably the one screen that hits that perfect balance between being simple, and not being underwhelming. Unlike almost all other screens in this app, you do not feel that there are features missing. 

That isn’t to say that it includes every possible feature ever implemented by the “drown you in features” platforms. It just means that it actually fulfills the stated philosophy of “all the features you need, without the bells and whistles”. It essentially reminds you how underwhelming the rest of Aweber is in comparison.

List Management

The list management options are so limited as to be shocking, especially when you consider that other platforms offer many times more segmentation and management options on even free plans. Yet Aweber is super limited on even the top tier plans.

While the platform provides basic list management capabilities, there are significant limitations in both customization and segmentation logic:

Basic Features (Available on All Plans):

  • Import/export functionality
  • Automatic handling of bounces and unsubscribes
  • Landing page lead capture integration
  • Push notification subscriber management
  • Basic subscriber profile management

Custom Fields Limitations:

  • Limited to basic plain text fields only
  • No support for other field types (date, number, dropdown, etc.)
  • Basic implementation without advanced formatting options

Segmentation Approach:

There is no dedicated “segment builder”. What you do is go to the subscribers tab, perform a search based on certain criteria, and then you’re allowed to save the search results as a “custom segment”. Oh, and on the lite plan you can only have 1 such custom segment.

The good news is that “segments from reports” don’t count against this limit. For example you can go to the report for a given campaign, click on the opens tab and save the list of people who opened this email as a segment.

The search functionality does let you combine conditions, but only in an additive fashion. For example “the subscriber is on the domain gmail.com, AND the subscriber clicked on a specific link AND they have a certain tag”.

It doesn’t however offer IF/OR conditions, and it doesn’t support nested conditions. This is true no matter what plan you get. This is surprising as these days even the lowest tiers on most platforms have this functionality.

  • Built around the subscriber search feature instead of a dedicated segment builder
  • Search uses basic “AND” conditions only
  • Search results can be saved as segments
  • Lite plan limited to 1 saved search-based segment
  • Unlimited segments from campaign engagement (opens/clicks)
  • No support for “OR” conditions or nested logic
  • Cannot combine multiple segments
  • No virtual or smart segment capabilities

Lite Plan Specific Restrictions:

  • Limited to a single list
  • Basic tracking capabilities

Pro Plan Additional Features:

  • Multiple lists
  • Full tracking capabilities

Analytics

Aweber provides basic reporting functionality on the lite plan. The campaign reports include fundamental metrics:

Core Metrics:

  • Opens
  • Clicks
  • Unsubscribes
  • Domain breakdown

A useful feature is the ability to create segments based on campaign interactions (opens or clicks), which operate separately from the platform’s custom segment limit. These campaign response segments provide a way to target engaged subscribers despite the one-custom-segment restriction on filter-based segments in the lite plan.

Higher tier users get access to more comprehensive analytics including:

  • Full sales tracking analytics
  • Comprehensive webpage tracking
  • Detailed subscriber engagement metrics
  • Advanced segmentation analytics
  • Complete e-commerce analytics

The basic nature of the reporting on the lite plan, while clear and easy to understand, may leave marketers wanting more detailed insights into their campaign performance.

Support

Aweber provides customer support across all plans, including:

  • 24/7 live chat support
  • Phone support during business hours
  • Email support
  • Knowledge base access
  • Live webinars
  • Video tutorials

While their support team is knowledgeable, they often have to explain feature limitations to lite plan users. Support quality remains consistent across all features, including assistance with landing pages and push notifications.

