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Omnisend Review (2024): Top Choice For Ecommerce?

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This article has been written and researched by our expert tooltesters through a precise methodology. Learn more about our methodology

Charlotte Evans

Charlotte Evans

Researcher

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With so many email marketing services to choose from, it seems like a good idea to specialize in something and do it really well. So perhaps the fact that Omnisend specifically focuses on email marketing for online stores is a big point in their favor. Let’s dive in and take a closer look at Omnisend to see if that’s the case.

Launched in Lithuania in 2014 under the name of Soundest, Omnisend has come a long way in recent years. They now employ over 180 people and cater to over 70,000 ecommerce brands.

With a rating of 4.7/5 on the Shopify app store, we knew Omnisend was popular among Shopify users. We even ranked it as the top email marketing service for Shopify. But how does it do overall? And what do you need to know before signing up?

Omnisend Review Summary

Omnisend is an email marketing solution directed toward ecommerce users. It offers a free plan that comes with all features and its paid plans start at $16/month for an unlimited contact list and contact reach of up to 500 per month.

Features include landing pages, ecommerce email automation, and advanced segmentation.

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  • Omnisend Review
  • Omnisend vs Klaviyo
Omnisend Review video

Try Omnisend for free

Omnisend Screenshots

Omnisend Pricing

$ 0

250 Subscribers

500 Emails

Free plan with 500 email/month limit - unlimited contact list (reach up to 250 contacts).

$ 20

1,000 Subscribers

12,000 Emails

Standard plan, all features included

$ 65

5,000 Subscribers

60,000 Emails

Standard plan, all features included

$ 115

10,000 Subscribers

120,000 Emails

Standard plan, all features included

See our complete pricing guide here.

Note that if you’re an existing Klaviyo customer looking to migrate, Omnisend will take care of the migration for free! You can also take advantage of a 15% discount for the first 3 months, using code EMAILTOOLTESTER. Check out the offer here.

Pros and Cons

  • Pros
  • Cons

Pros

  • Ecommerce centered

    If you have an online store, Omnisend is a great choice. It integrates seamlessly with all popular ecommerce platforms and the email editor includes unique features like their product picker, scratch cards and gift boxes. Product and Category Recommendation reports help you target the customers who are most likely to buy a specific product.

  • Free plan includes all features

    Though Omnisend’s free plan has a very limited sending allowance, it does come with advanced features, and you can store unlimited contacts.

  • Automation

    You’ll save tons of time and no doubt see your revenue increase with its range of automation workflows. There are plenty of triggers, filters and conditions to choose from and the editor is really easy to use.

  • Sales tracking

    This is available for email, SMS and push notifications. Web-tracking filters make it possible to segment your users by the pages and products they have or have not looked at.

  • SMS marketing

    SMS marketing can be very important for ecommerce brands. With Omnisend, users can text to join your list, really simplifying the opt-in process.

Is Omnisend the right newsletter service for you?

  • Recommended if:
  • Not recommended if:
  • You have an online store

    There’s no doubt that Omnisend is a great email newsletter platform for online store owners, especially those on Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce,  Magento, OpenCart, Drupal Commerce, or Volusion, as Omnisend has a direct integration.

  • You’re serious about ecommerce automation

    Aside from abandoned cart automation, you’ll have templates for cross-selling, customer reactivation, transactional emails, and order follow-up. These will save you plenty of time and no doubt lead to more conversions.

  • You want modern designs

    Omnisend comes with 36 attractive email templates and a number of cool form designs. They’ve just added a variety of modern holiday forms to the mix so that you can add seasonal discount popups to your store.

  • You want to check your performance against that of industry peers

    Using the last 30 days of brand data, the health check feature uses contextual benchmarks and evaluates your brand’s overall performance compared to its industry peers in each of the following areas: Customer retention, Campaigns, Workflows, Cart abandonment, and Sign-up forms.

Rating Details

Ease of Use

Omnisend is pretty easy to use. It has a clean, modern interface design and everything works smoothly.

Editor Info popup

The drag and drop editor makes featuring your store products and their prices easy. You can use their “product picker” to drag your e-commerce store items into your email template. The speedy email editor has been further improved by a ‘Quick add’ section, where you can find all your most-used content blocks. You can also duplicate blocks and sections, making your email creation process even faster. Order summary and shipping and billing content blocks are also available for your automation.

