Omnisend Review 2025: the best ecom email marketing tool?

Paul Newham 12 December 2024

Omnisend is a popular email marketing platform among small and midsize ecommerce stores. Shopify users love it. Its strengths include quick and easy integration with major ecommerce platforms. And an intuitive, user-friendly interface. But it’s also packed with advanced tools designed to help online retailers grow. All of this is wrapped up in affordable plans and backed up by great support.

For this review, I signed up to Omnisend with a fresh account, connected our test Shopify store, and put it through its paces. Drawing on my experience using and reviewing 20+ email marketing services, this is what I made of it.

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Omnisend Core Features

• Drag and drop email editor. Omnisend’s email builder is packed with tools and is easy to use. Importing product listings from a web store is simple.
• Templates: Comes with 350+ professional quality email templates, mostly geared toward product promotions. You can set up templates with your own branding.
• Automation: Omnisend’s automation tools have conditions, actions, and ecommerce workflow templates for targeting and driving conversions.
• Contact Segmentation: Includes highly flexible, precise segmentation with a Customer Lifecycle Map feature.
• Ecommerce Features: Omnisend connects to your web store. You can use all the ecommerce data, pick products, include product recommendations and a nifty customer product reviews for Shopify right within Omnisend. 
• SMS and push messaging: Omnisend campaigns can be fully omnichannel,  creating SMS messages and push notifications inside the platform.

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Omnisend Pros and Cons

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Is Omnisend for you?

Recommended if:

• You have an ecommerce store. Omnisend is 100% ecommerce focused and has great features for ecommerce senders. It’s not just set up to work smoothly with your online store. All the tools are geared towards driving sales for ecommerce senders. Some general-purpose platforms can be mixed.
  
• You are about to start your online store. Everybody has to start somewhere. With Omnisends free tier you can start promoting your store at no cost. You get 24/7 live chat and email support even on the free plan. That’s very reassuring when you’re finding your feet with ecommerce email marketing.
  
• You want to drive more sales from email marketing. If you‘re not satisfied with the impact you’re getting from general-purpose email marketing or platforms like Mailchimp, try Omnisend. Promotional drip campaigns, retargeting automations, product recommendations. To detailed customer tracking and precise segmentation for targeting.

Not recommended if:

• You don’t have an ecommerce store. And no plans to launch one. Without the ecommerce integration, you lose a lot of what makes Omnisend stand out. 
• You only want to send a simple newsletter. If you are planning to send only one newsletter to everyone and smaller volumes there are cheaper and simpler tools for you.

Omnisend Review Rating: how does it perform?

Email templates	350+ professional quality email templates ready for mobile. You can set up these templates with your own company branding in one go. Most are ecommerce promotion-focused, which makes sense.
Creating & sending newsletters	Omnisend’s email builder is easy to use. Premade layouts work well, although the navigation takes a little getting used to at first. Has an AI content assistant for writing. Great for pulling product listings directly from your web store. And the best feature is dynamic product recommendations.
Ecommerce Marketing Automation	The workflow builder makes building advanced automations simple. It has 37 workflow templates and you can add conditions to automations. It’d be cool to see more pre-built workflow templates.
SMS & Push Messaging	Add SMS to multi-channel workflows or send standalone SMS campaigns. You can personalize text messages. We love that the Pro package has almost 4K SMS credits. MMS is available for the US and Canada.
Reviews for Shopify	You can add product reviews to a Shopify store in a few clicks. Comes with pre-made email workflows that automate review requests. Great extra and directly integrated, so you don’t need an extra app for reviews.
Getting new leads	We like the selection of form templates and the user-friendly form builder. You can build multi-step forms and add gamified incentives like spin-the-wheel to increase conversions.
Managing contacts	Targeting is a real strength. Use the segment builder, behaviour tracking, sales data and tagging to make it very powerful. Customer lifecycle maps show the right customer engagement strategy per group.
Customer service	Customers are raving about the very responsive and knowledgeable customer service. 24/7 live chat and email support on all plans, including free. And we found this to be true in our own test.
Reporting & analytics	Provides clear email marketing metrics that you can also drill into. Direct sales attribution to report on revenue and sales from your marketing activities.
Integrations and API ✔️	170+ integrations including major ecommerce platforms, like Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Wix. Connecting your webshop is almost a one-click integration.

