Smaily

Smaily sells itself as "intentionally simple email marketing & automation". It is a platform for sending newsletters and campaigns, building automated flows, collecting subscribers through landing pages and, more recently, sending transactional email, with the promise of the easiest possible tool for the email itself and apps for everything else. The site runs in English, Estonian, Finnish and Latvian, and customer comments on the home page place the support team in Estonia. The company's own figures are 50+ international partners, 20k+ satisfied customers and 200M+ letters sent per month. Its stated goal is to promote quality in email marketing, so that the word "email" evokes excitement in people's minds.

What a sender gets

The product has five parts: email marketing, the template editor, landing pages, automation and transactional emails, plus a Campaign Revenue feature and a library of apps.

Campaigns are built in the template editor, which the site describes as an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor that makes template creation "as easy as ABC". Customer quotes on the home page lean on the same point: the marketing manager of Elisa Eesti, a customer since 2015, says the drag-and-drop platform lets its editors create functional newsletters while saving time, and a product manager at EAS says anyone can start using it and become quite pro in no time. The CEO of MyLook says it gives a really clear overview of customer activity, and the CMO of Viaplay Baltics says the platform saves the team a considerable amount of time day to day.

Landing pages collect new subscribers' data, and a quote from Inchcape Motors Estonia adds that personalized questionnaires can be built quickly alongside them. Automation covers both ends of the scale; the page says you can create simple or highly complex automation and that all the tools are there.

Transactional email is the newest module, marked NEW in the menu. The site's announcement reads "Smaily Transactional email platform is ready!" and says it can be used for the most important triggered emails, such as sending invoices, order confirmations or important client notifications: messages that, in Smaily's words, customers actually want to receive.

Campaign Revenue connects email campaigns with sales results. The site says it gives deep insight into campaign performance through its latest sales integration, so you can see what a campaign earned rather than only how it was opened.

Apps and API

Smaily keeps the core tool small and pushes everything else into apps. The home page says you can connect Smaily to your website and ecommerce business to get fully automated services such as abandoned cart emails and a welcome series for new users, and describes the goal as integrating everything into one functional marketing entity. For custom work, a For Developers section holds the API documentation. A user manual with step-by-step tutorials covers the functions themselves.

Plans and pricing

The free plan is generous and plainly stated. You can send unlimited emails and use all the features for up to 2000 contacts for free, and the site says all the features are included at an affordable price. Signing up is self-service through "Get started free", and a new account gets instant access to everything the platform does. The home page gives the free allowance but no prices for larger lists. One customer quote notes that the pricing page promises "Best support in the world", and another, from the CEO of MyLook, praises the pricing as transparent.

Support and services

Human support is the feature Smaily puts first. The site says robots do not care how your campaign is doing, so real people answer your emails and chats, from quick advice to fixing template errors. The testimonials on the home page make the same case repeatedly: one customer was helped on chat at 10pm Estonian time, another thanks the team for fixing an issue at night, and a customer at Hilp says problems are solved in minutes, not hours or days, adding that the platform is constantly developed and has improved over time. Several quotes come from first-time users: one had turned the idea of email marketing over for 2-3 years, afraid it would be too hard to set up, and another describes having many questions as a new learner and always getting quick answers.

New customers can book a free personal consultation by video, which gives an overview of the platform and answers to questions, and existing customers can book a consultation too. Beyond the software, Smaily sells hands-on services:

• Strategy and consultation, with experts helping plan where your email marketing should go.
• Design, for teams that want a professionally designed email.
• HTML, for anyone who finds the code side complicated.
• Copywriting, for when you lack time or inspiration.

The learning side includes the Smaily blog, which covers practical topics such as combining push notifications with email, writing product recommendation emails, personalizing by browsing history and avoiding landing page mistakes, as well as a free e-library on email marketing, recorded webinars and a certified partner program.

Compliance

Under the heading "Always compliant", the site says Smaily holds ISO/IEC certification and follows European Union rules, and that it offers "world-class protection for both you and your subscribers". The footer links to terms of service, a privacy policy and a list of subprocessors.

Customers

The quotes on the home page come from companies such as Elisa Eesti, MyLook, EAS, ABC king, Viaplay Baltics, Hilp, Inchcape Motors Estonia and Hansab. The marketing director at ABC king describes Smaily as a reliable partner that built tailored solutions for the company over the years, and the CMO of Hansab compares switching to Smaily with getting an automatic washing machine after a lifetime of washing laundry by hand.

Who it suits

Smaily fits small and mid-sized businesses, especially those working in Estonian, Finnish or Latvian, the languages the site offers besides English, that want a straightforward newsletter tool with landing pages, automation and transactional email under one login, and that value talking to a person when something breaks. The free plan lets a company with up to 2000 contacts run the full product without paying, which suits a new online shop or a nonprofit starting a list. Teams without in-house design or copywriting skills can buy those services from the same company. The trade-off of the intentionally simple approach is that anything beyond email, such as ecommerce data or other channels, comes through apps rather than being built into the core.