BigMailer: Email Marketing for Agencies

BigMailer is an affordable email marketing platform for agencies and makers. It was built from the ground up to facilitate the management of multiple brands and users with a single login. The platform is used and loved by digital marketing agencies, web development shops, email marketing consultants, franchises, and makers with multiple projects.

Brand and User Management

BigMailer allows their customers to manage unlimited brands at no extra cost and the brand’s dashboard is the first thing customers (with admin role) see when they log in:

The platform allows you to easily manage clients and users with relevant brand access roles. There are 3 access roles:

1. Administrator has access to everything, including billing and user management. It’s possible to have more than one administrator user on the account.
2. Brand managers have access to assets inside the brand they have access to.
3. Campaign manager has access to campaigns and templates, but not subscriber lists or brand settings.

Once a user accepts an email invitation and creates an account with BigMailer they can choose to add 2-Factor authentication to improve account security.

White Label

If you are an agency that offers managed email marketing services to your clients, you may need a platform that offers white labels for agencies and allows you to bill your clients any fees you want without disclosing what platform you use. 

With the white label option, you can host the BigMailer platform on your own domain with your logo in the header and other places like login page and notification email templates. This option is only useful to agencies who don’t want their clients to know what platform is used and requires full support for agency customers.

On the white label, the typical chat support provided by the BigMailer team is not available, and help articles are simplified to not reference some of the admin functions that are limited to white label admin users.

BigMailer’s white label option isn’t suitable for resellers because it doesn’t facilitate billing and because of limited support options and content.

Email Template Options

BigMailer customers have a choice of using:

1. Classic HTML editor allows you to import your existing templates and edit the code directly. HTML templates are hard to optimize overtime in order to make emails appear correctly across many email clients. 
2. Drag-drop editor that creates mobile-optimized templates without a need to edit any HTML code. 
3. Pre-made templates library. This option is popular with SMBs (Small Business Owners) who don’t want to spend much time on creating email templates.  

All options allow unlimited images to be stored and access to unlimited stock photos inside the drag-n-drop editor.

Another useful workflow for agencies is the ability to share a template with all the brands in the account which can be helpful 1) when sharing custom designed seasonal or promotional emails, e.g. holiday greetings or happy birthday 2) to ensure certain elements are always present.

Competitive Feature – All Email Campaign Types

Historically, many businesses have used a transactional email provider like Sendgrid and a separate platform like Mailchimp for newsletters and promotional content. This would result in increased cost and the need to synchronize data between platforms, e.g. bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes.

BigMailer supports all email campaign types – marketing/bulk, auto/drip, transactional, and RSS to email – with a simple low price based on total list size. As of August 2021, the price is $1 per 1000 contacts (unique email addresses) with a paying plan starting at $10/month minimum. 

See this comparison table with sample pricing tiers on BigMailer vs market leaders.

Branded and Customizable Unsubscribe Page

If you are in Europe and need to comply with GDPR your email consent has to be unbundled (e.g. explicit) and you may need to provide an option to manage subscription preferences.

You may also send different types of emails and prefer to let your subscribers unsubscribe from some type instead of the entire brand. BigMailer allows you to manage subscription preferences in this way, while also allowing you to add your logo and custom text to your unsubscribe page.

Chat Support 7 Days / Week

It’s not uncommon to wait 2-3 days for a response from a market leader like Sendgrid or Mailchimp as can be evident by searching their account mentions on platforms like Twitter. If email marketing is mission-critical for your business, you may want to choose a provider like BigMailer that offers support 7 days a week and a quick turnaround time.

The Setup

Unlike most platforms, BigMailer setup has a few extra steps – it currently requires customers to connect to their own Amazon SES (Amazon’s Simple Email Service) account. This setup model allows BigMailer to offer very competitive prices with exceptional ROI while taking advantage of the very high deliverability that Amazon SES offers.

BigMailer plans to offer options to connect to other services like SparkPost and Mailgun as well as an option to send emails without connecting to any other services, sometime before the end of 2021.

High Volume Sending

It’s not uncommon for high-volume senders to experience deliverability issues with providers like Yahoo and AOL, so some like to throttle email volume to improve email deliverability and engagement.  

BigMailer offers to send volume throttling for bulk campaigns where you can choose your email batch size and sending rate of 15/30/60/120 minutes.

Final Thoughts

Not sure if BigMailer is a good option for your business? Check out this comparison page for email service providers that has an easy-to-reference table with features and prices to compare. You might find it’s a good starting point in a search for your new email service vendor.

Have questions for the BigMailer team? You can find the chat option on the pricing page to have your questions answered in real-time by a live person.

Ready to try out BigMailer and see if it meets your business needs?