Mailjet Review 2024: it’s low cost, but how does it perform?

Paul Newham 9 September 2024

Mailjet is a well-known email marketing software. Quite affordable and easy to use, it’s popular with SMEs and marketing teams. There is plenty to attract growing businesses, too. Especially those with developer expertise to use its API.

With Mailjet, you get unlimited contacts, a free forever plan and email validation. So is Mailjet the email marketing platform for you? Read our fully tested Mailjet review to help decide.

I’ve tested and reviewed 30+ email marketing platforms. I signed up for Mailjet’s Premium plan to see how it shapes up with the competition. 

Mailjet’s Core Features

Here are the main features I focused on:

• Drag and drop email editor: Mailjet’s email builder is simple and has an easy-to-learn interface.
• Templates: There are 70+ email templates to choose from. The designs are mostly simple and easy to customize.
• Automation: Tools are basic, just email sequences triggered by time or events. There are no workflow templates, just 4 outline ‘scenarios’.
• Contact Management: You can create as many contact properties as you like. This carries through into very flexible segmentation.
• Email validation: Mailjet’s email validation is a real USP compared to most email marketing services. 
• Other channels: There are APIs for transactional emails and SMS messages.

Get started with Mailjet for free

Mailjet Pros and Cons

Try Mailjet for free

Is Mailjet for you?

Recommended if:

• You want an affordable way to grow your email marketing. Mailjet is priced for SMEs. Unlocking all features on its Premium plan only costs $27/mo for 15K emails. Unlimited contacts mean you can keep building your lists without limits.
• You have developer expertise close to your team. Mailjet is targeted at both marketers and developers. It’s an easy, accessible tool for marketing teams. But with its API, you can unlock even more.
• High deliverability is a high priority for you. With a great sending infrastructure behind it, Mailjet has excellent deliverability credentials. It’s one of the few email marketing platforms that offers email validation. Detailed analytics make it easy to identify the cause of issues.

Not recommended if:

• You’re looking to automate your email marketing. You can automate campaign sending in Mailjet. But it’s limited to simple sequences. There are very few automation triggers. And you can’t automate anything outside email sending. 

Mailjet Rating at a glance: how does it perform?

Ease of Use		Mailjet is very easy to use. I like the simple, clear interface. And the consistency across different editors. I think some features could be easier to find.
Value for Money		Mailjet is priced very competitively. It costs only $27/month to unlock all features on the Premium plan. Unlimited contacts and multiple users per account make it great value. There is free plan to get you started.
Email Editor and Template		The email builder is easy to use. However, showing what section you are working in could be clearer. There are 70+ email templates. They’re simple and of reasonable quality. So you’ll have to bring some magic if you want to send eye-catching designs.
Email Automation		Mailjet’s automation tools are basic. You can set up simple automated email sequences and autoresponders. But there’s no visual workflow editor and no templates.
Segmentation and Contact Management		You can custom build contact properties to store any data you like about your contacts. That makes for very flexible segmentation. But it all has to be done manually.
Lead Generation		Having the same editor for forms, landing pages and emails makes life easier. All Mailjet sign-up forms are double opt-in. I’d like to see reCAPTCHA, more form and page templates, though.
Reporting and Analytics		Mailjet digs deep into performance analytics. It tracks 10 email/campaign metrics for every email sent. And breaks the data down in lots of different ways.
Functionalities		Some rival email marketing platforms come with more features than Mailjet. But it has some unique strengths. In-platform email validation is a huge plus.
Customer Service		Mailjet relies on its user guides and email support tickets on lower-cost plans. A virtual assistant helps you find what you need. It’s a shame phone and live chat support are only available to users sending 50k+ emails.

Try Mailjet for free here

Getting Started with Mailjet

Mailjet is an email system that works for marketers AND developers. As a marketer, I’d say a key USP is simplicity. I got that impression right from the sign up process. It’s very quick to get started with Mailjet. You just fill in your details and activate your account via email.

Next you’re taken straight into a Welcome Guide. I’m always a fan of these as they help you get started. And give you a chance to play around with key tools. In Mailjet, the prompts are for creating and sending a test campaign. Importing a contact list is a basic early step.

