ElasticEmail is a newcomer to the email sphere, but getting some traction due to it’s attractive starting price and feature set. This is my comprehensive (means mean) review of it.
This review will be updated after I try the Pro Tier with the Automations. I liked the tool a lot, so I can’t let it go.
Can’t help but stop at the name for a sec. Elastic Email. It was a long day of planning. Everybody was tired as sh*t.
If they get popular, give them 2 years and they’ll change to some made up BS word like Wota, or Kalup. Mark my words. “…to better express our mission in changing the way people interact, from now we are Kalup”)
Ok, let’s get serious and dig into the oily elastic depths of Elastic Email and see what we find.
First impressions
The somewhat unimaginative but friendly website suggests a tool where design and style is not going to be the strongpoint…but we’ll see Oh, they are Polish, that’s a plus.
The signup was quite straightforward. Nothing tedious.
The dashboard layout isn’t bad, but a bit reminds me of those 2010ish enterprise softwares that left permanent scars on interns with their 12 size Arial system fonts and endless dropdown menus.
I can’t say I feel a creative uplift by looking at it, despite the Michelangelo touch of God image on the right side.
But to give credits, the organization of the tabs is logical, following the industry standards of mailers.
Segmentation & Contact management
I really like this section. Clear, clean and well structured with some really good ideas. Interesting feature to see Geo and device stats. Handy intel for cpc, not much use for email marketing. (btw. Geo was way off tho in my test.)
ElasticEmail is list based, which is often easier for people to set up and think-up than tags. You can expend segmentation with the clever use of custom fields, but here unfortunately these is tied to the rather expensive Pro tier. We’ll get back to that.
There are some cool unique ideas to list tho. One is that you can track the change history of the lists and segments over time.
A brilliant feature – a bit hidden – is that you can seperate the list into random groups for testing at ease. Either a small test group (100 random people from this list), or 2 or more equally distributed for AB testing.
This is very cool to be done with one click. In other tools when I have to set this up for clients, usually I have to twiddle segments with ‘First name contains ‘a’ ‘g’ (…)’ filters, and balance it show half the list.
The Segmentation section is also neatly done. I like the UX here. Easy to see what you are setting.
They already added engagement segments, that you can select right away when you are sending broadcast. (eg. send the broadcast first to the most engaged to warm up the delivery stats for a fresh list)
Unfortunately, without custom fields, your options are pretty limited to engagement (like broad statistics) or like subscription date. You can’t mark if they clicked a specific link.
Automations – also only available in the Pro tier – may update custom fields so that you can mark link clicks. These are important, because these allow your subs. to express interest in a promo, or on the other end – to opt-out from one.
Facepalming reality – the cost
Without going further, this means is that the usable version of the tool starts at $60/mo. (there are location based discounts like in my case)
While this stands till 10k subs – you don’t start at that. You start at 0. As you are working on your project, settling on the tech stack, solidifying your products, writing all the content and messages, estabilishing presence and reach…to slowly collect your first few 100 followers. All this takes time, may take a year… and already paying for a 10k list.
What bothers me is that without the Automation feature, you can’t even send welcomes to new arrivals (other than a confirmation email), or do anything other than sending broadcasts.
For starting businesses, an advantageous pricing is in small price steps starting from a few hundred subs, that allows full usability.
The base price here is at $9/mo up to 2k subs, which is fine.
But it’s barely usable. You can get around the lack of list management automation by using a more affordable 3rd party integrator, like SureTriggers or PabblyConnect…but that increases tech complexity and fragility.
Unfortunately you can’t move subs between lists by link triggers, I checked. (btw. MadMimi can do that, just saying)
So you can’t really escape the Pro and at 60/mo, you have a plethora of tools to choose instead as your mailer.
But, before we write off ElasticEmail, they have one more card up their sleeve that makes them still a viable choice for a starting business.
Sub-accounts for side-projects
With the Pro tier, you can create as many sub-accounts as you like, with one unified counter on the emails sent. If you held multiple irons in the fire, have little blossoming side projects, in various niches each needing a solid, cost effective mailer –
then with Elastic the combined cost would be $60/mo – or less if you are getting a location discount. $30 in my case.
So, let’s say, with 4 projects – you have a very capable, well built mailer in each, with a total list size limit of 10k and 300k emails/month to send. And that’s fair. If you have 10k subs in any combination and you can’t monetize your list to cover that fee – it’s on you.
If you just run one project, I think there are better options. Flodesk with a flat fee of $38, Convertkit starting at $27 or Brevo with a prepaid option until you can switch to their weirdly priced subscription plan.
what about the email editor and broadcasts?
Shortly, I loved both. Oh…there is a crucial feature missing from the campaign setup.
The editor
The drag-n-drop editor is fairly pleasant and sterile, like a corporate hotel suite.
The Bee-free like drag-n-drop builder feels instantly familiar, nothing annoying or misplaced. By this time I feel the industry figured this part out so tools just white-label, or buy the code from Envato.
Of late I liked Bevo’s ‘mirror your site’ editor the most, but this one is still among the better ones, among the blog dragging type HTML builers. (eg. much better than MailerLite, ActiveCampaign or Klaviyo. (or a many other)
These are the available block options. No fancy stuff like countdowns, or dynamic hide/show text. If you want the latter, Convertkit, or Brevo both have those.
The editor is fairly fast to work in it, and that’s what matters the most.
Single Campaigns
UX-wise the campaign settings is fantastic. Both the single and the AB-test. It offers the pre-set engagement segments that you can combine with your lists, everything is silky smooth and fast to set.
The AB testing allows you to change parts of the email and set when and how the winner is decided. Just saying that this is head-n-shoulders above of what Convertkit allows for testing.
Wait a minute.
I was about light fan-flares for how awesome everything is, when I noticed that one crucial function missing here.
You cannot add exclusion rules. Filters on who should not get the email. And that’s a problem.
This rules out multi-email sales campaigns. You want to be able to exclude people who have already bought the offer, and give an opt-out link for those who don’t want to hear from it again.
In ElasticEmail you can only do this in an automation.
But then how you trigger it? Or maybe move people out of your list? But they still belong there, just this specific promo is no longer relevant.
Let me check it again, maybe I’m missing something.
Nope. I searched through their help docs, tried at the segments, this is not something that you can do.
a sad Verdict – for now
As a viable email marketing tool, capable of handling promotions the right way, Elastic email is sadly
To be honest I feel oddly disappointed, that I wouldn’t feel if the rest were junk.
But no, I actually loved pretty much everything up to that point, and as hard as I give the recommendation badge, I wanted give one.
For those running multiple small projects (like I do) using the sub accounts with one Pro tier subscription was a very attractive option , particularly with the location-gift discount. 30/mo total for 3-4 projects, each being ran in a tool that is clean, well-organized and pleasant to use.
But the lack of exclusions in the campaigns is simply a deal breaker, so I cannot recommend ElasticEmail to my audience. (small, smart entreprenours and creators)
Maybe it’s fine for larger corporations, who are just hammering their list and without caring much about long term relationships – but the tool deserves better clients than those.
I want to get back to this and test the Automations in the Pro tier. There are no tags, but you can update fields by link clicks there is a way around this. We’ll see.
Also as is, Elastic Email can work as a simple newsletter publisher tool.