Acumbamail – Grow your e-mail list on auto pilot

Nurturing and growing your email list doesn’t have to be a manual process. With automation flows and the right tools at hand, you can build and grow your email marketing on autopilot. Today’s product showcase is Acumbamail, a software helping you growing and nurturing your email list from multiple channels. So without further Ado, let’s dive into Acumbamail and let me show you the platform. We are now inside the platform Acumbamail where we have all of our modules on the dashboard. Here we get a quick overview of our campaigns, our plan, and we have a marketing calendar over here.

The marketing calendar is great to see what campaigns you’re sending out or if something is happening on specific days. So we can see here, for instance, 31 October there is Halloween. So if we want to run an email campaign surrounding Halloween, we can easily do that and set that up in here. But we will just jump right into campaigns here, where we will set up our first email campaign because this is what Acumbamail is really about. For me, it’s about email campaigns and it’s about the automation which I will show you after.

1. Features of Acumbamail
2. Acumbamail pricing
3. Alternatives to Acumbamail
4. Future of Acumbamail
5. Pros & Cons using Acumbamail
6. My experience using Acumbamail

Features of Acumbamail

When we set up our email campaign, we can choose whether it should be a newsletter, A/B testing an autoresponder or RSS. RSS is great if you have a blog and you want to shoot out an email for every blog post that you make, or at least have the possibility to do so because the RSS feed will automatically pull in your article and create an email marketing campaign around that article. For now I will just use newsletter. I would like to be able to send a series of emails, but I will show you a workaround for that later.

Now, when we create our newsletter here, we need to give it a campaign name and a subject. On the next step here we choose who we send to. I will just choose myself and then we have to choose our templates. Either we can choose one we have already created or we can make a new template based on some of the templates already in here. You can see here they have a lot of templates.

Some of them are a bit outdated, but you can always turn them into your own style. I will take this template here called Be the Change. I will then give it a name and then I have now created the template. See now we are shown in a view where we can build out the email and this is very easy with drag and drop it’s like we know it from MailChimp. It is very similar to that.

It’s very easy to change all of the elements here, we can make a button and we can call this one sign up for our YouTube channel. Then we can easily out here change the colour if you want it to be a little bit more reddish like YouTube and then that’s it. So up here we can change to our logo if we want to, we can change the text and it’s as easy as just dragging and dropping. If you want to build rows, let’s say you want an image on the left and you want text on the right that is also possible.

Within the rows here, you just pull out the section you would like to use, and then you can up here basically just add what you want to the left and add the content to the right as well. The last settings menu point here is how the area width should be, whether the content should be centred or left aligned and some other elements you can choose here. This is how simple it is to build up an email campaign. I will now press next and the last step is basically we just have to send out this email to whomever we want to send it out to.

Of course you need consent, but this is how easy it is. Here we can see all of the steps and in the bottom here we can actually choose to send it out to the subscribers when they’re most active. This is a great feature because then there is a bigger chance for them opening the email and interacting with the email. So I will enable that one. When we have sent out the email, we will have some analysis that we can check and then we can also down here choose to resend to subscribers who don’t open but with a different email subject.

So if I enable this one, then it will send out a new email with this subject here two days after they haven’t opened the email and it will be the same email just with another subject.

So that’s a different way of A/B testing. If you didn’t choose the A/B test campaign to begin with. Now the last step is just to either schedule the campaign or send it now. I will just send it out immediately, but moving on, we have our lists and within our list we have, of course, whoever is in the list. And for each of these lists, we can build custom fields. Let’s say you want to use the text message module within Acumbamail. Then you have to add a text message field for the phone number that you can use to send out text messages. Other than that we can build forms.

If we want to build a form that people sign up for this specific list. That is also possible. When we build a form it is very simple. You start out by choosing the template you want to work on, and then you can choose different elements. So after they have submitted the form, you can show them a message here.

