Omnisend Review: Automated dynamic emails for happier customers

Omnisend features you’ll love

• 🎁 Pre-built everything

  Getting the right info to the right people at the right time is no mean feat.

  Luckily, Omnisend have created all the messages, subject lines, and workflow settings you need to get going. There’s over 30 readymade automations waiting, covering every stage of the customer journey e.g.

  • Welcome
  • Cross-sell
  • Abandoned carts
  • Order confirmations
  • Product recommendations
  • Special occasions
  • Delivery updates
  • Re-activation

  Or you can choose by goal e.g.

  • Convert subscribers
  • Recover visitors
  • Sell more
  • Build loyalty
  • Reactivation

  Omnisend is probably the quickest way to get from zero to automated email marketing I’ve seen. It’s literally just a case of selecting a customer interaction template and drag & dropping to make it yours, whether that’s changing branding, adding send delays, splitting campaigns based on in-flow actions, and more. Omnisend’s email templates are professionally-designed and therefore really look the part.

  

  However, getting started is the easy bit. Once you step into the world of email automation you can’t be complacent. You need to make sure you know what you’re doing or with so many emails going out the door. Omnisend’s templates are a fail-safe as much as a head start. Pick one and be sure it’s based on best practice triggers and tried-and-tested workflows.

• 📧 Easy email campaign builder

  If you’ve seen one email automation tool, you’ve seen them all. Omnisend’s UI is intuitive and easy to use – an express ride to perfectly targeted messages.

  

  Functionality I was particularly fond of included:

  • Preview pane – showing you precisely what your recipient sees
  • Campaign booster –automatically follows-up with anybody who hasn’t yet opened your message after 48 hours
  • Product Picker – because Omnisend connects to your store, you can embed products and product imagery into your emails, including price, title, description and link
  • Utilise multiple channels – the workflow builder lets you drag multiple channels (Email/SMS/Push) into a single flow
  • Human nuances – overly-eager trigger emails can be creepy. You decide who campaigns go to and, just as importantly, when (immediately or scheduled)

  However, the greatest praise is reserved for Omnisend’s Mailchimp-inspired templates and builder. Emails look stunning off the bat and most of what you see is customisable. Choose the blocks you want (e.g. product block; video; scratch card; button; image gallery; dynamic discount codes), or whether they should be visible on mobile or not. Your emails, your way!

• 🔀 Dynamic workflows and content blocks

  “Knowledge speaks but wisdom listens” - Jimi Hendrix

  Nobody likes a forced conversation that feels like the other party is reading from a script. Omnisend’s dynamic email workflows remind me of to those Choose Your Own Adventure Books that enable Omnisend to make choices that determine the user’s actions and the messages and outcomes they encounter.

  With dynamic email messages nobody need to wander aimlessly through your store. Use Automation Splits to create alternative personalised messaging paths within a single workflow (e.g. if a cart sum is over $100, offer free shipping) and A/B Split Testing to pit channels, incentives or subject lines against each other.

  

  So far, so good. However, the real game changer is Omnisend’s Conditional Content Blocks. Delivering a highly personalized shopping experience at scale, you create the one email and insert different dynamic content depending on what information you know about your customers. Hide or show different content based on this data or use it to sharpen your product recommendations, channel selection, incentives and more.

• 🤵 Customer lifecycle segmentation

  Thanks to Omnisend’s direct integration with ecommerce platforms, you can leverage all of your data to segment your customers based on what they’re buying, their average order value, their purchase recency and much more.

  

  The potential here can be overwhelming, so a good starting point is Omnisend’s customer lifecycle map. It paints a simple picture of the lifecycle of your entire customer base, to guide you to the most appropriate retention strategy.

  On the one side are the ‘Champions’ and ‘Loyalists’, happy to tell world how much they love your company. Make sure you say “thanks” and go the extra mile for them, which could be exclusive discounts, early access to new product ranges, or fast-track shipping.

  On the other, are the ‘About to Lose’, who speak for themselves. In need of a little TLC, Omnisend flags them for special attention. Omnisend can automatically reach out, say “hello”. Remind them of key benefits, offer a discount, or see how they’re getting on with their recent purchase. You know the drill.

  In the middle are your ‘Luke warm’ customers. Keep in touch and gently nudge them towards their next purchase.

  With Omnisend you can do all of this on autopilot. People dynamically flow between segments and campaigns can happen automatically. Say “goodbye” to one-size-fits-all email blasts!

• 📌 Contact tagging

  For uber-targeting and personalization. Organise your contacts with tags for things such as individual product purchases, source, past segments, complaints, country, user engagement levels and so on. Add or remove tags with ease.

• 👋 Contacts – get to know your customers

  Nobody is a stranger in Omnisend.

  See a contact’s full journey and purchase history, including when they first became a customer, any forms they’ve filled out, products bought, email campaigns received, key dates etc, order value. This is all great segmentation fodder and the basis for meaningful automated email marketing. The more you know, the more dynamic emails can be.

• ✨ Sync segments with your retargeting efforts

  Customer lifecycle stages can improve your advertising campaigns too.

  Sync Omnisend segments with your Google and Facebook ad accounts to find lookalikes of your best customers. Alternatively, if your email or SMS reactivation efforts aren’t paying dividends, extend your reach and reactivation potential with retargeting ads reflecting what you know about them.

• 📝 Capture leads – forms, landing pages and popups

  Grow your email list with Omnisend’s fun and functional form options. Choose from popups, small sign-up slide-outs, landing pages and the engaging wheel of fortune game.

  

  Omnisend’s built-in signup forms are every bit as beautiful as their email templates and can, of course, enter all new subscribers into a dedicated welcome email flow. Change what it looks like, the data you collect and when it shows – whether on arrival, percentage of page scrolled or exit intent. Omnisend’s branding can be removed on a paid plan.

• 📈 Action-led reporting tools

  Omnisend’s reporting is by far the best I’ve seen from all email automation tools. Their sales performance dashboard focusses on what matters most to an e-commerce store, with bird’s eye view of total revenue and audience growth, as well as the contributions made by your Omnisend email campaigns and automations.

  Plus, you can dive into very granular reports on individual user engagement campaigns from directly inside the Automation Editor. It’s so helpful seeing exactly where people are converting in your flows, so you can easily make changes there and then. Every user activity is captured and stored for analysis in Omnisend too, which also feeds into the excellent Customer Lifecycle Maps.

  This is action-orientated reporting at its best.