Pricing

Aweber’s pricing structure reveals their strategy of restricting core features to higher tiers:

Lite Plan ($15/month for up to 500 subscribers):

  • Limited to 3 landing pages
  • No email sales tracking
  • No webpage tracking
  • Extremely limited automation capabilities
  • Basic analytics only
  • Aweber branding required
  • Split testing available
  • Basic push notification features

Pro Plan (starting at $30/month):

  • Unlimited landing pages
  • Full sales tracking
  • Webpage tracking
  • Advanced automation features
  • Comprehensive analytics
  • No Aweber branding
  • Advanced push notification features

The pricing scales with subscriber count (Lite/Plus per Month):

  • 2,501-5,000 subscribers: $60/$90
  • 5,001-7,500 subscribers: $85/$120
  • 7,500-10,100 subscribers: $100/$135
  • 10,001-15,000 subscribers: $150/$180

Pros

Established Platform

  • Long history in email marketing
  • Reliable infrastructure
  • Stable company

Additional Features

  • Landing page builder (though limited on lite plan)
  • Web push notifications
  • Integration capabilities

Good Support

  • 24/7 availability
  • Comprehensive educational resources

Cons

Severe Lite Plan Limitations

  • Only 3 landing pages allowed
  • No email sales tracking
  • No webpage tracking
  • Limited automation capabilities
  • Basic plan feels like a paid trial
  • Essential tracking features not available on lite plan
  • Paid lite plan more restricted than some competitors’ free plans
  • Required Aweber branding

Limited Feature Sophistication

  • Basic segmentation with “AND” logic only across all plans
  • No complex conditional logic or nested rules
  • No support for combining segments
  • Single plain text custom field type only
  • Dated template designs
  • Basic automation capabilities

Final words

Aweber presents itself as a comprehensive email marketing platform with additional features like landing pages and push notifications. However, their approach to feature availability – particularly the severe limitations on their lite plan – creates significant drawbacks for users seeking a complete email marketing solution.

The platform’s strategy of restricting core features like email sales tracking and webpage tracking to higher-tier plans, while also requiring branding and limiting landing pages on the lite plan, makes it feel more like a paid trial than a fully functional service tier. This is particularly notable when compared to competitors who make such essential features available across all plans or even in their free offerings.

Whether Aweber is right for you depends largely on your needs and budget. If you’re willing to pay for higher-tier plans to access core features, and you specifically need integrated landing pages and web push notifications, it might be worth considering. However, for users seeking a platform that provides comprehensive email marketing capabilities without artificial restrictions, there are likely more suitable options available.

The addition of landing pages and web push notifications, while potentially useful, doesn’t compensate for the core limitations in their lite plan. Users might find better value in platforms that either excel at core email marketing features without restrictions or offer truly comprehensive feature sets at their price points.

 

About the ESP

Emercury positions itself as a mid-sized ESP that caters primarily to email marketing veterans and businesses focused on ROI. What makes them interesting is their philosophy of prioritizing core features and deliverability over flashy additions. While they’re not as well-known as some of the bigger names in the space, they’ve carved out a niche by focusing on what they believe actually drives results in email marketing.

The platform stands out for its approach to features and pricing. Rather than using feature-gating as a pricing strategy (common among larger ESPs), they make most features available across all plans. Their development philosophy centers on proven, ROI-driving capabilities rather than chasing every new industry trend. This makes them particularly appealing to experienced email marketers who value substance over novelty.

This review will explore how this philosophy plays out across their various features and capabilities, from their streamlined interface to their emphasis on human-based support.

Onboarding Process

Emercury has a pretty streamlined onboarding process that ensures you get started on the right foot. The moment that you sign up, you’re guided to setting up your sender profile and the support team is there to help you. You get access to an actual live support team to guide you if you get stuck at any point.

Ease of Use

This is probably the leading advantage when it comes to Emercury. As per their stated philosophy, their platform is designed to focus on the core features that make a difference. That isn’t to say that they don’t also have a lot of additional cool features.

However, the design seems to be entirely focused around the fundamentals. You will never feel overwhelmed, and there is next to no learning curve. Whether you’re a newbie trying to send your first campaign, or an advanced email veteran, you are sure to craft your first campaigns in minutes.

Broadcast Feature

If you care about broadcasts, then Emercury might just be right up your alley. With the ever increasing focus on “automation”, many ESPs have stopped innovating when it comes to broadcasts. Emercury is different because at their core they believe that broadcasts are just as important as automation. Something you can learn more about in this mailcon article here.

