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Mailjet Review – A Good Service, But for Who? [2024 Update]

Paul Newham Paul Newham Email Marketing Expert

Affordable, simple to use, highly scalable – there’s a lot to like about Mailjet. But although it promotes itself as a service set up for professional marketing teams who want to run high-volume campaigns, I was underwhelmed by some of its features, especially when compared to ActiveCampaign’s high quality, feature-packed plans.

Overview

Does Mailjet Live up to Its Own Hype?

Mailjet is Europe’s leading email solution – or so claims Mailjet itself.

You always have to take these claims with a pinch of salt, so I spent some time testing out the Premium plan’s email marketing features to see for myself whether the platform lives up to its own hype.

Having taken a deep dive into everything Mailjet has to offer, my opinion is that Mailjet is a decent email marketing service with plenty of plus points…but not one of the very best out there.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not the right service for you, depending on your business needs. My in-depth review will show you the good, the bad, and the ugly side of Mailjet before you sign up, or you can look for an alternative among the other top services we’ve reviewed.

4.0

Features

A Solid Set of Core Features, But Not Much to Get Excited About

Mailjet lets you know exactly what you’re getting from the moment you sign up. And, rest assured, you’ll get all the core features you’d expect from an email marketing service – a drag-and-drop editor, templates, personalization, A/B testing, list segmentation, automation, and analytics.

The “Get Started” set up guide is also very user friendly, and walks you through pretty much everything you need to know right from the start – perfect if you’re a complete email marketing novice.

But, honestly, while I can’t fault Mailjet for how easy it is to use, I was left wanting a little more from some of its features – especially from a service which says it’s aimed at professional marketing teams.

Email Campaigns, Templates, and Personalization

Email campaigns are the bread and butter of email marketing, so it’s no surprise that Mailjet builds its service around creating, sending, and analyzing emails.

Because it’s designed as a dual service for email marketing and transactional emails, Mailjet is set up for large email volumes – and I mean large. Paid plans start at a limit of 15,000 emails per month, going all the way up to 500,000 and beyond.

Even then you don’t have to cap your activity, as you can still sign up for a Custom plan, which lets you send as many emails as you like. If you want to grow your email marketing to truly stratospheric levels, this is great news.

In terms of actually creating and running campaigns, I found Mailjet very easy to use. Even if you’ve never run an email campaign before, there’s nothing to fear here – all you need are the basic IT skills that most people use day in, day out.

To help you build your email campaigns, Mailjet has 41 pre-designed templates to choose from, plus five “blank” outline templates. The designed templates are sorted into five categories – newsletters, e-commerce, events, travel, and sports.

MailJet templates
Templates are great if, like me, you’re not the most artistically gifted person and need a bit of help getting started with your visual designs.

The templates vary in quality. The newsletter templates are pretty straightforward and functional, if a little generic – and dated. Given how important digital branding is nowadays, that might be a problem for you. Other categories are more image focused and visually appealing, although they are all pretty similar.

Mailjet reports that all templates are mobile responsive, and you can use the preview option in the editor to check how your designs look on desktop and mobile. But when I first previewed one of my early template creations, the pre-set logo on the template I’d chosen was displayed out of alignment in the mobile view.

MailJet Mobile preview
I’d like to think this alignment issue is a fault with the preview widget rather than the templates…but it’s not a great look.

Once you’ve picked your template, you can customize it using Mailjet’s email builder, Passport. Passport is a typical drag-and-drop editor, with content arranged into a series of horizontal blocks. It’s a really simple set up – you just click the type of block you want and drag it into position.

This tool is great for the flexibility it gives you with layouts. You can rearrange blocks vertically anywhere on the page, and can also choose how many columns you want each block divided into.

MailJet Passport editor layouts
The amount of flexibility you get with layouts means you’re never stuck with generic template designs you don’t really like.

In terms of the content blocks themselves, there’s not a great deal of choice, just the standard stuff like text, image, video, button, and social sharing. But there is an option to add an HTML block if you have the know-how to code your own.

Once you’ve added your block, there’s a good selection of editing options, which you access simply by clicking on your content. I particularly like the fact that you can change the letter spacing as well as the line spacing of text, which makes it very easy to ‘fill’ a space, especially horizontally, without having to change the overall font size.

