Userlist

What Userlist is

Userlist is an email automation platform built for SaaS companies. Its features page promises "Full-Stack Email Automation for Your Product-led Growth" and "behavior-based email to improve each stage of your SaaS funnel: acquisition, activation, retention, and referral." It sends lifecycle email, marketing email, transactional email, broadcasts and in-app messages, and its distinguishing idea is that a SaaS customer is usually a company with several users, so Userlist lets you "Onboard and engage company accounts, not just individual users."

The about page says Userlist "was started in 2017 as an alternative to enterprise email platforms," and the footer names the company as Userlist, Inc. in Atlanta, Georgia, "Helping SaaS companies with email marketing automation since 2017." The co-founders are Jane Portman (CEO) and Benedikt Deicke (CTO), and the about page lists a group of individual investors from the SaaS world plus Tiny Seed (Spring 2020).

Messages it sends

The features page describes five kinds of sending:

• Lifecycle email to "Automate onboarding, activation, and retention with perfectly timed lifecycle messages for every customer stage."
• Marketing email to "Send newsletters, announce new features, run promotional campaigns and nurture sequences."
• Transactional email for "password reset emails, activity notifications, and billing receipts."
• Broadcasts to the whole user base or a segment, for newsletters, announcements and product news.
• In-app messages sent inside the customer's web application, plus internal notifications to the customer's own team, such as sales or support.

Leads and product users live in the same account. Forms come as embedded or hosted signup forms with a form builder, lead magnet delivery through workflows, CAPTCHA protection, a double opt-in flow and custom thank-you pages. Identity resolution merges a marketing lead with the product user it later becomes.

Workflows

The visual workflow builder is the center of the product. Workflows can start on behavior triggers ("what users and companies do (or don't do) inside your product"), recurring schedules, monthly or annual anniversaries, or several triggers at once. Steps include email messages personalized with user, company and event data, in-app notifications, internal notes, property updates on a user, company or relationship ("works much better than tags"), new custom events, webhooks, and Zapier and Make actions. Advanced steps include Teleport, repeat-until cycles, production systems (a set of rules the workflow cycles through), A/B/C testing that splits a journey "in up to 5 paths," and conversion goals with custom time windows.

Company accounts and data

Company-level automation is what the testimonials praise most. Users are organized under companies, with a separate set of company segments and company-triggered workflows, and a workflow can fire when a user joins or leaves a company. The data model supports many-to-many relationships with properties for users, companies and the relationship between them. One customer on the pricing page, Christian Asche of Coveto.de, calls it "the only tool that can handle n:m relationships between users and companies."

Data arrives through the HTTP API and integration libraries for Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript and PHP; the docs add Python and integrations with Segment, RudderStack, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap, Rewardful, reCaptcha, Make and Zapier. Segment groups map onto Userlist companies. The user management side includes real-time sync, a custom dashboard, CSV import and export, filters, external segments synced from tools such as Mixpanel or Amplitude, deletion via API, and automatic pruning of inactive users.

Editor and deliverability

The email composer supports Liquid for conditional logic and dynamic content, reusable snippets, design themes, copy-and-paste images, Markdown, and previews with real user profiles. On sending, the features page lists multiple sending domains, multiple sender profiles, unlimited public or internal subscription topics, subscription preferences that let users choose topics instead of unsubscribing, and the option to reach unsubscribed users with critical messages such as security alerts. The docs include pages on GDPR, data deletion, a data processing agreement and an anti-spam policy.

Plans and pricing

Pricing is based on users, with a monthly or annual choice (the page says annual billing saves 20%). The pricing page shows prices through a slider, so the base price is not printed as text, but the comparison table is:

• Basic: marketing and lifecycle email, in-app messages, internal notifications and company accounts. 10,000 users included, $10/month for each additional 1,000 users, 20 custom properties, 20 custom events, 5 team seats, and a 60-minute roadmapping session for new accounts.
• Professional: everything in Basic plus A/B split testing, conversion goals, advanced logic controllers, outbound webhooks, advanced integrations and group training. 10,000 users included, $12/month for each additional 1,000 users, 50 custom properties, unlimited custom events and 10 team seats.
• Enterprise: custom pricing, custom message limits, custom company-level integration, done-for-you data planning, a dedicated account manager and monthly review calls.

The FAQ explains the billing: the fee uses the "high-water mark" number of users over the previous 30 days, and all stored users count, active or not. Rates drop automatically as the list grows. There is a free 14-day trial for all plans, with card details taken upfront. SaaS companies that have raised less than $500k in total funding get 50% off for the first 12 months (new accounts only).

Support and onboarding

Userlist puts its onboarding on the pricing page: a discovery demo, a 60-minute roadmapping session with a strategy expert, a data tracking plan for the developers, then segments, content, workflows and broadcasts. Content planning follows its own Atomic Emails framework, and the resources include campaign templates, planning worksheets and a consultants directory. Done-for-you services are offered for teams that want the Userlist team to do the setup. Support is by email at support@userlist.com. Customers on the pricing page say "The customer service has been top notch" and "The templates are so well thought-out. It literally saved me days compared to creating the emails from scratch." Aaron Kassover of AgentMethods says "We cut our churn by 25% in three months."

Who it suits

Userlist fits B2B SaaS teams whose customers are companies with several users, and product-led teams that track in-app behavior and want onboarding, activation and retention email built on it. Teams on Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, PHP or Python, or already sending events through Segment, will find the integration short. A newsletter writer or an online shop has little use for the account model, and because pricing counts every stored user, lists with many inactive signups need the pruning tools to keep costs down.