With that said, the main thing we love about the broadcast panel in Emercury is how it prioritizes the main features that you need. You can choose to either create a regular campaign, an A/B split campaign. To the side you have your folders which allows you to easily organize your drafts and templates, and then you have the list of all campaigns.

The really fun stuff begins once you enter into the campaign creation process 

Emercury decided to go with a wizard whereby you can easily create a campaign and get access to all the features and options you need, without getting overwhelmed. This is accomplished by first splitting the process into 4 steps.

But even then, within the different steps the most important features are put front and center, whereas the more advanced features are unveiled as you need them.

The first step involves creating the actual email (using the editor of your choice), and it includes everything you might expect, and then some more. Aside from allowing you to easily design the email and handle the copy, it also allows you to tweak personalization to your liking.

Aside from the basic merge tags that let you drop in bits of personal data (like first name, city, or custom field values), it also allows you to leverage “Smart Personalization”.

This is a pretty cool feature where you can literally have entire parts of the email look or show differently based on who’s viewing the email. That is to say you can set certain conditions, and based on which conditions the viewer meets, they will see different content.

In the second step is where you get to see the really cool extra features that broadcasters will love.

At first glance it seems simple because you just define the basics such as the subject line, and preheader text, however, it also provides a ton of extra features. All you have to do is click on the “Edit Advanced Options” button and see a plethora of extra features.

This includes enabling an automatic delivery reminder or permission reminder. These remind the subscriber either how they got on your list and/or that they need to add you to their address book, as a way of boosting deliverability.

Next, you will see a super useful feature that automatically adds anyone who opens the campaign to a specific list. An option to add google analytics tracking to the links inside of the email, an option that generates ECPM/CPA tracking code so you can see the ROI for each campaign. And finally, an ability to set the delivery stop time.

Aside from this it allows you to customize the footer if you want to for this specific campaign, as well as decide if this campaign will be public (shown on publisher’s site).

The third screen is where you get to leverage the power of your segments

It is a simple panel where you choose which list or segment you want to send the campaign to. And then, you also get to select suppression lists (contacts to be excluded from this campaign).

But the really cool feature is something that they call “virtual segments”. It is a special segment that is created for that specific campaign, and won’t show up in your “lists” panel. This is used mostly for the purpose of throttling a campaign and making sure that it sends in multiple steps. That is to say, it makes it so that not everyone gets the campaign at the same time.

This is a feature that is essential for those with bigger lists and serious email marketers who care about deliverability.

And finally, overview and content scoring

The final step is an overview of how your campaign is set up, and it has shortcuts to the main actions you might need. This includes the preview feature, if you want to take another look at the email without going backwards. It has the option to schedule a delivery, schedule a test send, or even send the campaign immediately, if you’re especially confident.

Autoresponder/Automation Feature

The automation feature is probably the best example about how Emercury tries to make things feel simple, and yet still offer a lot of power. Instead of overwhelming you with a ton of different modules, you’re presented with some really straightforward fundamental blocks.

This means that you can recreate a basic autoresponder in literally seconds from the moment you open the journey builder for the first time. However, at the same time it still offers some powerful features when you want to get fancier, you just need to enable them.

Some of our favorite modules include the “if” block which lets you define all sorts of cool logic about how the automation should flow. Including day and time targeting, as well the webhook module which allows you to to trigger actions in any external system.

However, the module that really stands out is the “Go to” module which we think hasn’t been seen on other platforms yet, at least not to our knowledge. It’s this really cool module where you can have the automation go to any previous step.

This is useful if for example someone has been sent an entire sequence, but hasn’t bought yet. You can simply insert a go-to step that takes buyers through the flow once again.

Templates

Emercury offers a growing library of templates. It’s not a huge library by any means, but it offers everything you need with classic, elegant, responsive templates that are a good choice for any brand. If you want to go super custom and match your brand exactly, they offer custom services where their team of designers can custom-design templates to match your brand.