You’re also asked to add and authenticate your email domain. This is where things get a bit more technical. But email validation is important so Mailjet can quality control who uses its platform. And optional authentication using SPF/DKIM helps to protect your sender reputation and improve deliverability. 

If you want to send transactional emails, you have to set up Mailjet’s Send API or SMTP Relay. I’ll talk more about this later.

Mailjet Review: Email Marketing Platform

I found creating email marketing campaigns in Mailjet easy and the navigation very straightforward. From the Campaigns menu, you simply click the Create a campaign button. Then it’s picking a contact list and you’re ready to build.

Email templates in Mailjet

The first step in creating a campaign is picking a template.

Mailjet has 70+ email templates to choose from. That’s about a par number. I know of services that offer a lot more and a lot less. The designs are of a reasonable quality but mostly simple. The simple templates are easy to edit. There’s a good choice of newsletter templates and the rest of the designs are mostly for promotional emails, split into themes like seasonal, events and travel.

Developers can code and save their own templates in HTML. 

Setting up email campaigns

After choosing a template, you’re prompted to finish the campaign set up. The most important part here is adding a subject line. This is the first thing recipients see in their inbox. Mailjet helps you out in 2 ways:

1. Ask AI. You tell Mailjet’s generative AI tool what your campaign is about. And it suggests subject lines for you. 
2. Personalize the subject line. The Insert variable option lets you add contact details linked to an email address. The most common example is adding the recipient’s name.

This is also where you can set up A/B testing. At the top left you’ll see a box marked Version A. From here, you can create up to 10 versions of the same email. You can change anything you like. Subject lines, images, text content. You can create and test 10 completely different emails if you like. Mailjet is one of the most flexible email marketing platforms for split testing I’ve come across.

One final and critical part of the set up is adding a sender address. To do this, you have to first authenticate your email domain. You get prompted to do this the first time you click on Sender address. 

Creating and sending newsletters with Mailjet

Set up complete, it’s time to design your campaign email. I decided to test out creating a simple newsletter. All templates are fully customizable. And once you’ve finished setting up, you go straight into the drag-and-drop editor.

I found Mailjet’s email builder very intuitive to use. It’s got a very simple, uncluttered layout. You can find everything easily.

The editing tools are split into 3 menus on the far left. Elements, Layouts and Settings. 

I like how you can customize email layouts. The Standard layout containers are blank boxes divided into columns. But the Pre-built blocks take things up a level. They’re like mini-templates you drop into your design. You can choose from logos, hero content boxes, text and image combinations, product listings and more. You get elements, positioning and styling all combined and ready to customize.

Once you’ve arranged your layout blocks, it’s time to drop in your Elements. These are simply types of content. Text, images, link buttons etc. Mailjet doesn’t have a huge choice. But it covers the basics.

As for editing the content, the Mailjet editor has its pros and cons. I turned my template into the above design in just a few minutes. There’s no doubt it’s quick and easy to use. When you click on a content block, a contextual editing menu appears. Above you can see the text editing menu. Note the Ask AI and Variables again. You can get help from the gen AI tool to write your content. You can also personalize in the same way you can the subject lines.

But I also found some of the navigation clunky. It’s not always easy to see which element or container block you are clicking on. Sometimes sections remain highlighted while menus for others are displayed. 

I also only stumbled across the dynamic content feature shown above by accident. For this, you have to click outside the main content blocks. It’s a great tool for advanced personalization. It means you can set conditions for when certain sections of content appear. And that means you can change them up for different audiences. I’d love to see dynamic content flagged up a bit better!

Finally, the Settings tools set design styles for the whole template. You can choose from 21 different languages. You can set background colours, default container sizes, and edit pre-set text styles. Page design locking is useful for multi-user collaboration in teams. It lets you set permissions on who can edit a template.

Create an email campaign in Mailjet for free

Managing contacts in Mailjet

Mailjet packs a lot in the Contacts tab. I’ll come to the Form Builder and Validations later. First, I wanted to explore how you add existing contacts to Mailjet. And then how you manage and use contact data. 

Creating contact lists and adding existing contacts is very easy. You can import .csv or .txt files directly. One slightly strange thing is that Mailjet only data matches email addresses automatically. All other contact field data gets flagged as ‘unmatched’. You have to create fields like First Name, Last Name, Location etc yourself. This is a lot of work for very common data.

