SendFox, easy and affordable email marketing tool

SendFox is an email marketing tool developed by AppSumo (my favorite store for online entrepreneurs) that will allow you to easily create a newsletter for your business. 

If you want to read a detailed SendFox review, you are in the correct place!

SendFox Plans and Pricing

Usually, I like to talk about pricing at the end of the reviews, as you need to know and understand every feature that a service, application, or plugin is offering you, in order to understand the different plans and see the costs with some perspective.

But one of the most striking things about SendFox is its price since normally all email marketing platforms have a monthly payment.

But not this one.

Besides that, the differences between the free and the (unique) paid plan are few, so you can easily decide which plan is right for you.

One of the biggest limitations of the free plan is that you can only have up to 1,000 contacts on your list(s).

More than enough if you are starting out.

But if you have more contacts, or you reach that limit, you’ll need to upgrade to the Lifetime plan, which has a limit of 5,000 contacts. 

If you have more than 5,000, you can extend that limit by making unique payments of $49; each payment will give you room for another 5,000 users.

The other limitation of the free plan is the sends per month.

The Free Plan states that those are “Throttled”, and this means that the server will send around 1 email to each independent subscriber per minute.

So:

• If you have 120 subscribers, sending one campaign will take 120 min: 2 hours
• And if you have the max 1,000 subscribers, sending one campaign will take 1,200min: 20 hours.

Not good if you want to deliver your message at the same time to all your audience, but considering that you can send those emails for free, is not a bad deal.

With the lifetime deal, you’d get off course instant delivery.

Although the lifetime deal reduces SendFox branding, it still maintains a little of it, if you want to completely get rid of it, you’ll need to sign up for the “empire add-on”, which costs $18/month.

This add-on will also allow you to use an HTML editor so you can create more eye-catching newsletters.

There are more differences between the free and the lifetime plan, we will talk about them during the features section.

SendFox features

SendFox has many of the classic tools that you would find in any email marketing service.

Lists

Lists are the collection of emails of your subscribers, leads, or clients.

• Important: within the free plan, you can only create 3 lists. There is no list limit in the paid plan.

You can use them to group contacts from different projects or interests.

For example, you can have a mailing list for your blog, and additionally, you could create a waiting list for a specific product launch.

The nice thing about these lists is that they don’t add up separately to the contacts limit.

If you have the contact “john@email.com” in the “blog list”, and the same contact “john@email.com” in the “blogging course launch waiting list” list, that contact only counts in the limit as 1 contact, not as 2.

This is very good because you can segment your projects and interests without fear of exceeding the limit of contacts.

By the way, you can import your contacts from Mailchimp, Google, or a CSV file when creating or editing a list.

Contact management

The SendFox contact tab is very simple, it will allow you to see all your contacts (regardless of the list they are on), as well as their level of engagement with your emails (open, clicks…)

The contact tab also has a quick filter for checking for instance inactive subscribers, or unconfirmed ones.

Although you can add private notes to the single-person cards, for the moment you can’t add any tags to further segment users.

The only possible segmentation, as you have seen, is through lists.

Forms and Landing Pages

Although SendFox allows you to manually import contacts on your lists, you will want to use forms and landing pages to capture your subscribers info.

• Important: you can only have 1 form and 1 smart page (landing page) in the free plan. Lifetime plan offers unlimited creation of these two tools

Forms

In SendFox you can create forms that you could later on embed on your website.

The process is very simple, as you just need to define:

• Which list the users will subscribe to when filling in the form.
• The page to which they will be redirected when they sign up
• And the data you want to capture (no extra fields can be added). 

As you can see, there are not many customization options, neither at the design level, nor at the level of information you want to capture (address, phone number, gender…)

Note: these forms will be embedded into your website with an HTML code.

Smart Pages – Landing Pages

If you don’t have a website , or you want a more eye-catching design that simple forms don’t offer, you can choose the “Smart Pages” menu option, to create an email capture page inside SendFox itself (you will get an URL like SendFox.com/namecode.

The creation of this pages is pretty straight forward, as there are just 3 simple steps

• Add Content: i.e. the text of the box on the right side.
• Add Visual: the photo on the left, your logo, or the color of the button.
• Add the Form: form content, button text, data to capture, etc

Referral System

SendFox has a very curious referral system, which will help you out to grow your Newsletter effortlessly.

You can configure it from the “Referrals Campaigns” section on the top bar.

The system consists of automatically sending different prizes to users who have get X people to subscribe to your newsletter using their referral link.

This referral link appears at the end of each campaign (if you want), so it’s a fantastic way to grow your list with little effort on your side.

Automations

SendFox allows you to automate the sending of emails from its platform, but only if you are in the lifetime plan.

However, for the moment, the only existing trigger is that the user subscribes to a list.

This is enough in most cases, but if you are looking for something more specific, SendFox does not offer it.

These automations are quite linear, you can send emails one after the other (with a delay of X hours).

You can make more complex automations by clicking on the button of the label, so that when a user for example clicks on a link of the last campaign, he subscribes to another list, and ends this automation.

Campaigns

Of course, in addition to automations, with SendFox you can send single campaigns at any time and whenever you want.

Just choose the list you want to write to (in the To: field) and start creating the content.

The editor is very intuitive, as it is WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).

As you can see, SendFox is not oriented to create ultra-visible newsletters, but it is focused only on the content.

Note that from this campaign editor you will be able to:

• Add dynamic content by clicking on the person icon: to replace for example {{contact.first_name}}, by the subscriber’s name.
• Add buttons that are a little more attractive.
• Save the campaign as a draft, or leave it scheduled to be sent in the future.
• And most importantly, launch the “Email Generator” or content generator wizard. Which will allow you for example to upload your latest blog posts with just a couple of clicks, which will save you a lot of time.

SendFox, opinion and conclusion – is it worth it?

Although it may sound counter-intuitive, Sendfox’s free plan is not worth it, as it has important limitations on it (mainly, throttling the sending)

If you want to benefit from the power of email marketing without paying, there are better options, like Email Octopus.

SendFox shines on its lifetime plan, because it will allow you to save lots of money, as there are no recurring costs involved.

For instance, keeping 5,000 subscribers on Email Octopus will cost you $24 per month, but with SendFox you will only need to pay $49 once.

There are other factors to take into account though.

For instance, if you want to create more complex automation systems, then I do not recommend SendFox either, because as you have seen, it lacks for example tags, or more advanced triggers.

Although SendFox has integrations with for instance Carrd or Thrive Suite, is a less known service than others like Mailchimp, so it may not be compatible with your favorite website or plugin.