Email Template Editor

Email Template Editor Options

✅ HTML WYSIWYG

✅ Drag and Drop

The drag and drop editor is another example of how Emercury balances power with simplicity. As you might expect, it gives you all the standard drag-and-drop functionality for building your emails visually. However, what makes it interesting is how it integrates with Emercury’s personalization features.

When you’re working with any text content in the editor, you get access to both basic merge tags and the Smart Personalization feature mentioned earlier. This means you can select any text block and either drop in basic subscriber data (like names or custom field values), or set up those conditional content rules we talked about in the broadcast section.

This is a good example of Emercury’s focus on ROI-driving features. Instead of overwhelming you with dozens of fancy-sounding options, they’ve focused on making it easy to do the things that actually impact your bottom line – like personalizing your content to different subscriber segments.

The integration is particularly well thought out. You won’t find yourself hunting through complex menus to find the personalization options. They’re right there when you’re editing text, which makes it practical to use these features in your day-to-day email creation process, rather than treating them as a special occasion thing.

List Management

Sending emails is only one half of the coin. If you have low quality list management, then no amount of sending features will help you. Fortunately the people behind Emercury seem to share that notion, as can be witnessed by their attention to list management features.

Adding contacts

When it comes to adding contacts, aside from the basics such as letting you build forms, integrations, and adding contacts manually, they also support an incoming webhooks feature not common on most platforms. With this you can essentially make it so that you can feed new data to your Emercury account, in real time, coming from other platforms.

In addition, they feature a full contact profile where you can at a glance see the assigned tags and all custom field values, as well as the “Message Center”, which displays the full messaging history with this contact.

Segmentation

Emercury seems to support every single way that you can imagine of organizing, segmenting and managing your contacts. It all seems to start with lists, which are the basic organizational unit for contacts. Each contact must belong to a list.

From there on you have multiple ways to differentiate contacts in even more granular ways, including via tags, smart segments, custom profile values and events.

As you might and should expect, when you send out a broadcast campaign you can choose one or multiple lists (or segments).

If you want to get super granular, you can use the advanced segment builder and create a segment based on any possible combination of tags, conditions, actions, events that you can imagine. And then when you do broadcast, proceed to choose any combination of segments or lists.

Of course, if you’re utilizing the automation builder, you can trigger a journey any time a lead enters a given segment or list. And even create “broadcasted journeys” which are something like a hybrid between a broadcast and an automated journey. They call this feature “Scheduled Automations for Existing Lists”.

Analytics

Emercury claims that its analytics and reporting features are one of the main reasons why a lot of email veterans are moving to their platform. If you’re overwhelmed with the reporting and analytics on other platforms, then Emercury might just be right for you.

It displays all the metrics you need in a simple and straightforward way which is simple to interpret at a glance. This makes it fun and easy to go and look at your reports each time you’re trying something new in your marketing. And that is how you grow and improve as a marketer. If this ease of use sounds good, then it might be right for you.

Support

One of the advantages of working with a medium-sized ESP is that you still get to deal with humans, and we see that advantage clearly displayed here. Whenever you reach out to support you will notice that there are no support chat bots, ready-made (copy-pasted) answers and runarounds that make no sense.

You’re dealing with actual humans who are inside the company and working right alongside the key players. As opposed to an outsourced support team following canned scripts, as you would with a larger more corporate ESP.

Pricing

The pricing is really interesting here, because it highlights the difference between those “in the know” and beginners who chase after flashy featurettes. If you look at the actual price per email sent, Emercury is far more affordable than those big platforms.

According to Emercury, their philosophy is that you pay for sending emails, not for features (unlike most other platforms). Their philosophy states that features should be available to everyone, and not use features as a pricing metric.

When they develop a feature, they try to make it available to all tiers. The only exception is if the feature is genuinely computationally expensive, in which case it differs from one plan to the next. Otherwise though, pricing is not related to features.

