Omnisend Review 2024 – Ecommerce Automation Simplified?

Welcome to our Omnisend review.

Omnisend is our top recommended marketing automation platform for ecommerce stores—but is it the right choice for your business?

To help you answer that question, we’ll be exploring everything Omnisend has to offer in this review. 

We’ll be looking at all Omnisend’s key features and how they work, revealing the platform’s biggest pros and cons, discussing pricing, and more.

By the end of this post, you’ll have all the information you need to make the right choice. And if you feel Omnisend isn’t a good fit, we’ll suggest some alternatives to try instead.

What is Omnisend?

Omnisend is an all-in-one marketing automation platform that’s purpose-built for online sellers.

Omnisend Homepage

You can use it to design email newsletters, send out SMS marketing messages, automate your campaigns, create signup forms, and more.

From email marketing and SMS marketing to push notifications – Omnisend can power a significant portion of your marketing strategy.

There are a lot of marketing platforms out there that can do the same sort of thing. But none of them match up to Omnisend when it comes to ecommerce.

It’s jam-packed with awesome features that make it the perfect solution for online stores, including pre-built ecommerce automations (like abandoned cart emails), robust integration with ecommerce platforms, and ecommerce-focused email blocks and widgets.

And that’s not the only reason we’re big fans of Omnisend.

Another thing that makes it stand out from its competitors is that—true to its name—the platform takes an omnichannel approach to marketing. 

You can use it to manage and automate your customer interactions across all your different communication channels and customer touchpoints. Not just email.

Omnisend can be used to set up SMS/MMS campaigns, deliver push notifications, etc. And it even syncs up with Google and Facebook Ads so you can retarget your audience members wherever they are on the web.

What features does Omnisend offer?

Omnisend offers a ton of sophisticated features and tools out of the box. These are grouped into five toolkits:

  • Campaigns
  • Automation
  • Forms
  • Audience
  • Reports

In the next section of this Omnisend review, we’ll explore each of these and give you a first-hand look at all of Omnisend’s most important features.

One-click store integration

To get started with Omnisend, the first thing you’ll want to do is connect your ecommerce store. This will unlock access to critical features including Reports, Automations, and Forms

Fortunately, it only takes a few minutes to do so thanks to the one-click store integration.

From the welcome screen, hit the Connect your store button:

01 Connect your store button

Then, choose the platform you built your store on and follow the on-screen instructions to set everything up in a couple of clicks.

02 Select a platform to connect

What’s great is that Omnisend integrates easily with pretty much every major ecommerce platform including Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Magento, and more.

If your store is built on WooCommerce, there’s a native Omnisend plugin that you can install and activate on your site from your WordPress dashboard:

03 Omnisend for WooCommerce

Then, all you have to do is navigate to the Omnisend tab from your WP dashboard and click Connect your account, then Approve to complete the setup process.

What’s really cool is that once you’ve connected your store, Omnisend will automatically detect and pull brand assets like your social links, logo, and color scheme from your site. 

04 Brand assets

You can then choose to add these brand assets to your emails automatically and provide your customers with consistent branded experiences across channels.

Note: At this point, it’s important that I point out that Omnisend requires you to connect an ecommerce store in order to use the platform. If you don’t run an ecommerce store, I highly recommend scrolling down to the section on Omnisend alternatives. Those automation platforms can be used without an ecommerce store.

Campaigns

To create your first campaign, open up the Campaigns tab. Then, click New campaign.

05 Choose campaign type

From here, you can send or schedule one-time email broadcasts and newsletters. You can also set up SMS/MMS campaigns, A/B tests, and push notifications here. 

But for brevity’s sake, we’ll just look at the email campaigns tool.

In the next window (Campaign settings), you’ll be able to add your email subject line, sender address, preheader, and all the other important stuff.

06 Campaign settings

One cool feature worth pointing out here is the Subject Line Personalization tool. You can use it to add custom fields to your subject lines.

For example, you can add the account name field to your subject line so that each recipient receives a personalized email addressed to them by name. This can help dramatically improve email open rates.

