An Introductory Guide to BirdSend, the New Email System for Bloggers
By: Tara Fitness
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Freelancing, Blogging, Email Marketing, Startup

BirdSend Review — Features & Functionality

In no particular order, these are some of the features and functions I love (and hate) about BirdSend.

Send a test email

Many email marketing systems allow you to send a test email to yourself before sending the broadcast to your list. If you’ve never used this functionality before, I’d recommend you begin with it. It’s the perfect way to catch any problems with your email before it hits your subscriber’s inbox.

BirdSend offers a ‘send test email’ functionality, but what I most like is it’s found within the regular steps you complete to send an email. Unlike some other systems where you have to go out of your way to find this option, BirdSend allows you to send a test email from the same page where you schedule your email.

Image Source: BirdSend

A/B testing of headlines

Every time you send a broadcast email, you click through a page that gives you the option to split test your email headline. This feature is available on all accounts (including free trials), and you can use it for all or none of the emails you send.

To split test a headline, check the ‘Split Test (A/B Test)’ box and add a subject line variation.

Image Source: BirdSend

You also have the option to set an automatic winner so you don’t have to return to check the results and send the winner to the remainder of your list. Instead, during setup, check the ‘Automatic winner’ box. You have a number of criteria to choose from, including:

Higher Earnings

Higher # Sales (Conversion)

Higher Open Rate

Higher Click Rate

You also have the ability to set the duration of the test and identify how much of your list you’d like to use for the control and variation emails.

Finally, you can also resend the A/B test winner to people who haven’t opened the email by checking the “Resend winner to Unopens” box and selecting a timeframe to wait until the email is resent.

Image Source: BirdSend

Resend to unopens

As discussed above, you can resend the winning email to people who haven’t opened an email during a split test. However, you also have this functionality for every email you send. Simply set a timeframe, and your email will be re-sent to people who haven’t opened the initial email. You can also choose a new subject line if you wish.

HTML and CSS emails customisation

BirdSend allows you to customise emails using HTML, which allows for simple changes to headlines, paragraphs, and the introduction of buttons in your emails. However, they only allow inline style, which means every single line of your email has to be coded if you wish to change it from the default (e.g., to change the font). Unfortunately, BirdSend doesn’t currently offer CSS customisation, which would reduce the difficulty of this coding, but I’m hoping they introduce this option in the future. Regardless, I still send emails that look like the image below with limited use of HTML.

Image Source: Tara Fitness

Footer customisation

Along with customising your email body, you also have the option to customise your footer for every email you send. If you don’t customise the footer, it will contain the following content:

“This email was sent to you ([subscribers_email_address]) because you opted in on our website and indicated you’d like to receive emails from us. If you no longer wish to receive such emails, please unsubscribe here. To ensure you receive our emails, please add [sender_email] to your address book. Our postal address: [sender_address].”

Image Source: BirdSend

Integrations

BirdSend integrates with all of the major systems you’re likely to use for lead generation, including Google, Lead Pages, ClickFunnels, PayPal, ThriveLeads, and WooCommerce. Where integrations don’t currently exist, you can connect BirdSend to 1000+ other platforms using Zapier.

Image Source: BirdSend

Conversion/sales tracking

Disclaimer: I don’t currently use conversion or sales tracking so I cannot attest to how well it works. However, BirdSend does provide automatic tracking as part of their platform.