SendPulse Review – Send Emails, SMS & Push Notifications. Your MailChimp Alternative

SendPulse review is what I intend to do in this blog post. I was looking for MailChimp alternative for one of my client as he was exceeding his free quota of 12,000 emails a month. Client was ok with paying to MailChimp however before that wanted to evaluate if any better alternative option is available. During this I came across SendPulse. This post shall help you in understanding what is SendPulse, its offering and pricing for same.

What is SendPulse?

SendPulse is a fast and affordable way to send email newsletters, email campaigns, sms, web push notifications and emails using SMTP. These services should help you grow your blog, business as well as increase brand awareness through effective usage of email marketing.

You can use SendPulse to send daily newsletter and broadcast important announcements over email. But this is not it, you can use SendPulse to send SMS and Push Notifications as well. To send SMS you need to have mobile number of your subscribers as well.

What is Push Notification?

You must have seen a notification that says website abc want to Show Notifications. When you allow, you receive notification as and when new content is published. Using this notification, you can visit the website by clicking on it. Ever wondered, how can you enable push notifications for you website? SendPulse is your solution.

SendPulse Web Push Notification

What Is Offered by SendPulse?

Email Marketing

You can use SendPulse to start sending emails to your subscribers and potential clients. Other products that you are familiar with are MailChimp, Aweber etc. Email is most effective method of reaching out to your subscribers and clients with highest ROI. SendPulse’s email delivery powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) helps you in increasing email delivery and open rate. SendPulse’s algorithm decides best time to deliver email based on subscriber’s behavior.

You can use drag and drop email editor to quickly create and edit email messages with zero HTML knowledge. There are email templates available that you can use too. Of-course, all these email templates were responsive.

For better experience, you have an option to user Autoresponders, trigger emails on action taken by users etc. I loved this offering and have set an autoresponder that delivers 4 emails to users on defined time intervals on subscribing.

For beginners, you can send 15,000 emails for free in a month. Trust me, this is more than what you will need when you are starting and is in early stage of your blogging career.

Reports:

Multiple reports are available to understand effectiveness of your sent campaign.

SMTP Server

You get emails when comment is posted on your blog, user registers, on form submissions etc. Similarly, users also receive email from your website when they complete an action. It is your server who sends these emails on your behalf and there is limitation to this. Typically, you cannot send more than 500 emails in any given day and chances of these emails landing in Spam folder is very high as your server is sending emails for thousands of other clients as well.

What if you can use some other service provider to send these emails? This is where SMTP Server offering of SendPulse will help you. You can use SMTP of SendPulse and start sending emails from your CMS or CRM. Though frontend will be yours, the backend that will actual deliver email will be SendPulse’s. Isn’t it great?

With SendPulse you can send 12,000 free emails each month using SMTP. You will need intermediate programing knowledge to make this work. This is not tough at all.

Web Push Notifications

Your readers or customers can subscribe on the site to receive push notifications from your website and start to receive notifications on their own devices. Users can subscribe and receive notifications right on their desktop or mobile devices. Push notifications work on over 80% of devices, on all modern browsers like Edge, Chrome, FireFox etc.

It is important to understand that users will receive notification even when they are not on your website. Hence, these notifications will help you bring users back to your website. Get $5 every month for using web push messages on SendPulse.

SMS Service

I know, you are not using SMS so often now to communicate but businesses are still using it. Whenever you make any transaction you get a SMS right? What if you are enabled to send such SMS messages? SendPulse will enable you to send SMS to your readers and customers. Start grabbing mobile numbers of your readers. If they are your customers and placing orders on your website chances are very high that you already know mobile number of your customers. Use state of the art infrastructure deployed by SendPulse to send SMS messages.

SendPulse claims that it can help you in sending SMS at speed of 200 to 250 per minute on over 800 networks in 200 countries.

You can send only up to 10 SMS messages for free on SendPulse. I checked their pricing for sending SMS and was disappointed to see that cost of sending one SMS in India is ~2.25 Rupees.

API Services

For advanced users who are well versed with programing SendPulse also offers API so that you can connect your project or product with SendPulse.

SendPulse Pricing

Above I discussed about different services that you can choose when you opt-in for SendPulse. All these services are offered at different prices and I am sharing pricing details with you service wise. Let’s first start with Email Services.

Email Services

Pricing for email services depends on how often and to how many subscribers you send newsletters to. SendPulse offer 4 types of payment plans.

Free Plan:

If you have less than 2,500 subscribers, you can send up to 15,000 emails per month for free. This is suitable for beginners.

Monthly Subscription:

This subscription plan lets you select number of subscribers and then pay for it. Say for example, you want to opt for 10,000 subscribers, you will end up paying $35 a month.

Pay As You Go:

If you do not send emails at a set frequency you can choose to pay as you go. If you opt to send 10,000 emails it will cost $32 that is $0.0032 per email.

VIP Plan:

This is for enterprise level customers who wish to send emails to over a million subscribers, you should contact their customer support to discuss pricing.

SendPulse – Email Services Pricing

SMTP Service

First 12,000 emails that you send using SendPulse’s SMTP server are free. When you cross a monthly quota of 12,000 SMTP emails you must start paying. The pricing plan for SMTP Service is again available in two options.

Monthly Subscription:

You will have to chose number of emails that you plan to send each month. Let’s take an example with 25,000 emails. If you choose to send 25k emails in a month using SendPulse’s SMTP you will be paying $8.85 i.e. $0.00035 per email. For Indian customers, this comes to ~2 paisa per email.

Pay As You Go:

If you are not someone who sends emails frequently, this plan is for you. If you plan to send 10,000 emails you will end up paying $15 i.e. $0.0015 per email. It translates to ~9 paisa per email.

SsendPulse SMTP Pricing

SMS Service

Pricing for SMS depends on country to which you want to send SMS and cost is based on per SMS. If your target audience is in India, you will end up paying $0.035 or ~2.25 Rupees. To see country wise pricing please click here.

Web Push Notification

This is exciting, web push notifications service is free of cost. You pay nothing for using push notifications. I am just loving it.

Where to Start?

To start using SendPulse head to website www.sendpulse.com and click on sign up. You can sign up using your Facebook or Google account as well.

Proceed and let me know your experience of using SendPulse.