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On their homepage, SendFox claims to be “the BEST solution for growing your audience.” To investigate that claim, and find out how it compares to the numerous other autoresponder services on the market, I took it for a test run and did some research on the company. The following is my SendFox review & FAQ current for 2020 and 2021.
(If you’d like to skip straight to the verdict on how good SendFox is, click here)
Getting started on SendFox
Signing up on SendFox is extremely simple, and you can get started on a free plan within a minute:
Then, you’re taken to the dashboard where you can play around with the options available in SendFox. Here I’ll go through some of them.
Creating a form with SendFox
Here’s what the create a form page looks like with SendFox (click to enlarge):
And here’s the form I generated with it. It’s certainly not going to win any awards:
That’s it. While the form creator for SendFox is very easy to use, it gives you no customization options whatsoever as far as design, and just generates a very plain HTML form that submits to a Javascript script. You’ll have to do that yourself outside of SendFox, which will probably require some CSS skills. Compare that to something like Flodesk, which generates beautiful opt-in forms (here is an example of a form I created with Flodesk). So SendFox could be better here.
‘Smart Pages’ on SendFox
SendFox Smart Pages are basically landing pages, and I like them a lot more than the forms you create with them like I showed above. Here’s what the Smart Page editor looks like:
You can see that you can at least customize the formatting with these, unlike the form builder. The ‘Visual’ tab also lets you change the page editor, the colors, and the page image. And the pages it creates actually look good. Here is the one I created, and a screenshot of the opt-in form on it:
Much better. 🙂
Contact management in SendFox
Contact management is good in SendFox. You can get a list of all the people who have subscribed to your newsletter, of course, along with all the stats you’d expect like opens and clicks. Here’s everything you get when viewing a contact on SendFox:
Automations in SendFox
What SendFox calls automations are just autoresponder sequences where your subscribers get emails sent to them automatically at certain intervals. These are good in SendFox, and one of the cool things SendFox does is actually give you automation templates to get you started. Here’s an example of an automation sequence I made:
I just entered my website name (OutwitTrade) and URL, and SendFox created this for me automatically. SendFox automatically scraped the social media accounts we use and our latest posts, and then created emails for an autoresponder sequence:
Pretty cool. You of course have full control over any automation sequence you create in SendFox, and can add as many emails as you want, to be sent at any time period you want.
Smart Campaigns in SendFox
Speaking of automations that SendFox can do and some of the cool features that are unique to it, the ability to create Smart Campaigns in SendFox impressed me the most. Here’s what you can do:
This is a very nice feature. SendFox can automatically pull the latest posts on your blog and your latest popular social media posts, and send email(s) highlighting them. If you just run an ordinary email list, you may send emails fairly regularly, but also want to have a once a week roundup email where you let your subscribers know what you’ve posted lately on your blog and social media. It’s very handy to be able to have such an email done automatically.
Email deliverability on SendFox
I am not aware of any email deliverability issues with SendFox, and it should perform the same as other autoresponder services in this regard.
My verdict on SendFox
SendFox is great if you need something simple and you’re just getting started in email marketing. That is clearly the kind of customer they’re targeting, because the focus with SendFox is making everything dead easy to do — and it is. I was impressed with the interface in SendFox and how simple and intuitive to use, and can’t imagine anyone having problems with it. It reminds me of Flodesk in this regard. The advantage of SendFox over Flodesk is its Smart Campaign feature and how easy it is to send emails that feature your latest posts and social media activity, while the disadvantage against Flodesk is it doesn’t have beautiful templates like Flodesk. But in any case, SendFox is clearly great for beginners to email marketing and it’s a very pleasant experience using it.
HOWEVER: if you need a sophisticated autoresponder service with all the bells and whistles, SendFox is almost certainly not the right autoresponder for you. Compared to some of the big dogs in the autoresponder space like Constant Contact and Mailchimp, it lacks a few features:
- Advanced A/B tracking
- More triggers for automations (such as if a user clicks a link, they get a different email later on)
- Custom fields in your opt-in forms like telephone number, address and so on
You’re also vastly restricted in how many subscribers you can add with SendFox. Take a look at the pricing page of SendFox:
If you’re going to be sending more than 70,000 emails a month, SendFox is not the right autoresponder for you (they say you have to contact them if you’re going to go above that, meaning it’s clearly not their target customer). And 70,000 emails a months isn’t as much as it may sound. If you send an email once every 3 days to your subscribers, you’d only be able to have a subscriber list of ~7,000 people (i.e. 70,000/(30/3)) at a maximum with SendFox.
Of course, if you’re just a website owner starting an email newsletter for the first time, you should stay well within SendFox’s limits.
Is SendFox good value for what it offers?
A peculiarity with SendFox that I especially appreciate is that they don’t try to bill you monthly, and instead just take a one-off payment (if you stay below 5,000 contacts and 50,000 sends per month, at least). That can save you a lot of money over the course of months or years and makes it excellent value in this regard.
If you would like to try SendFox, you can either signup on sendfox.com or check it out on AppSumo here (our referral link). AppSumo is a platform for getting software cheaper, created by the developers of SendFox themselves. Therefore, it’s worth checking it on AppSumo first to see if it’s listed there cheaper than on the website.