Personalization Info popup

Omnisend has added personalization options in the form of a drop-down to every input field (e.g. links, buttons etc.). This lets you personalize just about everything easily. The only thing that is more complicated is conditional personalization (if/then/else rules).

What’s more, you can decide what you show on different devices. You can show a specific item for mobile or desktop users by clicking on the “Layout” tab and scrolling down to “Display settings”.

Email types Info popup

All email types are available: Classic newsletters, autoresponders, A/B testing, recurring newsletters (e.g. birthday emails), SMS and advanced automation.

Choice and Flexibility of Template Designs Info popup

There are 36 mobile-responsive templates available across all plans. These are very modern and work especially well for ecommerce. There are various themes you can choose from that change the color palette of your email. You can also create your own HTML design by importing the code or pasting it in. Bear in mind that Omnisend are currently moving over to a new email builder so half of their templates can be found in the old builder and the other half in the new one. Hopefully, these can all be found in the same place soon.

Email Marketing Automation Info popup

A number of automation workflow templates are available. Omnisend’s automation features are especially good for those with online stores on platforms such as Shopify. There are plenty of options related to triggers, filters and conditions, and automations can include SMS and push notifications. A/B testing is also possible.

List Management Info popup

You can create lists by tagging contacts. To remove them from the list simply remove the tag. If you unsubscribe a contact, this is from all lists. There are tons of filters you can use for segmentation, e.g. contact field criteria, behavior (clicks, reads, purchases, etc.). When setting up your segments, suggestions that are most commonly used with your chosen event are offered, which saves you time. You can also set up an automation to tag a contact when they perform a specific action like viewing your pricing page, purchasing a product, etc. Users can opt in to receive SMS from you by simply texting a keyword. An Email List Cleaning solution scans contacts with subscribed and non-subscribed statuses and gives you recommendations to optimize your audience. This is priced at $0.20 per 100 contacts.

Registration Forms/ Opt-in & Opt-out- Process Info popup

You have some pretty cool templates to choose from, and there are plenty of them, including seasonal ones. The new form builder allows you to drag and drop the content elements directly onto the design. The form is added automatically to your store once it’s been enabled, and you’ll have various display options, for example, according to the device, time on page, exit intent or scroll depth. In addition to this, they’ve recently introduced user-friendly multi-step forms to the mix, enabling you to gather more data from your subscribers in a more casual and less overwhelming way. Contact tagging can also be set directly in the form builder options. Options include signup forms, cross-selling, and promotions.

Deliverability Info popup

Omnisend’s deliverability leaves room for improvement, particularly with Microsoft’s services (Outlook and Hotmail). If you are looking for a solid email marketing platform and a better performer, ActiveCampaign would be a better choice. Omnisend includes deliverability reports, so you can easily track key factors that influence your email deliverability, such as your email list hygiene and sender domains, and make improvements based on their tips.  You can also see from our latest deliverability test that they scored poorly, coming eleventh out of fifteen.

Reports and Analysis

These are cleanly laid out and easy to read. They include click map, open/click rate, revenue, unsubscribed and issues. With the ability to track geo-location, you can translate the language of your emails, send your campaigns during your customer’s time zone, national holidays and more. With Omnisend, you can track your sales on the following channels: email, SMS, push notifications. A new feature gives users a lifecycle map, highlighting which contacts need nurturing, are at risk, are loyal customers, etc. You’ll also gain access to a customer retention report.

Languages Info popup

Only available in English.

Spam- and Design-Testing Info popup

You can preview your design on desktop & mobile and send a test email, but it’s not possible to see how your email will look on specific email clients. Spam testing is also not available. Find out how to avoid spam filters here.

Bounce Management Info popup

Hard bounces are shown in reports. If the emails to the same subscriber are soft bounced three times in a row, Omnisend counts it as a hard bounce and does not send any emails to this address anymore.

Blocklist Info popup

 If you don’t want to send emails to contacts in a specific segment and the one you’re sending to, you can do that by using the ‘exclude segment’ option.  For eg. You can send an email to US customers, but not to those who didn’t open previous emails.

Storage available for data and images

Unlimited

No limit on quantity of stored images. Max size of uploaded images is 5 MB.

Authentication Info popup

SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

Own Domain Info popup

Available on Pro plan.

Different levels of account access Info popup

Levels are as follows: content creator, campaign coordinator, analyst, manager, admin and owner.