MailJet Passport editor text editing options
Text editing options include all the things you’ll be familiar with from a standard word processor.

Images are just as easy to add and edit, although there’s no stock photo library, so you’ll have to source your own. To be honest, it’s not that common for email marketing services to come with a free stock image library, although AWeber gives you over 6,500 images, so if that’s important for you, you know where to go.

Once you’ve chosen your images, you can either drag and drop the files from your own computer or post external links for online images (watch out for usage rights).

Another big plus with the Passport editor is that you can personalize emails as you build them. I don’t know about you, but I’m much more likely to engage with what is obviously a mass mail-out if it at least contains my name or, even better, has something to say that’s relevant to me.

Mailjet makes this process very simple. You can personalize pretty much every single block of content in your email, which is cool – although you probably wouldn’t want to go that far.

One helpful option is that you can set conditions so certain blocks of content do or don’t appear to different people.

MailJet Passport editor conditional display
Conditional display uses list segments to only show certain content blocks to specified contacts.

You can also add variables to text blocks that alter the content based on contact properties or predefined tags. So by using contact properties, for example, you could add a variable so the recipient’s name or country appears, again making your content that little bit more personalized.

Once you’ve finished customizing your template and designing your campaign, there’s one more feature to make use of before you send your email to your contacts – testing.

Mailjet’s A/B testing options are comprehensive compared to a lot of rival email marketing services. You have to be signed up to the Premium plan to use it, but while other services might only let you A/B test one or two things (like your email subject line), Mailjet lets you customize and compare more or less anything you like. And you can test up to 10 different versions at a time.

A/B testing works by sending a sample email to a small group of your contacts, and a slightly different version to another group. The idea is to see which works best – does a certain subject line lead to more opens than others? Do you get better deliverability with more or less images?

Once you’ve run your test, you can review the results and send out the best version to your full contact list. The fact that Mailjet gives you so much freedom with your A/B testing is a real strength, especially if you want to send out really big campaigns.

Mailing Lists and Segmentation

What’s an email marketing campaign without people to send to? Contacts, subscribers – call them what you like, but they’re the lifeblood of your email marketing efforts. And the great news is, Mailjet lets you have as many as you like.

While some email marketing services cap the number of contacts you can have per plan, Mailjet lets you grow your lists as much as you’d like, even on its Free plan (although there are daily and monthly email sending limits on the Free plan).

So, first things first, how do you build those big old lists? Well, you can start off by importing existing contact lists from elsewhere.

MailJet create new contact list
Mailjet offers three ways to import existing contact lists.

The easiest way to import a contact list is via an existing spreadsheet, as this makes matching all the metadata – data fields like name, email address, age, and location – to Mailjet’s systems straightforward. Once your file is imported, Mailjet will automatically try to read the different data fields, and gives you the option to specify what they are.

This “Match properties” step sounds a little technical, but the way Mailjet sets it up makes it very easy to follow and saves you a lot of time and trouble inputting contact properties by hand. There’s also a sample contact list template you can use to format your spreadsheet before you upload it, which speeds things up.

MailJet Contact List Match Properties
The “Match properties” prompt lets you create whatever metadata categories you like.

However, note that when you use the “Upload a File” option, it appears you can only use CSV spreadsheet file types rather than a standard XLSX Excel file.

If you don’t have a spreadsheet, you can input contacts manually either by copying and pasting them or typing them out one by one, which I wouldn’t recommend.

A lot of email marketing services will also let you input contacts from external platforms, whether that’s other email marketing sites you’ve used previously, CRM services, or e-commerce platforms.

Mailjet does allow this, but unless there’s a pre-existing plug-in for the service you want to import contacts from (there are none for other email marketing services, you won’t be surprised to hear), you’ll have to start using APIs – great if you’re a developer, but not so great if, like me, you don’t have those technical skills.

Whether you’re creating brand new lists or adding contacts as you go, one final and important step is that Mailjet will always prompt you to certify that you have permission to use those email addresses. This is an important reminder of the strict data use and privacy rules that regulations like the EU’s GDPR set out.

MailJet contact certification
Agreeing to Mailjet’s sending policy means you can be kicked off the service if you break the terms.

Of course, if you had to add contacts yourself all the time, building your list into the thousands would take forever. Fortunately, once you’ve imported or added your existing contacts, you can create sign-up forms for your website and let new contacts come to you.

