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Omnisend Review

A beginner-friendly marketing platform for e-commerce brands

3.5
Good
By Gabriel Zamora

The Bottom Line

Omnisend's template-heavy, user-friendly email marketing tool is good for small and midsize marketers, particularly those seeking extensive SMS support, though it lacks the robust analytics of some competitors.

Per Month, Starts at $16.00
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Pros

  • High-quality newsletter templates and email builder
  • User-friendly tools for small and midsize marketers
  • Excellent customer support
  • Affordable plans

Cons

  • SMS costs can quickly add up
  • Comparatively weak analytics and automation

Omnisend Specs

Free Plan
A/B Testing
Social Media Marketing
Search Marketing
Unlimited Sequencing
Drag-and-Drop Creation
Unlimited Email
CRM Integration
Annual Plans
Limited Free Trial
Image Library
Survey Tool
Marketing Automation
REST API
Social Media Integration
24/7 Phone Support

Omnisend is a full-featured email marketing platform that emphasizes SMS support, robust email assets, and useful segmentation and reporting tools, with affordable plans and excellent customer support. Its template-heavy foundation makes Omnisend a useful service for e-commerce businesses that need to quickly create campaigns without investing too much time into learning the ropes. Experienced marketers can leverage its analytic and automation features for their campaigns, but may feel limited by the relatively limited automation capabilities and analytics. As such, HubSpot Marketing Hub and Mailchimp remain our Editors' Choice winners for robust, all-in-one email marketing.


How Much Does Omnisend Cost?

Omnisend has three pricing tiers, and like many email marketing tools, the one you choose depends on the size of your contact list and how much email you plan to send. The Free plan caps your contact list to 250 and your monthly email sends to 500. That's fine for a free trial, but most businesses will want more.

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Next up is the Standard tier. It starts at $16 per month for up to 500 contacts and increases in price from there. For example, 150,000 contacts bumps the Standard tier subscription to $1,456 per month. The monthly email volume is pegged to 12 times the size of your contact list, so you can send 12,000 emails per month if you have 1,000 contacts. Campaigner has a 6x email cap. (Note: Campaigner is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com's parent company.)

Pro plans are Omnisend's costliest tier, but with good reason. This tier gives you unlimited monthly email sends, and it unlocks advanced reporting tools that let you track aggregate performance and compare email and SMS performance. Pro plans start at $59 per month for 2,500 contacts and scale to $1,914 for 150,000 contacts.

The Pro tier is worth considering if you plan to make heavy use of SMS messaging. SMS sends are billed differently than email sends, often costing extra. The amount you pay for SMS depends on where you send the message. For example, one SMS message costs $0.015 when sent to a number in the US, but $0.08 when sent to France.

Omnisend gives you $1 of SMS credits when you sign up for the Free and Standard tiers, and that's a one-time bonus. That amount gets you roughly 67 SMS messages to US phone numbers, which isn't much. If you want to send more SMS messages at these tiers, you must sign up for an add-on SMS credit plan (starting at $20 per month). Pro plans, on the other hand, give you SMS credits equal to the amount you pay for your plan each month, which makes a huge difference when budgeting campaigns. 

If you're willing to forgo the advanced analytics and SMS additions, Omnisend is inexpensive compared with Mailchimp and other more extensive services. That said, Klaviyo has similar pricing at lower tiers and offers a monthly SMS stipend to sweeten the deal. With larger contact lists, however, Omnisend is the more affordable option.


Omnisend's email builder
Omnisend's drag-and-drop email builder (Credit: Omnisend/PCMag)

Building Emails

Email builders are important features for email marketing tools because they let you create emails and newsletters to send to subscribers. Like HubSpot, Omnisend excels in this regard by delivering a great drag-and-drop editor and a wide range of attractive, predesigned email templates. These are particularly useful if you want to quickly put together an email campaign and your business lacks a dedicated email designer. Omnisend lets you upload custom HTML templates, too.

Thanks to the drag-and-drop editor, you can easily personalize Omnisend's templates to suit your needs. One outstanding feature is the ability to drag and drop entire section blocks into your email, such as a body or hero image, rather than introducing individual elements piecemeal. You can also generate unique discount codes to reward subscribers, and you add them to emails in a similar fashion. 

Omnisend's templates are highly flexible and customizable. By comparison, Brevo offers a feature-rich email builder and a greater selection of templates. Still, Omnisend holds its own thanks to the discount block feature and more interactive templates to punch up your emails.


