Sendblaster is the Swiss Army Knife of bulk email tools.
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
In the past, I have used Sendblaster to design, send, track, and manage, email marketing campaigns and also email communication to students and other stakeholders in higher education. Sendblaster is the best product I have used for these needs, even better than Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc. There are multiple reasons why Sendblaster is superior. (1) Sendblaster allows good/picky designers to design templates that look beautiful without limits, instead of being limited by the canned templates provided by other services/softwares. (2) Sendblaster does not force the use of footers that mention a bulk email service provider, force standardized "unsubscribe" verbiage, etc. This is very important in higher education and other settings where we *MUST* be able to contact people via email because we have a business relationship with them, and we cannot allow them to unsubscribe. ...but yet we still have the option to provide unsubscribe links when it's appropriate. (3) Sendblaster provides lots of options for sending, so you can use your organization's own SMTP servers, and lots of other sending scenarios/configurations. (4) Once you pay the affordable price for the Sendblaster software, there are no more costs. You don't have to pay ongoing subscription fees or per-message volume fees.
Pros
- Ultimate control over design of templates and messages. Sendblaster provides great templates, but you can also design your own from scratch, with total control.
- Lots of options for sending your outgoing messages, including your organization's SMTP server, a third party's SMTP server, "direct" sending from your desktop, and many more configuration options.
- Sendblaster is even easier than Microsoft Word for "merging" data into your outgoing messages.
- Once you pay the affordable price for the Sendblaster software, there are no more ongoing subscription fees or volume-based per-message charges.
Cons
- The user interface could be more polished. It's very easy to use, but the appearance of the user interface looks a little old fashioned for a desktop software. Of course recipients don't see that interface, so that is not very consequential.
Likelihood to Recommend
Sendblaster is a great tool for any environment. It's particularly good in organizations that do not have a full featured CRM that manages bulk email marketing and communication. Even if an organization has a great CRM, Sendblaster is still great for those marketing or communication campaigns that go out to recipients who are not already in the CRM, custom groups, bulk sending that you want to keep separate from your other CRM(s), etc.