EmailOctopus Review: The Affordable and Feature-Rich Email Marketing Tool for Small Businesses

EmailOctopus is a powerful, barebones email marketing platform that is absolutely perfect for individuals and small businesses looking to grow their email lists and convert incoming customers as efficiently as possible. From their drag-and-drop email editor to in-depth analytics, this review will take a deep dive (ha ha) into EmailOctopus as an smaller email marketing software relative to its big-name competitors.

EmailOctopus’ Key Features:

1. Drag-and-drop editor: EmailOctopus’ drag-and-drop email editor is as simple and intuitive as any I’ve personally tried, plus they offer 34 email templates if you want to hit the ground running.
2. Email templates: As mentioned above, EmailOctopus offers users 34 email templates in order to kick off your email campaigns as soon as you can.
3. Landing page builder: Just like the email editor, EmailOctopus’ drag-and-drop landing page editor is incredibly simple, providing 5 templates which you can edit to your heart’s content. Additionally, you can create forms as a part of this editor.
4. Analytics: Simple analytics allow you to monitor campaign activity, including open, click, and bounce rates with incredibly straightforward campaign reporting.
5. Customer support: Great customer service around the clock via live chat and email on both free and paid plans. Plus, EmailOctopus has an extensive knowledge base with articles and videos on their website.
6. Integrations: EmailOctopus integrates with big names such as WordPress, Shopify, and Zapier, which by itself allows more than 500 additional integrations and automations.

Drag-and-Drop Email Editor & Email Templates

The email editor comes in three stages: Setup, Content, and Send.

The Setup stage enables you to customize the name your emails will come from, what email address they’ll be sent from, subject line, preview text, and to which email list you’ll be sending your emails to.

In the sidebar, there are also a few advanced settings.

You can enable or disable EmailOctopus subscriber tracking (for example, who opened your campaign and when they opened it), click tracking (links clicked, and when), Google Analytics tracking, and your personalized “to” field for your email campaigns.

This email activity monitoring can help you optimize your emails in the future for more visitors, and ultimately more conversions.

Next, the Content stage.

This is where the drag-and-drop email editor comes in, and the 34 templates available to users in both the free and paid plans.

Once you choose your template (or make your own), you can edit the H1 title, text, images, and more using a standard block editor.

If you want to get a little more technical, you can change the colors of the email using hex codes; custom fields that you can input your own color codes into.

From here, you can also send a test email to an email address of your choice, to see how visitors will see your emails.

Finally, the Send stage.

This is an overview of the settings you chose in the Setup stage, and a preview of the email you created in the Content stage.

From here, you can choose between delivering your email immediately and scheduling it at a specific time, which is available in the free plan unlike some other apps.

Landing Page Builder

EmailOctopus’ landing page builder is structured similarly to their email builder, plus the functionality of custom forms as well.

These forms aren’t limited pop-up forms as, alongside pop-up forms, you can also create inline forms, “hello bar” forms, and slide-in forms as well.

These landing pages and forms are connected to an email list of your choice, and follow a similar three-stage building process as the email editor.

First, the List stage for landing pages and the List & Style stage for custom forms.

Here you choose which email list to link your landing page/form to and, in the case of forms, you also choose which form type you want to create, which I listed above.

The second stage, the Template stage, allows you to choose a template, which EmailOctopus provides several of for both landing pages and forms; around five for each type of form.

The last stage is the exact same as the email builder, the Content stage. The two editors are exactly the same, just in this case you are creating a landing page or a form instead of an email. As this editor is the same as the email editor, it is incredibly intuitive and makes personalization incredibly easy.

Analytics

Under the Reports tab in your dashboard’s header, you can get insight into your reporting, and the data your email campaigns have generated. You can see anything from subscriber count, to open rates, to CTR (click-through rate), and more.

This grants the user the ability to use that data generated from your email sequences by your subscribers to improve your campaigns in the future.

While it isn’t an inherent feature as a part of EmailOctopus, you can conduct some A/B split testing to get the most out of EmailOctopus and optimize your email marketing efforts for maximum conversions.

Customer Support

EmailOctopus’ customer support allows you to engage with the team behind the platform with near 24/7 availability, and if they aren’t available or your question is fairly basic, you can reference the EmailOctopus knowledge base including their blog site and universal guide to email marketing with their platform.

This incredibly secure live chat and email customer support is available to all customers, free or paid.

Many companies reserve their customer support for paid subscribers, but EmailOctopus is generous enough to offer their support free to any subscriber.

Additionally, as a pseudo-related topic to support, EmailOctopus is fully GDPR-compliant and makes following CAN-SPAM regulations incredibly simple.

Integrations

In today’s email marketing landscape, an email marketing software is only as good as what it can integrate with. Luckily, EmailOctopus integrates with many big names, like WordPress, Shopify, Paypal, and more.

Most importantly, EmailOctopus integrates with Zapier, which leads to an ocean of other integration options, over 5,000 to be precise. This helps patch up any flaws with EmailOctopus; for example, EmailOctopus doesn’t have any native SMS marketing feature. With Zapier’s library of integrations, there are plenty of options for you to utilize SMS marketing with, from SimpleTexting, TextMagic, SlickText, and more.

EmailOctopus Pricing

EmailOctopus not only has one of the best free plans of any email marketing software, but also some of the best paid plan pricing as well. The free plan allows up to 2,500 contacts and up to 10,000 emails per month, while also allowing you other features like the option to create up to three landing pages and forms with their landing page builder, automation, contact management for new subscribers, and access to their near-24/7 customer support.

EmailOctopus’ paid plans start at $8 per month for 500 subscribers, and scales up depending on how many subscribers you want as part of your plan.

On EmailOctopus’ site, under the “Why EmailOctopus?” tab, EmailOctopus provides a savings calculator that allows you to plug in how many subscribers you want and how many campaigns you plan on sending per month, then it shows the pricing of EmailOctopus versus other email marketing software like Mailchimp, MailerLite, Getresponse, and a handful more. They do this because other services are noticeably more expensive, and don’t necessarily provide more features as an email marketing service.

Overall, Emailoctopus is the ideal email marketing software for solopreneurs and smaller businesses but, at the end of the day, EmailOctopuscan be used by businesses of any size.

Reviews

According to review sites like G2, Software Advice, Capterra, and more, the average EmailOctopus review stands somewhere between 4 and 4.5 out of 5 stars, which is incredibly good for a smaller, alternative email marketing service like EmailOctopus.

Reviews

According to review sites like G2, Software Advice, Capterra, and more, the average EmailOctopus review stands somewhere between 4 and 4.5 out of 5 stars, which is incredibly good for a smaller, alternative email marketing service as EmailOctopus is.

EmailOctopus Review Conclusion: is it right for you?

In this EmailOctopus review, I’ve gone over all of its (albeit limited number of) features in depth, including drip campaigns, automation, contacts, and more. I’ve also discussed its affordable pricing, target audience and reviews along with their implications.

I can’t decide for you if EmailOctopus is the best email marketing platform for your needs, but in all the time I’ve used it, I’ve had no complaints.

I would highly recommend EmailOctopus to individuals and businesses of all sizes simply because of its ease of use, and incredibly lean and effective feature suite.

If you’re not sold on EmailOctopus, here is another article of mine detailing 11 of the best email marketing services for quite literally any use case.