Ok, I love rule based automations. They are more transparent with less risk of doing stupid sh*t. Your labrador can see it though in 2 mins. So I’m biased.
Alongside BirdSend* and Convertkit, SendX is one of the few email marketing tools featuring trigger-action rules with a more streamlined UX for building drip sequences.
For the exact reason I was using BirdSend for a time, but there the complete lack of styling prevented me recommend it as a go to simple, affordable mailer.
So I’m starting this review on SendX with really high hopes.
Let’s see.
Main selling points
Apart from the good pricing (more on that later) SendX’s main selling point is that it’s an early-Convertkit build, (like BirdSend).
This build favors sequence based emailing, easy automations and tag based segmentation.
- You can set up sequences seperately to the automation, edit and overview them as a flow
- The automations are Action-Trigger based rules
So this means you can focus the steps each email represents in the flow of the communication, then set up the rule on who to add to that flow.
The brilliance of Convertkit beyond this is allowing you to add exclusion on the email (or sequence level) – setting who should NOT get these.
This is a more simple, elegant way of email marketing automation.
Bad early impressions
After seeing some really thoughtful, well design interfaces of late, SendX UI-wise was quite a disappointment.
It has this cheap MailerLite vibe all over, without much originality or clever use of space.
For example on the dashboard above if you scroll down there is a full page wide ‘check the demo’ video wedged between the report chart…
And then the report is far at the bottom, scrolling through 2 page hights. It seems to be that stacked barchart copied from Convertkit, but I’m not sure without more data.
If you go above those blank rods an 8px note appears saying ‘Form 1’. It’s like this:
‘Form 1’
The HTML Editor is the cheap one
The editor uses my arch nemesis – the whitelabeled Beefree cheap crap looking drag-n-drop nightmare, with some really ugly templates.
But because of the support of sequences, I thought I can live with that…until I tried to set up a drip sequence…
And the sh*tty editor was half-missing.
Out of screen Glitch
Sorry Sir, no more room inside.
I have a 13″ Mac Pro. I know it’s not a wall-to-wall gamer screen, but I’m not trying to work on a Nintendo switch either.
Now on my 13″ screen, some elements are half-out on the right hand side in several parts of the tool.
That’s the corner of my screen in the Forms tab. That’s just a bit annoying, but still usable.
Not so much so the email editor within the drip sequence:
It’s a bit hard to see, but there supposed to be another column on the right that is out of the screen. Because in the sequences, the left side is taken by the drip emails, there is not enough space for the rigid Bee editor they inserted.
Why that left column needs to be that wide? No idea.
By the way, see that blue chat button at the corner? I wrote to them about this – no response. Hopefully their email gets seen. (I usually don’t test support responsiveness…but I’ll follow up on this.)
*** I got a reply 4-5 days later about an earlier email verification question (the warning bar didn’t disappear) – unfortunately not a word about this screen issue.
The editor shows fully if you zoom out to 90%, and then it’s an absolute treat to fiddle with the already all over-the-place settings of the Bee-editor.
Plain text at your rescue
Much to my relief I found that in the Settings you can kill the Bees altogether (ie. HTML editor) and switch to a plain text editor.
Which is ironically a much-much more pleasant, fully usable rich text editor that gave my faith back in the tool a bit.
You have a handful of fonts only (at least there are some, unlike in BirdSend), but you can work in it fast, add buttons, resize images easily from their corner.
And it shows up fully in the sequence editor too. Yay.
the form editor I also disliked
…at first
UX design-wise the form editor is also quite poor.
There are these series of boxes you scroll down, each with a sentence to add. Fortunately you can embed by HTML into a better looking form builder on your site, which is always my preference as the templates you get in most these tools look sh*t.
To be fair: You get a lot of variety
After looking at it the second time – and choosing the ‘Drive more traffic’ goal, I realize the pop up / exit intent lead gen options are quite sophisticated with SendX.
You have all type of disruption type popups and bars, and can set where these appear, how often and what triggers them.
You can even show something for certain tags, which opens up some advanced super-sneaky targeting. (when the tracking works right)
This quite advanced stuff and it theoretically frees you from paying hard $$ an 3rd party lead gen tools.
Practically tho – while the functions are there – all the templates I found are looking outdated and ugly. The type of cheap aggressive popups that I’d hate seeing on my sites.
And there is virtually no customization to these design-wise, other than changing the copy in those weird form fields.*
Oh and you can add cheesy images if you have the stomach for it.
