TheMarketer review – “rocks … in my best shoe”

E-Commercium email vulgo sugentes.
(Ecommerce mailers generally suck.)

Marcus Aurelius

There are just some universal truths in the universe
–and yet nothing makes us more passionate than looking for exceptions.

I remember, sometime in 2019 or so, I was helping a new vitamin brand kicking off their webstore. One idea they insisted for the emails – quite reasonably – is to dynamically show products, that the customer haven’t yet tried*. But then – beyond reasonable – they also wanted the emails to look remotely decent. Shtt.

*Mailchimp may have this. Or claim to.

So we enrolled into one of those blind date reality shows, moving from one pretty face to another – OmniSend, Klaviyo, Drip – then I think eventually their IT guy convinced them on ActiveCampaign. With one the looks was treacherous, with the other the reports, or something else. And of course none could do natively that not-yet-bought trick. (I think Drip’s liquid was the closest, but there were other problems there.)

This is, my general problem with ‘ecommerce mailers’. Apart from the native connection to the shop platform – they suck to work in and don’t deliver on traits that would really make the difference and justify their cost.

And as a consequence, emails you get from most webshops also suck. You know those catalogue looking junk listing the discounts for impulse buyers that you don’t even have to open to know what’s in it.

And this brings us to todays review–after all this uplifting introduction–

–I found a new aspiring Ecommerce Mailer coming from Romania–that actually sounds and looks good.

TheMarketer – you know, the one setting up the emails

Yeah the name kind of sucks – but I guess someone asked “Who will work in this?” when they pitched the concept and this was the answer.

Well, The Marketer (me) is in for a treat this time – because beyond the usual stuff you’d expect, TheMarketer (the tool) also brings loyalty programs, gamification, referrals and testimonials to the party.

That’s some cavalry you have there lined up, Sir.

The multi-channel harassment I’m less interested of, but one thing I am is that

the.pricing.is.really.good.

I may sound like a tightwad who preps for every Black Friday with 2 weeks of meditation, but that’s not why I’m always riding on the price. As a business, you want to start lean so you can afford the initial costs of getting traffic.

And with most tools – particularly mailers – you can get the same perks for $ or $$ or $$$$$$. Thus the purpose of this site. Kinda.

Pricing – theMarketer know how to make an attractive offer

I like the way the pricing is structured. Makes sense. Beyond the look around & send broadcasts free plan (till 1k), they have two similar tiers:

1. One for non-webshops (hands up) starting at 5€/mo
2. And one for ecom for just a few euros more.

UPDATE–
Prices went up to 20/mo & 25/mo respectively

The latter is only different by giving you ecom. templates, product recommendations and some kind of RFM analysis. (fortune telling from bird guts)

These tiers are good for most, the steps are small and the fee only passes 100/mo beyond 20k, making TheMarketer (the tool, not me) among the most affordable advanced automation mailers out there.

On the ecom. side, it’s pretty close equivalent of Brevo (reviewed and recommended) with the one major difference that T.M. charges based on list size with unmetered sending (not just on email but on sms & push too if you’re that harassing type – of course you are).

Now beyond these two tiers, there is the Ecom PRO, which gives you all the cavalry listed above. (ie. loyalty programs, gamification, referrals and testimonials)

I think it too expensive at 150/mo – particularly in the beginning, relative to the other two options – but if you count the price of 3rd party tools for each (feedback app, referral manager, loyalty program), I think you’d spend about the same.

Integrations – TheMarketer has weird friends

Yeah, after the fanfare, I want to quickly bring to your attention the fact that the Marketer (both) lives in Europe and relatively new to the game (the tool) with only a few friends (both the tool)

If you run a webshop, most of the native integrations you’ll find are less known European platforms. Most I’ve never heard of to be honest.

If you use Woo, Magento, Presta or OpenCart from the better known ones, you are golden. Beyond, you will be down to API or Zapier.

Update–
Yep, they added Shopify and WordPress since. Well done. No longer a werido.

We’ll see how the form can be embedded in a sec. Now let’s penetrate inside theMarketer (the tool!) and see how things feels. (!)

The Dress of the Marketer – UX impressions

I liked the registration process, it’s not overly long, but they clearly thought it through.

The purpose of it is to streamline the tool a bit based on the type of business you do.

For example the dashboard will prompt you with the integration type fitting the platform you selected in the reg. process.

The selectable plans also depends on your choice, which makes sense. The Ecom and Ecom pro are only offered if you chose to sell products.

For now I went with the free cause I’m a bloodsucking cheap-ass #ř%§@ę, who just ķ∂∆«€ąę, to see if it can be used as a naked newsletter publisher alternative. I’ll test the automations later.

The Marketer is rather disorganized

The interface is tasteful and modern, I like the colorscheme and the proportions. On the other hand, there is quite a lot of things going on.

The sidebar is overly busy for my taste. Looong list with submenus *brr* on top.

I don’t like that all of the ecom specific are there, despite not being relevant or accessible. It would be lovely to switch some of these off in the settings.