Integrations

Omnisend integrates with all the popular ecommerce platforms: Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce (WordPress), Magento, OpenCart, Drupal Commerce, Volusion. Integration with Facebook Lead Ads allows you to pass leads collected from Facebook & Instagram to Omnisend. Other types of integrations are limited.

Landing Page Builder Info popup

Limited designs. The free plan allows for unlimited landing pages.

Customer Support

24/7 email and chat support is available on the Standard plan and access to email support is on the free plan. The support agents are friendly and do their best to help you. A detailed knowledge base is also available.  Another plus is that you’ll have access to free online courses within the Omnisend Academy. On top of this, Omnisend hosts and records webinars and events to help you learn the ins and outs of the tool.

Overall rating

4.1

Omnisend has a great deal to offer email marketers with its wide range of advanced features. We hope to see spam and design testing features added in the near future, as well as a stronger deliverability rate.

A More Detailed Look at Omnisend’s Top Features

As you can see from what we’ve already covered in this Omnisend review, this email marketing solution offers a good range of pro features for ecommerce marketers. Let’s break those down and assess what works and what could be improved:

Omnichannel Marketing

Omnisend is an omnichannel marketing automation platform, meaning you can retarget your audiences with the right message at the right time.

It means a seamless customer experience across all touchpoints (e.g. web, mobile, social media, customer service, etc.)

While multichannel marketing uses all these channels individually, omnichannel marketing goes much further. It integrates those channels, so the messages you send to your customers are customized to their current buying stage

A good example would be a customer who added an item to their shopping card, abandoned it and later received an email reminder about the missed purchased as well as a retargeting ad on Instagram. 

An email marketing strategy that involves various channels is the key to success for many ecommerce businesses, so being able to set this up through Omnisend’s omnichannel software is a big plus.

Google Customer Match allows you to sync your segments and continue engaging with this audience across Google Search, Shopping, Gmail and YouTube.

You can do the same with Facebook Customer Audiences, using social media campaigns to retarget your audiences across Facebook & Instagram.

The great thing is that this feature is included on all Omnisend plans, even the free one. Typically, these kinds of features would be reserved for higher-tier plans, so this is a big advantage to using Omnisend.

Ecommerce Automation

Automating your email campaigns with personalized messages is key if you want to increase customer engagement and sales.

Ecommerce businesses will be happy to hear that Omnisend does an excellent job of ecommerce-specific automation.

omnisend automation templates

You can filter the automated workflows by type (welcome, abandoned cart), goal (build loyalty) or channel (email/SMS), and there are plenty of templates to choose from.

Note that all the templates are catered toward ecommerce business requirements, so you may be missing some more content-based automation templates.

We compared the automation features against other marketing automation software and found it to be very good value for money. For example, split automations are something some providers reserve for higher-paying customers, whereas Omnisend includes this feature on all plans.

Customer Lifecycle Map

Omnisend’s Customer Lifecycle Map is a handy report that uses AI to sort your email subscribers into different segments based on how much they spend, how often they buy, and when they last made a purchase:

omnisend lifecycle map

This helps you figure out who your best customers are, and who might be slipping away. Once you know this, you can send them messages that suit them better and encourage them to shop with you more.

You can use these groups in your email campaigns and automatic messages. Omnisend even gives you ideas on how to keep each group interested with retention strategies specific to their stage:

omnisend retention tactics

But here’s the trick: It works best when you have at least 100 customers, and around 5-7% of them have bought from you recently. That way, Omnisend can really tell who’s who. If you have fewer customers or fewer recent buyers, it will make guesses based on general rules, not your store’s unique data.

Overall, it’s a unique feature that we can’t say we’ve seen in many other email marketing services, empowering you to personalize your campaigns based on what may arguably be the most critical factor: your customers’ spending habits.

SMS Messaging

Omnisend allows you to send SMS messages on all plans. In fact, a certain allowance is included at no extra cost, whereas other email marketing and SMS tools will require you to buy credits on top of your paid plan.

If you need more than the free allowance, you can purchase additional credits at a very reasonable price. For example, if you’re sending to the US, each SMS will cost you $0.015.

Brevo does offer SMS sending slightly cheaper at €10 for 1,000 SMS, however, you’d be missing all the niche ecommerce features that Omnisend comes with.