Mailjet calls these “Subscription Widgets”. You can build static or pop-up versions that either sit on a webpage or appear when a visitor first lands on it.

These widgets are very simple to build, although there’s not much flexibility in the design. You can link them to existing contact lists so new subscribers are added automatically, or create brand new lists for everyone who signs up using that widget.

What Mailjet doesn’t offer, which most email marketing services like AWeber and GetResponse provide as standard, is a feature to build landing pages to host your sign-up forms. For me, having no landing page builder at all is a big drawback.

In terms of managing your contact lists, Mailjet gives you plenty of options, although they’re not organized as well as they could be. For example, there’s no single place where you can view both contact properties (e.g. name, gender, date of birth) and activity information (e.g. whether they’ve opened or clicked on a link in your email).

MailJet contact list filters
Mailjet lets you filter individual contact lists by contact properties, but by only a very limited set of activity data.

There isn’t even an option to search for both contact property and activity data at the same time. I can create a segment that sorts lists by both (more on that shortly), but I might not want to create a segment – I might want to filter through all my contacts, not just a single list.

MailJet All Contacts filters
In the All Contacts page, you can filter by a full list of activity data, but not by contact properties.

Talking of contact properties, Mailjet is far from user friendly if you want to edit or create new ones. Being able to edit properties matters for segmentation, as I’ll explain below.

I came across issues with how you use activity data to edit and manage lists. This is really important for your list hygiene – keeping your lists “clean” of unresponsive, possibly unused emails and spam addresses, and making sure you don’t keep sending emails to people who have unsubscribed.

Having contacts lists full of dead or spammy emails, or contacts who have blocked you so your emails won’t be delivered, means your campaigns are going to fall flat on their face. And continuing to send unsolicited emails to people who have said they don’t want to receive them could land you in hot water over privacy breaches.

MailJet unsubscribed contacts
Mailjet automatically flags users who unsubscribe from your campaigns.

Something really important to note is that Mailjet doesn’t automatically stop sending your emails to contacts who unsubscribe. It flags them up, but you either have to manually remove them from your lists, or add them to an Exclusion List. Anyone added to an Exclusion List will stop receiving marketing campaigns from you, but they will still be able to receive transactional emails.

To me, relying almost completely on manual list hygiene spells danger, especially when it comes to dealing with unsubscribed contacts.

One thing that Mailjet does do well is list segmentation. Mailjet offers a pretty good summary of what segmentation is and why it’s important: “Segments are custom filters that you can apply to your contact lists in order to target a specific group of contacts based on their behavior or properties.”

Mailjet’s segmentation options are pretty much open-ended. You can filter lists by activity, or how they have interacted with your campaigns, by contact properties, or by several things at the same time.

Although adding contact properties to existing contacts is long winded (there’s no way to automate it), the fact that you can create as many properties as you like means you can also, in theory, segment lists in as many ways as you like.

MailJet segmentation
This would create a segment for all female contacts who had opened a campaign in the last 30 days but hadn’t clicked on a link.

Automation

Sending out one email campaign at a time is fine. It serves a purpose. But it’s a bit of a scattergun approach – it’s essentially throwing out the same email (with a bit of personalization thrown in, granted) to as many people as you can, to see how many hits you get.

What you want is to string several emails together at once, one following the other. And you want to be able to set them up so there’s a logic to how the email chain builds – so that certain contacts get specific emails depending on something they do (or don’t do).

That’s marketing automation. At its best, it can save you hours of work while radically improving the impact your campaigns have.

With Mailjet, you’re not getting automation at its best. The options are pretty basic, there’s no visual workflow editor, and, to top it all off, you have to subscribe to the Premium tier to get access to any automation tools at all. While Mailjet’s Premium plan is actually reasonably priced, rival services like Sendinblue provide automation tools as part of their free tiers.

The basic automation options and the lack of a workflow editor go hand in hand. To compare Mailjet to a competitor service, with GetResponse you can build long chains of automated emails based on any kinds of conditions you like. You can even access this on the cheapest GetResponse plan, which is quite rare. This ensures contacts get emails that are on point for what they are interested in and where they are in terms of their engagement with your brand, with minimal effort on your part.

Best of all, with pre-made workflow templates and a visual editor to customize them, even complete beginners can start to build highly effective automated pathways in next to no time.

