Moosend Review: Unstoppable email marketing made easy

29th March 2021

Surges is 100% independent, but some links may earn us an affiliate commission. Learn more.

TL;DR

There’s a lot more to email marketing than crafting good content and hitting send. Moosend can grow your subscriber base, create Amazon-style personalised ecommerce campaigns and automate the lot. It’s a ridiculously comprehensive email marketing tool given its relatively low profile. The simple drag and drop builder puts all the key conversion assets at your disposal, including landing pages, subscription bars and pop-ups, welcome messages and win-back and you-may-also-like ecommerce recommendations. A one-stop-shop for all your email marketing needs.



Moosend Pros

  • Drag & drop editor
  • Low cost
  • Customisation
  • Ecommerce features
  • Tutorials
  • Page version

Moosend Cons

  • Template designs
  • Small but growing workflow library

Make marketing tools your superpower

  • Giveaways
  • Sneak peeks
  • Discount codes

The Story

What is Moosend?

That should probably ready “What isn’t Mooseend?”

Moosend pitches itself as an email marketing all-rounder. It’s bursting with features and pitches itself as a raw and rebellious alternative to Mailchimp.

Moosend’s capsule collection of features includes:

  • Drag & Drop Email Editor
  • Landing page builder
  • Subscription forms
  • Email Automation Templates
  • List Segmentation
  • Shoppable Emails

But also:

  • Website and User Tracking
  • A/B Testing
  • Data Analytics

And also a ton of conversion features for ecommerce stores, whether that’s to pique their curiosity, jog their memory or upsell, resell or sell alike.

There’s a lot to unpack here, so I’d better get started…


Yannis Psarras & Panos Melissaropoulos

Meet the Maker:
Yannis Psarras & Panos Melissaropoulos

Behind the scenes at Moosend are Yannis Psarras and Panos Melissaropoulos. As the technical founder and engineer, Yannis cares deeply about the architecture and experience of the core product. Panos is the marketing brains.

Moosend has come since it attracted its first customer in 2012. It prides itself on being a more nimble and cost-effective alternative to Mailchimp, that’s also easier to use. The introduction of its drag-and-drop newsletter editor in 2017 and the creation of readymade automation hacks put email marketing power tools into the hands of all marketers and they’ve kept building from there.

Today, Moosend’s client list includes many of the world’s biggest brands, publishers and agency groups.

The Product

How we tested Moosend for this review

Moosend looked like it could help my goal to reach 10,000 subscribers in 2021 and they reached out to offer me a free account.

I first heard of it not long after installing Sumo for subscription pop-ups and trying Mailchimp’s landing page on Surges. I was looking to streamline my marketing stack and lessen the site’s load times as I’m always wary of annoying visitors with too many plugins and sending irrelevant emails.

With its comprehensive features and oven-ready templates, Moosend looked a good shout. However, could it improve Surges’ 2.09% conversion rate to newsletter subscribers?

I asked Moosend for most suitable template for growing a subscriber list. Turns out they have a few just for that purpose. There’s also one pagers for lead generation, app downloads, online courses, restaurants, webinars, coming soon teasers, and lots more. Or you can use their drag & drop builder to create your own.


Getting started with Moosend

The Moosend Academy is a 30-minute crash course in how to get the most out of the platform.

With so many features under the hood it’s definitely time well spent!

The first step is setting up your mailing list and the basics there of e.g. any custom fields, whether single or double opt-ins, segments, etc. Import your subscribers is super easy, as is automating a personalised welcome email for new subscribers to your mailing list. There’s a good selection of templates to choose from, plus this step will expose you to the many automation ‘recipes’ Moosend has premade for you, such as special offer reminders, upselling, drip emails and repeat purchase emails. It’s definitely worth familiarising yourself with these automation possibilities first as it’s arguably Moosend’s strongest feature and will help you to get the most out of the platform.

With the email basics mastered, you’ll want connect your website to Moosend to find out who’s doing what and how you respond with a relevant email. Customers of WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento can take advantage of the Moosend plugin for faster setup and start relating users to actions in no time.

I need to give a shout out to Moosend’s excellent drag & drop email builder here too. There’s over 50 templates to choose from for every conceivable industry and campaign.

Moosend templates review

Despite these many features, I found Moosend far easier to navigate than Mailchimp and ultimately achieve what you want to.

Moosend features you’ll love

  • 🗣️ Personalised recommendations – ‘Amazon-ise’ your startup

    With Moosend, there’s no need to send discounts or product recommendations indiscriminately.

