Where Did Sendlane Come From?

Sendlane is a baby compared to established email marketing companies like Aweber and GetResponse.

Sendlane was founded in 2013 by 3 co-founders: Jimmy Kim, Zakariah Meftah, and Anik Singal. They were all digital marketers who weren’t quite satisfied by what existing email marketing software tools had to offer for marketers.

In 2015, they got their first customer, and from there Sendlane has rapidly grown to over 40,000 users as of 2017.

In my personal experience, I haven’t seen any significantly negative comments about Sendlane in marketing communities. They seem to have a solid reputation online.

Sendlane Pricing and Plans

There are a few things about Sendlane’s plans that stick out right away:

• There’s no free plan – But there is a 14 day free trial. You will need a credit card to sign up.
• All plans have the same Sendlane features – You only pay more if you need a greater number of contacts.
• Only unique contacts count – Putting the same contact on multiple lists still only counts as 1 contact towards your limit.

Here’s a summary table of how much Sendlane charges based on a maximum number of contacts. Not surprisingly, the Sendlane price per contact goes down as you go up through the plans.

I’ve also put together a comparison table that has the pricing of 2 close competitors, Aweber and GetResponse.

GetResponse is a bit tricky to compare, because the features they include on each plan differ. I chose the “Pro” plan because that’s the most similar to Sendlane, although not the exact same.

Features of Sendlane

On top of email broadcasts or autoresponders, Sendlane has a few features designed to make your life easier. I’ll go over them quickly in this section.

Drag and Drop Email Editor

Sendlane has one of the most polished drag and drop email editors that I’ve use.

It’s smooth, and there’s no weird layout issues or input lag.

All the email elements in the Sendlane email marketing tool are available from the left side menu, and you have control over every aspect of the layout.

The big weakness is that there’s only a few dozen email templates to choose from. The overall quality is good, but not any better than competitors.

Landing Page Creator

Some companies like GetResponse have a huge range of products they bundle together on top of their basic email marketing platform: Webinars, CRM, Landing pages, Forms, and more. It gets difficult to tell where the line is between an email marketing tool and a general marketing tool CRM.

Sendlane only really offers one additional tool, a landing page creator. It comes included in all plans.

For you this might be a good or bad thing. Some marketers need those extra automation tools, while others don’t and find they add bloat to the core tool that they want.

There are over 50 landing page templates to choose from, with a decent variety of designs.

Once you’re done, you can upload the code to your website or host it on Sendlane’s domain.

There are a few interesting features included in certain landing page templates:

• Countdown timers
• Video
• Pop-ups and retargeting

And your landing page has built-in analytics to measure performance.

Advanced Contact Tagging and Automation

This is the area that makes Sendlane stand out from competitors for me.

To start with, you can create workflows to modify your email marketing solution funnel and behavior based on your subscribers actions.

If a subscriber does or does not meet some condition that you specify (click a link, live in a certain area, etc.), you can automatically take an action like adding a tag, or adding them to a specific list.

Of course, you can also run manual queries on a list and create a segment that way if you don’t have a workflow set-up already:

Compared to other tools that offer similar sorts of functionality, I found Sendlane to be as or more powerful, and very simple to use.

I’ll dig into the specifics a bit later.

Standard Reporting and Analytics

Like any email marketing tool should have, there is a basic level of real-time analytics and and real-time reporting for your emails:

It covers all the basics in a nice marketing automation dashboard:

• Open rates
• Click rates
• Bounces
• Unsubscribes
• Link clicks
• Most active subscribers

Nothing really stands out either positively or negatively here, but there’s a manageable level of real-time event tracking without being overwhelming.

Automatically Optimized Send Times

A final neat feature that Sendlane includes is the optimized timing features that you can enable or disable on each individual email.

With it enabled, Sendlane automatically tracks the open habits of your subscribers and delivers emails at the best times to individual contacts. Obviously, this gets better over time as you collect more deep data.

That’s it for features, now let’s move onto the actual functionality and how Sendlane works.

Creating a List of Contacts

You’ll find all your lists in the “lists” section of your account (shocking, I know).

The set-up is smooth for each list, with just a few form fields to fill out for each:

You can set-up as many lists as you’d like. Remember that adding an existing contact to a new list does not count towards your contact limit.

Once you have a list, you have a few options to add subscribers to it.

• You can add them one-by-one as they sign up on your website through the API or a form you make with Sendlane.
• You can add them manually one-by-one. Not very convenient, but there may be rare cases where you need to.
• Finally, you can import subscribers from other email marketing platforms.

Honestly, this process is a huge pain.

