I’m now using Sendy for sending out the newsletters to my blog subscribers. In this post, I’ll be presenting my Sendy review, a MailChimp Clone.
Until recently, I’ve been using MailChimp free version for my blogging needs. The moment I learned the importance of autoresponders, I decided to shift to Getresponse Pro plan.
However, after continuing for a few months I felt that my investment for the Getresponse plan is getting me only around 20% ROI.
I began looking for an alternative, that would allow me to send my email newsletters over Amazon SES. After some research, I came across Sendy. I went for it as Thrive Leads also allowed me to easily integrate with it.
Sendy is a self-hosted application like that of WordPress, that you install on your server. It sends emails through Amazon SES SMTP servers. But unlike WordPress, it’s not open-source and free. You need to upload the Sendy files on your server manually and install it.
As it sends emails through free Amazon SES you need not pay a monthly fee for using this software.
You need to pay a one-time fee of $50 to get Sendy for the lifetime. Once you get it, email marketing will be free for lifetime.
My Honest Sendy Review
For getting your hands on Sendy, you need to purchase the software by paying $59. You’ll be emailed with invoice, license key, and download file. As I told you earlier it’s easy to set up Sendy, that too as a blogger and marketer.
If you don’t bother to do the installation yourself, the Sendy Team also offers installation services for $79 one-time. That’s worth it considering the money you save every month.
Sendy pricing
After acquiring the software by paying $59, you need to pay for Amazon SES only $0.10 for every 1000 emails you send. Let’s see how this pricing stacks up with other email marketing software’s pricing.
I personally send over 10,000 emails a month and pay around $1! The monthly price of $1 for Amazon SES is what I’m paying for my email marketing.
Sendy features
As I’ve said you earlier you can treat Sendy as basically a MailChimp clone. It includes all the features that any popular email softwares have in the market.
There are features like:
- Autoresponders (which MailChimp free plan don’t have)
- Automatic bounce and complaint handling
- Import and exporting of email lists
- Statistics (by countries, opens, link clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, mark as spams, etc)
- Scheduled emails
- Campaign builder.
You can also view the list of all those who opened your email, clicked on a link and target them in your separate campaign.
The greatest part is that you can handle email campaigns of multiple brands you manage under a single Sendy installation. Under each brand, there are options to create virtually unlimited lists.
For each list you created, you can either choose the single or double optin. You can also setup the subscription page and also send thank you emails to the subscribers.
Below is how the Campaign builder looks like. You can also create templates for your email campaigns. The only downside is that there are no inbuilt template designs. Personally, I never use design templates. So Sendy covers my needs.
There are also options for you to use the personalization shortcodes, or create some of those using merge fields. Below is the screenshot depicting the personalization tags you can use with Sendy.
For each list, you can setup unlimited autoresponders. Below is the screenshot of the autoresponder which I send to my new subscribers, for downloading the EBook. You can also display what autoresponders are already sent and what are already opened.