Mailjet doesn’t have templates and, with no visual editor, the customization options are very limited. There are no automation options at all relating to e-commerce, such as automated follow-ups for abandoned carts, which I find strange for a service that makes a big deal about its transactional email offer.

MailJet automation scenarios
Mailjet offers just four automation ‘scenarios’.

There are no automation options for managing contacts – such as moving them between lists or changing their properties – either, which, as already discussed, means you have to do everything manually. There’s not even an option to create your own automations from scratch.

For a service that sets itself up as a platform aimed at larger marketing teams, this is a major shortcoming.

I found the workflow options very basic, but, on the plus side, you can control the time zone for when automated emails are sent, and also whether emails are triggered as soon as a condition is met or after a delay of a specified amount of time.

This makes sure contacts receive emails at the optimum time, wherever they are in the world – I don’t know about you, but I’m suspicious of Happy Birthday emails that arrive at 12:01am…

MailJet Welcome automation scenario
The “Welcome” automation scenario is completely fixed, with no option to customize the conditions at all.

Of all Mailjet’s automation scenarios, the one I thought would be most useful was the Contact Properties Update.

I assumed this would let you create workflows to automatically send emails to anyone who had, say, not engaged with a campaign for a specified length of time. Or to send out special messages to your most highly engaged subscribers (“We’ve noticed you’ve clicked through to our web page 10 times from our newsletters – here’s a special offer”).

However, when I tried this, I ran into a problem – contact properties are fixed and have to be changed manually. This left me scratching my head about what the purpose of this automation scenario is. If contact properties don’t change, how can they ever trigger an automated email?

Contact Properties static field type
If a data field doesn’t change, it can’t act as a condition to trigger an automation.

When I contacted Support about this, they replied to say there’s no way of making contact properties dynamic. Their suggestion was to use segmentation to filter out contacts who had not, for example, engaged with several campaigns over a period of time.

But this doesn’t answer the question about automation – I’d still have to do the work to look up the segment and send them a follow-up email manually.

Multi-User Collaboration

One other feature I think is worth pointing out is that Mailjet makes it very easy to have more than one person working on the same campaign.

Some email marketing services are quite precious about multiple users – they either stick to a strict one person, one account policy, or otherwise charge handsomely for adding several users. None of this exactly encourages teamwork.

With Mailjet, every Premium account (which starts at $25.00 a month) comes with a licence for multiple users, up to a maximum of 10.

That doesn’t simply mean that a group of people can all build their own campaigns in the same account, either. The Passport editor is designed so that changes to an email template or design made by one user will be flagged and highlighted to all the others.

You can all even edit the same template in real time from different locations. If you’ve ever co-edited in Google Docs or Office 365, it works on exactly the same principle.

To stop a complete free-for-all, the account “owner” can decide which parts of a campaign to open up to collaboration, locking any they want to keep for themselves. Or they can assign roles and permissions which allow certain people to do certain things.

Advanced Email Features & Plug-Ins

I said right at the outset that Mailjet has two sides to the service it offers – one for email marketers, the other for developers looking for a more complete email package that they can integrate into other applications.

It’s worth running through these more technical features briefly, as there’s some crossover with what’s available for email marketers. For one, Mailjet makes a big play about its email service API (which goes under the brand name MailGun).

If you don’t know what an API is, it stands for Application Programming Interface, and it’s basically a special piece of code that allows two very different pieces of software to work together.

For those with the necessary technical know-how, the MailGun API allows you to integrate an email platform directly into any kind of program or platform you wish – such as your website.

The big benefit of this is that if you’re an e-commerce business, for example, you can send all your own transactional emails (receipts, order confirmations, shipping updates, and so on) from your own domain, at high volume, and with high deliverability rates.

For us humble email marketers who don’t need or want to know too much about such things, the API matters because it opens the door to integrating your email marketing with third party services. With the right tech skills, you could in theory use the Mailjet API to link any service you want.

There are also 83 preset plug-ins for connecting to external services. These remove much of the technical complexity, covering services like WordPress and other content management systems, e-commerce, social media, CRM, and workflow automation solutions.

Plus there’s a plug-in for Zapier, a web app integration platform that extends the number of third-party services you can connect to into the hundreds.