Another feature we really liked is the Campaign Booster tool. Under the subject line, check the box that says Boost my campaign to turn it on.

Once you’ve done that, you can enter a second subject line, which will be sent out again after 48 hours to recipients who didn’t open the first email. According to Omnisend, this alone can increase open rates by as much as 30%, which is pretty great.

Email templates

When you’re setting up your email campaign, you’ll have the option to choose a pre-made email template.

07 Email templates

There are over a dozen to choose from, and they’re all specifically designed for ecommerce.

For example, there are templates for promoting new product launches, sale announcements, best-seller roundups, discount code offers, Black Friday deals, etc.

And every template is fully customizable in the drag-and-drop editor, which we’ll talk about next. 

One of my only gripes with Omnisend is that the selection of templates on offer could be better. They’re good, but they’re not great. And we’d have liked to see a little more variety. Some competitors have hundreds of templates. In comparison, Omnisend only has around 18.

The good news is that if you can’t find a template you like, you can just start from scratch and build your own instead. 

Then, you can save these custom templates to your catalog so you can use them again and again without having to start from scratch every time.

Drag & drop builder

After you’ve selected a template, you’ll be brought to the drag-and-drop email builder. This is arguably Omnisend’s standout feature.

08 Drag and drop builder

It uses a similar interface to most WYSIWYG editors, with the ability to drag and drop blocks/widgets from the sidebar, and then customize them in the preview window.

There are blocks for all the usual stuff like headers, images, body text, and even conditional content. But it’s the Product Listing blocks that make Omnisend so powerful.

Once you’ve added a Product Listing block to your email, you can click the Pick products from the store button to import personalized product recommendations. 

09 Pick products from the store button

Then, you can customize the way your products look in your emails by controlling the layout and what information is included (like pricing, product title, etc.)

This is a game-changer for ecommerce stores and can help you to drive a ton of sales through stunning shoppable emails. 

Customers can click the shop button in the email for any products they’re interested in to open up the product page on your store.

Pre-built automations

Another one of Omnisend’s biggest selling points is its automation toolkit. To access it, click Automation from the top navigation bar.

10 Choose automation workflow

Here, you’ll see a ton of pre-built automations that you can customize and roll out in a couple of clicks. These pre-built automations are a huge time saver for ecommerce businesses. 

Instead of building each automation from scratch, you can implement automated abandoned checkout emails, abandoned cart emails, order confirmations, birthday discounts, and all kinds of other essential ecommerce workflows in next to no time.

All of the pre-built workflows are fully customizable. And they even include ready-made email content.

Workflow builder

Next, you can either click Customize workflow below your chosen pre-built automation or create an entirely custom workflow from scratch to open up the workflow builder.

11 Workflow builder

The workflow builder takes the form of a flow chart, in which you connect up triggers and actions to create automation sequences. Omnisend’s workflow builder is one of the most powerful and flexible that we’ve seen, but it does have a high learning curve. 

You get unlimited custom events to use as triggers in your workflows on all plans. And you can add conditional content blocks and personalized recommendations to your automations to create highly targeted campaigns.

Popups, signup forms, and landing page

You can also use Omnisend to create lead-generation materials like landing pages, opt-in forms, and popups that can help you to grow your list.

To do so, navigate to the Forms tab, then click Create form to get started.

12 Create form

Again, there are tons of pre-designed templates to choose from here. And most of them are specifically designed for online stores.

For example, there are templates for Christmas discount email capture forms, free shipping offer forms, etc.

But one of our favorites is the Wheel of Fortune popup template. It invites the visitor to spin a prize wheel and win a discount that’s just for them. This sort of gamification converts like crazy and can help you to grow your list fast.

All templates are fully customizable in the form builder, which uses the same drag-and-drop interface as the email editor.

13 Wheel of fortune popup template

In the form builder, there are behavior options so you can change the scheduling, targeting, visibility, etc of your forms. And you can choose what tags to add to audiences who subscribe via your form. 

There are also a bunch of blocks that you can drop onto your forms. You can add custom form fields like email, phone number, drop-down lists, etc. And there’s also a legal consent block that you can drag in to make sure your opt-in forms are fully compliant.

