Choosing an email marketing platform: what to pay attention to Russian companies

Email marketing is an effective tool for attracting customers, and today there are a large number of services for mailing lists. The problem is that many of them are not suitable for Russian companies. There can be many reasons for this, so today we’ll talk about what you need to pay attention to when choosing an email marketing tool for a Russian company.

Russian language interface

Many foreign, especially American, email marketing systems, such as MailChimp, are not localized for use by Russian users. When you need to configure a complex chain of trigger messages, you also don’t feel like understanding the meaning of a menu item in English.



It is important to understand that when starting to use the American service, you should not expect localization of the interface in the future, because the Russian market in the near future will not become of any significance for developers.



But what about systems like UniSender, Sendpulse, Getresponse, Mailigen, because these products are localized? This is so, but when choosing, you need to analyze other important points - further we will focus on them.

Development Team in Russia

UniSender and SendPulse are services with Ukrainian roots, their development teams are located in Ukraine. Getresponse is a Polish product that has only a sales department in Russia; Mailigen development is located in one of the Baltic countries.



In the case of these services, you get a Russian-language interface, which is very important. However, these are all the same international companies that serve the markets of many countries at once. In practice, this means that it is difficult for them to quickly take into account all changes in norms, laws and simply preferences and tasks of business in our country.



We at DashaMail focus exclusively on the Russian market. The entire project development team is located in Russia, we are promptly introducing updates that take into account the specifics of the home market and the tasks of companies. Therefore, I would like to separately tell about our development, taking into account the specifics of Runet - for example, we still have a significant number of users using mail.ru mailboxes, the existence of which some Western services do not even know. When sending mailings using DashaMail, you can not worry about delivery to Mail.ru mailboxes, since we work closely with this mail service.



In addition, DashaMail has a special “Peoplemeter” tool for analyzing the address base of subscribers. The basis of this tool is Yandex.Audience, which helps to evaluate precisely the specific Runet audience.



Relatively recently, in response to the requests of our users, we have built in an affiliate service to check the validity of email addresses.



To help with testing mailings, for those who want a lot of tests and analytics, we launched Gestalt testing. This function uses machine learning algorithms and allows you to most thoroughly test the tests while keeping all test options to the end, but giving preference to the winning option.



And for fans of statistics and analytics, we have statistics on address databases. Some customers came precisely because they want more opportunities to analyze within the service itself. This is the dynamics of the audience, and involvement, and even a ready-made cohort analysis of discovery statistics.



Honestly, we implement many functions precisely thanks to feedback from our customers. For example, just last week they introduced the automatic reactivation of “sleeping” subscribers, a function that arose as a result of communication with one of the clients.

Compliance with the legislation of the Russian Federation

Of course, the completely Russian DashaMail service complies with Russian law, including No. 152-FZ, which in itself is not trivial for products of foreign companies.



Despite the fact that many companies neglect this paragraph, we believe that compliance with the law is necessary to avoid future adventures. After all, there will be precedents.

Company size and support quality

Large international companies with offices in several countries, as a rule, are physically unable to respond to user requests as quickly as a small startup.



The DashaMail team is many times smaller than the main competitors. And this is our plus when it comes to supporting and developing the service. We are constantly in touch with users, collect feedback and suggestions, quickly solve the emerging difficulties. The average reaction time to a ticket in a support service during business hours is no more than one minute - it is almost instantaneous, in comparison with international services. And all the answers, of course, we give in Russian.

Price

It is clear that whatever criteria are used when choosing a tool for a business, its price plays a very important role. Many inconveniences can be tolerated if they are offset by the low cost of use.



But here, for Russian corporate users, it is important who created the specific email marketing system. International companies need to pay for business development in different countries, if their main development office is in the USA or Europe, then the cost of supporting and developing the product itself is also significantly higher than in Russia.



As a result, the fact that we are located in Russia - and more precisely, in St. Petersburg - plays into our hands in terms of pricing. DashaMail is initially cheaper not only from American products like Mailhimp, but also from the main players in the Russian market UniSender, SendPulse, Sendsay, GetResponse, Mailigen.



We’ll touch on pricing in our service in more detail. Everything is transparent and clear. DashaMail's pricing depends on the size of the subscriber base at monthly rates. All functions, except the built-in affiliate email validator, are already included in the tariff. In addition, only active subscribers are taken into account (unsubscribed, inactive do not affect tariffing). Even if the subscriber is contained in several different databases, then it is counted exactly once, unlike the Getresponse service. We consider this approach reasonable and economical with respect to our users.

Conclusion

Choosing an email marketing system is an important business decision. Therefore, you need to approach it carefully. If you can be sure that the interface of the tool will be clear to you, you will always be promptly answered in Russian, and the likelihood of your requests being realized is hundreds of times higher than in the case of foreign services - this is a big plus for a Russian company.



At DashaMail, we deliberately focus on working with Russian clients from the small and medium business segment. Our development team has always been in St. Petersburg, so we are well aware of the specifics of Russian business, and are actively helping companies from Russia to develop their projects.