In order to complete your subscription, you must click in the email that we have sent to you and down at the bottom is the message for those who sign up but are already signed up. Very simple. On the next step. Here is the more exciting part because here we can actually design our form as we want it to. Often we want the form to look like our design of our website.

So it looks like it’s part of the website that you can do in here where you can change the style of the buttons, the input fields, the text on the buttons and all of the colours. I will just go with this for now and now on the last step is the integration step. Here you can add this form to your website by adding these two codes. The first one needs to be in your header and the last one here needs to be wherever you want the form to actually appear on your website.

And then the form is already integrated with Acumbamail and a specific list.

So here you can already start by gathering an email. You can of course, also use this form when we build a landing page. But now let’s move on to the automations. Automations you can use to basically automate all of your manual processes. Here will create a new automation. I will just call it YouTube video.

What we will often do is that we will get content and we will get subscribers in from multiple channels, and it’s very important they get on the right list. So let’s say that we get an email subscriber in from an external form that doesn’t have anything to do with Acumbamail. Then in here we could say that the trigger was that they were added to the list and then we had to choose what needs to happen to them when they’re adding to the list. It could be that we want to send them out an email template, maybe welcoming them to the list. What they can expect.

Another thing could be that we wanted to shoot a webhook. A webhook is more technical if you want to do anything within your system and the last one here is the text message, so you can also shoot them out a text message if you have the module and you of course, need the phone number of the list subscriber. Right now the automation flow is very simple. We don’t see so many integrations, and we really need integrations in order to get the full value of automations.

That’s what we see within Encharge and within ActiveCampaign that by having integrations, we can build even more processes and automate them, which in the end saves us a lot of time.

Now we’ll just quickly show you here the SMTP. Because per default you are using Acumbamail’s SMTP relay, but if you would like, you can also use your own SMTP, and it is very simple to set up. You basically just click on the setup button here. Then you enter your username, the server and the password and then you’re good to go, then you’re using your own SMTP, and this is good because then you do not rely on Acumbamail’s SMTP. Let’s say that Acumbamail has a customer who is spamming out emails, which means that the mail server at Acumbamail can get banned from multiple websites or email providers. This will hurt you.

So I will recommend you using your own SMTP relay if you can. Otherwise, you can, of course, use Acumbamail’s SMTP record and they do have multiple. So do not worry that much about it. Now I don’t have the text message module, so I cannot send out text messages, but I can show you the campaigns and the quick send. Because the quick send you can use if you fast want to send out a text message to someone.

It can be that you have a customer who has made an order, but you do not have a specific item in stock. Then you can fast here send them a text message, asking them if they would like a different type of item and they can just reply to it. But other than that, we can actually set up campaigns, and this is campaigns for text messages, which means that it will send out to multiple text message numbers in one go. This is where we set up the campaigns, and I’ll just choose my test campaign that I have already set up.

It is very simple. You choose who needs to be the sender, and then you write your text message. Then you can choose whether you want to schedule the campaign or just send out the text messages immediately. And then when you have written these three elements, then you just press send campaign and it will then send out the campaign to all of the numbers on the list that we have chosen in step one here, where I just chose customers. This is how simple it is to send out text messages to multiple.

But again, I would like to be able to send out a series of text messages just with the email flow.

You can do that with the automation where you basically set up a text message and then you set up a hold for two days maybe, a text message, a hold for two days and so on. So I will recommend you building a campaign like that. Now the last module is landing pages. This is a fast way to test ideas, because often when you need to build a landing page, if you’re building from scratch, it’s going to take a long time. But in here you can just choose a design to start from.

And then, of course, you can make it your own. But by having a design from the get go, it really saves you a lot of time in the end, I will just choose a design over here and we will call this one YouTube video as well. First off, we need to give some SEO description and title. If we want we can also put it as a subdomain on our own domain here in the: Configure the page domain section. For now, I’ll just keep it as it is and go to the next page where we have to design our entire landing page.