There are rival services which offer more third-party integrations – ActiveCampaign boasts an astonishing 850+ integrations, for example – but Mailjet provides a solid selection which helps to overcome a few of the limitations of the tools Mailjet offers directly.

MailJet plug-ins
Mailjet plug-ins let you carry out extra functions like directly importing and managing contacts from other apps.
4.0

Deliverability

Good Options for Domain Authentication and Dedicated IP But No Sign of Anti-Spam Monitoring

Deliverability is an important consideration when choosing an email marketing service. When you go to the trouble of building a campaign, you want to know most of your emails are going to make it to your contacts’ inboxes.

However, deliverability is a difficult thing to measure. Whenever you see services promising “98% deliverability” or some such figure, take them with a pinch of salt – they’re almost impossible to verify.

Rather than obsessing about deliverability as a number, it’s better to look at what an email marketing service does to maximize deliverability. This is all about dealing with spam filters and other mailbox settings designed to protect users from unsolicited and potentially dangerous emails. My colleague has kindly put together a realistic guide on how you can help boost your email deliverability.

One of the things email marketing services can do to boost deliverability is to offer domain authentication. Domain authentication is basically a way of proving that the email address (or domain) you are sending your campaigns from really is who you claim you are.

Email services are very suspicious of organizational emails partly because anyone, anywhere can in theory register an email domain and use it for dishonest means, and partly because it’s surprisingly easy to clone even genuine email domains.

As a result, many spam filters take a blanket approach to business and corporate-type email domains. Anything that a user has not explicitly flagged as safe, or which is a known contact, can easily find its way into the spam box.

In addition, services like Google now have an extra “Promotions” folder that acts as a halfway house between the spam folder and the inbox, automatically diverting your marketing emails potentially out of sight of the recipient.

Domain authentication is a way around this, as it basically flags to recipient email services that the email domain you are sending from isn’t some devious fraudster sending a phishing email or trying to infect the contact’s computer with malware.

Mailjet offers two types of domain authentication, DKIM and SPF. Both involve a bit of a technical process – you have to copy what are known as the DKIM and SPF values from Mailjet over to the DNS records of your domain hosting account (where your email is sent from). That basically declares that all emails sent via Mailjet from that domain are okay.

If the technical side of it sounds daunting, don’t worry – Mailjet has a very clear and comprehensive guide that talks you through what to do step-by-step. It’s a bit of work, but it will boost your deliverability over time no end.

Another thing Mailjet offers is a dedicated IP address for sending emails. By default, email marketing services use shared IPs for sending campaigns, as it’s more economical for them. But this can cause problems with deliverability, as the spam filters on email services start to notice when high volumes of emails are being sent from the same IP.

Mailjet offers a dedicated IP if you sign up for a 100,000 monthly email limit on its Premium plan, at a cost of $95 a month. But when you’re sending that volume of emails, you’re running a fairly sizable email marketing operation, so probably have the budget.

Mailjet recommends its dedicated IP if you send 5,000 emails a day or more, as it’s frequent sending at volume that is most likely to get an IP flagged as spam.

So far, so good on Mailjet’s deliverability protocols. Less convincing was the outcome of a test I ran to see if Mailjet actively screened for users uploading what are obviously spammy, nonsense emails.

MailJet allowing spam lists
I uploaded a list of made-up email addresses hoping Mailjet would reject it. Disappointingly, it didn’t.

If I can upload lists of spam emails, it means other users could be doing the same and actually using Mailjet to send out spam. That’s not great for deliverability, as once a service gets a reputation for spam, it affects everyone using it.

4.2

Analytics & Reporting

Mailjet Gives You Plenty of Info to Help Improve Your Campaigns… But Leaves You to do the Work

Email marketing isn’t the sort of thing you get right the first time. Even when you’ve been doing it for a long time, there’s always plenty of scope to learn more. The trick is to learn what kinds of email design, topics, and offers your audience respond to best, gradually increasing the number of opens and clicks.

For that, you need analytics.

I was pleasantly surprised by what Mailjet’s analytics cover, if not necessarily always by how they are presented or by how they (don’t) lead to meaningful actions.

First and foremost, Mailjet analyses how campaigns perform on an impressive range of criteria. You can get both basic information on how many emails have been delivered and opened and how many links in your email have been clicked, but also more advanced metrics like hard and soft bounces (i.e. emails that aren’t delivered, due to either permanent or temporary issues). Mailjet even reports on recipient actions, like who has unsubscribed from your campaigns, who has blocked you, or who has marked you as spam.

