Mailjet has been around for some time, always on the lower end, then recently bought and solved several times. (wonder why) I recall it being a older looking, simple option, that didn’t catch my attention then, so I was interested to see if that changed.
Well.
low cost Jet tickets – to a place you don’t want to stay long
on paper
Mailjet’s cost and listed features are pretty attractive.
The low-fare flight (Essential plan) is around Brevo’s first tier cost, giving you 15k emails for 15/mo. That’s about 4-5k subs if you are not hitting the send button more than once a week.
But before we light fanfares, at this tier, Mailjet is pretty much a manual newsletter sender, with no marketing automation functions.
The Business class (called Premium) starts at 25/mo, and counting with an avr. of 10 emails a month you will be at the lower mid on the list. The image below is sorted by the avr. price of all the price steps within 10k subs for easy comparison.
I won’t drag you around the whole tool – because after a brief test I concluded that I won’t recommend it.
There are two main reasons.
as an email marketing tool – the ‘Automation’ is very limited
The automation that you get from the 25/mo tier is effectively an autoresponder with drip email functions, much similar to what you get in Aweber or MadMimi.
(or Audienceful/Buttondown on the minimalist ends)
You can’t automate contact updates or segmentation and given the alternatives already at that price range, that’s very thin.
“But what if I just want to run a simple newsletter with a few preset sequences?”
Yep…that brings us to the second problem. The process of setting up such a thing sucks.
Ugly templates painfully adjusted
The email management – like in most HTML based tools – is around templates. You need to create or use one to pass the step in the automation or send out an email.
The templates are all ugly and old looking … and the editor is so tediously slow and shit to work with that I’d probably procrastinate 3 weeks just to get myself into it. (I did that with FluentCRM)
It’s a returning theme now that I rant about Beefree whitelabeled…now at MailJet they developed their own inspired from the worst aspect of Bee.
Clicking in and out, look for the padding the size, the fonts it’s all over the place.
So you either make a very clean, only text and logo email – in two hours – or make the mortal sin of using the layouts and try to make something fancy that never will be.
If you go minimalist, believe me, you at least want to give yourself a treat with the writing XP. Wasted 15-20s of minutes add up.
What to pick instead?
On the cheaper end, even MadMimi has a better editor, with by the way an important function to move subs between lists by link-clicks.
The closest to Mailjet price-wise is Brevo (see review here), similarly tiered by the the number of emails sent. About that’s where the similarities end…Brevo is a world apart on what it offers for about the same.
If you want something more simple (you don’t want advanced automations, SMS, CRM and the whole wardrobe)
then go with Flodesk.
Gorgeous templates, that are actually easy to adjust and recreate in the best visual editors of the all design email tools.
If you want to go ultra-minimalist – you won’t save on costs – for a clean fast write-publish-go experience then there are two very cool essentialists there: Audienceful and Buttondown.