If you do get approved, you’ll be allowed you to upload spreadsheets or paste in contact information to bulk add subscribers.

The first 2 options are essentially the same, but the second is a bit simpler if you come from one of the other major email marketing tools (MailChimp, Aweber, GetResponse, Active Campaign).

For each, you’ll need to fill out a form with several questions:

Then wait for up to a business day to actually get your information imported.

On top of that, there are additional conditions on this. Sendlane won’t import all of your contacts, but only active contacts on lists that have open rates of greater than 10%.

I’m sure this weeds out spammers really well, and helps keeps their deliverability rates high, but just be aware the migrating over to Sendlane will take some time and hassle.

Email Broadcasts in Sendlane

All email marketing tools allow you to send a broadcast, and it’s a good place to start when looking at a tool.

Sendlane’s process is simple, and streamlined. You start by creating marketing campaigns and new email campaigns, and choosing which list(s) or tag(s) to send it to.

Then, you pick a template.

There are just over 20 marketing templates to choose from right now, with quite a bit of variety.

They’re all responsive and have reasonably good designs.

That will take you to the email editor, which as I mentioned before, is very smooth and intuitive to use.

Clicking an element will let you change the text if applicable, and edit its appearance on the left menu panel. You can drag around or delete existing elements, and add them from the left side menu.

Once you’ve finalized everything, you’ll get to choose when to send out the email:

You can send it right away, or some time in the future. You can also save it as a draft and edit it later.

Overall, Sendlane gets email broadcasts just about perfect.

Email Automation in Sendlane

This is arguably the most important part of Sendlane.

The big thing that other tools are lacking for marketers is advanced automation, and Sendlane aims to fill that marketing gap.

There’s 2 options for automation: Autoresponders and workflows.

Autoresponders are your classic email sequences where you specify the time between emails, while workflows are a lot more advanced and offer more customizability.

When you click “add automation” in your automations tab, you can click “start from scratch” if you want to create an autoresponder.

Not exactly obvious, but I guess Sendlane assumes that you’ll mainly be using workflows.

From there you can add as many emails as you’d like, it has a pretty standard user interface:

The workflows are more interesting to most marketers.

You can choose from several templates for workflows, or more likely, start from scratch and build your own funnel.

To create a workflow, there needs to be an initial trigger:

This could be someone subscribing to an email list, or when you add a tag to them.

For example, if someone opens an email where you mention a new product, you could add them to a workflow that takes them down a sales funnel.

Workflows consist of 2 things: triggers and actions.

Actions occur automatically after a trigger occurs.

For the actions, you have several options.

You can send a specific email, subscribe or unsubscribe them to a list, or even start a new workflow.

The most common one for marketers is the “If / Else” action.

You can make an if-statement that divides contacts in the workflow into a “yes” and “no” branch, where they receive different emails.

If-statement conditions can be based on several factors, including subscriber activity, signup source, location, and signup date.

For example, if you choose subscriber activity, you can make a condition that checks if a contact opened or did not open a specific email, or if they clicked a link in it.

It’s a powerful feature, and the process to use it is simple.

The way this automation is implemented is better for digital marketers than almost all competing email marketing platforms.

Creating a Landing Page

The only additional tool Sendlane provides is a landing page creator that can help you collect subscribers.

I already mentioned that there are 50+ templates to choose from with some advanced features like timer countdowns, so let’s take a quick look at the editor here.

It’s very similar to the email builder, which makes the time to learn how to use it essentially zero.

Again, you can drag and drop elements like images, videos, forms, and buttons as you please. You also have nearly full control of the style of the page.

The bottom menu bar lets you preview the page on mobile or desktop devices.

When you’re done, you have the option to copy the code and paste it on your website.

Overall, it’s a smooth landing page creator with no clunkiness or input lag. It’s on par with most dedicated landing page creator tools, which says a lot.

Pros and Cons of Sendlane

We’ve looked at a lot up until this point, so I’d like to try and summarize the biggest strengths and weaknesses of Sendlane here.

Pros

• Advanced automation (workflows) – Gives you the ability to send emails based on a wide variety of subscriber actions (triggers).
• Intuitive, modern design – Every part of the tool is well designed and easy to use.
• Smooth landing page and email editors – The drag and drop editors are easy to use, and aren’t clunky at all.
• Great support documentation – The knowledge base is full of well-written tutorials with clear images.

Cons

• Cost – Sendlane is more expensive than most competitors.
• No instant migration process – You will need to be manually approved to import subscribers from somewhere else, and then your first emails will also have to be manually reviewed.
• Lack of integrations – There are some integrations, but not to the same level as leading competitors. I’m sure this will improve over time.