Now, if you’re experienced with email, you will know that most of your profit comes from using the staple foundational features and that deliverability impacts your profits far more than any fancy side-featurette. If you’re this person, Emercury pricing will appeal to you as you will get to make more profits, while spending less per email sent.

Pros

Feature development that focuses on ROI

If you read through the Emercury blog, you’ll notice a pattern. Their CEO is adamant about making it clear that their philosophy is that they give you what you need to make money off of email marketing.

This means that their approach is entirely different to platforms that try to lure you in with cool-sounding features that you’re either not going to use, or don’t make much of a difference.

Emercury states that they primarily cater to and serve the needs of email veterans, and all feature development is driven towards what their expert users need to boost ROI on email.

This isn’t to say that they don’t also add all kinds of fun and quality-of-life features, merely that their focus is heavily biased toward results, not what sounds cool on paper.

Simplicity of use versus overwhelm

One thing that you will notice is how “simple” Emercury seems when you first use it. This seems to flow directly from their philosophy of prioritizing the money-making features, as this is what they put front and center.

The interface is almost like a guide that gets you to focus on what matters in email marketing, making sure that you don’t get lost in overwhelm. Now, this isn’t to say that they don’t also have a lot of the extra features. Their interface is just designed in such a way that they are de-emphasized or enabled on a per-need basis.

If you ever feel overwhelmed trying other email marketing platforms, you might just want to try Emercury and see if your opinion changes. When everything is in front of you all at the same time, it can feel like an impossible task to master email marketing. However, when you realize that most of your results come from getting a few basics right, email marketing can become quite a bit easier.

A focus on human-based support

If you’ve used other SaaS offerings (email marketing or otherwise), you might be used to customer support that is frustrating. You might be used to obvious canned responses (even when you do reach an actual human), and conversations that go in circles. This is because most platforms outsource their customer service.

Emercury has an in-house customer service where you talk to members of the core team. That is to say they are intimately familiar with the product and how it works, as opposed to merely random people trained how to answer questions.

Fair pricing, not using features as blackmail

Another thing that the CEO of Emercury seems to emphasize quite often is their philosophy that features should be available to all. This is in contrast to many of the larger email marketing names that use “feature lock” as a way to get you to upgrade.

It’s typical with many of the services that we review to see a situation where you only need one small feature, but you have to upgrade to a higher tier that includes a volume of email you don’t actually need.

Emercury on the other hand bases its pricing on the number of emails sent, not number of features included. Almost every feature is included in every plan, and you only pay more in order to send more emails.

Cons

Less of the smaller or more experimental features

If you’ve grown accustomed to one of the smaller exotic features on a different platform, you might find that it doesn’t exist on Emercury. This is both good news and bad news, depending on how you view it. They seem intent on developing proven features that really move the needle, and don’t rush smaller and unproven features.

It’s good in the sense that it might help you focus on what actually gives results. It might be bad if you find that you have a habit of using one of these smaller features. We recommend giving it a test and finding out.

Final words

Emercury presents itself as a focused, deliverability-oriented ESP that prioritizes core features and ROI over flashy additions. Its streamlined interface, fair pricing model, and emphasis on human support make it particularly appealing to email marketing veterans who value substance over novelty. While it may not offer every experimental feature found on larger platforms, this intentional restraint appears to be a strategic choice rather than a limitation.

For businesses seeking an ESP that emphasizes what actually drives results in email marketing – deliverability, usable analytics, and core functionality – Emercury offers a compelling option. The platform’s philosophy of making features available across all tiers, coupled with its focus on human-based support, creates a refreshing alternative to the feature-gating common in the industry.

Whether Emercury is right for you ultimately depends on your priorities. If you value straightforward functionality, strong deliverability, and direct access to knowledgeable support over having every possible feature, it’s worth serious consideration. The platform seems particularly well-suited for experienced email marketers who want to focus on what drives actual results rather than getting lost in feature complexity.