Sendlane Review: Hype Or The Real Deal? (2023 Update)

Sendlane review

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Sendlane Review 2023: Hyper Or The Real Deal?

Sendlane review

Published by Al Rose

Last Updated on January 11, 2023

Welcome to my updated, 2023 Sendlane review. Most reviews on page 1 of Google are dated 2020 or older, or are missing critical pricing and feature information about this popular email marketing tool. 

This review is different as it is thorough, analytical, and it contains all the information you need to make a purchase decision.

You might find Sendlane a bit pricey for just an email marketing platform, but once you understand its key features, integrations, email deliverability, email builder, customer service and pros and cons, you will see the reason for the price tag.

Let’s dive into our full Sendlane review and show how it stacks up against other email marketing platforms.

Table of Contents

Section 1: What is Sendlane?

Sendlane is an email marketing automation platform that uses deep data integration to help users create personalized customer experiences through highly segmented and hyper targeted popups, email, and SMS campaigns. 

Sendlane also uses real time tracking and multivariate testing to help you optimize your messaging, increase retention and generate more sales.

You can test all of Sendlane’s pro features for 14 days free.

Section 2: Pros and Cons of Sendlane Email Marketing Tool

Pros

  • Clean and intuitive dashboard
  • Advanced reports
  • Helpful, friendly and involved customer support
  • High email deliverability
  • Easy to use
  • Effective automations
  • Advanced segmentation and list building
  • A/B testing

Cons

  • It’s costly for beginners with small budgets and also gets costlier as you scale your number of contacts
  • You can only send SMS to US phone numbers. Sendlane does not support international SMS due to privacy regulations and data limitations

Section 3: Is Sendlane Worth It? Who Is Suited For?

Anyone can use Sendlane. But it is most beneficial for those in need of advanced email and SMS marketing tools, such as advanced digital marketers, ecommerce stores, digital agencies and SMBs. 

Sendlane could be costly for beginner businesses with small budgets. You will find the price worthwhile however, if you want high email deliverability and effective automation.

But if you need a cheaper email marketing tool for customer engagement, you should look at a freemium option like MailChimp. If budget is not an issue but you need an all-in-one marketing platform, go with Kajabi.

Section 4: Key Sendlane Features/ Benefits Breakdown (what does it do)

Marketing Automation (Including Autoresponders and Workflows)

Sendlane relies on audience behavior to automatically trigger actions or communications such as welcoming new subscribers, nurturing audience members through a sales funnel, segmenting, or performing list hygiene, all of which helps you build better, more profitable customer relationships.

automation

Sendlane’s entire infrastructure is built around automation. By using workflows and autoresponder options, you can create personalized emails, sms and popups that not only land in your audience’s inbox, but that also stimulate conversations, improve list building and reduce cart abandonment.  

A trigger is an action or a behavior by a customer. Your automation will begin when that behavior is detected. For instance, when a person subscribes to your list.

What follows is an action by your Sendlane automation. E.g a notification is sent.

Goals help you customize each customer’s journey throughout your automation. Goals use and/or conditions to segment your customers and determine what happens next in their journey.

Email Deliverability: How Good Is It with Sendlane?

Sendlane is designed to improve email deliverability. Poor email deliverability can be a result of different factors, such as, emails going to the spam folder.

Luckily, Sendlane ensures better deliverability rates in several ways.

First, Sendlane owns and controls its IP addresses, whose reputation it works hard to protect. As such, all emails sent from those IP addresses will have a good reputation and are therefore less likely to go to the spam folder.

Second, Sendlane’s multivariate testing allow you to conduct experiments on different versions of an email to determine the email with the best deliverability. This process is fully automated, making it accurate, quick to perform, and delivers real time results.

This feature is very helpful for improving audience engagement and eventually driving up sales. If your engagement levels and sales have taken a dip, you might want to test deliverability.  

Third, Sendlane provides some suggestions for reducing the likelihood of your emails being marked as SPAM. They include:

  • Delivering original email content
  • Never using curse words in your emails.
  • Maintaining a hygienic list. List hygiene improves your sending reputation. We’ll talk more about list hygiene later in this article
  • Avoid excessive use of formatting, special characters, emojis and imagery
  • Use catchy but relevant subject lines
  • Mask links or use a button
  • Only send marketing emails from your custom domain email address

Sendlane’s email deliverability is one of the reasons for this tool’s above average pricing. Most email marketing tools have lower and less reliable delivery rates.

Email and Landing Page Builder

You can create emails ideal for your campaign with Sendlane’s easy to use drag-and-drop email builder. The builder is equipped with tools, sections and layouts that you can use to customize text, image or html content in your emails and pages.

email builder

You can also add social media icons and buttons to allow your contacts a convenient way to navigate to your landing pages or social media accounts

Different editing options such as adding space or dividers give you an easy way to separate content to make it stand out.  

You can use custom content blocks to create, save, and reuse the same content in other emails. This saves you the time you would otherwise spend adding information such as company logos or email signatures.

Use of personalization tags such as name, email address or phone number, allows you to customize your emails and landing pages with dynamic content to create a personalized experience and encourage more engagement with your contacts.

SMS Marketing Tool

Sendlane’s SMS marketing tool provides a quick and easy way to populate your entire funnel with personalized messages about new products and discounts, or to send notifications about upcoming products and events.

SMSs increase more engagement as it’s easy for users to jump from a text message to your campaign.

You can send stand-alone SMSs or include them in a workflow.

Data Analytics

Sendlane’s real time tracking allows you to view campaign data as it comes in. Real time data gives you an immediate understanding into customer behavior.

