EmailOctopus Review 2025: Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons
EmailOctopus is a simple yet powerful email marketing service. Founded in 2014, they’re on a mission to make email marketing simple and intuitive.
The email service has over 50,000 customers and sends 19 billion-plus emails a year.
EmailOctopus is used by all kinds of small businesses, but is it the right email marketing software for you? For this EmailOctopus review, I tested the tool from start to finish, so let’s find out!
EmailOctopus review quick summary
EmailOctopus is great fit for small businesses who want easy email marketing at a low cost without too many bells and whistles.
- EmailOctopus focuses on affordable and quick email sending.
- Simple and modern drag and drop email editor with high-quality email templates.
- They have an amazing free plan: 2500 contacts and 10K emails per month.
- Beginners will like how easy it is to navigate and use the software.
- Basic automation features: welcome campaigns and drip email campaigns can be automated.
👉 If you want an email marketing service that lets you create and send a newsletter within 10 minutes, EmailOctopus is the way to go. Give it a try today.
Get started with EmailOctopus for free here
EmailOctopus’ most important features
- Drag n drop editor: Makes email creation super simple. The editor interface is fresh and easy to use.
- Email templates: Work with 34 pre-built templates to quickly design emails. The templates look modern.
- Autoresponders: Create basic automations for welcome emails and drip campaigns.
- Landing page builder: Easy to use drag and drop landing page builder comes with 5 templates.
- EmailOctopus Connect: Option to send emails via Amazon SES for lower prices.
- Customer support: Near 24/7 live chat and email support on both free and paid plans. They also have a knowledge base with useful articles and videos.
- Integrations: EmailOctopus directly integrates with 47 apps and supports Zapier.
EmailOctopus Review: sending emails
EmailOctopus makes it easy to set up your email. You’ll add email names, sender names, subject lines, preview texts, and email lists on a single page.
On the same page, you’ll decide if you want to track clicks, opens, and allow Google Analytics tracking. All these options on a single page save you a bunch of time and give a complete overview of your email settings.
When you’re happy with your settings, it’s time to choose your email template.
Email Templates in EmailOctopus
EmailOctopus offers 34 email templates to choose from. There aren’t many compared to other email marketing software, but you’ll be happy to see all templates are modern-looking and of high quality. Other email tools will offer 100s of templates but are low in quality. That’s not the case here.
The email templates cover both formats and goals.
For example, you have format emails for blogs, newsletters, and products. Then you have goal-oriented email templates like launch, engage, and review. EmailOctopus wants to make it easy to do email marketing. You’ll notice that all these email templates seem most relevant to artists and creators, but they work fine for other industries too.
EmailOctopus Email Editor
Once you’ve selected an email template. It’s time to start editing. This is where you use EmailOctopus’s drag and drop editor.
The drag and drop editor is designed with simplicity in mind. You have 7 major elements you can drag and drop onto your email. These include:
- Titles
- Text
- Images
- Videos
- Buttons
- Social buttons
- Dividers
- Custom code
In EmailOctopus, you edit the text and title elements inside the preview. This is great because you immediately see how your copy and layout looks.
Personalization is quick and easy. I clicked on “Merge tags” above the editor and it brought up this popup with the most common merge tags. I could just copy them in and that’s it.
Clicking on the “customisation cheat sheet” will take you to a help article. That shows handy things like merge tag formatting. But more importantly, it explains how to put dynamic content in your emails with conditional statements.
Here’s an example conditional statement:
{% if Age < 25 %}
Content 1
{% elseif Age < 50 %}
Content 2
{% else %}
Content 3
{% endif %}
This will display Content 1 to subscribers younger than 25. Content 2 to subscribers below 50 and Content 3 to everyone else. Make sure to fully test your email before sending if you’re using conditional statements.
EmailOctopus doesn’t have AB testing built-in. There’s a workaround to split your list then create separate emails for them. This is a lot of work to run a simple AB test. If you test lots of campaigns I’d go with a different service.
In the ‘Rows’ tab, you can select layouts with multiple columns. The ‘Settings’ tab is useful for giving your emails a consistent look and feel. You’ll decide which colors to use in text, titles, headers, etc. This is super handy if you want to give your emails consistent branding.
After your content is ready. The editor lets you review all your content, settings, and when you want to send your email.
All in all, the email editor feels smooth to use. And even if you have no experience with email marketing, you’ll grasp the tool in no time. It took me 10 minutes to create my first email.
Get started with EmailOctopus for free here
EmailOctopus Autoresponders: automating drip campaigns
EmailOctopus offers two basic automation features. Create welcome email campaigns and drip email sequences when a customer subscribes to your list. The creation process for automated email campaigns is the same as for regular emails. This makes the learning curve of EmailOctopus even shorter. You don’t have to learn a complex automation builder like in advanced marketing automation tools.