The form builder is seamlessly integrated with the automations tool. So for example, when you create a form that includes a discount code, Omnisend will prompt you to set up an automated welcome sequence that sends the discount code to new subscribers.

14 Automated welcome sequences

Segmentation & list management

You can manage your email and SMS contact list under the Audience tab. Here, you can create contact segments for more targeted campaigns.

15 Contact list

There are two ways to create audience segments: manually or with pre-built segments. 

If you go down the manual route, you can segment your contacts up based on filters like tags, contact properties (i.e. birthdate, country, etc.), and on-site behaviors/events (i.e. clicked on message, canceled order, applied coupon, viewed product, viewed page, etc.). Omnisend handles the site tracking for you.

Alternatively, you can roll out pre-built segments in one click. For example, there’s a pre-made segment for high-potential buyers, which sorts your audience by those who’ve bought high-value items or made several purchases from your store. 

There are also segments for frequent store visitors, active email subscribers, at-churn-risk subscribers, first-time buyers, and more.

Elsewhere in the Audience tab, you can add contacts, import and export lists, etc.

Plus, you can see useful analytics like average customer order value, returning customer %, and the average days that elapse before customers buy from your store again. 

And you can even see how many customers are at different stages of the customer journey with the lifecycle stage map.

This provides super useful insights that can help you inform your strategy.

Reports & analytics

On the Reports screen, you’ll be able to access customer data about your campaign performance. 

16 Standard reports

Advanced reports are only available to users on the Pro plan, but all plans have access to Standard reports.

Under Reports > Campaigns, you can view essential metrics like emails sent, open rates, ctr rates, and sales for all your individual campaigns. 

And for more detail, click View Report next to the campaign. 

There, you’ll then be able to see a breakdown of campaign sales and performance over time, like revenue and unsubscribes,  contact activity, etc.

You can also access analytics and reports for your Workflows and Forms from this page.

Deliverability tools

To help make sure as many of your emails land in your recipients’ inboxes as possible, Omnisend includes a bunch of useful tools. You can access them via Reports > Deliverability.

17 Deliverability

Here, you can view the status of your sender domains and email addresses, as well as your email list hygiene.

You can also add a custom sender domain and sender email address to improve your sender reputation and achieve better deliverability. Plus, clean your list by removing fake and unknown addresses, or utilize the Warm-up feature.

Warming up your email list is great if you have a large list of 20k contacts and helps you build a good sender reputation. It does this by gradually increasing the number of emails you send over days or weeks. This will ensure your email marketing efforts pay off.

App Market

If Omnisend is missing a feature you need out of the box, there’s a good chance you can find a third-party add-on or integration that can handle it in Omnisend’s App Store.

18 Omnisend app store

For example, Omnisend Integrates with Facebook Ads via the Facebook Custom Audiences app. 

Once you’ve set it up, it’ll automatically move customers from Omnisend to your Facebook custom audiences so that you can retarget them on Facebook and Instagram in your paid social media marketing campaigns. 

And you can also do the same with the Google Ads Customer Match app to retarget users across Google Search, Shopping, YouTube, and Gmail.

And of course, that’s not all. There are hundreds of more apps to choose from.

And to help you sort through them all, you can filter them by category with the Collections filters. 

That way, you can quickly see all the available loyalty and rewards apps, shipping apps, subscription apps, review apps, etc.

How much does Omnisend cost?

Omnisend offers three different pricing plans: Free, Standard, and Pro. The cost depends on the plan you choose and how many contacts you have.

All plans include the same automation features; the only differences between them are in support, reporting, and usage limits.

The Free plan won’t cost you a penny but is capped at up to 250 contacts, 500 emails/month, 60 SMS messages, and 500 web push notifications per month. You can sign up with no credit card required.

The Standard plan starts at $16/month for up to 500 contacts and 6,000 emails/month. But you can choose your own usage limits. The more contacts and emails you need, the more you pay.

All standard plans are capped at up to 60 SMS sends, but you do get unlimited web push usage.