Try Omnisend here

Getting Started with Omnisend

The best way to start using Omnisend is to directly connect your online store. First, sign up for a free trial with Omnisend. It will ask what ecommerce platform you use, and you’ll get the right wizard based on that. I chose Shopify and got going. 

Clicking the “Connect to Shopify button” on the dashboard takes me to the Shopify App Store. Here I just click on “Install”.

You’ll then see a permissions page explaining the data Shopify needs to share with Omnisend. After clicking Install again, you’ll be back in Omnisend with your Shopify store connected. It takes only about 1-2 minutes.

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Email Templates in Omnisend

I want email marketing software to help me make great-looking emails. And the biggest shortcut to that is pre-made email templates. It’s like having a cheat code for graphic design.

Omnisend has 350+ professional quality templates to choose from. Not surprisingly, there’s a heavy slant towards product promotions and sales events. There could be a bit more variety. But overall the amount of choice impressed me. I like that you can search by goal, such as promoting specific products or announcing a sales event.

I’m also a big fan of the branded templates feature. Automatically pull in your company logo and brand colours directly from your website.

Creating and sending newsletters with Omnisend

I had no problems learning how to create and send email campaigns in Omnisend. All the tools are easy to find. There are 4 options under Campaigns > Create Campaign. Email, Email A/B Test, SMS and Push Notification.

Clicking Create email takes me to the Email Settings page. This is an important step as it’s where you set the subject line for your campaign.

You can personalize the subject line with any information from a contact’s profile. Including product names and locations. There’s also an AI subject line generator (1) if you need inspiration. A feature I really like is the Inbox Preview (2). This shows you both the subject line and the preheader as your contacts will see them. It’s a reminder that adding a preheader (3) is important, too. You can also auto-post your campaign to your Facebook account (4). 

Next, I chose my template. I picked a branded newsletter template, so I already had my logo and colour scheme set. 

Using the Omnisend Email Builder

Your template opens in Omnisend’s drag-and-drop editor. I’ve used more than 30 no-code HTML email editors.

What I look for is ease of use and flexibility in 3 areas:

1. Choice of elements
2. Editing elements in the email 
3. And customizing the layout

I score Omnisend highly in the first two. I found the editor very easy to use. My design took around only 5 minutes. That’s a sign of a good template and a user-friendly editor.

I like the way the editor works. The elements are in the Library on the left. Clicking on an element shows the editing tools on to the right. It keeps everything clear and easy to navigate.

Click on any element to open the editing options. The screenshot above shows the tools for text blocks. You can use the AI generator to write or refine text.

There are a lot of options beyond the standard “first name” personalization. You can automatically add purchase details like order numbers, tracking URLs and price. This is great for transactional emails, sale follow-ups and retargeting campaigns. And you can add your own custom fields for even more personalized messaging. 

I love that Omnisend comes with built-in image editing tools. Not many email marketing platforms offer this.

Onto adding elements to your design. The Quick Add section gives you all the individual elements. So things like text boxes, images, link buttons and product listings. Then the rest of the Library is pre-formatted ‘layouts’ or groups of elements. Product Listing blocks include product image, description, price and button.

The pre-formatted layouts let you build a design quickly. For each section like pre-header, header, body and footer, there are multiple layouts per template. Which is really nice. You simply drag and drop your elements into position.

I found the Library menu itself a little awkward to navigate, because it flies over part of your email. I’d also like more freedom to customise the layouts, it’s a bit limited in that it will keep to for instance standard buttons. If you want to go all out, you’ll have to add more standard button styles. 

