Mailforce

Mailforce is an email marketing platform developed in Italy for companies that send newsletters and promotional mailings (DEM, in the site's own term) to their own contact lists. The company's site calls it "la soluzione italiana progettata per inviare newsletter con controllo totale e alta deliverability" (the Italian solution designed to send newsletters with total control and high deliverability), and the homepage says the business has been sending email since 2008. It runs in the browser as a web-based service, with the interface, the templates and the support desk all in Italian. The footer describes Mailforce as a business unit of chantive-solutions.

The homepage pitches the software at "aziende di tutte le dimensioni", companies of every size, and says a campaign can be built in a few minutes without any graphic design experience. It lists the sectors it has in mind, from retail and ecommerce to manufacturing, craft businesses and associations. Its customer section names the kinds of organizations that use it: commercial, service and manufacturing companies, marketing consultants, associations and nonprofits, and public bodies.

What a sender gets

The product follows the usual four steps of an email program, and the site gives each one its own section: manage lists and contacts, design the email, send the campaign, and track the results.

Lists and contacts. The platform lets a customer manage an unlimited number of contacts and an unlimited number of lists. Inside that, the site lists signup forms, automations, segmentation and custom fields, and adds "Tutto incluso!" (all included), so none of these is sold as an add-on. Signup forms feed new subscribers into a list, segmentation lets a sender pick part of a list for a mailing, and custom fields hold the extra data a business wants to keep on each contact, which is what personalized content draws on. The homepage frames the aim as sending targeted messages, personalizing the content and making the most of the lists a business already has.

The editor. Emails are built in an editor that works from free templates or from a customer's own custom templates. For a technical user the editor also allows direct editing of the HTML and CSS, so a house design can be coded by hand rather than assembled from blocks. Before a campaign goes out, a sender can make test sends and look at a preview of the email.

Sending. The sending section is the most detailed part of the site. It promises "controllo totale" over sends and lists what that means: open and click tracking, fast sends that are certified through SPF and DKIM authentication, an antispam check, integration with Google Analytics, management of sender identities, and procedures for stopping and canceling a mailing that is already under way. The ability to halt a send in progress is a practical detail that matters to anyone who has ever spotted a wrong link after pressing the button. The homepage also says the platform handles delivery "in modo automatico e veloce", automatically and quickly, and its headline promise is automated sending of newsletters and DEM.

Reporting. A built-in reporting module shows each campaign's performance as charts and indicators: opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and an analysis of errors split into soft and hard bounces. The site presents this as the basis for deciding the next steps in a marketing plan. The Google Analytics integration carries campaign traffic into the website's own analytics beyond the email metrics.

Mailforce ReBrand. For resellers the company offers a white-label edition. ReBrand is aimed at communication and advertising agencies, marketing companies and web companies, which can resell the newsletter service to their own clients "senza alcun riferimento a Mailforce", with no reference to Mailforce anywhere. The site has a separate partnership and agencies section for this program.

Plans, pricing and data location

Mailforce's pricing model is its main point of difference, and the company explains it on its Mailchimp alternative page. The price does not depend on how many contacts sit in the database. It depends only on sending speed. In the page's words the fee is fixed: "paghi di più solo se vuoi che le tue email raggiungano più velocemente i tuoi destinatari" (you pay more only if you want your emails to reach your recipients faster). A customer can add contacts over time without having to raise the annual fee, and the page says there is only one flat price list, built on that single variable. It adds that most of its hundreds of users chose the platform for exactly this reason.

The same page gives one concrete price. The entry-level plan costs "296 euro/anno" and lets a customer load and use almost 9,500 contacts with no sending limit at all, so the customer can send 10, 15 or 20 newsletters a month. Beyond that tier the site offers a quote calculator ("Calcola il preventivo") rather than a full price table.

The homepage offers a free trial ("Prova Mailforce gratis") and invites visitors to create an account and evaluate the platform. That is a trial, not a free plan. The page describes billing as an annual fee ("canone annuale"), so a buyer should plan on a yearly subscription.

On data location the site is specific. The homepage says lists, contacts and emails are hosted on IT infrastructure located in Italy and protected at both the logical and the physical level. The Mailchimp alternative page adds that Mailforce is built in Italy and hosted on Italian servers with IP addresses from the RIPE zone, which the page calls Italian addresses. The same page raises the GDPR and says the regulation calls for personal data to be kept on European servers. The homepage says the company adheres to the main industry antispam standards and that this is what allows it to offer a high delivery rate. The site publishes its antispam rules in a dedicated section.

Support runs through a ticketing system inside the platform. The Mailchimp alternative page says tickets are answered in about two hours, in Italian, and that a customer who asks will be called back by phone by the Mailforce staff. The site also carries a customer support section, an FAQ, a blog and a news page.

As for size, the homepage uses two figures. One says "Più di 500 clienti, dal 2008", which translates as more than five hundred customers since 2008. A second passage in the customer section says "Oltre 800 aziende" (over 800 companies), spanning commercial, service and production firms, consultants, associations, nonprofits and public bodies, have chosen the platform for years.

Who it suits

Mailforce fits an Italian business that wants its email software, its support and its data to stay in Italy. A shop, a manufacturer, an association or a public body that works in Italian will find the whole product in its own language, from the interface and templates to the support tickets, and will get a person on the phone when a ticket is not enough.

The flat, speed-based fee suits a sender whose list is growing and who does not want the bill to rise with every new contact. A company with a few thousand contacts that sends a newsletter or two a week gets a known annual cost on the entry plan, which covers almost 9,500 contacts without a sending cap. Teams that write their own HTML will appreciate the direct HTML and CSS editing, and marketers who live in Google Analytics get their campaign traffic tracked there.

Agencies and web companies with several clients are the second audience. ReBrand lets them put their own name on the service and sell newsletters as part of their offer.

The limits follow from the same design. The product is built in Italian throughout, from the interface to the support desk, which makes it a tool for teams that work in Italian. Pricing is yearly, and only the entry tier is priced on the site; anyone who needs faster sending than the entry plan offers will need a quote from the calculator. The feature list centers on email campaigns and newsletters with lists, forms, segmentation and automation. For a business that wants a straightforward Italian newsletter tool with local hosting, that focus is the point.