    Protect your margin and boost your conversion with emails triggered by actual user actions. For example, marketers using Moosend can:

    • Develop customer segments based on detailed criteria, such as recent engagement, product purchases, cart size, campaign clicks, and more!
    • Rank customers and prospects by their current and future value
    • Assign positive or negative scores with every action taken
    • Sell similar products to one’s viewed or bought previously
    • Match products to real-time weather data in their location
    • Notify customers when it’s time to restock their favourite product
    • Cart abandonment emails triggered every time items are left in the

    Moosend’s website tracker, forms and granular email data ensures that as user’s behaviour changes, so too their segment. A clever use of this functionality is to predetermine what constitutes a VIP customer or warrants a special discount code, so you can reward them for their loyalty.

  • 📇 Data capture popups – grow that list

    “Subscribe now”, “Buy this”, “Save –%” – Moosend offers a number of quick fixes for growing your newsletter and recapturing lost sales.

    I’m a big fan of SUMO’s freemium product for putting data capture at the heart of the visitor experience and its ease of use. Moosend’s formats are almost identical: Floating bars and boxes; inline forms; full pages; and inline forms. And you can set them to appear according to the same parameters: dwell time; exit intent; page scrolls. The 7 data capture templates are all eye-catching enough and everything you see can be customised.

    2Form templates image

    There’s really no surprises here. The subscription forms perform as you’d hope and feed seamlessly into Moosend’s core product, labelling and reacting to each new visitor added to your lists.

  • 🔚 Landing pages – Make every visit count

    Sending blanket emails is no longer enough. The same is true of landing pages.

    Moosend offers a fast way to publish landing pages tailored to your objectives and those of your visitors. Its templates give you a jump start and are easy to make your own. Everything on the page is customisable – fonts, images, colours, positioning, size, you name it.

    Moosend has an okay selection of landing page features. There’s countdown timers, follow and share buttons, built-in forms and an image/GIF feed direct from Unsplash, Giphy or Instagram.

    Moosend & Unsplash   review

    You can also edit social cards and page titles and meta descriptions for SEO. I was particularly fond of ‘Page versioning’ feature, which keeps a history of all your changes to the page. If, like me, you can be a bit too eager with the edits you can revert to a previous version. WordPress users will also be pleased to hear there’s a simple plugin to get your landing page live in record time.

    Moosend’s landing page features are certainly lighter on the ground than Unbounce, however there’s generally an integration for anything missing. The only exception is AI optimisation, arguably Unbounce’s USP as the landing page king. Moosend trumps Mailchimp on landing pages in my opinion. Although the templates aren’t as beautiful, they are significantly easier to work with.

    Don’t forget to set the message form fillers should receive after subscribing.

  • Automated workflows – send while you sleep

    Save yourself a mountain of manual work with Moosend’s good-to-go workflow templates or drag-and-drop your own.

    If you can think it, there’s probably a Moosend recipe for it. Alternatively, if you’re feeling kind, you can setup and share your own for others to adopt. Examples of existing recipes include:

    • Greet subscribers a welcome email
    • Entice visitors with a free lead magnet
    • Assign points to different actions to rate leads
    • Reminder emails sent in regular intervals
    • Wishing customers a happy birthday with discount
    • Recover abandoned carts and cold subscribers
    Moosend automated workflows recipes   review

    The Moosend automation library is only going to grow and you control the precise mechanics, whether it’s the trigger, filters, delays and actions. Once an automation is live you can see how it’s performing and tweak accordingly.

  • 🛒 Annotated Gmail emails– finger-stopping offers

    We’ve talked about saving abandoned carts and recommendations that fit like a glove. Another great Moosend feature is shoppable products that can be drag-and-dropped direct into your emails.

    Top tip: Gmail’s promotions tab has ability to display extra info into the preview pane of your email to catch the eye and convert. Add these annotations directly from Moosend e.g. discount codes, special offers, expiration dates and more.

  • 📥 RSS email campaigns – digests on autopilot

    Moosend lets you test a small number of variables before rolling out the winning version to your full list. Split test different versions of the:

    • Subject Line
    • Campaign Content
    • Campaign Sender Name

    You decide how big your test groups are and on what basis a version will be judged the winner – unique opens or unique clicks.

Things to consider

  • Integrations for everything else

    Moosend gets even more powerful when connecting it to your full marketing stack.

    Hook it up to your ecommerce platform for even smarter product recommendations, your CRM to turn hot leads into customers, address books and event booking sites to pull in more contacts and validation apps to double-check your list’s health.

    The usual suspects work with Moosend, including MailChimp, Zapier, WordPress, Evenbrite, SurveyMonkey, Segment, Neverbounce, Unbounce and Zendesk.