On the main Stats tab, the default analytics view is a graph of recent campaign activity. There’s a lot of flexibility to adjust the date range and timescales. For example, by breaking down daily activity by hour, you can quickly see the best time of day to send emails to maximize your open and click rate.

However, unlike other services, Mailjet doesn’t offer any tools that automatically act on these insights. You have to put the data to work yourself.

MailJet Statistics page
While I’m all for visual analytics, I found the Mailjet line graph pretty basic and would have liked some options for the type of charts I could use.

Below the chart, a simple table shows key campaign data as percentages and as totals. You can also click to see “detailed reports”, which break down activity by individual contact.

MailJet Detailed Report
I found filtering the Detailed Report list to show which contacts had responded (or otherwise) in what way easier than trying to remember all the color codes!

Once you’ve filtered your campaign recipient list, there are shortcuts for doing things like removing contacts who unsubscribe or block you, or adding them to an exclusion list.

Mailjet also offers some more advanced and niche metrics for measuring your campaigns, including the time it takes from delivery to the recipient opening the email, and delivery rates by email provider, which lets you see if you are having any problems with emails bouncing with specific email platforms.

For me, some of the most useful metrics Mailjet offers are what it calls “Click Analytics” – a heatmap that shows not just how many times links in your campaigns have been clicked and who by, but a breakdown for each individual link.

This is great for getting a feel for the best place to locate links in future campaigns. For example, do links in the first line perform better than call-to-action links at the very bottom of the email? Do hyperlinks in images and logos perform better than text?

MailJet Links heat map
I find this kind of visualization of campaign data very useful for improving future email layouts.

Another useful analytics tool in the Campaigns tab is Compare Campaigns, which gives you comparative analysis of all the metrics mentioned – delivery, contact behaviour, etc – for up to 10 campaigns at once. Again, this is great for building up your understanding of which campaigns have performed best and why.

4.0

Support

Limited Support Options and You Are Kept Waiting

Support is critical for all email marketing services. Even when you have a bit more experience, when you’re getting to grips with a new platform, there are always things you need help with.

I needed to contact support five times in the course of testing out Mailjet for this review. And if you’re new to email marketing, you’ll often need to ask for help a lot more than that. There’s a lot to get to grips with.

Mailjet’s support options are disappointingly limited until you start ramping up your email send limits – and therefore your spending.

If you’re sending fewer than 50k emails a month, there are just two options – an online knowledge base filled with FAQs and how-to articles that you can search, or the option to raise a ticket and ask for help directly via email. 

Start sending over 50k emails a month and there’s phone and live chat support available, but I was unable to test this as it wasn’t available on the free trial I was using.

When you consider that GetResponse offers 24/7 live chat support via instant messaging on all paid-for plans, Mailjet’s offer looks a little thin. But as long as Mailjet’s customer service team responds to tickets promptly and offers clear, useful advice, that’s not a problem, is it?

My experience was a mixed bag. For quite simple, general queries, I was usually able to find what I was looking for in the knowledge base. When I wasn’t, and I had to open a ticket, the response was prompt – I got a reply to every question I sent within 10 minutes.

MailJet Support Centre knowledgebase
The knowledge base is clearly sorted out into categories.

Unfortunately, the responses I got to my queries were not always relevant. For example, when I wanted to find out about uploading contact lists from third-party services, it wasn’t clear if this was possible on the contacts section, and I couldn’t see anything useful when I ran my own search in the Support Centre.

I got a reply to my ticket just over 10 minutes later, but it didn’t relate to what I asked. When I clarified what I was looking for, I got another reply from the same agent saying they would have to pass my query on to another team.

This time the response was disappointingly slow – it was four days until I got a reply from (presumably) a more senior member of the team.

MailJet Support Centre refer query
This seems to be a standard response for any query where Support Centre staff cannot refer you directly to an article in the knowledgebase.

This became a pattern for the other tickets I opened with more technical or specific questions, some of them concerning problems I’d encountered with the service. I’d get a prompt enough response, only to tell me my query had been referred to another colleague.