Adding Product Listings from your Online Store to Emails

Omnisend’s email builder is packed full of product listings and promotional tools. In the screenshot above, I dragged and dropped a product listing layout into my email. You can add products by editing these placeholders manually. You can toggle what information to display. And add images, text, prices, and links to the buttons one by one.

But this all takes time. It’s much quicker to import product details from your connected web store. You do this with the Pick products from your store button.

The button opens the product list from your connected store. You then choose the items you want to add to your email. Omnisend automatically imports all text and images. Plus a ‘buy now’ link to the product page on your web store.

A cool alternative to a straightforward product listing is the Product Recommender (1). This imports products from your store based on set criteria (2). You can pick best-selling, recently added, and most viewed products. Or include or exclude certain product categories and products. 

The Discounts element (3) automatically generates discount codes for your store. You can choose cart discounts and free shipping. Cart discounts can apply to all orders, minimum order prices, or a collection. And you can set a percentage or a fixed amount.

Create your email campaign in Omnisend for free

Save time with Ecommerce Marketing Automation

Setting up Abandoned Cart Workflows in Omnisend

When you first click on the Automation tab, you’re encouraged to get started with an Abandoned Cart and Checkout workflow. Abandoned cart emails are one of the highest-converting emails of all. 

I followed the link and was taken through a two-step activation. It’s incredibly simple. First, you can choose a discount to tempt customers back to purchase, then you choose whether you want email-only workflows or email + SMS:

This adds the workflows to your active automations. One for an abandoned cart and one for an abandoned checkout. Now you can go in and tweak them. Choosing a premade template and editing it in the editor is quick and easy.

All the integration and personalisation are already there, so once you get started this is really quick. Personally, it’s different than I am used to. I like to see my workflows as I set them up step by step, I am sure that’s just me. 

Customizing Automations with Omnisend’s Workflow Editor

On the plus side, the editor is packed full of options. And it’s pretty easy to use. Like the email editor, there’s a left-right split in what you can add to your workflows and editing workflow actions. 

You can send email, SMS, and push notifications with automations. And add actions, delays, and conditional rules. Delays can be set in minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and specific time of day. This gives you a lot of control over how and when the workflow sends a message. You can also add tags to contacts to track progress through workflows. And add dynamic content to automation emails based on contact fields.

The editing options impressed me. For example, there are 20+ triggers you can choose to start a workflow. A lot of these are related to actions in your web store. So you can target contacts and customers based on their behaviour. And you can AB test in automations. Just add an “A/B testing” action to the automation, and choose the split between the two paths in percentage.

One final thing I love about Omnisend’s workflows is the pre-built branded messages. You can go off and build emails and SMS messages from scratch for each message. But you start off with a branded template for each one. This can save you so much time over all the automations you create.

Omnisend’s Pre-Built Workflow Templates

So what about other automations? Omnisend has 33 pre-built workflow templates, covering all common automations used in ecommerce. So things like welcome emails for new subscribers. Transactional emails. And also post-purchase requests for reviews. 

I like the fact that Omnisend lets you filter workflows by goal, too. If you’re new to marketing automation, you might not know what browse abandonment is. But you know you want to recover visitors. Or get people to buy more with cross-selling.

The Customer Lifecycle Map

One outstanding feature that feeds into automation is Omnisend’s Customer Lifecycle Map. This is found in the Audience tab (1) under Customer Breakdown (2).

It uses your web store data to map out engagement levels for all your customers (3). Now you can target customers you are at risk of losing. Those who need a little nurturing. And high-value loyalists and brand champions (4).

This is more than a visual guide of engagement. Each lifecycle stage comes with recommended Retention Tactics. Including the types of workflows you can build to target each group. 

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SMS Messaging in Omnisend

As we’ve seen, Omnisend is an effective tool for Shopify text marketing, too. SMS marketing is an effective and direct way to reach mobile shoppers.