*Correction: You can add a CSS code at the bottom to try and change these. At least the fonts and the background. Not the most convenient way though.
the Trigger-Action automations
I really liked
The Rule based automation section of SendX is (finally)
very well made with some surprising native integrations on both ends. Reminds me of how Drip started back then.
You can set triggers from pretty much the who-is-who of carts and payment providers, and send actions not only in SendX, but to Pipedrive (CRM) and Demio (webinar tool I think?) too.
That’s very neat, after all those ‘code-it-yourself’ API dependent tools I tested of late.
It’s a bit confusing tho that they just copied the same trigger options into the actions. So the actions are also in past tense as if it already happened. (?)
Anyway…I can live with that.
Trigger interest by link click ✔
Fortunately the automation allows you to opt-in or out people in a promo. You have to use a unique link, unlike in Convertkit, where you can have just one ‘ok, got it’ page for all that. But at least it’s doable.
As for auto-contact management, you can’t update fields by these rules, but apart from that you can pretty much do everything: add to lists, sequences,apply tags, even send notifications and fire webhooks.
Segmentation and list management is superb
Another (very) strong point of SendX is segmenting contacts.
You have both lists and tags, as well as custom fields with the ability to save segments on a great variety of engagement metrics.
For example you can even segment on engagement down to specific campaigns.
Custom fields can be text, yes/no, number and date too.
Fortunately, these are universal and not tied to lists, so you can’t make much of a mess around it.
Running multiple businesses?
Because of the great segmentation & list management, and the fact that you can add multiple domains you can effectively run multiple projects on a single SendX account.
Each list can have multiple forms, and it’s own double opt in message.
So I don’t see why not, other than the universal unsubscribe problem that comes with this.
A quick note: I encountered some problems while verifying my domains. Despite setting them up as instructed, they still show as unverified. Oddly enough, I had a similar issue with the simple link-click based email verification.
Price-wise – it’s wise
To be honest, the pricing was the other appealing factor that piqued my interest.
SendX has a good pricing structure with a low 10/mo start and reasonable steps.
And more importantly, there are no shenanigans with hybrid pricing, addons, feature tiers – you get everything from the getgo.
To place it into context – the avrage price under a 10k list is around where ActiveTrail, CakeMail or Elastic Email is with a regional discount. It costs about half than Convertkit, but a bit more than Birdsend.
Now, since both SendX and BirdSend copied had the same inspiration for their tool…it is right to compare the two before we draw our conclusion.
SendX vs BirdSend
Both BirdSend and SendX tries to be the same: a cheaper Convertkit alternative.
And they both succeed and fail the same way.
They are both rather unpleasant in their frontend and UI design. They have this rough, beta vibe.
On the other hand they both have a pretty well made rule-based automation.
To me Birdsend has a more friendly, personal vibe. Can tell that it’s a love project of its founder. And I like that. They also have a built in LTV tracking thingy that’s kind of usable.
On the other hand their resistance to use any kind of styling in email makes them hard to recommend.
So strictly of the two, I’d probably go with SendX.
Verdict – is SendX your tool?
SendX made quite a comeback from the initial bad to worse experience.
The out of screen bee editor… the ugly forms… it all made it look like a beta version.
On the other hand the rich text editor is surprisingly usable, the forms – while ugly – have a great variety in placement and the rules allow you to integrate seamlessly to a good selection of tools.
So it made quite a comeback to the end.
But –
Measuring all the kind of good against the very bad … I wouldn’t like to work in SendX. I don’t like the UX, and I don’t feel that it would accelerate my progress in early stages, or add anything uniquely beneficial later.
There are more pleasant mailers costing less if you want to go cheaper or offer you much better work experience or functionality.
Because of that, SendX as a go to email marketing tool is
The only exception I can think of is if you take advantage of its native integrations to Pipedrive and Demio. If you need Pipedrive to begin with.
Recommending instead
- Convertkit – similar Sequence based editing, rules, plus a class better editor, liquid code support, snippets, forms, landings, tags, exclusions … just to name a few.
- Brevo – so you can use it’s CRM, while save money on the costs (of Pipedrive)
- AWeber – a relatively new tool … just kidding. AWeber was pretty much the first autoresponder pioneering the whole thing. While most others of that era stayed still, becoming outdated as shit, AWeber is surprisingly a good XP to use.