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Sender Review: Is It the Best Email Marketing Software for Small Businesses?
May 1, 2025
By
Cindy Graciella
Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to build meaningful customer relationships and drive sales. Yet, small businesses and startups often struggle to find an affordable platform that doesn't compromise on features.
Sender bridges this gap by offering budget-friendly email marketing software packed with powerful tools at a fraction of the cost of many competitors. That's why more than 180,000 businesses worldwide trust Sender with their email marketing needs.
In this comprehensive review, I'll cover everything you need to know about Sender. By the end, you'll know whether it’s the right email marketing service for your business.
Sender is an email marketing tool known for its affordable pricing, user-friendly interface, and excellent customer support. It’s built for startups, small businesses, ecommerce stores, and even enterprises.
The platform offers a drag-and-drop email builder, automation workflows, and audience segmentation. The best part is that you can access all these features on the free plan.
Overall, Sender strikes the right balance between being powerful enough for seasoned marketers and simple enough for beginners to start their email marketing journey.
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Affordable (yet powerful) email marketing platform
Easy-to-use drag-and-drop email builder with responsive templates
Automation and workflow templates
Advanced segmentation and personalization
SMS marketing campaigns
Detailed reports and analytics
High-converting popups and forms
24/7 friendly customer support, even for free users
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Sender’s branding on the Free Forever plan
Lacks some advanced features like A/B testing, landing page builder, and send time optimization
Sender’s workflow covers the entire email marketing process. You can design professional emails, capture leads, segment your subscriber list, set up automated email campaigns, and track everything with detailed analytics.
All these functions are accessible through an intuitive dashboard designed to be human-friendly so you can focus on strategy and optimizing the customer experience.
Let’s now look at each of Sender’s key features that make your email marketing campaigns more effective.
Sender’s dashboard is designed with simplicity in mind. Everything is logically organized so you can access it quickly.
Important sections, such as Email campaigns, SMS campaigns, Automation, and Forms, are clearly listed in the sidebar menu, making it easy to jump to whatever task you want to do.
With Sender’s drag-and-drop email builder, you can create beautiful, professional-looking emails even if you don’t have any coding skills. And if you're comfortable with HTML, there's an editor available to give you even more control.
The tool provides various content blocks and design options, so you’re not limited to a single format. You can adjust sections, background colors, and more to fit your brand’s style.
As you're designing your email, you can preview it to see how it looks in real time. If you spot something that's not quite right, you can fix it on the spot.
Designing an email from scratch can be time-consuming, especially if you’re not a designer. Sender provides a library of email templates you can use as a starting point. Just pick a template and use the drag-and-drop editor to add or remove sections as needed.
You can also apply your brand’s color scheme and logo. This way, you get the benefit of a professionally-designed layout, but with the option to add a personal touch to match your brand.
Since all the templates are fully responsive, they will automatically adjust to different screen sizes. This means you don’t have to worry about how your email will look on a smartphone versus a laptop. The template will reorganize and resize content so readers won’t have to squint or scroll sideways.
Sender offers pre-made automation workflows to help with common email marketing scenarios. Currently, there are nine different automation sequences, so you’re sure to find one that fits your needs perfectly.
For instance, you can choose a “Welcome” series to greet new subscribers, an “Abandoned Cart” sequence to remind customers to finish their purchase, or a “Thank You” note to follow up after a sale.
The platform doesn’t limit your use of automation features, even on the free plan. You can create as many automated workflows as you need without worrying about hitting a cap. This is beneficial as your business grows, as you might start with a simple welcome email and later add more complex campaigns (like re-engagement emails for inactive subscribers).
In addition to emails, Sender lets you send SMS campaigns to expand your marketing reach. You can use SMS marketing even on the free plan, but you'll need to buy SMS credits separately.
The SMS platform works hand-in-hand with the email tool to help you send omnichannel campaigns. For example, you can send a detailed promotion via email and then a short follow-up text to remind users to check that email or to act on the offer.
Sender also allows you to set up SMS campaigns triggered by certain actions or timings. For example, if it’s a customer’s birthday, the system can automatically send a birthday greeting text with a discount code.
In addition, the interface for creating SMS campaigns is user-friendly, with templates and options to personalize each message.
Sender provides robust reporting and analytics tools to help you understand how your campaigns perform.
The reports have all the key metrics you’d want to know. This includes open rates, click-throughs, bounce rates, unsubscribe count, and spam reports. These metrics are often shown in a dashboard format with clear labels.
In addition, Sender starts showing you live data the moment your campaign is sent so you don’t have to wait for days to gauge subscriber engagement. This way, you can quickly see how your emails perform, evaluate results whenever, and improve accordingly.
Another unique feature is the newsletter heatmap. This is a visual overlay on your email content that shows which parts of the email got the most clicks. As a result, you’re able to see what parts of your email attract interest, allowing you to position key elements where readers are most likely to click.
Sender allows you to group your audience based on behavior and characteristics like shopping preferences and demographics. That way, you can send hyper-personalized promotions or newsletters tailored to the preferences of each segment.
Despite being “advanced,” creating segments in Sender is pretty easy. The interface provides drop downs to define a segment rule. You can also combine conditions, like “Placed order at least once in the last 30 days.” Sender will then automatically include all contacts that meet your criteria into that segment.
Growing your email list is important if you want to enlarge your customer base, and Sender helps you do that with its subscription forms and popup feature. You can design a basic embedded form and place it in a sidebar of your website, or configure popups that appear after a visitor spends, say, 30 seconds on landing pages.
The design process is easy. Just choose the type of form you want and set the colors, fonts, and wording so the form or popup looks like a natural part of your website.
