Cons

• “We deleted a credit card from the website but it was still illegally charged. Multiple requests to cancel the account were denied.”
• “The purpose of this tool is to send out mails that a user will receive in time to their mailbox. The messages should not end up in Spam.”
• “Well, one could argue that we are just considered Spam so maybe it’s on us, right. Wrong: we received Mails from Moonmail promoting their own products.”
• “This software unfortunately continuously triggered our clients’ spam and junk filters. When adding a hyperlink, Moonmail adds their trackers onto the link as well.”

Who is MoonMail for?

Most email and direct marketing solutions try to appeal to all types of users. However, MoonMail’s lack of email templates suggests that this product was built by people who don’t understand that the average email marketer might not have the skill level to use markdown and might need pre-made templates.

MoonMail’s features

MoonMail is light on features. It has most of the basics: email wizard, segmentation, autoresponders, A/B testing, sign-up forms and analytics.

But it lacks advanced features that would encourage you to pick it over the many other solutions on the market.

Campaigns

MoonMail displays an always-visible checklist with the steps you need to take to create an email blast, so you always know where you are in the process.

The first step in creating an email newsletter is to decide if you want to create a single message campaign or an autoresponder campaign that is triggered by customer behavior.

Once you’ve chosen your segment, and you must choose one, it’s time to create your message. MoonMail doesn’t provide pre-designed templates; you have to code your own using its HTML builder and a markdown cheatsheet.

This suggests that MoonMail was built by someone who doesn’t understand how marketers work and what they are looking for in an email platform.

This will also put the solution beyond the reach of novice email marketers and anyone who doesn’t have access to design resources.

MoonMail doesn’t include email templates, so you have to build your messages yourself. Image source: Author

You can also create basic contact forms that encourage signups that will help grow your email list.

Segmentation

I’ve used and reviewed a lot of email marketing software, and I consider myself tech-savvy, but I was at a loss when it came to building a segment.

Bear in mind that it’s common when choosing new software to want to test out a variety of different options before making a decision. That means it’s important to make everything very clear during the testing process.

Creating a segment in MoonMail is confusing. Image source: Author

The only condition you can add to create a segment is when the contact had last been active, for example, if they had opened an email within the last week or 24 hours. There are no options to add conditions such as location, past purchase behavior, or website visits.

Analytics

MoonMail’s reporting and analytics functionality is basic, especially compared to other email marketing solutions, such as Mailchimp, which provide revenue-driven analytics.

MoonMail’s main dashboard consists of different email campaign performance reports. It provides data on:

• Total emails sent and delivered
• Spam complaints
• Bounces
• Opens and open rate as a percentage
• Clicks and click rate as a percentage
• Unsubscribe rate
• Email deliverability reputation

MoonMail provides limited analytics functionality. Image source: Author

MoonMail’s ease of use

MoonMail is one of the only email marketing solutions that asks for your payment details upfront.

It then charges you $1 without your consent — I assume to confirm that your payment method is valid. It refunds you that payment, but it says it can take up to 10 days for this refund to reach your account.

While $1 isn’t a massive amount, it isn’t good business practice to do this without asking your permission first.

MoonMail charges you $1 when you first sign up. Image source: Author

Moonmail doesn’t make set up any easier from thereon.

You have to fill out your domain (MoonMail won’t work unless you have your own domain), your website URL, and a description of your company’s activities. It feels like they’re going to even ask the name of your firstborn.

It’s a time-consuming and over-complicated process, and the user experience compares very badly to other email marketing solutions.

But it doesn’t end there, you’ll be excited to know. You then have to add DNS configuration for your domain, although you can skip this step if you want to start using the functionality immediately.

But congratulations if you were hardy enough to make it past these steps, as you’re ready to start using MoonMail!

Finding your feet

MoonMail’s navigation is straightforward. It splits out the options for campaigns, segments and contact forms into separate menus. I believe it would be useful to make autoresponders a separate menu rather than including it as an option in the campaign menu.

Some of MoonMail’s features are easy to use, for example creating a campaign. As long as you are able to create an email yourself, that is. Its segmentation functionality is much more complicated than other solutions.

MoonMail’s pricing

MoonMail provides a free sandbox account for testing purposes, which allows you to send emails to up to 10 verified contacts.

There are three main paid plans and an Enterprise plan with custom pricing. Its least-expensive pricing plan starts at $59 per month. This allows you to send 50,000 emails per month to 10,000 recipients. This price could put it out of reach for many small businesses.

None of the pricing plans are good value for the money if you have a lot of subscribers or send a lot of emails per month. Even if you upgrade to the Starter plan, which costs $249 per month, you can still only send 250,000 emails to up to 50,000 contacts. Most other email marketing solutions let you send unlimited emails to unlimited contacts when using their more expensive plans.