I got one response two days after the ticket had been opened, one the next morning when I’d opened it at 6pm the previous evening, and one the following Sunday when I’d opened the ticket on the previous Thursday morning.

Perhaps things are better if you scale up to a 50k email a month limit and get phone and live chat support. But compared to the instant assistance services like GetResponse offer even on lower tiers, MailJet’s ticket system struck me as very slow and not the level of service I’d usually expect when you pay for a Premium plan, regardless of how many emails you want to send.

4.2

Pricing

Affordable Plans That Let You Scale Big

When determining whether an email marketing service provides good value, you need to consider various factors. While affordable pricing is certainly advantageous, it’s also important to evaluate the actual benefits you’ll receive for your investment.

It’s all well and good going for the cheapest service you can find, but what’s the point if it doesn’t let you send as many emails as you want to, or the tools are so basic you might as well just run campaigns from your regular email client?

For me, Mailjet strikes a nice balance between affordability and features. It isn’t stacked with the greatest range of email marketing tools I’ve come across, but it’s far from the worst, either. On price, it compares pretty well with a lot of rival services. And there’s a lot of room to grow your email marketing operations as much as you like.

MailJet Review 2021
Mailjet’s monthly email limits are pitched high, starting at 15,000 emails a month. The more emails you want to send, the more you pay.

For example, Constant Contact starts at $12.00 a month for its cheapest plan, charging $35.00 for its Email Plus tier. Likewise, ActiveCampaign charges $29.00 a month for its Lite plan, but you’re restricted to 500 contacts only. The Plus plan starts at $49.00 a month.

We’ve also put together a detailed breakdown of Mailjet’s pricing plans tier-by-tier to help you out.

From my perspective, the important things to note are that Mailjet’s Essential plan is very basic indeed – you get a decent visual email editor, good quality analytics, unlimited contacts, and big send limits, but no automation, no A/B testing, no segmentation, and no landing page builder.

The Free plan gives you access to the same tools as the Essential plan, but with a limit of 6,000 emails per month and 200 per day (and no online support – it’s you and the knowledge base).

So, although you’re not paying anything, there’s a very clear limit on how far you can grow your email marketing before you have to pay. Compare that to Sendinblue’s free plan, which lets you send up to 300 emails a day (no additional monthly limit) and gives you access to automation, segmentation, and other features.

For me, better than the Free plan is the fact that when you sign up, you automatically get a 31-day trial of all Premium features without having to provide credit card details (I don’t know about you, but I’m always suspicious of signing up for anything “free” where you have to give your bank details first).

If you’re looking for any kind of “professional” campaign management – which roughly translates as having a decent selection of tools that make your life easier – you have to start with the Premium plan. So to get a no-obligation taster of what the Premium plan offers is a nice touch.

If you get to the end of the 31-day trial and decide you can live with a limit of 6,000 emails per month and don’t need A/B testing, segmentation, or automation (albeit limited), that’s absolutely fine – you can carry on using the service for nothing. But for any growing business, the free trial period is a great opportunity to see if Mailjet is the right service for you.

Another really nice touch is the fact that Mailjet offers non-profit organizations a 20% discount. If you’re a charity or community organisation, that has to make Mailjet worth considering.

Everyone gets a 10% discount if they pay annually instead of monthly. But this isn’t as much as other services offer, so I’d suggest the saving you make isn’t worth the additional tie in. With monthly plans, you can walk away easily if the service isn’t for you. If you pay annually, there’s no refund.

In terms of payment options, Mailjet accepts credit cards, or you can arrange to pay from a bank account from any country via Wire Transfer, which involves setting up a prepaid account with a minimum deposit of $50.

Direct Debit is accepted if you are based in France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Portugal, Austria, or the Republic of Ireland – but not in the USA or the UK. Annual payments are only accepted by credit card.

# of emails per month # of subscribers # of users Automation Segmentation Analytics Starting price (15,000 emails)
Free 6,000 Unlimited 1 No No Yes $0
Essential 15,000 – 500,000 Unlimited 2 No No Yes $15.00
Premium 15,000 – 500,000 Unlimited 11 Yes Yes Yes $25.00
Custom Unlimited Unlimited Custom Yes Yes Yes Custom

Comparison

How does Mailjet match up to the competition?