You’ll create emails for a workflow list and decide how to space them out. You can set up automated emails to go out immediately, or hours and days after a subscriber signed up.
I did speak to the EmailOctopus team and they told me they have advanced automation workflows on the way. These will allow you to use action-based conditions to get more juice out of automated campaigns.
EmailOctopus Landing Pages & Forms
Landing Pages
Creating a landing page is simple. Choose a list for your subscribers and start building your page. Currently, EmailOctopus offers 5 landing page templates.
The templates are simple-looking but serve as a good starting point for building a landing page.
Use the drag and drop editor to add titles, images, videos, dividers, social buttons, and more. In the settings tab, you’ll select your URL.
When a visitor subscribes through your landing page, show them a thank-you message or redirect them to a different page on your website.
Another useful landing page feature is the ‘SEO and analytics’ section in the settings tab. Here you decide how you want your landing page to show up in search results and social media. Add a Google tracking code or Facebook Pixel ID to study how visitors interact with your landing pages.
Opt-in forms
With EmailOctopus you can create in-line forms and popups. You’ll find 5 templates for both types of forms. Creating forms is easy compared to some other email marketing platforms. This is because you create your forms with the same drag and drop editor here too.
Simply drag elements you need to add to your forms and drop them into the editor. You’ll be able to add text, titles, images, dividers, and social icons.
In the Settings tab of the pop-up editor, you’ll find the display options. Choose when to show your form according to visitor behavior. These behaviors include the amount of time spent, amount scrolled, exit intent, and link click.
EmailOctopus List Management
EmailOctopus offers some useful features to keep your contacts organized. You can add up to 20 data fields for each contact. I found this quite easy to do. You go to your lists and click on add fields to start adding more data.
If you’re a European company or have customers in Europe, you’ll be glad to know EmailOctopus is GDPR compliant. And you can easily set up a double opt-in too. Go to your lists and select Double opt-in settings to enable it. The best part is you can design a confirmation email in seconds in the settings tab.
It’s also easy to create and manage segments. Segment based on email activity or custom data fields.
Create super precise segments by drilling down into filter groups. You can set a filter group to match all, any, or none of the filters inside it. Use filters like names, emails, sources and apply conditions like ‘belongs to’ ‘doesn’t belong to’. With these segmentation options, it’s easy to send email marketing campaigns that are precisely targeted.
Reporting and analytics
This simple email marketing tool comes equipped with useful reporting. You’ll get access to real-time email campaign reports that show a line graph of subscriber activity.
For each email, you can check opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes. Dig into more detail by seeing how an individual subscriber responds to your emails. Get a historical overview of their activity and use insights to make segments and refine your content.
Integrations: connect EmailOctopus to your favorite tools
An email marketing platform is only as good as its ability to connect and share data with other apps. And EmailOctopus has done a good job of making integrations easy and accessible. This tool directly integrates with 47 apps, including Poptin, Carrd, OptinMonster, Payhip, and Ninja Forms.
They also have Zapier, Make, and Integrately integrations which opens up the door for over 4000 other apps, including Woocommerce, Shopify, Leadpages, Airtable, and Webflow.
To add an integration, go to your account and open ‘Integrations and API’ from the drop-down menu. The native integrations are easy to set up. Most can be done in about 5-10 sets without any coding.
EmailOctopus Connect: sending emails via your own Amazon SES
There’s an option in EmailOctopus to connect it with your own Amazon SES account. This decreases the prices by a lot, especially for higher plans. As if EmailOctopus wasn’t cheap enough. Sending via Amazon SES decreases the costs for EmailOctopus and they pass those savings to you.
What’s even better is that Amazon will not charge you for the first 62,000 emails you send in a month! Even after that, you’ll pay them $0.10 for every additional 1,000 emails.
If you have some tech knowledge or someone who can help you, this is the best option.
Get started with EmailOctopus for free here
EmailOctopus Customer Support
Reach out to EmailOctopus’ customer support via chat or email. We asked the team and they said their support is near 24/7. They have an ‘instant answers’ section that lets you find answers to frequently asked questions. Their knowledge base covers the whole software and has some great videos.
They have positive reviews on Capterra (4.6) and G2 (4.1). Most customers enjoy the ease of use, the simplicity of the interface, and the support.
EmailOctopus pricing and plans
EmailOctopus has one of the best free plans of all the email marketing software out there. The free plan gives you 2.500 contacts and up to 10.000 emails a month. There will be an EmailOctopus logo on the bottom of your emails and landing pages on the free plan though.
The Pro plan starts from $24 a month with 5000 contacts and 50,000 emails. The prices are based on the subscriber count and the email limit is always 10 times the subscriber count.