Omnisend Deliverability

One downside of Omnisend is its deliverability rate: our tests put it in the bottom third of email service providers. They have always scored very average results in previous tests, however in our latest round, they scored pretty badly. They were also one of the providers that saw the highest percentage of emails landing in spam folders. Looks like there’s still a lot of room for improvement, we look forward to seeing if their rate improves in our next round.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, the fact that Omnisend focuses specifically on email marketing for ecommerce is a big point in their favor.

Specializing in the ecommerce area means that what it offers online store owners is tailored to their needs and is done well.

You’ll find a host of ecommerce automation workflows at your disposal as well as advanced segmentation, transactional emails and SMS marketing campaigns. The email template designs are also very attractive and modern.

It’s also attractively priced if we compare it to similarly positioned newsletter services such as ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo. You should be aware of one difference, though. Omnisend limits the number of emails you can send per month – it works out at 12 emails you can send each contact. ActiveCampaign, for example, includes unlimited emails. However, you should consider whether it’s indeed necessary to send more than 12 emails in a month to a single contact.

Try Omnisend for free

FAQ

Omnisend, an EU-based company located in Lithuania, adheres to GDPR regulations.

Data storage, albeit on U.S. servers, is in compliance with the “EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework,” a provision that should be noted could potentially be repealed in the future, as has happened with previous frameworks.

Omnisend offers a suite of tools to help you ensure that your email marketing meets GDPR standards.

Take care not to use features that might violate EU rights, for example, monitoring your website visitors’ behavior without first securing their consent.

If GDPR compliance is a priority for you, you might consider Brevo or MailerLite, as they store your contacts’ data on servers within the European Union.

It depends on the use case, as both have their own limitations and advantages. Find out more in our Omnisend vs Mailchimp guide.

Omnisend is the top Mailchimp alternative for ecommerce businesses.

The simplest way is to add Omnisend from Shopify Market Place and register your Omnisend account from ‘Shopify admin’.

There’s no need to worry, as Omnisend is a legit email marketing tool for small businesses, and more specifically, for online store owners. Rest assured that your customer data will be safely stored in their data storage centers.

Omnisend Alternatives

GetResponse is a powerful alternative to Omnisend with good automations, landing pages and a unique autofunnel feature. Unlike Omnisend, GetResponse’s platform is available in more than 20 languages, and you can track email clients and geo-location.

ActiveCampaign stands out for being one of the platforms with smarter automations. They are not only very powerful, but also straightforward to use.

MailerLite is for those who need an easy-to-use, affordable email marketing tool.

The authors

Learn more about us

Roberta Phillips

Marketing Manager

Hey, I'm Roberta! Having worked as a digital marketer for a host of online businesses, I've tried, tested, fallen in love with and despaired with so many marketing tools. I'm excited to help you find the email marketing and CRM tools you need to thrive.

Charlotte Evans

Content Manager

Hey, I'm Charlotte! I've always been enthusiastic about helping others. After working for various tech startups and eCommerce businesses, I developed a strong passion for email marketing. Now, at EmailTooltester, I'm putting this knowledge to good use by recommending the very best digital tools for your business.

Learn more about us

We keep our content up to date

05 Feb 2024 - Updated deliverability results
06 Nov 2023 - Added information about Customer Lifecycle Map
27 Oct 2023 - Pricing update
25 Aug 2023 - Information about GDPR compliance added
07 Aug 2023 - Updated discount
18 July 2023 - Deliverability section edited
18 Jul 2023 - Omnisend vs Klaviyo video added
22 May 2023 - Form builder update
04 May 2023 - Small updates
18 Apr 2023 - Smaller updates
16 Mar 2023 - New features added
01 Dec 2022 - New video review added
12 Sept 2022 - New small features added
03 Aug 2022 - Section on Omnisend's top features added
27 Jul 2022 - General update
07 Jun 2022 - Updated form builder
16 May 2022 - New small features added
10 May 2022 - Deliverability reports added
28 Apr 2022 - You can now use Omnisend without an online store
25 Apr 2022 - Deliverability rating decreased slightly
21 Apr 2022 - Note about web tracking added
17 March 2022 - Note about legitimacy added
08 March 2022 - General update
18 Jan 2022 - General update
09 Nov 2021 - General update
16 Sept 2021 - Prices updated
08 Jul 2021 - New features and FAQs added

Our Methodology

This review has been written and researched following our EmailToolTester methodology.

Our Methodology

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