In this Sendlane review allow me to walk you through this beautiful and powerful marketing automation tool that is easy to use, rich with new features and backed by great customer support.
But Sendlane isn’t perfect and don’t trust flawless Sendlane reviews that are just looking to hook you into their high pricing for a healthy referral commission.
As a marketing tool Sendlane is sleek and powerful and performs just about everything you need from an email marketing tool. But is it the best email marketing solution? I would say for the time being it is quite expensive for what it is and it has struggled to
Sendlane is very new in the world of email marketing. It was a classic bootstrapped startup by Jimmy Kim in 2013 – making it even newer than the hot email marketing software Drip.
Their first customers came from email marketing courses Kim was selling, who then trusted his expertise and had faith in his creation.
Sendlane is all about behavior-based marketing, watching what customers are doing and responding accordingly.
Today many email marketing software providers have caught up with this kind of intelligent targeting, but Sendlane keep it at their core.
That includes everything you want from an email marketing tool from email automation and email retargeting to social media integration and a simple to use email editor.
Despite competition, today Sendlane is best defined through its very “startup” approach.
It is not the cheapest software out there but the user interface and customer service are second to none.
Technical challenges are confronted by their staff who work hard to make sure your issue is fixed as soon as possible.
But for bigger lists and more complex businesses like ecommerce stores, Sendlane will power you up with advanced automation and reliable customer service to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Sendlane clearly appears as a much more specialist product that has slowly maintained a sustained amount of interest.
Sendlane Review
Sendlane Pricing
Sendlane is a much more premium tool, but definitely offers value over plenty of competitors like ConvertKit and Mailchimp.
Their cheapest “Growth” plan will only cover up to 5000 contacts, while the Pro plan is available no matter how many subscribers you have.
That Growth introduction is $79 per month when paid annually, versus $125 for Pro. However, you can get six months of the Growth plan worth $594 for just $497 by signing up to the Sendlane starter pack course bundle.
The Sendlane pricing of Pro then increases depending on how many subscribers you have. There’s a clear economy of scale. These Sendlane prices are per month based on an annual plan.
- 10,000 subscribers – $208/month
- 25,000 subscribers – $266/month
- 50,000 subscribers – $374/month
- 75,000 subscribers – $491/month
- 100,000 subscribers – $666/month
Sendlane Free Trial
Sendlane only offers a 14-day free trial but no credit card is required. This is fully functional and lets you send up to 500 emails to 100 contacts.
Sendlane Email Automation
Sendlane integrates deeply with your website and lets you create beautiful automations with a wide range of functions and segmentation.
Email retargeting for instance is best if you can see how your subscriber has interacted with your website.
If you have an ecommerce site then Sendlane has a range of ready made ecommerce templates, like post purchase follow ups for Woocommerce and Shopify.
Sendlane Segmentation
Sendlane also allows you to add tags based on a variety of behavioral conditions including email opens and link clicks. However, with the beacon tool – which is basically an event tracking tag on your site – you can also base tagging on user behavior on your website.
The event tracking-based trigger is particularly promising.. Tagging aside you can create different automations in Sendlane based on a much broader array of actions, from website activites to contact information, dates and more.
Sendlane has segmentation based on a wide variety of conditions so you can segment very closely and automatically.
However, I do feel the lead scoring and segmentation capabilities are better in ActiveCampaign and GetResponse.
Sendlane Form Builder
I had high hopes of a platform that places so much emphasis on user experience, and while you do get a choice of popups including floating bars and modal popups, the actual editor is pretty bad.
After some trying I was able to expand the width and change the colours, but I couldn’t edit my text colour and so was such with black on colour when white would be better.
There was also no option for adding additional checkboxes which some marketers prefer for additional segmentation, and GDPR compliance.
So Sendlane wins on a form drag and drop editor – by a fairly small margin.
Or does it?
A weak form builder not to the detriment of either of these platforms. There’s not much need for an integrated opt-in form with an email provider now that there are so many third party software providers out there like Optin Monster that let you craft a perfect popup.
The best popup builder should be highly customizable and allow A/B testing, so cramming a basic one into an email provider is hardly likely to be that fulfilling.
Instead an email marketing automation platform should integrate readily with these third-party tools, without resorting to an extra app to join them up like Zapier or Leadsbridge.
Sumo, despite seeming to have a native integration for just about every email service going, does not at the time of writing have one for Sendlane.
However Sendlane works with both Leadsbridge and Zapier as tools to connect with additional services.
No Landing Pages
Sendlane has no landing page tool but recommends Convertri, mainly because it is one of the fastest landing page builders.
Again there is some credit in how Sendlane doesn’t simply bolt on a simple landing page software but instead focuses on being the best email marketing automation software and then recommending users find the best landing page builder elsewhere.
In fact its integrations marketplace is full of powerful landing page builders.
Some of the benefits of Convertri are:
- Funnel planner
- Drag and drop page builder
- Mobile editor
- CDN
- Integrated shopping cart
- Split testing
- Custom scripts
- Unlimited custom domains
- One-click upsells
- Background video
- Free SSL
- Countdown timers
- Bump sells
- Custom CSS and HTML
- Timed element reveal
- Recurring payments
- Pop-ups, lightboxes and conversion bars
Sendlane also has a native integration with the popular funnel builder Clickfunnels. Unfortunately there don’t seem to be any native integrations with Leadpages, Unbounce and Instapage but this can be remedied with Zapier or Leadsbridge.
In general though I prefer Sendlane’s approach of encouraging you to build a more advanced landing page or website with a tool like Convertri, although this is an additional cost.
The best combination of email marketing service and landing pages is probably GetResponse.