The flip side of this is that you get complete control over contact data. On the Contact Properties page, you can create your own custom data fields. This translates into near open-ended freedom to store any contact information you like.

This has huge benefits for how you target your campaigns. The more data you have stored about your contacts, the more precise your segments can be. Mailjet doesn’t just let you segment by an open-ended number of contact properties. You can also filter by activity. So things like whether someone has opened an email from you. Or clicked on a campaign link in a specified timeframe.

You can stack as many and/or conditions as you like. Combined with the custom attributes, Mailjet’s segmentation is as flexible as any I’ve seen.

Don’t forget Exclusion List. Contacts added to the exclusion list are automatically blocked from receiving your emails. This is important if they unsubscribe or flag you as spam. You are potentially breaking privacy laws if you keep sending to contacts who unsubscribe.

Some email marketing software automatically adds unsubscribed contacts to an exclusion list. Mailjet only removes unsubscribed contacts from the list. You have to add them to the exclusion list manually.

Save time with Email Automation

Email automation lets you set up campaigns to send automatically. A lot of email marketing software provides templates. These help even novice users get started with marketing automation. I found Mailjet disappointing in this regard. It doesn’t really have automation templates. Just 4 ‘scenarios’ that provide a basis for building sequences around.

Welcome campaigns are one of the most common types of automated sequence. It’s a simple idea. Signing up for a newsletter or promotional emails triggers a welcome email. Or even a series of welcome emails.

Mailjet’s welcome scenario is pretty basic. You can add emails and delays between them. But the workflow editor is very basic, too. All you can do is schedule when emails are sent. Another quirk of Mailjet’s automation tools is how you add an email to a workflow. You have to build one especially using an ‘automation email template’. 

The other scenarios look and work in the same way. Just with different triggers. Dates and Anniversaries both send emails at a specified time. With dates, you can set the time yourself. Anniversaries depend on data held for each contact. 

The most useful automation scenario in Mailjet is Contact Property Updates. Again, the workflow is very basic. It’s simply about triggering an email when the specified property changes. But you can at least take advantage of the flexible contact property options. Because you can create any property you like, it means you can have any trigger you like.

The downside is contact properties can’t be updated automatically. The best marketing automation tools let you automate lots of different actions. Things like updating contact data, adding contacts to a segment and creating tags. Mailjet is limited to automated email sending. The one benefit of this is that it’s very simple for beginners. But it doesn’t save as much time and effort as it could do.

Setting up transactional emails with Mailjet Email API

Mailjet is the sister platform of Mailgun. There’s some crossover between the two. For example, Mailjet benefits from Mailgun’s outstanding deliverability. Another example is transactional emails.

There are two sides to transactional emails in Mailjet. You could call them the creating and sending sides. Creating a transactional email is much the same as creating a marketing campaign email. Although, once again, the tools are a little hidden. You have to go through Templates > Email Templates before you see the Transactional option.

As with marketing emails, building starts with templates. There are 20 transactional templates to choose from. Again, the designs are mostly simple. But there are templates covering most reasons for sending transactional emails. Confirmations, receipts, account updates, support ticket acknowledgement. 

The rest of the building process is the same as campaign emails. Same editor, same tools. But sending your transactional email is very different.

Transactional emails aren’t sent in bulk like email campaigns. They are sent one at a time, triggered by a particular event. But you can’t use automation workflows to set up transactional sending in Mailjet. Instead, you have to use its Send API or SMTP relay.

These are tools borrowed straight from Mailgun. The Send API is one of the best around. Its big USP is exceptional deliverability rates. You can be confident that nearly all your transactional emails will arrive safely. Mailjet backs this up with some of the most detailed performance analytics I’ve seen. So if an email doesn’t land right, you will see exactly why. Check out our full Mailgun review to find out more about its features, pros, cons, and pricing.

But there’s no escaping that Send API is a developer’s tool. Mailjet publishes all the documentation you need for setting up and working with an API. Including libraries for working with different coding languages. But you have to know what you’re doing with code.

Validating Emails with Mailjet

Mailjet’s Validations tool is in the Contacts menu. Email validation means checking that email addresses in your list work. Inactive accounts and fake addresses cause bounces and hurt your deliverability rates. So being able to weed them out is a big strength of Mailjet. A lot of email marketing platforms don’t offer any sort of email validation.