    More technically-savvy marketers can tap into the Moosend API to automatically perform all the main tasks in Moosend, be that adding subscribers and updating their vital info, managing segments or creating campaigns.

    Having all your customer data in one place is the secret to building highly relevant and more effective email marketing campaigns.

  • Visual dashboards and granular data

    Is your email marketing strategy going to plan? Chart performance at a list, campaign and subscriber level on a single screen. Moosend’s visual, interactive dashboard tracks all the key campaign metrics, such as recipients, opens, clicks, bounce rates, forwards and unsubscribes. The links view is helpfully brought to life via a click heatmap, making it easier to interrogate the results and see what other elements in the email contributed to its success.

    Moosend landing page builder review

    All this can be easily shared with a link or downloaded for closer inspection.

  • A/B testing – test and win

    Moosend lets you test a small number of variables before rolling out the winning version to your full list. Split test different versions of the:

    • Subject Line
    • Campaign Content
    • Campaign Sender Name

    You decide how big your test groups are and on what basis a version will be judged the winner – unique opens or unique clicks.

Moosend Pricing & Offers

from $10 per month

Full selection of forms and pop-ups, templates and workflow recipes.

Moosends’s free plans get you access to its full selection of forms and pop-ups, templates, workflow automation, analytics and integrations. Plus, unlimited sends on a small number of subscribers.

So, how do the paid plans compare?

Upgrade once you start getting subscribers and for transactional emails, landing pages and advanced customisation. Moosend’s is very cheap as it’s still challenging its more established rivals, so I’d advise getting in now to lock in these prices. Upgrading costs $8 and upwards, with a subscription base of 20,000 costing $100 per month.

That’s about half the price of Mailchimp, however you can also manage social posting and ads with Freddie the chimp. Unless you’re firing off daily newsletters you won’t be too concerned by Mailchimp’s monthly send limit of 10 times your contact count, versus the flat free Moosend charges for unlimited sends.


Moosend Alternatives

Moosend’s closest peers include Mailchimp, SUMO, Unbounce, Campaign Monitor and SendGrid.

Many of those are highly accomplished platforms with years and millions of dollars of funding on Moosend. However, that comes at a price – twice the price to be exact in Mailchimp’s and Campaign Monitor’s cases.

All the features are just a little more polished in Mailchimp, however the UI can be a little confusing with so many options and the templates hard to mould to your exact wishes. Campaign Monitor probably has the edge on visual workflow building, however it’s a close call and Moosend is a great blend of them all.

Moosend Support   👍  or   👎

forms and workflows a breeze to use. However, should you run into any difficulties, you’re not going to be fobbed off with its knowledge base. Every plan, including the free one, comes with email and chat support so help is never far away.

Enterprise plans jump you up the support queue and come with on-boarding and migration, and deliverability and strategy optimisation advice.

Praise goes to some of Moosend’s free tools too. For example, the Moosend Subject Line tester ‘Refine’ predicts how your subject line will perform against industry benchmarks and give actionable tips for improving your open rate. Everyone loves a freebie!

The Verdict

Surges score

78%

Long story short: Moosend does a great job catering to anybody looking to automate their email marketing and get even closer to customers.

There’s always a risk of annoying subscribers when ramping up your emails. Becoming less relevant and cluttering their already busy inboxes. Not so with Moosend.

The comprehensive email marketing toolkit has everything you need to capture early interest and welcome them to your brand, track and react to user actions, and automate the lot. Moosend’s templates and drag-and-drop editors speed up the whole process, so you can tick off a handful of email marketing essentials off in a matter of hours.

Design-wise, Moosend’s newsletters, forms and landing pages need some work, however they’re very easy to make your own.

No one-stop-shop for email marketing is complete without ecommerce features. Moosend can help you to recover abandoned carts, send shoppable emails, annotate promotional emails in Gmail and upgrade your most loyal customers to VIP status.

Despite investing the time in some Mailchimp templates and automation for Surges, I’m seriously considering making the switch to Moosend. I’ve got lofty ambitions for the newsletter and as subscriber numbers grow the cost won’t get out of control, unlike other providers. Plus with newsletters, email automation and subscription pop-ups in one, it means I can further cut the third-party code on the website.

So, in summary, Moosend caught be off guard, in a good way. Its readymade templates and drag-and-drop builders mean I can plug some big gaps in my email marketing game, with very little effort or outlay. Definitely a strong contender for anybody wanting to do the same.

New window Visit Website


Make marketing tools your superpower

  • Giveaways
  • Sneak peeks
  • Discount codes
open in new window Surges Surges