It also allows you to make smart campaign decisions on the fly. If open rates are low for instance, you can immediately launch another version of the email. Such immediate action is helpful for improving performance.

You can view campaign activity and performance in the daily digest section or on the dashboard. The daily digest gives you a snapshot of the performance of your account, while the dashboard displays different metrics giving you a deeper view of email and SMS performance.

The dashboard contains simple and detailed performance reports on ecommerce, deliverability, revenue, and contacts. You can change the reporting period for all these reports.

List Management and Segmentation (Including List Hygiene Feature)

The quality of your contact list will influence the success of your email or SMS campaign.

Sendlane’s list management feature uses its more than 100 data points to automatically segment your audience.

list management

In addition, you can maintain a high-quality contact list using the smart list hygiene feature. This allows you to separate disinterested contacts from the interested ones, and also improves your retargeting efforts among interested contacts. It also allows you to keep your conversions with different customers focused and relevant.

Integration With Other Tools and API

Sendlane makes managing all the tools you use, or stores and brands that you own by integrating them all under one account.

integrations

Once integrated, you can manage communication to all your stores or brands from a centralized platform.  A key advantage of this high level of integration is that it gives you more data points per customer to work with when creating or optimizing your campaigns. More data points result in more focused targeting which leads to more conversions.

Other advantages of integration include:

  • Integrating ecommerce platforms increases engagement with customers, to increase sales with upsells, and to better manage cart abandonment with automatic emails.
  • Integrating with landing page builders allows you to grow your email lists
  • Integrating with autoresponders is a great way to improve quick response to your customers. It also makes your work easier by automating email sending.
  • Integrating with Facebook will help you improve ad targeting by building custom audiences

Ease of Use

Sendlane is an easy platform to use. It is aesthetically pleasing, it has well-labeled and legible icons, and its intuitive drag and drop builder simplifies email and landing page creation.  

The process of integrating Sendlane with other apps and stores is also easy, and so is managing ecommerce. For instance, you can create cart abandonment emails in just a few steps and have them automatically send out whenever a customer does not purchase.

ease of use_create new automation

Sendlane’s personalized support through assisted onboarding and dedicated account managers makes the platform even easier to use.

Onboarding and Customer Support

Sendlane provides 24/7 email and chat support to all its users. All users also get access to onboarding support.

Users on the professional plus plan get a dedicated success manager to help with everything: from set up to integration, A/B testing, setting up your CRM, importing data, performance issues, and more. The friendly customer support staff take their time to explain everything to you and this helps to improve your interaction with the email platform.  

In addition to this personalized support, you can get detailed answers to any queries you might have in Sendlane’s detailed articles, eBooks and podcasts in the knowledge base.

Section 5: Sendlane Pricing

Sendlane pricing has a growth plan and a professional plus plan. The pricing of these plans is not feature-based but is dependent on the number of contacts.

The Growth plan costs $100 per month for 5000 contacts, 24/7 live chat and email support, and assisted onboarding. 

The Professional plan costs $275 per month for 10,000 contacts, 250,000 total emails sent, customized onboarding and customer support. 

You can save a little bit of money by paying annually for either plan, giving you the equivalent of two months free on whatever plan you choose.

Sendlane does not have a free plan, but it has a 14-day free trial period and a no-credit card sign up process.

Section 6: Alternatives to Sendlane

If you try out Sendlane and find that it doesn’t suit your business goals or budget, you should consider these other options:

Aweber

This email marketing software is great for sending newsletter emails, autoresponses, and for converting RSS to email.

You can create and customize emails with Aweber’s more than 150 templates, and schedule how and when those emails are sent out. Aweber is easy to use and the customer support is well-structured and responsive.

Aweber has a free plan that allows you to manage up to 500 subscribers and 3000 email sends per month.

While the free plan is powerful enough for a beginner, it does not offer split testing, behavioral automation, cart abandonment, or link tracking. It also offers very basic reports.

The pro plan offers these advanced features, and also allows you to manage unlimited contacts, email sends and lists for $19.99 per month and up to 25000 subscribers for $146.15 per month.

We go into more detail in our Sendlane vs Aweber guide.

Mailchimp

This 20-year-old freemium email marketing platform is most ideal for beginners on a budget. It provides email marketing, lead generation, social media management, website and ecommerce store creation services under one roof.  

Mailchimp has pre-made and custom-made templates, a drag and drop campaign builder, segmentation, A/B testing, multi-step customer journeys, behavioral targeting, among other features. It also supports hundreds of integrations.

You can manage up to 2,000 contacts on MailChimp’s free plan and also access most audience, automation and brand building tools available to subscribers in the paid plans. We break down other key features in our Sendlane vs Mailchimp article.

Other MailChimp plans include essentials, which starts at 500 subscribers for $9.99 and a 10X maximum send limit; standard plan which also starts at 500 subscribers for $14.99 but a 12X send limit; the premium plan, at $299 for 10,000 users and a 15X send limit.

Getresponse

Getresponse is a powerful yet simple marketing automation platform for creating emails and landing pages. You can integrate your ecommerce stores with Getresponse, build sales funnels, segment, send highly targeted communication, build lists with popups and automatically recover abandoned carts.

Getresponse has a free plan that allows you to manage up to 500 contacts, build a website, landing pages and sign-up forms. The paid plans cost $15/month for 1000 contacts for the basic plan, $49 for the plus plan and $99/month for the professional plan, all for 1000 contacts.

Getresponse price plans are feature-based; the more you pay, the more advanced features you can access. Find out more in our Sendlane vs Getresponse comparison.

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