Mailjet’s email validation is easy to use. You can run checks on existing lists in your account. Or upload new addresses, either individually or in bulk. The results are straightforward. A dashboard shows how many addresses in your list are deliverable, undeliverable, disposable or unknown. Disposable accounts are temporary email addresses that will bounce once they expire. 

There’s no breakdown of why addresses are undeliverable. And you have to download a csv. file to get a breakdown address by address. This adds a step in removing unwanted addresses from your lists.

Try Mailjet for free here

Getting new leads with Mailjet

The last section in the Contacts menu I want to talk about is the Form Builder. I can understand why Mailjet has its form builder in its Contacts section. But it feels a little hidden here to me. It’s a key email marketing tool.

Form design starts with choosing a template. Mailjet only has 8 form templates, so again the choice isn’t huge. But there are some nice, tasteful designs. They range from basic newsletter sign-ups to discounts and digital products like ebooks.

I love the fact that the form builder is identical to the email builder. A lot of email marketing platforms end up with different editor interfaces for emails, forms and landing pages. I find it helpful when they are all the same. You get familiar with how they work so much quicker.

The big strength of the form builder is how easy it is to use. You just drop the elements you want into position. You can choose from 8 different field types in Mailjet. These include pre-formatted fields for phone numbers, dates and web URLs. For every field type, you are prompted to add a contact property. To map the data into your contact list correctly.

Mailjet has a standalone Pages section with all its landing page tools. To be honest, they’re pretty basic. For a start, there are just 3 layout templates to choose from. I’d like to see more fully designed templates to help people along.

I like the familiarity of Mailjet’s landing page builder. Same layout, same drag-and-drop tools as the email and form builders. Even with the basic templates, you can create a decent-looking page very quickly. And although Mailjet chooses not to have landing pages and forms together, you can add a form to a page. You simply pick a form you’ve built previously and drop it in.

Reporting and Analytics in Mailjet

Mailjet’s analytics impressed me. It’s very thorough at tracking all the core email campaign performance metrics. You can break these down into 2 main sections:

• Engagement statistics: Open, click, unsubscribe and marked as spam. Some email marketing services will only focus on these.
• Deliverability statistics: Mailjet reports whether emails are delivered, blocked, and hard and soft bounces. It also records emails that are queued for sending. And re-attempted sending is logged as retrying.

This is a strong range. But what I really like is how Mailjet uses and presents this data in different ways and different places. On the main dashboard, you get an activity overview of the last 24 hours. You can pick and choose which metrics you view. And filter a list to see which addresses have bounced, which contacts have opened etc.

On the Stats page, you can view the same stats by day, week, month or up to a year. 

The My Campaigns page provides a summary of open and click rates for each campaign. Opening a sent campaign gives you a detailed performance breakdown. You can see which links in an email got the most clicks. And how your campaign performs by email provider. You can choose 10 campaigns at a time to compare.

For all of the above to work, you have to activate email tracking in your account. This is done in Account settings > Email tracking settings. 

Get started with Mailjet for free

Mailjet Integrations & API

Mailjet comes with 29+ direct integrations with third-party software. Some highlights are:

• CMS and website builders like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.
• Ecommerce platforms including WooCommerce, Prestashop, and BigCommerce.
• Marketing automation services such as Vero, Ongage, and Leadliason.
• Lead generation tools like ManyContacts, Optimonk, and Poptin.
• Text marketing software like MessageMedia.
• Integration platforms like Zapier, Cloud Elements, and Skyvia.

The WordPress integration lets you connect WordPress form builders to Mailjet. WordPress form builder plug-ins offer enormous choice. And they are the easiest way to add forms to WordPress pages. But you can still sync captured leads into your Mailjet contacts lists. And use them in campaigns.

Developers can also use the API to integrate any platform of their choice.

How Much Does Mailjet Cost? Pricing and Plans

Mailjet is great value for money. The Essential plan starts at $17 a month for 15K emails and unlimited contacts. This gives you basic campaign creation tools, but no automation or landing pages. But you do get 500 email validations a month.

The Premium plan starts at $27 a month for 15K emails. You get all advanced features for this price, including dynamic content, A/B testing and all analytics. You can also have 20 users on the same account, which makes it superb value for teams.