And here you can see that it’s the same view as we saw just before when it was that we built out the email templates, so it is the same view and it works the same way where you drag and drop the elements you want to use and you still have the rows up here. When you want to build the design down. If you want to change anything, you just click on it and you change it. Now this editor here can also be shown on Mobile for you to see how it looks and it is responsive per default.

It is not a full extensive landing page builder. It is made to test out ideas and build an email list. It is not meant as a landing page with full functionality with a lot of advanced animations transitions and so on. It is a bit more simple and for each element you can see over here we have some properties that we can change, of course, depending on the element that you’re clicking on. But it is very simple and you can see here on my screen.

I have to scroll a lot to build at least the desktop version. It is easier to build a mobile version, and maybe they should focus on mobile first because even more mobiles are coming, and we’re just seeing that the primary unit for websites today often is the mobile, so that could be a way that they could work around this issue they have with a lot of scrolling. But it is great to see that you can build out landing pages because it’s an easy and cheap way to test out ideas, even though if it’s not a business idea but an idea for your already current running business, you can still use a landing page and test it out.

And the way you see whether the idea will be a success or not is the amount of email subscribers you get, of course, hold it up against how many visitors you have, and then you actually have a conversion rate where you can see whether the idea is a good idea or a bad idea.

Acumbamail pricing

When we take a look at the pricing structure, you can get started for free, and you should definitely do that to test out Acumbamail to see whether it’s for you or not. And overall, with all types of software, I always recommend starting with the free plan. When we do take a step further into the paid plans, it can be confusing because there are so many modules that we can twist and turn on the amount of emails we send out and text messages. But do not worry they have a more simplified view.

If you click on the comparison model, then you can see we have only three plans we need to focus on and the amount of emails that we send out.

This is a more simple way of looking at the pricing, and this pricing is very similar to one of the alternatives ActiveCampaign, whereas Encharge the other alternative is even more simplified with two plans only.

Alternatives to Acumbamail

Now the alternative to Acumbamail is, as I just mentioned before, ActiveCampaign and Encharge. ActiveCampaign is definitely the most enterprise system within the industry of email marketing systems, whereas Encharge is a bit in the middle because with Acumbamail we can build landing pages. This we can also do within ActiveCampaign, but we cannot do it within Encharge.

However, Encharge and their entire email system is much more built out and has more extensive functionality with for instance, A/B testing. This is not yet within a ACumbamail. Hopefully it will come in the future.

Overall. When we also look at the design, Acumbamail has the potential to have a pretty design. However, it’s not so functional and often when you click around all of a sudden the page refreshes on times that we do not expect it to, so they do have some UX they need to work on compared to the alternatives.

Future of Acumbamail

When we do look into the future of Acumbamail, there are four main points that they are focused on. They are focused on adding faster Loading landing pages, which is good for SEO. Then they are working on adding more templates both for email campaigns but also for landing pages. Furthermore, they’re working on adding more languages within the platform and last, but not least, they’re adding even more integrations so we can build more extensive automation flows and automate even more processes that we do manually at the moment.

Pros & Cons using Acumbamail

Now moving on to the pros and cons of Acumbamail. Starting with the Pros, they have a text message module. They have native integrations to CMS platforms and you can use your own SMTP setup. Whereas for the cons, the UX is not as fluent. I’m missing more modern designs for both email campaigns and the landing pages, and I’m missing more options in the automation flows to build more extensive automation flows.

My experience using Acumbamail

If you’re getting started in the email game, and you’re looking for software which can help you with building and growing your email list, then Acumbamail is definitely a software for you. Overall, I will give Acumbamail three stars, but yeah, that is my review of Acumbamail. I hope that you like the video and if you did, please give it a thumbs up. If you have any questions to Acumbamail or other products you would like me to review, please leave a comment down below.

Thank you so much for watching. Let’s catch up on the next one.