Not professional level. May work for you, but…

I have used MailChimp for years and before that Constant Contact. MailPoet is significantly cheaper than both of those, and may be a good fit for you that will save you money. But it is not at those level of professionalism as those services, so be careful before you switch. I am using it, and have canceled MailChimp, however it is frustrating to use and it is more limited. I want to tell you here some things you may not have thought of and which are hard to know until you use MailPoet for a while:

1) The biggest difference is the support. MailPoet doesn’t really offer support. Technically you can email their team, but responses (yes for PAID accounts) can take many days and as is often the case with email support, it takes multiple emails to just get them to understand your issue correctly. You will not get same day support. You will not get support on weekends, period. And their support is not that great when they reply.

In short: If you are confident in yourself and your IT abilities regarding email and learning new systems, have at it. But if you need hand holding, skip MailPoet. Just skip it.

2) They have a very frustrating onboarding AND upgrading policy. When you onboard, once you get everything set up and import your first “List” (also called “Audience” in other services) you will get a message that they have to review your list and account before you can send emails. This can take days. So know that once you get signed up, you will still need days before approval, and remember, nothing happens on weekends as well.

Now you might say that is no big deal, but this also happens when you UPGRADE! They do not tell you this, but it is true. So let’s say you add some subscribers, say from an event you do on a Saturday, and it takes you over your current limit. You will need to upgrade to a higher tier. Normal stuff, all of these services price this way (for the most part). BUT, when you upgrade to a higher level MailPoet requires that you go through the approval again! We added new subscribers on a Saturday, had to upgrade. Guess what? After upgrading we were locked out of sending new emails until approved, so all weekend. We wanted to thank people THAT DAY, but had to wait until Tuesday.

This kind of stuff is not really acceptable to professional organizations, especially as it is not documented when you upgrade, but honestly even if it was. Be prepared for these surprises AND that you will not be able to contact anyone and get them fixed. If you are used to real customer service, you will not get it here and you will be frustrated. If you can deal with it, you will save money. But if not, don’t switch.

3) Unprofessional and confounding quirks. There are numerous of these. Let me give you one example: You can not name your EMAILS (called CAMPAIGNS in MailChimp). Emails you send out are named by the SUBJECT of the email, you cannot give them a custom name.

How is this a problem? Say you use segments to send nearly identical emails to 3 different groups. For example segment one is getting a coupon for 10% off, segment two 20% off and segment 3 for 30% off. So the email is exactly the same except for the text about the amount and the coupon code.

In a “normal” service you might name these something like “Winter sale 10 off”, “Winter sale 20 off”, “Winter sale 30 off”. All with the same email subject “Big savings in this email. Time is limited, shop now!” and almost the same content. So when you look at your list of emails to send you will see your three versions. Well in MailPoet you cannot do that. You will have to modify the SUBJECT of each email so they are different and they will be listed by subject. This can really be annoying and difficult if you do a lot of segmentation with nearly identical emails. And frankly it makes no sense. There is no reason MailPoet cannot easily allow you to name your emails for internal reference. It’s just dumb.

And there are numerous things like this that you will encounter where you will say to yourself “Wait, this cannot be right…. I must be able to do XYZ.” But no. Be prepared for this.

4) AI chatbot. Yes, everyone uses these annoying ChatBots for support and as gatekeepers to their support staff nowadays, and we all hate it. MailPoet takes it a step further though. Their ChatBot will give you literally incorrect information. It will tell you things that are completely wrong. It will say you can do things that cannot be done. It will give solutions that mention fields or flows that do not exist. It is not just unhelpful, it is incorrect. Of course you can use ChatGPT or GEMINI or whatever service to ask support questions instead, and I suggest you do. I use ChatGPT and it works very well on MailPoet questions. But stupefyingly MailPoet’s own support AI does not. Also, this may give you some idea of how poor the support experience is with MailPoet.

Summary: If you can live without support, or very slow (days, perhaps weeks) support, OK. If you can deal with UI quirks that often make little sense. If you are ok doing workarounds in Segmentation or do not use segmentation. If you know what you are doing technically, at least fairly well. If you are either not spoiled by the support of more expensive services, or truly willing to live with substantially lower levels of support in exchange for substantially lower prices…… if all of this? Then “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it”. Or at least, you will save money.

Also, if you use WordPress for your site, the integration as this is a WordPress plugin is very helpful and makes a number of workflows simpler and faster. I have not commented on this as it is well documented in their marketing, and in other comments etc. As I said at the beginning, I am sticking with MailPoet despite the annoyances. But know what you are getting into! Best of luck 🙂