For EmailOctopus Connect, consider that you’ll need to pay for Amazon SES. They will not charge you for the first 62,000 emails you send in a month. And even after that, they only charge $0.10 for every additional 1,000 emails.
| Number of subscribers | EmailOctopus | EmailOctopus Connect |
| 2500 | Free | Free |
| 5000 | $24 | $20 |
| 10000 | $36 | $26 |
| 25000 | $70 | $44 |
| 50000 | $130 | $74 |
| 100000 | $250 | $134 |
| 250000 | $550 | $254 |
Compared to other email marketing software, EmailOctopus is really cheap. Sooo much that they even have a savings calculator on their website. Input your subscriber count and how many campaigns you send a month. It will give you their price compared to other email marketing software like Mailchimp, MailerLite, AWeber, GetResponse, Constant Contact, and ConvertKit.
Looking for a sweet deal on EmailOctopus, we’ve got you covered. Get started for free today and get a 50% discount for the first 3 months 😍. Sign up via this secret link to get your EmailOctopus discount.
EmailOctopus Pros and Cons
What’s great about EmailOctopus
- One of the simplest-to-use email marketing platforms
- High-quality email templates
- Excellent free plan
- Easy list management
- Near 24/7 support on both free and paid plans
What can be better
- Automation features are limited (advanced automation is underway)
- Would love more email and landing page templates
- No AB testing option, you’ll have to send separate emails to do tests
EmailOctopus review wrap-up: Is it the right newsletter service for you?
EmailOctopus is a great tool as your first email marketing platform of choice. Or if you’re a creative person who wants to focus more on creating and less on the nitty-gritty of email marketing. Here’s how we score this tool:
Ease of Use: 4.5 / 5
Value for Money: 5 / 5
Email editor and templates: 4 / 5
Functionalities: 3.5 / 5
Email Autoresponders: 3.5 / 5
Customer service: 4 / 5
Total score: 4.1 / 5
We gave EmailOctopus a 4.1 on its strength of ease of use, good prices, modern-looking email templates, and great support.
Start using EmailOctopus today
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
How does EmailOctopus work?
EmailOctopus is easy to work with. The dashboard has a minimal design and accessing email templates is easy. Once you select an email template, you’ll edit content in the drag and drop builder. Then schedule your email to send out whenever you want. EmailOctopus also supports landing pages and forms.
Is EmailOctopus good?
It offers great value for money with its cheap pricing plans, modern email templates, and great customer service.
Does EmailOctopus accept marketing affiliate links?
Does EmailOctopus accept cryptocurrency businesses?
Does EmailOctopus have training materials?
EmailOctopus Alternatives
We’ve included some competitors in this EmailOctopus review. If you’re looking for similar email marketing services or want to see how EmailOctopus compares, here are the best alternatives.
GetResponse
GetResponse has a free plan like EmailOctopus. Although it only covers 500 contacts compared to EmailOctopus. Where GetResponse shines is with automated campaigns.
Along with drip campaigns and welcome emails, GetResponse automated campaigns include birthday emails, split automation, contact tagging, and scoring. GetResponse also offers a website builder in its suite of features.
GetResponse is expensive compared to EmailOctopus. EmailOctopus’s plans start at $24, GetResponse’s Plus plan starts at $36 a month. In the end, it comes down to how broad of a feature set you want.
Read our full GetResponse review
Mailerlite
Mailerlite is an email marketing platform that offers a free plan for 1000 contacts. Unlike EmailOctopus, you can A/B test your email marketing campaigns. They offer dedicated templates for eCommerce and offer a complete package of features.
With Mailerlite you pay as your list increases in size. It starts from $17 for 2500 contacts and goes up to $1881/month for 500,000 contacts.
If you want an all-around email marketing platform with automation and eCommerce features, but is still cheaper compared to other industry giants, Mailerlite is the way to go. If you want to stick to simple email marketing campaigns, EmailOctopus is the better and cheaper choice.
Read our full Mailerlite review
Brevo
Brevo is a powerful email marketing platform. You’ll find they have a lot more email campaign templates compared to EmailOctopus, but some of them will stick out like a sore thumb.
It’s pretty easy to build landing pages, pop-up forms, web forms, and automated campaigns. But not as easy as it is with EmailOctopus. Brevo goes the extra mile as they offer SMS marketing and Facebook ads support. With this, you can expect them to dent your pocket a bit more than EmailOctopus.
Brevo has a free plan that supports 300 emails a day. Paid plans start at $9/month for the Starter plan or $18/month for the Business plan. Your price increases with your monthly email volume.
If you want an email marketing platform that offers an all-in-one package, Brevo is a good choice. If you’re looking for the friendliest and simplest user interface, EmailOctopus is the way to go.