SendX Boosts Small Business Email Marketing with Affordable Tools That Promote Engagement

TL; DR: Email marketing has become more challenging as consumer preferences shift and email providers focus on safeguarding inboxes. SendX aims to make email marketing easier for small businesses by improving deliverability rates and providing intuitive tools and robust customer support. SendX has earned our Developers’ Choice endorsement for its award-winning support and innovative email marketing strategies.

Small businesses often find email marketing campaigns ineffective because they don’t reach consumers. That’s because getting those emails through to inboxes has become more challenging as service providers offer more strict account controls.

SendX started as a side project aimed at helping email marketers solve that deliverability problem. The company eventually generated enough revenue to launch a comprehensive product line and provide high-level support for marketers. Today, the company is a rising star in the email marketing industry — and it has much bigger goals.

“We’ve gone through multiple iterations since we launched,” said Rohan Mendiratta, a Marketer with SendX. “Right now, we’re trying to make SendX the simplest and most affordable email marketing tool out there.”

Rohan said that a handful of major players dominate the email marketing industry, but what sets SendX apart is its straightforward UI.

“When you look at our features, we help with sending very simple emails at an affordable price,” he said. “We’re focusing on simple newsletters & drip sequences, without very advanced automation workflows and other more complicated tools.”

The SendX platform emphasizes simplicity and aims for best-of-breed deliverability. Marketers can check all the standard campaign metrics through the intuitive dashboard — including email heat maps for CTA optimization. They can also access a host of responsive email templates and stock photos managed through a drag-and-drop email editor.

The company is one of the few that bills based on the size of a mailing list instead of limiting the rate of emails sent. And SendX offers an intuitive tiered structure for its customers that doesn’t charge more for special features. It provides a free trial period and a product demo so potential clients can test its functionality and backs it all up with award-winning support to help SMBs grow.

The earliest forms of email marketing included messages sent from a commercial mail server to a blind-copied list of recipients. That approach benefited simplicity, but it was also the same way spammers filled inboxes worldwide. The war against spam counted email marketing as collateral damage, but marketers adapted as trends and technology collided.

Early technical changes looked at email content, using keyword scanners to identify potential spam. Those scanners developed sophisticated algorithms, trained by users who classified messages, but they worked best on single machines. If a company changed machines or email programs, it had to start from scratch with its Bayesian filter logic. Accordingly, email marketers knew that certain subjects would be more likely to trip up a spam filter.

Later, changes worked at the server level. Email servers classified messages on the user’s behalf. Initially, the same keyword logic held, although it didn’t take long for providers to require server-to-server protocols to show that messages were legitimate. The major email providers — Google, Microsoft, Yahoo — developed a series of protocols to ensure that legitimate senders would get through, while most spam senders would fail.

Accountability for sending email marketing evolved from an individual process toward a series of companies specializing in email marketing. Thus, the major providers and the major marketing firms all spoke the same language behind the scenes. That helped content from those firms pass to consumers while other content was relegated to the spam folder.

Of course, spammers can spoof legitimacy — which is why today, email deliverability depends on a host of technologies, including reputation, authentication, infrastructure, and content. In a world where 70% of all emails are spam, a deliverability rate of 80% is considered good.

SendX started with a broader vision but narrowed its focus to deliverability when it saw the challenges in the market.

“We built our own deliverability engine,” Rohan said. “It is different from other email marketing tools because we have our own infrastructure when it comes to deliverability. We decided to focus heavily on deliverability and support.”

Sometimes consumers control how an email server sorts a message, but sometimes they don’t set a preference. For example, Google’s Gmail product sends some emails to a Promotions folder, but the rules about what gets into the inbox versus the promotions folder versus the spam folder are a tightly held secret.

In 2021, Apple announced that its Mail app would block email tracking through Mail Privacy Protection, which upends the typical way marketers assess whether an email is opened. People who opt-in to Mail Privacy Protection will block the tracking pixels that identify whether the message was opened — and the IP address that accessed the pixel.

“If somebody wants to send a lot of emails at scale, we are the right tool for them,” Rohan said. “We’re pretty good at keeping senders’ emails away from spam and landing them into the inbox.”

The recent push for consumer tech privacy hasn’t explicitly targeted email marketers. Still, the typical methods that marketers use to assess the effectiveness of email campaigns are in jeopardy as more trade practices are blocked. If a campaign returns no valuable results from Apple devices, for example, then all the standard metrics become less useful when a significant chunk of messages effectively vanish without an analytic trace.

That’s why SendX offers comprehensive customer support that works with customers to solve their issues.

“We have 24/7 support, and we take support seriously,” Rohan said. “A lot of people come to us because they are frustrated by the support and the problem-solving capabilities of our competitors.”

Email marketing has evolved significantly over the years, from mass email delivery to more sophisticated consumer technology. Today, under-the-hood protocols can verify the legitimacy of messages from source to recipient.

It’s not unusual for 20% or more of messages from a marketing campaign to never arrive at the recipient’s inbox, thanks to the aggressive policing of spam.

And the prevalence of spam has driven those changes. As spammers and email server providers dance around each other, seeking to exploit vulnerabilities, marketers must stay one step ahead. SendX offers the technical know-how and works with email providers to ensure as many messages as possible arrive in the intended inboxes.

“The major thing that we have seen is that people tend to get stuck on what they see as being too hard, or they’re not able to find agility in their workflow,” Rohan said. “So we prioritize support that’s got a strong eye.”

SendX prioritizes affordability, simplicity, and deliverability. Those attributes help form a well-rounded email marketing tool — without the complexity of excessive automation and integrations. That means SendX is ideal for small businesses and agencies with specific email marketing needs.

Now, SendX plans to pivot back to where early marketing efforts initially thrived: content.

“From a marketing standpoint, we are going heavy on the SEO side,” Rohan said. “We are planning to scale that up. And that’s something I’m personally very excited about because, as we are scaling up the SEO component, we’ll deepen our learnings about how the email marketing industry works.”