The setup process for SMS is a lot simpler than for emails. You can add an image if you are sending SMS in the US and Canada. You can create personalized messages using contact data. In automation workflows, you can also use the personalization tools to add links. For example, a link to an abandoned cart. Or to a product page you’re offering a discount on.

Beyond that, it’s simply a case of writing your message. Subscribers can opt out by clicking an unsubscribe link. US contacts can just reply STOP to unsubscribe from text messages.

Omnisend uses a credit system to cover the cost of sending SMS messages. See Omnisend Plans and Pricing for details.

Omnisend Reviews for Shopify

Omnisend’s review and star rating widgets are specially made for Shopify stores. You simply drop them into product pages in Shopify’s site builder. And set up your automation to request a review post-purchase.

These tools are found under the Reviews tab. There’s another one of Omnisend’s set-up wizards to get started. 

The wizard starts with instructions for adding the reviews widget in Shopify. You then click through to the Shopify app. When you are done, you come back to confirm the changes.

From the Omnisend wizard, the Shopify builder opens on the product page template. Omnisend’s Product reviews widget is listed under Apps. You simply drag and drop the reviews section where you want it to go on the page. It couldn’t be easier.

You can then repeat the same process to add Star ratings: 

The widgets are connected to 2 automation workflows. One sends a review request after every purchase. The other sends a thank you for every review received. Again, the fact that these are already set up makes the whole process incredibly easy. You can edit the workflows like any other automation. If you’d like to tweak when the review requests are sent, just change the delay in the automation. Or you can change the trigger to only ask for reviews for set collections or products.

Getting new leads with Omnisend

Omnisend’s lead capture features are in the Forms tab. Clicking Preview and launch form takes you straight into the form editor.

Omnisend’s form editor is very similar to the email builder. There are 14 items (1) you can add from the left-hand menu. You just drag and drop them into position. There are standard data capture fields like email and phone numbers. A preformatted legal consent element makes it easy to keep your forms GDPR-compliant. Then there are ecommerce-specific items.

Countdown timers are great for creating limited-time offers. And a wheel of fortune ‘gamifies’ lead capture with random prizes for signing up.

As you add items to your form, you can toggle between desktop and mobile views (2). This is important because you’ll get more sign-ups from mobile users these days.

The editing options impressed me. They’re listed as behaviors (3) to the left of the screen again. Seven options give you so much control over what you can do with forms. They include scheduling forms to appear at set times or for limited periods. Setting rules for when a form appears, to who and how often. And you can A/B test different forms to see which performs the best. 

Another cool feature is the option to create multi-step forms. So as shown above, you can have one form offering a 10% discount if people sign up by email. And once they fill that,  invite them to join your VIP club with their phone number. This is known to increase conversion and gives people a choice about what they want to share. And you end up with more data and opt-ins you can target in different ways.

You can set up thank you and already subscribed messages. I found this a really easy way to manage the whole sign-up process.

In the Form Library, I like that you can search form templates by goal (1). Apart from pop-up forms, you can choose from embedded, landing page and flyout templates (2). Flyouts usually appear on the side of a page and ‘fly’ off-screen once used. Alternatively, you can build a full landing page with a form. Omnisend only lets you build landing pages for lead capture. You can’t create campaign pages to direct people to.

You can also sort form templates by what Omnisend calls ‘form settings’ (3). This includes multi-step form templates, forms with wheel of fortune, and mobile-only forms.

Managing contacts in Omnisend

Omnisend’s contact management features are found under the Audience tab. Here you can view and add to your Contact list. All contacts in Omnisend get added to one master list. You then break down who you want to send a campaign to using Segments. You can also create and add Tags manually in the Audience tab. 

Segmentation in Omnisend is very simple. You have a segment builder and segments update automatically so the people in there are always up to date.

There are 30+ pre-built segment templates, all are fully customizable. And you can copy any segment to quickly start a new one. They’re a great way to get started, especially if you’re setting it up for the first time.