GetResponse even positions itself as a rival to Clickfunnels with pre-made funnel templates and a webinar hosting tool.
Sendlane Email Builder
The Sendlane email builder is as you would expect – smooth and sleek for ease of use. There’s nothing particularly exciting about it.
The templates provided are well designed but there are only a handful of them, and they seem a bit thrown together rather than providing you a starting point for a wide variety of situations like ActiveCampaign.
They are also very ecommerce and graphic-heavy so you aren’t really given many plain text options with swipe copy. So putting together emails in Sendlane could take a little longer than some providers.
Is Sendlane Easy to Use?
In terms of general navigation, Sendlane is much smoother in its user interface and live chat but it is a more complex tool. Although it can feel a little cluttered.
Remember how Jimmy Kim used email marketing courses to sell Sendlane to his customers? Well today Sendlane still offers a great beginner bundle.
For just $497 the starter pack offers six months of the Sendlane Growth plan worth $594, 8+ hours of training, 57 video lessons, two hours of expert interviews, case studies and an Ecommerce marketing certification.
Sendlane Customer Support
Sendlane prioritizes customer support. It is fascinating to see how email marketing platforms evolve and how little stands between them.
Drip started off as just an opt-in pop up before we had tools like Optin Monster and Sumo but then became an Ecommerce CRM after selling to Leadpages.
Sendlane might have had first-mover advantage when it came to behavioral-based automation but today it is its customer support which stands out over everything else.
Email marketing is complicated, especially when you have lots of different workflows and different apps integrated together.
It is a huge relief to have Sendlane’s customer support so attentive and ready to step in when you need help. The Pro plan even helps with migration for free if you are moving from another email platform.
I did have a minor issue with Sendlane to do with my email address. Now we all know the pain of typing into a chat box without knowing how long we will have to wait, or if we can close the tab and stay in contact or what happens if we forget to reply for a couple of hours.
However, I was assigned to a member of the support team in minutes who was able to respond quickly and offered to escalate my case to the dev team if it was required, which it wasn’t (thanks Elena!) Copies of the conversation were swiftly sent to my inbox.
Sendlane Affiliate Friendliness
Affiliate marketing is a great way to use your email list to make money on autopilot. With Sendlane you don’t need an expensive funnel builder like Clickfunnels to sell products.
You can just set up a Facebook lead ad with a sign-up offer and then quickly grow an audience relevant to your niche who will engage with products you send them.
But not all email marketing services let you do that because of the bad reputation affiliate marketing has thanks to spammy approaches.
Some email marketing platforms will disable your account if you are caught sending affiliate links – which could potenially block you from accessing all the valuable leads you have generated.
Sendlane was actually created partly to be more affiliate-friendly than email marketing software like Mailchimp and Mailerlite that ban affiliate links.
Their only condition is that you remain ethical and avoid controversial niches like loans and gambling. They have a policy of giving you a warning before a ban and also invite you to email them if unsure about your niche.
However, Sendlane do require you to have your own business email address when you sign up. As mentioned previously, I don’t honestly think setting up a social media ad and emailing leads from a Gmail account is going to create much trust – and therefore sales – plus you have the issue of complying with spam laws that Sendlane is trying to achieve.
However, it could be a dealbreaker for you – Sendlane requires you to get a domain email address.
If you are an experienced affiliate marketer with a big email list I would go with Sendlane.
Sendlane Integrations
If an email automation provider natively integrates with other products then it is easy to use and much faster. You can normally get around this with Zapier or Leadsbridge to connect apps together but this requires an additional subscription.
Sometimes these extra moving parts don’t get along, amking a very frustrating experience rather than a seamless workflow. For a small business this time cost is bad news.
Native integrations mean you can connect services from your own dashboard. For instance, marketing automation is a lot easier if you can integrate your autoresponder with your Facebook lead ads.
As such Sendlane integrates with Facebook lead ads without a problem.
Sendlane has 1400 integrations
Sendlane seems to have done an impressive job of catching up – perhaps because of its emphasis on being an advanced email marketing tool that relies on third parties for equally good landing pages, shopping carts and sales funnels.
Sendlane A/B Testing
Sendlane have very impressive A/B testing functions. While some email marketing software only lets you test a subject line or two, these both let you test any element of the email content as separate emails.
With Sendlane you get the exact same, so this has to be a draw. Although the smoother user experience of Sendlane might give it a slight lead simply because setting up split tests is easier and more enjoyable.
Sendlane Reporting
The real time reports of Sendlane are easily available on the front dashboard of the platform so you can see how your email campaigns are performing straight away every time you log in.
That includes detailed breakdowns on revenue – by source and an average revenue per contact.
Sendlane Alternatives and Competitors
Sendlane vs Aweber
Lots of you have been asking about Sendlane vs Aweber and I’ve actually written a full Sendlane vs Aweber comparison for you. But in brief, there is a lot separating these two marketing platform providers.
Most of all, Aweber seems much more clunky and dated compared to Sendlane. But on the other hand, Aweber does have a free plan of up to 500 subscribers while Sendlane only as a 14 day free trial.
Sendlane also has many more ecommerce features and integrations and so is clearly the better ecommerce marketing platform.
For a basic autoresponder, I would probably still go with Aweber just because of the price difference for required functionality but Sendlane is definitely much nicer to use.
Sendlane vs Mailchimp
Besides Aweber, Mailchimp is one of the marketing platform leaders Sendlane has to compete with furiously.
A lot of Mailchimp’s popularity stems not just from its free plan but also its age as one of the older email marketing platform.
However, despite the free plan Mailchimp does get expensive quickly when you want extra features. Sendlane on the other hand reserves very few features between its “Growth” and “Pro” plans – mainly SMS and premium support services.