ActiveCampaignCompareOur Score4.8Compare
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)CompareOur Score4.7Compare
MailjetCompareOur Score4.0Compare
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Mailjet REVIEW: BOTTOM LINE

So, what are my final thoughts on Mailjet? Who would I recommend it to? That’s just the thing – I’m not quite sure who Mailjet works best for.

On the one hand, with the high email send limits, unlimited contacts and multi-user collaboration, it’s the sort of service professional marketing teams might look at. When you throw in the transactional emails and API, I can picture digital marketing departments at large companies enjoying the fact that they can work together on the same platform.

On the other hand, its feature set isn’t what you’d expect for a service targeting professional marketers. 

It has its good points. The Passport email editor is easy to use and supports flexible designs and straightforward personalization. The A/B testing options are excellent, and you get almost complete freedom to segment contact lists any way you like.

But, for me, having no facility to build landing pages and only very basic automation are big marks against using Mailjet for any kind of email marketing at scale. I also experienced several glitches that don’t give the best impression, and support isn’t the best I’ve ever experienced.

Worst of all, I found contact management (aside from list segmentation) options confusing and complex, to the point where I ran into issues doing something as fundamental as making sure unsubscribed contacts didn’t receive further campaign emails.

Overall, because of its price, ease of use and high scalability, I would say Mailjet is worth a look if you’re a small business or online entrepreneur looking for a first email marketing service that will grow rapidly with your business without costing too much.

For professional marketing teams, although I really like the collaboration options Mailjet offers, I’d recommend the likes of Benchmark or GetResponse instead, which deliver a far more comprehensive and polished email marketing experience (and plenty more besides). 

But check out our 10 Best Email Marketing Services for 2021 to make up your own mind about the right service for you. 

FAQ

What is Mailjet used for?

Mailjet is an email marketing and transactional email service. These function as distinct parts of the business. You can sign up to use Mailjet to create and manage email marketing campaigns, or you can use it to send automated business emails – things like receipts, order confirmations, or delivery details. For the latter, Mailjet offers a special API which allows you to embed an email server into your existing web channels.

Is Mailjet really free?

Yes. Mailjet has a completely free email marketing plan which you can use to design and build emails, send campaigns, create contact lists, and analyze campaign performance. There are, however, limits on how many emails you can send – 200 a day, up to a maximum of 6,000 a month. You can also use all of the Premium tier features completely free for the first 31 days, without any kind of commitment.

Is Mailjet safe?

Mailjet has very clear GDPR protocols that remind you of the importance of getting explicit consent from all contacts before you send email marketing campaigns to them. However, you have to stay on top of who unsubscribes, as you have to manually remove contacts from sending lists or add them to an “Exclusion List”. There is also no filter for uploading spam contacts to the service.

How much does Mailjet cost?

Mailjet pricing starts at $15.00 a month for the Essential plan for sending up to 15,000 emails a month. The Premium plan, which unlocks the full range of features, costs $25.00 a month for the same number of emails. Within each plan, you can pay more to increase the number of emails up to a maximum of 500,000 a month.
Paul Newham Paul Newham
Paul is a Technical and Business Blogger based in the UK. His professional interests include digital marketing, content production, and business journalism. Away from his laptop, he leads a hectic double life as a father, husband, musician, sports team captain, forager, gardener, vegan cook, and book nerd.
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Rubbish company

I have provided all the documentation related to the registration of the company to MailJet, purchased a paid account, validated the domain and sender email addresses etc.. yet every now and then they keep suspending the account without any notice and without any reason. The MailJet account is used in production capacity and so we cannot have it closed randomly out of anywhere. Yet when it happens there is not even a single phone number that we can call to resolve the issue!!

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Mike Mengel, Australia
April 28, 2020
1
Poor Customer Service, They Stole My Money

Was trying to do some email marketing. I did not realize the difference between transactional emails and cold emails. They promptly shut down my use. Again, that is fine...learning curve for me. And they did not refund the payment to me. Again, fine, cost of knowledge. My real problem with them is that I sent them an additional $50 from Paypal, which they accept. It never appeared on my account and they say they never received it, despite my giving them all of the transaction details. They refuse to acknowledge the payment or give me a refund. Their customer service was slow, demeaning, and utterly useless. How does the "accounting team" not find a transaction after giving them every last detail of the transaction? I wonder if they are actually malicious.

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Greg Sperber, USA
November 18, 2019
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