You can sign up for a free plan with 1,500 contacts and 6,000 emails a month. You can send a maximum of 200 emails per day. You’ll get the drag-and-drop email editor, form builder, and basic statistics.

See full pricing here

Mailjet Customer Support

Mailjet’s standard customer support focuses on guided self-help via an online knowledge base. And email tickets when you need assistance from the support team. 

There are 2 ways to access support on every page. The question mark on the top right opens a drop-down menu. Here you’ll see links to User Guides and the Support Centre for creating and managing tickets.

There’s also an AI Customer Assistant Chatbot. The bot will either direct you to relevant resources to answer your query. Or help you send a ticket if you can’t find the answer.

You get phone and live chat support on the Premium plan. But this excellent customer support is only available if you pay for 50,000 emails a month. 

Final Conclusion: Is Mailjet the right email tool for you?

Mailjet is a simple, affordable email marketing platform ideal for SMEs. Some of my highlights are unlimited contacts on all plans and email validation. I also think the quality of its analytics, high deliverability rates and flexible A/B testing make it great value. With Mailjet, you can get premium email marketing performance at bargain prices.

I’d recommend Mailjet if you’re a small business looking to grow your email marketing. But still want to keep a lid on costs. It’s especially powerful if you have developers on your team who can make use of its API. The only real letdown is automation. If pushing efficiency through marketing automation is important to you, look elsewhere.

Here’s a short recap:

Ease of Use
Value for Money
Email Editor and Template
Email Automation
Segmentation and Contact Management
Lead Generation
Reporting and Analytics
Functionalities
Customer Service
Total score

Try Mailjet for free here

Mailjet Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Mailjet Alternatives

Mailjet vs. MailerLite

MailerLite is arguably Mailjet’s most direct competitor. Both prioritise affordability and ease of use. MailerLite edges both. Paid plans start at $9 a month versus $15 for Mailjet. But with MailerLite, you get unlimited emails compared to Mailjet’s unlimited contacts. So you have to work out what means best value to you. MailerLite’s free plan is also more generous, offering double the number of free emails. Check out our full MailerLite review and pricing guide to compare them.

MailerLite has better email marketing automation and more integrations. With Mailjet, you get built-in email validation for protecting sender reputation and more advanced analytics.

Mailjet vs. GetResponse

Mailjet is great if you want to grow your email marketing affordably. GetResponse is the better choice if you want to grow beyond email marketing. It has 3 pricing plans. The cheapest focuses on the basics of email marketing. The middle tier adds marketing automation. The top tier focuses on advanced ecommerce marketing. And leans heavily into supporting sales and revenue generation.

GetResponse’s cheapest tier is the most similar to Mailjet. Both combine campaign-building with straightforward lead generation and basic automation. GetResponse is cheaper to get started with. But with Mailjet you get unlimited contacts. GetResponse has more integrations and 24/7 live chat support. Mailjet wins on analytics, email validation and transactional emails. The latter isn’t available until GetResponse’s most expensive plan. Find out more in our full GetResponse review and pricing guide.

Mailjet vs. ActiveCampaign

One of Mailjet’s main weaknesses is its basic automation. If automating your email campaigns matters to you, ActiveCampaign is an obvious alternative. It’s arguably the best marketing automation platform for SMEs out there. Its excellent workflow editor combines intuitive use with sophisticated features. And it comes with 900+ automation templates to get started with. Learn more in our full ActiveCampaign review and pricing guide.

Like Mailjet, ActiveCampaign starts at $15 a month. But you pay more as your contact list grows. You also have to go up through the tiers to unlock the premium automation features. Mailjet is a better value for the basics of creating and sending email campaigns. It also has a free tier, which ActiveCampaign doesn’t. 

About Paul Newham

Paul Newham is a content writer specialising in business blogging, report writing, software reviews, and online copywriting. He has 5+ years of email marketing, marketing automation and software review experience. He tested over 60 business software including email marketing tools, CRMs, outreach services, SMTP providers, email verification, and AI writing tools.
With a background in journalism and PR, he understands business content from both sides. And knows what makes for great, engaging copy, but also understands that for businesses, the written word is all about driving value.

• LinkedIn