There are some very interesting ideas.

Like the Partners tab that list Agencies in your country you can hire. That’s cool. Except it’s just a directory, why do I have to look at it all the time? Hide it in the settings somewhere.

Or the Realtime report, showing what’s up in your site. That’s also cool. Except it should be just unified with the dashboard tab or into one Analytics tab.

Why the integrations are not in the Settings?

Or the Upgrade now…that opens the settings.

Or the support in the top right corner under the profile. Along with the other profile thingy that can only logout and now stuffed bottom left.

Bottom line, with a little thoughtfulness you could reorganize all this and have a much cleaner sight.

ok. Let’s get to the editor.

The editor…hurts

My wedding shoe was a beautiful brown-cognac leather Oxford. It looked fantastic, I wore it like a king and my feet fucking killed my by the end of the day. Like wearing a cheese grinder.

The drag-n-drop editor of this tool hurts. Gave me headache by the time I set up a basic template. They took that damn beefree layout and made exactly the same. Maybe even worse, not sure.

Every. Bit. Of. Adjustment. Takes fucking forever and sucks the living life out of you. Every element looks off by default so you have to retype each damn padding of each damn corner separately.

Like above in this screenshot…why on earth do you need to separately type how rounded each corner should be. Is there a scenario where you want the top left 5px but the bottom left 8? Bloody hell.

The font selection is limited, with a few completely useless weird typos added that look exactly the same as the websafe ones, just no one heard of them. Telka? Sriracha? WTF?

TheMarketer has a plain B

but it’s very plain

Not to worry, I thought. Just as SendX resurrected itself with a very usable and tidy rich-text editor, I thought I theMarketer has that covered too with the “plain text” version.

Well. Plain means desert dry plain. Think like typing a FB ad. No fonts, no bold, no nada.

Segments only include?

Ok, after the horrendous editing xp I thought that the contact management will be the strong suite of theMarketer. As it is for any good Marketer.

Well…kinda.

You get preset segments by engagement, which I absolutely LOVE.

This is super useful.

You can also set tags. Fantastic.

But strangely the filters to set up the segments are quite limited. The usual test I do is to set up a random A/B group for testing, by including certain letters of the first name for group A, then excluding the same for B.

Well…no can do here. There are no negative options on the filters. Only contains, or is. But not isn’t. The group filter rules are only Any or All, but not none.

The problem with this, is that you WANT TO exclude people who made them not relevant to messages you send. Opted out, already bought etc. This is not a luxury feature, but a mandatory one.

Automations

I was quite impressed with the automation canvas, with one obvious feature oddly missing.

There are a plethora of trigger options–clearly weighted on ecommerce–and you can filter on about any attribute (incl. CLV, and purchases).

With the SMS, push & email–weekday delays, AB testing, webhook based actions and triggers it is almost as capable as Highlevel.

–Almost.
Because there is one thing missing.

You can’t set an exit or jump ahead. There is no event/goal type of element or an exit rule like in Brevo. You can get around this with conditionals but it’s quite cumbersome and prone to errors. (eg. delay+if purchase was made then send next or not)

Conclusion

This may sound surprising–from me–but despite the horrible editor and the lacking exclusions on segments and automations I still think theMarketer is one of the better choices for webshop email marketing.

In fact I’d use and recommended rather than the expensive Klaviyo, with an equally dreadful email editor and less capable automation tool.

You can segment well and react to whatever your shoppers do. You can recommend them tailored products. Cart abandonment, rewarming, after sale communication is very easy to do right here–and SMS works great for ecom.

The integrations cover pretty much the how-is-who of ecommerce platforms, with maybe Webflow, that recently expanded towards webshops too.

And looking at the price theMarketer is considerably more budget friendly than Klavio, Omnisend, Bronto or MailChimp just to list the most commonly used ecom.mailer.

I hope the missing parts, errors will be fixed soon, looking at their roadmap they are going to the right direction.

The editor will continue to suck tho.

I wouldn’t pick it for univiersal email marketing, there are better options.

But with it’s ecom tailored features–and given that all other options either suck more, or way more expensive for about the same–

–theMarketer is my up to date NO.1 webshop mailer choice.

As an all-use mailer?

Well, the free for a thousand is still there. So if you have multiple low profile projects…I’d hate the editor, but budgetwise it’s tempting. Probably better to prepay Brevo.

Alternatives

Brevo–
Better automations, better editor, less ecom specialist tho. Also have a CRM.

Highlevel–
GHL have a rather beta ecom functionality within, that of course integrates perfectly with their insanely capable automation tool. The website builder is meh…but you have everything the ecom Pro tier of Marketer offers + your webshop under one hood for 97/mo.
And you can build 2 more side projects. Or sell the slots for someone to mitigate your cost.
GHL is not ecom specific tho–so no product inserts into emails.

Flodesk–
Not an ecom, but a gorgeous magazine mailer. If you just sent out feelgood emails, have a few products that people buy repeatedly, it may be a good choice. The flat fee is also advantageous if you have a larger list.