Sendshark Review: Not Convinced By The Deliverability

There is one circumstance that you may want to choose Sendshark over many other email marketing providers; where you want to promote your legitimate online business seriously AND are looking to build a big list of subscribers from the beginning. I mean, tens of thousands of. Today my Sendshark review will explain it all - I find it fairly easy to use, it has everything that you need, and most importantly, the deliverability is taken seriously. Absolutely no-spam policy, that's often missing from many cheap mailing services out there.

What Is Sendshark?

Sendshark is an email marketing service, which is part of the "Now Lifestyle" brand, owned by GVO Inc (Global Virtual Opportunities) based in Schertz, near San Antonio, Texas. Now Lifestyle sells health & workout programs as well as business automation tools, and with these two of the evergreen bestselling niches, it also offers an affiliate program that pays the 2-tier level of commissions. 

Sendshark is the Now Lifestyle's business automation tools. The autoresponder (email marketing tool) is sold as the main product, either solely or together with a page builder tool as a bundle. Other tools including Lead Capture system, Site Builder, and HD Video Bundle, are available for extra charges.

What's most unique about Sendshark is probably the fixed price of $25 per month that it charges up to 50,000 subscribers. It may seem slightly more expensive if your list size is small, but it'll become dramatically cost-effective as your list grows - I'll explain more about it later.

The Founder and CEO - Joel Therien

Joel is a multimillion entrepreneur, specialized in network marketing training, fitness training, web hosting, and other software solutions. His company GVO has created marketing tool suites including Pure Leverage and MyOwnMeeting. Now Lifestyle has been very popular among affiliate marketers - believe me, I've helped over a hundred affiliates make money with Now Lifestyle by sending traffic to their sites in the past.

The Autoresponder - Usability

I find the Sendshark dashboard clear and easy to use. If you've used any other well-known email marketing software, each menu items should be self-explanatory to you;

Campaigns

This is where you create and monitor your "campaigns". If you only have one website and plan to build one set of subscribers, you'll only need to create one campaign (e.g. name it "My Campaign"). If you are promoting two or more niches and building separate lists of subscribers, for example, Health/Wellness and Business Opportunities, then you'll create multiple campaigns.

With each campaign, you can set its own Company name, website URL, "From" name, "Reply-to" Email, Notification email, Unsubscribe text (e.g. "Click here to unsubscribe"), and Activation text (e.g. "Click here to join").

You can also add shared campaigns, which is useful when you use a set of followup messages that are provided by other "done-for-you" online marketing systems.

The stats (sent, open/click rates, failed, active/pending, unsubscribed, blocked) of each email can be viewed from here. Complaints (feedback-loop and spam complaints) will also be monitored and displayed here.

Messages

This is where you create and monitor your messages;

• Follow Up messages (autoresponder)
• Broadcast (one-off newsletter) and
• Opt-in message.

The message can be created in a standard HTML message editor. A drag-and-drop email editor is due to be introduced soon, but to be honest, there is a reason why not many email marketers use drag-and-drop email templates. Because statistically the more images, borders, and buttons you add to it, the more chance of your email ending up being treated as spam. For that reason, we tend to consider it best to create a simple text message with one or two photos if necessary, using a simple HTML editor. All the syntaxes are available to insert (e.g. "Hey [first name],")

Subscribers

Add, view and search subscribers, or delete particular subscribers from here. You can view and edit each subscriber's status, added date, last followup, and next followup. You can also block subscribers by email address or domain. If you want to add bulk email addresses, not from here but go to the "Import/Export" tab.

Forms

Create signup forms and view the list of forms. The Form Wizard will let you create one by one-click (choice of 27 templates), otherwise you can create a custom form and paste the HTML code to your own already-made landing page. 

Ready-made "Thank you" page and "You're already subscribed" page are provided, but you can also use your own by inserting your website URL. One-click to choose single or double opt-in.

Import/Export

Sendshark's anti-spam policy will prevent you from importing a list of leads freely, which is good. You can import only up to 100 leads per 24 hour period, and an opt-in message will be sent to the lead upon import.

Whereas exporting is easy - select the campaign and the subscribers status to import, just add fields that you want to export (name, email address and so on) and click to download a CSV file.

Pricing

Sendshark charges a fixed fee of $25 up to 50,000 subscribers. If you're promoting the "business opportunity / work-from-home" niche, there are two other email marketers to compare; AWeber and GetResponse, inevitably. (Because most of the other services don't allow affiliate marketing.)

As you can see, if you are with AWeber and the number of leads (subscribers) in your list exceeds 500, it will start charging $29, therefore Sendshark will be cheaper. Likewise with GetResponse, when the number of leads exceeds 1,000, you'll be charged $25 per month, same as Sendshark.

I've seen many email marketers who have multiple AWeber accounts (prohibited, by the way!) partly because it's cheaper that way. For example, if your list size was 16,000, AWeber would charge you $145 per month, but if you created 2 x AWeber accounts (prohibited!) and split the leads across 8,000 each, you would be charged slightly less (2 x $69 = $138 per month).

By all means, your list will grow pretty quickly if you start affiliate marketing by using CPA ads and solo ads, so as you can see, Sendshark definitely offers a competitive price.

Deliverability Rates

No matter how many flashy templates it has, how easy it is to use and how reasonable the price is, an email marketing service is total rubbish if it cannot safely deliver your emails to the recipients' inbox. Sendshark takes this absolutely seriously, and Joel explains in his video how trustworthy the Sendshark's server is, and shows the IP addresses have extremely low spam scores, according to Sender Score.

Whilst I appreciate this, I've tested the deliverability by sending various test emails to myself over a few days - to a couple of Gmail accounts, Hotmail and iCloud. 

The tests include;

• Absolutely no spammy words anywhere in the email,
• My sender/reply-to email being my domain,
• Containing a few paragraphs,
• Include one hyperlink, as well as no hyperlink,
• No syntax or emoji in the email. 

Disappointingly, the results I saw weren't good at all. All my emails ended up in the spam folder. It means that even a recipient confirms subscription, any followup emails will also end up in the spam folder unless you tell them to make sure to whitelist your email address.

Having said that, I carried out these tests for myself to find out whether Sendshark was good for me. It's not like I sent broadcasts to thousands of leads to confirm the open rates, so I cannot either recommend nor not recommend Sendshark to others based on my quick test-run results.

30-Day Money-Back Policy

If you're not happy with Sendshark, you are covered by its 30-day money-back policy. You can tell the support that you wish to discontinue via support (online chat, ticket system, or phone), and claim a full refund.