JangoMail Conclusion

JangoMail is not user-friendly enough for the average email marketer, but they offer some valuable email marketing features for advanced internet users. JangoMail offers some very useful features, such as unlimited image hosting, list segmentation based on triggers and a scheduled auto-responder, which allows you to schedule and send emails ahead of time, based on specific actions or triggers. (MyNewsletterBuilder and AWeber are the only other email marketing providers in our reviews that offer auto-responders.) But JangoMail’s imperfect deliverability rate, limited template options and confusing online interface contributed to a lower overall score.

JangoMail: Email Creation

JangoMail’s online interface isn’t as intuitive as some other email marketing services, but it gives you several exceptional features. There isn’t a step-by-step process that walks you through the process of adding new email lists or creating new email campaigns, but you do get many of the functions and features of an exceptional email marketing service. One downside is that you cannot preview all of the templates on a single page before you select one. The only way to see them is to access the HTML Editor, which requires the installation of a Java Plug-in. JangoMail has 14 simple templates, which are more like layouts with one to three columns and do not feature images or different colors. However, you can easily customize these templates using the HTML editor, which allows you to add rows or columns, change text and background colors and switch to a different template. JangoMail’s templates do not feature the JangoMail logo at the bottom of the email. This known as “no branding,” and some email marketing providers will allow you to remove the brand logo either for free while others may charge a fee. You can also upload an unlimited number of images (max size of 300 kb) to your email template. JangoMail gives you the exceptional ability to create auto-series campaigns (or scheduled auto-responders), which means that you can schedule and send pre-written emails regularly, based on specific actions, like new sign-ups, clicks or forwards (these actions are known as “triggers”). A bonus feature is JangoMail’s Email Rendering Tool, which allows you to preview what your email will look like in popular email programs, such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, Thunderbird and Windows.

JangoMail: Contact Management

JangoMail excels at list management and segmentation but makes importing contacts from Excel rather difficult for average internet users. JangoMail makes it easy for you to view and remove unsubscribes, bounces and email address changes by listing them on separated pages, where they can be deleted from your list or edited easily. JangoMail also lets you automatically segment your email lists, allowing you to create “triggers” for opens, clicks and webpage views. You can easily create a customized website sign-up form under the Groups and Email Addresses as well. JangoMail lets you add contacts to your email list via copy & paste or import from text-based files (TXT) only. JangoMail also allows you to connect to MS Access, MS Excel, MS SQL Server and any ODBC compliant database in order to synch contact lists for your email campaigns. This is a useful and relatively complex feature, but it requires quite a bit of extra time to install and set up and is not user-friendly. Also, you are unable to connect to your database via Mozilla Firefox and must use Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher. If you manage your contact lists through Excel, we recommend using one of the other email marketing services we have tested allow you to import from Excel files and export your contact lists easily. A cool feature, however, is the ability to integrate your JangoMail interface with your Salesforce account and easily import contacts.

JangoMail: Email Deliverability

Emails sent using JangoMail had 63% deliverability rate to all major email servers that we tested. This means that our test emails were not delivered to three out of eight popular email programs. Although this result could have been influenced by a number of outside factors involving the email providers’ spam filters and requirements, it is partly based on the email marketing provider’s relationship with the major email providers and their track record. JangoMail does provide a standard spam checker, SpamAssasin™, which scores your email on its potential to be marked as spam. However, JangoMail offers no guarantees for deliverability and provides little information on spam issues. JangoMail sends messages almost instantly, which may mean that the message is not manually reviewed before being sent.

JangoMail: Analyzing Reports

JangoMail shows you all of the standard email campaign statistics, such as opens, clicks, hard bounces, soft bounces, unsubscribes, forwards and spam reports. You can view your reports numerically or graphically and also view a page that lists the statistics of all of your campaigns. You can export reports as a CSV (looks like a simple spreadsheet when opened with Excel), but these do not include graphs. JangoMail integrates with Google Analytics to provide more in-depth tracking and reporting for those who want it. JangoMail offers A/B Testing, which allows you to send split-test campaigns to see which performed better. However, like most features on JangoMail’s interface, A/B testing is difficult to locate. Also, you must have working knowledge of SQL (Structured Query Language) to be able to set this up.

JangoMail: Customer Support

JangoMail offers phone support, 24 hour email support, and a list of online tutorials and getting started guides. In addition to phone and email support, they feature a list of tutorials for “Getting Started with JangoMail,” “Basic Sending Tutorials” and “Advanced Feature Tutorials.” When we contacted their phone support, we were told that all agents are busy and were directed to use the online support form. However, we were called back within a few hours. For customers with paid accounts, they have a 24-hour support website, www.jangomail911.com, which is managed by customer support technicians. Regular customer support is available M-F 9a-6p ET.

JangoMail: Pricing

JangoMail charges a monthly fee, based on the number of emails you send per month and the number of data bytes you transfer. JangoMail requires you to sign up for a 3 month minimum service agreement. They also require a $500 setup fee, which is relatively expensive for an email marketing service. But they are currently advertising that they will waive the fee for a limited time only (before September 1, 2009). We are not sure whether the setup fee is simply part of a marketing tactic or not. The monthly fee is based on 20 KB size email messages. Additional data transfer can be purchased for $1 per 10 MB. Unused emails and/or bandwidth do not carry over to the next month. If you sign up for a free trial, you can test all of JangoMails’s email marketing features and send up to 50 emails at any time. These credits do no expire.