Here’s what the Active email subscribers template looks like in the segment builder:

What impresses me about segmenting in Omnisend is the level of flexibility and control you have. The example above has two data filters pre-set.

One for contact data.
The other for behaviour-tracking data.

And we have all the customer and purchase data from the ecommerce platform. Every grey drop-down and text box is a way to refine and customize.

You can add as many filters as you want, choose AND/OR conditions – nest them, filter by tags and set conditions for each filter. 

Minor point: Only once you save a segment, it will show the segment size and number of contacts in it. That is already good, but I have found it very handy to see estimated counts while making segments. 

Deliverability in Omnisend

Tools in the Deliverability tab check your sender domain and email addresses. These actively flag issues that could harm sender reputation and inbox deliverability. 

One important deliverability feature is found under Reports > Deliverability, you’ll find the Email List Hygiene tool. It checks your contacts for fake and inactive accounts to keep bounce rates low. 

Omnisend gives you a label based on your email list hygiene: good, fair, or poor. If you decide to clean your list or a segment, just select it and Omnisend will run the verification. When it’s over, you can automatically or manually unsubscribe poor-quality contacts.

Your sender domain and email address also get a good, fair, or poor label. If there are any issues, Omnisend will tell you the steps and help you resolve it.

The Omnisend team recommends increasing sending volumes over time for new customers. Omnisend doesn’t allow sending from email addresses that have public domains like gmail.com, yahoo.com, or outlook.com. Both of these are good practices to make sure your emails will land in boxes. High-volume senders can also get a dedicated IP for sending.

Reporting and Analytics in Omnisend

You can quickly check sales performance including revenue generated from Omnisend, total store revenue, and list growth in Dashboard » Overview.

Omnisend’s analytics features are found in the Reports tab. The ‘standard’ options are split into campaigns, automation workflows, and sign-up forms. 

Omnisend has all the analytics of the core metrics all email marketing platforms use. For emails, you can look up open rates, click rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates and spam report rates. 

Like all the best platforms, Omnisend breaks these basic metrics down into finer detail. And makes it easy to access the figures you want to see. You can look at click rates per individual link in an email. Or open rates by email client or device. Or data for each step in a workflow. Or automation metrics between the dates you choose. You can check how much revenue each campaign and automation email generates.

In Live View, you can track real-time contact activity in your store, including: viewed products, viewed pages, viewed categories, added products to cart, started checkout, and placed orders.

The advanced reporting analyzes performance by segment. Graphs show trends over time and include conversion rates.

Where Omnisend analytics really stands out is the reporting of sales and revenue data. It uses sales attribution to calculate revenue earned from marketing activity. 

You can change how sales attribution is calculated in Account Menu > Store Settings > Sales Attribution. Here, you can set the ‘order attribution window’. Or, the timeframe for a sale to be attributed to a marketing interaction. And you can set up if the orders get attributed when a contact places an order after opening an email or clicking a link in an email.

Omnisend can automatically add UTM-tags to your email links. The preset UTM campaign tags have the name and ID of your email. And will tell if the click comes from an automation or campaign email. This is clever, saving time while automatically tracking the data you’re looking for, even if you send lots of email campaigns.

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Omnisend Integrations and API

I’ve talked about how Omnisend is designed to work by connecting to your web store. It integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Wix, and WordPress.

These ecommerce platforms are among 174 integrations in the Omnisend App Store. You’ll find plenty of landing page builders, email editors, advertising networks, shipping and logistics apps, loyalty program builders, and Zapier. With the Google Ads integration, you can use the Google Customer Match feature. You can then share segments to use in Google Search, Gmail, Shopping and YouTube ads. 

Omnisend Plans and Pricing: How Much Does It Cost?

Omnisend pricing is divided into 2 paid plans, Standard and Pro. Price depends on how many contacts you have. There is also a Free plan that includes 250 contacts, 500 emails and 50 Shopify reviews, and $1 SMS credits. The email verification service costs $0.20 per 100 contacts.