Omnisend templates
You can quickly get started by using Omnisend's prebuilt email templates (Credit: Omnisend/PCMag)

Creating Lists and Segments

Omnisend lets you list and segment email subscribers to help narrow and focus your campaign's scope. You can target subscribers with personalized messaging at opportune times. Segmentation tools are integral here; the more robust and granular the criteria, the more precise and targeted your emails can be. For example, you can schedule emails based on the number of times a subscriber has opened your email within days or weeks. 

There's no limit to the number of segments you can build, and you're given a respectable selection of customization options to hone each one. In addition, Omnisend offers an impressive library of prebuilt segments, so you don't need to get into the weeds by creating one from scratch. These include segments for active email subscribers, recent buyers, and high-value subscribers. There are numerous options to choose from, which makes for a painless, user-friendly process. Moreover, you can sync your segments with Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Customer Match.


Omnisend's automation library
Kick-start your campaigns with Omnisend's prebuilt automations (Credit: Omnisend/PCMag)

Automations and Reporting

Once you get past email creation, creating automations is the next important step in maintaining customer relationships. Some other email marketing services call these flows or drip campaigns. The idea is to send an automated chain of emails to subscribers who trigger them with specific actions, such as subscribing to a list or clicking a link in one of your emails.

Omnisend's automation library offers a broad selection of prebuilt templates used to start the process without the burden of creating one from scratch. Examples include welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase, transactional, and special occasion workflows. You can create custom automation templates, too. The process is similar to other email marketing services. You pick a trigger, add message delays, and so on. 

After you split a path in your flow, you can A/B test to compare each version's performance, including recipient counts and open/click rates. Omnisend doesn't show email conversion rates as Klaviyo does.

Omnisend has good reporting features, but the advanced metrics are restricted to the Pro plan. They highlight the performance of all your campaigns and workflows while sorting the highest-performing actions. It's a solid start, but falls a bit short compared with rivals' reporting tools. For example, Klaviyo and Mailchimp include benchmarks that let you compare your results with industry peers. 

Customizing an Omnisend automation
Customizing Omnisend automations is easy and intuitive (Credit: Omnisend/PCMag)

Support and Live Chat

All Omnisend plans offer 24/7 email and live chat support, including the free plan. Paid plans offer "priority support," but it's unclear how much faster priority responses are compared with the other tiers. The company says its support agents typically answer requests in around three minutes. Omnisend lacks telephone support. 

Omnisend offers excellent documentation and resource pages that you can use to troubleshoot campaigns and automations. Omnisend customers who pay at least $400 per month get access to a dedicated Customer Success Manager who helps you migrate data, set up your first automations and campaigns, and who generally provides ongoing support to help you make the most of the tool.

Omnisend workflow prompt
Ease-of-use is one of Omnisend's best qualities (Credit: Omnisend/PCMag)

Verdict: A Good Starting Point for Beginners

Omnisend is a high-quality email marketing service that delivers the templates and convenience you want without the steep learning curve you'll encounter with more advanced tools. However, Omnisend lacks highly granular metrics and segmentation, which you may find limiting. If you're looking for a full-featured email marketing system that adapts to the needs of experienced marketers and large-scale campaigns, we recommend checking out Editors' Choice winners Campaigner, HubSpot, and Mailchimp.

Omnisend
3.5
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$16 Per Month at Omnisend
Per Month, Starts at $16.00
Pros
  • High-quality newsletter templates and email builder
  • User-friendly tools for small and midsize marketers
  • Excellent customer support
  • Affordable plans
View More
Cons
  • SMS costs can quickly add up
  • Comparatively weak analytics and automation
The Bottom Line

Omnisend's template-heavy, user-friendly email marketing tool is good for small and midsize marketers, particularly those seeking extensive SMS support, though it lacks the robust analytics of some competitors.

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About Gabriel Zamora

My career has taken me through an eclectic assortment of fields, and connected me with people from all walks of life. This experience includes construction, professional cooking, podcasting, and, of course, writing. I’ve been typing up geeky takes since 2009, ultimately landing a freelancing position at PCMag. This blossomed into a full-time tech analyst position in 2021, where I lend my personal insight on the matters of web hosting, streaming music, mobile apps, and video games. 

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Omnisend $16 Per Month at Omnisend
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