The Pro plan starts from $59/month for up to 2,500 contacts, unlimited email sends, and 3,933 SMS/month. The cost increases from there if you need more contacts or SMS messages. 

Like the Standard plan, the Pro plan also includes unlimited web push notifications. But on top of that, Pro users also get access to advanced reporting and 24/7 priority support.

There may be a couple of other differences between the plans aside from those listed above, but these are the main highlights. Visit the Omnisend pricing page for a more complete breakdown of what you get with each subscription.

Omnisend pros and cons

Now that we’ve covered Omnisend’s features and pricing, let’s review what we think are the platform’s main strengths and weaknesses.

Omnisend pros

  • Purpose-built for ecommerce businesses. Unlike other email marketing platforms that aim to appeal to everyone, Omnisend is specifically made for ecommerce—and it shows. It has more eCommerce-specific features than its competitors, like shoppable emails, discount codes, shopping behavior tracking, wheel of fortune popups, and sales dashboards.
  • Extensive integrations. Omnisend integrates really well with hundreds of tools that ecommerce businesses use. There are native integrations with all the leading ecommerce platforms including Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Wix. And a huge repository of apps available in the Omnisend App Store.
  • Customer support. Omnisend has won a Stevie award for its outstanding customer support. And it has a stellar track record of reviews across the web.  You get 24/7 email & live chat support on all plans, which is better than many other platforms. And a dedicated customer success manager is also available for customers who spend $400+.
  • Free forever plan. While the usage limits are pretty low, the fact that Omnisend offers a forever-free plan at all is one of its biggest benefits. Many competitor platforms only offer a time-restricted free trial. This makes Omnisend a good long-term solution for occasional email senders that don’t want to invest in a paid tool and have a smaller list.
  • Learning materials. Omnisend comes with a lot of features to help you get to grips with the platform. Beginners will appreciate the setup wizard that walks you through everything when you first sign up, complete with your own personalized goals checklist. Plus, there are handy tutorial tips embedded in every feature to help you get to grips with the platform. And there’s even a free educational video course on how to use the platform available through Omnisend Academy.

Omnisend cons

  • Usage limits on Free and Standard plans. Omnisend only includes unlimited email on its highest-tier Pro plan. In contrast, some other platforms, like Moosend, include unlimited emails across the board. You can also only send up to 60 SMS on the Free & Standard plans.
  • Learning curve. Omnisend isn’t as easy to use as some of its competitors. There’s definitely a learning curve. And while the educational materials and in-app tips help, it takes time to figure everything out.
  • Template designs. In comparison to some of its competitors, we weren’t blown away by Omnisend’s templates. There are not as many options to choose from as some other email marketing platforms. And we felt they could have been better looking. But then again, that could be personal preference.
  • Ecommerce store required. Unlike platforms like Drip, Omnisend requires you to connect your ecommerce store in order to use their omnichannel marketing automation platform. If you run an ecommerce store, this is a good thing because it makes it possible to offer tighter integration with your store. But if you don’t run a store, you’ll need to look at an alternative platform.

Omnisend alternatives

Not sold on Omnisend? Here are some alternatives to check out instead:

  • Drip | Our review — Another eCommerce-focused email marketing and SMS platform with a similar feature set to Omnisend.
  • MailerLite | Our review — A very affordable email marketing software provider that offers superb value for money. Also includes a complete website builder.
  • ActiveCampaign | Our review — An advanced email marketing and customer experience automation platform with best-in-class automation tools.

Final thoughts on Omnisend

That concludes our in-depth Omnisend review.

Overall, I think Omnisend is without a doubt the best marketing automation platform for ecommerce businesses on the market right now. Whether you need just email marketing, or the addition of SMS and push notifications – it’s a great platform that makes omnichannel marketing easier.

It has everything online store owners need: fantastic pre-built ecommerce automations, a flexible workflow builder, robust site tracking, one-click integration, email and SMS marketing tools, and more.

It’s also a great option for new store owners on a tight budget thanks to its generous free plan and scalable pricing model.

If you want to try it out for yourself, you can click the button below to sign up for free and take it for a test drive.


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