You also have control over how and when popups show up. For example, you could trigger a popup to appear only when a user is about to exit (commonly known as exit-intent popups) or after they scroll halfway down a page.
Sender also provides a unique “spin-to-win” popup option. Instead of a typical static offer, this gamified popup has a wheel that visitors can spin for a reward (like a discount code or free shipping). This gamified approach can significantly boost signup rates because it adds a fun element to the process.
When it comes to handling data, Sender takes security and compliance seriously. Based in Europe, the platform is fully GDPR compliant, but it also meets all other major international data protection standards. This ensures your subscribers' information is safe, no matter where they're located.
Sender also implements strong security measures to keep your account and contact data safe. The service is hosted in a highly secure server environment to prevent unauthorized access.
In addition, the platform has policies in place to make sure your emails comply with anti-spam laws. For example, it provides easy ways for users to unsubscribe and requires verification to prevent spam accounts. All of this is meant to help you focus on your marketing without worrying about the safety and legality of your email practices.
One of Sender’s advantages is its integration with numerous third-party tools and platforms. This allows you to connect your email marketing with the rest of your business systems to streamline workflows.
Notable integrations include:
Sender offers plug-and-play integrations for popular online store and website platforms. You can connect your Shopify, WooCommerce, or even PrestaShop store, as well as content management systems like WordPress, directly with Sender.
This helps you automatically sync your store’s customer data with your email lists, making it easy to send targeted campaigns.
While Sender has native integrations for many platforms, it also connects to hundreds of other apps through Zapier. Zapier integration allows you to link Sender with CRM software like Salesforce or HubSpot, lead generation tools, and more without needing custom code.
Sender also provides a robust Application Programming Interface (API) for developers, which enables custom integrations with virtually any external system.
Sender integrates with analytics tools to help you track the effectiveness of your email campaigns across platforms. Notably, it supports Google Analytics integration, which allows you to add tracking parameters to your email links and monitor how email traffic behaves on your website.
Sender’s pricing is straightforward and budget-friendly, with several options to accommodate different needs. All essential features are available on the free plan, which means you don’t have to pay extra to access things like automation or integrations. You mainly upgrade based on your subscriber count and certain add-ons like SMS campaigns.
Let’s look at the pricing plans in more detail:
Sender offers a generous free plan with no expiration. It allows you to manage up to 2,500 subscribers and send up to 15,000 emails per month.
Unlike many free offerings, this plan isn’t stripped-down. You get core features like the drag-and-drop email builder, free templates, basic automation with unlimited workflows, and signup forms/popups.
One limitation to note is that emails sent on the free plan include Sender’s branding.
The Standard plan is Sender’s first paid plan starting at $7 per month, aimed at growing businesses that need higher sending limits and a few extra capabilities.
The plan includes everything in the Free Forever plan, plus some important additions. Notably, Standard removes the Sender branding from your emails and unlocks SMS campaign features.
Another perk is multi-user access, meaning your team members can have their own logins to collaborate on campaigns in the same account.
The Professional plan is designed for businesses that want an omnichannel approach to messaging. It includes everything in Standard, plus extra capabilities and priority support for only $14 per month.
One major benefit is that it comes with SMS automation and free monthly SMS credits equivalent to your plan’s value. In other words, a portion of your subscription cost is returned to you as SMS sending credit, which is valuable if you plan to use text messaging in your campaigns.
The Professional plan also offers advanced automation options. Plus, you get access to special tools like animated countdown timers in emails (great for urgency in promotions). Support is upgraded to priority, meaning you get faster response times or dedicated support channels when you need help.
If you want more control over your sending reputation, the Professional plan allows options for dedicated IP addresses. However, you must have 20,000+ subscribers.
The Enterprise plan is a custom offering for large organizations or those with special requirements. It includes all the features of the Professional plan and allows you to send unlimited emails.
In addition, each Enterprise client is assigned a dedicated success manager. This is a point person at Sender who helps with onboarding, deliverability monitoring, and any questions that arise. Advanced user permission controls are included too, along with detailed activity logs for audit purposes.
Customer support is an area where Sender truly stands out, often highlighted by most users as being exceptional. The company provides 24/7 support, so that no matter your time zone or when you run into an issue, help is available.
Support is accessible primarily via live chat and email. The support team is very responsive and helpful in resolving questions or problems.
All users get access to customer support, even those on the free plan. This is somewhat rare in the industry as many companies limit assistance to paid-plan users only.
Furthermore, higher-tier plans come with enhanced support. Professional users receive priority support and Enterprise clients get a dedicated success manager and phone support.
In addition to direct human help, Sender maintains a comprehensive Knowledge Base covering all aspects of the platform. There are training videos and a blog with tips for email marketing, which serve as self-service resources for users to learn about the platform and best practices.
In light of its email marketing features, pricing, and exceptional support, Sender proves to be a worthwhile solution for many individuals and businesses. It strikes the right balance between offering advanced capabilities and being easy to use and budget-friendly.
Are there any limitations? Yes. But they’re relatively minor in comparison to the benefits. The most notable one is that on the free plan your emails will have Sender’s branding on the footer.
Also, the platform doesn’t offer some advanced features, like A/B testing, a landing page builder, and send time optimization. However, Sender is continuously improving its software and most users find that the available features more than cover their needs.
Overall, Sender is absolutely worth considering when building your email marketing strategy, as it has the capacity to support your company’s growth from a small mailing list to a large-scale operation.
Sender makes powerful email marketing effortless, even on a budget. Create, automate, and convert more with an easy-to-use platform built for growing teams and solopreneurs.
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Cindy is an Outreach Manager and SEO Specialist at ONSAAS who helps SaaS companies grow through strategic link building and SEO. Outside of work, she loves spending time in nature, especially hiking in the mountains.
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