OwlSend – Email marketing for small business

This needs to have simple plugin modules for ecommerce software and content management systems. Otherwise, why bother? Truth be told, getting the newsletter signup to work is a low priority for developers that have to do such things, so rolling one's own integration just is not going to happen.

There also need to be 'free' accounts for developer use. You don't want to be paying $$$ a month when you are merely testing if a newsletter sign up box works and on-boards the customer nicely.

Free accounts can be limited to a mailing list of 5. That is ample for test porpoises.

One thing that irks me about many email newsletter service things is that they think that their software is the centre of the universe. When integrated into something else, e.g. an ecommerce store or a blog, it is the ecommerce software or the blog software which is the 'centre of the universe'. There is really no need to strip as much as possible information about the site visitors and their spending habits, to then bring this into some glorified email contrivance.

I am quite surprised that this market exists for 'we can send email for you' services. Any computer is capable of sending an email, that is how it should be.

True, BUT, with Sendy one is not married to SES, any SMTP server can be used.

The landing page looks great. Very well designed. The UI looks good but I have a few comments as I have been dealing with Email Marketing lately and have come across some pain points. If you are using SES, how will you manage reputation and hourly/daily quota issues ? Are you going to show the reputation to the users in some way ? If a user gets marked as spam a lot, their reputation suffers which means they will not be able to send a lot of emails within the same hour/day and this needs to be explained to the user properly. A lot of clients don't understand this and will say "hey my campaign is paused, what happened".

Also, what integrations are available with services such as wordpress etc ? The reason I am asking because your tool seems to be targeted at smaller business to start with and quite a few of them use CMS such as wordpress and want integration. So standalone app is great but a lot of people will want to integrate with their existing CMS etc.

That takes me to the next point. This is not a criticism but just some food for thought. You are charging $30 for 10,000 emails which on surface looks great comparing with Mailchimp etc but there are plenty of plugins in the market that can provide similar UI, autoresponders etc and let users use Mandrill in the backend which lets you send 12,000 emails per month for free. Yes that quota is 12,000 but that is still a lot for most starters.

Hi Dan,

There are no lock-ins whatsoever. If you like to move over to somewhere else in the later stage. Just send us one email at hoot[at]owlsend.com and we will send you the export of all your contacts.

Thanks Neeraj OwlSend Team

Hi codegeek,

Thanks a lot for taking time to post your feedback.

Currently we extract data in realtime of users sending limits and emails sent by users in a day via SES API.

Since, we are already extracting all the users data and showing them in their dashboard. We will certainly plan to show the reputation to the users in the later stage as well.

We are working quite extensively on WordPress platform. What kind of integration would you be willing to get ?

Yes, you are right there are lot of plugins which provide the similar services, however there are few challenges. 1. You have to manage the hosting at your end. 2. You have to keep track on plugins and external apps and keep them updated. 3. There are not a robust solution out there, some don't have a simple drag drop email builder, others don't have a subscriber management system, some plugins don't track accurately and some don't provide web form embedding functionality or some plugins don't have autoresponders.

I am not saying that self hosted solution are all bad but there are certain limits where those solutions don't work well.

Mandrill is awesome, it gives 12,000 emails for free every month. However, they restrict their service to be used only for transactional emails and recommend MailChimp for marketing emails. On the other hand, SES has no such limitations whatsoever.

At the same time, if you are an Amazon EC2 customer, SES gives you 65,000 free emails every month.

We are actually coming up with a way to send emails via your custom SMTP to allow email sending via Mandrill or any other SMTP platform as well.

Once again, thanks a lot for taking time to post your feedback. I would suggest you to give OwlSend a try, I am pretty sure you will love it. If you have any questions or suggestions. Feel free to email me at neeraj[at]owlsend.com

Thanks Neeraj, OwlSend Team