The Standard plan starts at $16 for 500 contacts and 6,000 emails a month. You also get 1,000 Shopify reviews and $1 of SMS credits per month. 

The Pro plan starts at $59 for 2,500 contacts. Emails and Shopify reviews are unlimited. And you get 3,933 SMS credits per month. Compared to rival services, Omnisend is a great value. It has all the features ecommerce stores need for half the price.

See full pricing

Omnisend Customer Support

Omnisend’s customer support has 24/7 live chat and email support on all plans. Including free. It’s pretty rare to find 24/7 live chat support on any email marketing software package. It  says they have an average response time of just 4 minutes.

In our own support tests, we found this to be true. We got our first response in 2 minutes. And in our test, we pushed them with quite a complex technical issue connecting multiple test shops, which was fully solved in 6 hours, very impressive. 

Omnisend has 5000+ five-star reviews for support in the Shopify app store.

The knowledge base has 500+ articles. A big chunk of these are dedicated to third-party integrations.

Is Omnisend the right email tool for you?

So that concludes my Omnisend review. Just one final big question to cover. Is it the right email marketing platform for you?

Omnisend impresses me with its feature set, ease of use, and value for money. It’s ideal if you run a small or big ecommerce business with ambitions to grow. Its advanced targeting features and sales-focused automations will support you at every step. The free plan makes it a great option for starting and testing. And I’d especially recommend it for Shopify users.

Omnisend Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Omnisend Alternatives

Omnisend vs. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is best known as a simple email marketing platform. While Mailchimp can send emails to promote a web store. It is not focused on it and lacks functionality. Omnisend is specifically ecommerce marketing.

Omnisend is also better value, especially as your business grows. Mailchimp pricing leaps from $20 a month on its Standard plan to $350 a month on its Pro plan. Omnisend starts at $16/month. For 5000 contacts, Omnisend Standard costs $81/month while Mailchimp Standard costs $100/month. Check out our discount here to save more.

Omnisend has a detailed guide for ecommerce stores looking to make the switch from to Omnisend from Mailchimp. If you get a plan for $400/month or more, you’ll also get a dedicated account manager and migration support.

Check out the best Mailchimp alternatives here

Omnisend vs. Klaviyo

Omnisend and Klaviyo are both ecommerce email marketing services. The big difference is pricing. Omnisend is 34% cheaper. Klaviyo starts at $45 a month. This does come with more contacts and email sends than Omnisend’s cheapest tier. But you have to pay more for SMS ($60 a month). And Shopify review requests are priced separately as add-ons. With Omnisend, this is included for $16/month. For 100K contacts, Klaviyo costs $1395/month and Omnisend only costs $900/month. With our exclusive discount, you get an extra 20% off. Get a free trial and discount here.

Feature-wise, both are very similar. Klaviyo has a more user-friendly visual automation builder with more pre-built workflow templates. Omnisend is easier to use, more affordable, and has amazing support.

Find the best email marketing tools for Shopify here

Omnisend vs. ActiveCampaign

The biggest difference between Omnisend and ActiveCampaign is their automation features. Omnisend’s automation options are very good. Its workflows are flexible and strongly focused on driving sales. Its Customer Lifecycle Mapping feature analyzes engagement. And uses that to recommend targeted workflows.

But ActiveCampaign is a real automation powerhouse. It offers 900+ pre-built marketing automation workflows. And it has a powerful visual workflow editor that offers incredible flexibility. Read our full ActiveCampaign review for more details about the automation builder. You can connect ActiveCampaign to Shopify and other ecommerce platforms. And it comes with a sales CRM. Omnisend is ideal for simple, straightforward ecommerce marketing. ActiveCampaign supports more sales and marketing processes for all business sizes. Find out how much it costs in our ActiveCampaign pricing guide.

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.

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