We've tested Omnisend, an email and SMS marketing platform for ecommerce that plugs into your store and runs welcome, abandoned cart and post-purchase automations, with AI helpers for subject lines and segments.
Welcome to this Omnisend review ✨
Most people who run an online store end up with the same three emails on their wish list: a welcome message for new subscribers, a reminder when someone leaves a full cart behind, and a follow-up after an order. They're the emails that quietly bring in money every day. The problem is that a generic newsletter tool doesn't know what's in a cart, what a customer bought last month or which discount code to hand out, so you end up stitching together plugins, CSV exports and Zapier recipes to fake it.
Omnisend is built the other way around. It's an email and SMS marketing platform for ecommerce that connects to your store first, pulls in your customers, products and orders, and then lets you build campaigns and automations on top of that data. Shopify is the headline integration, but it also connects to WooCommerce, Wix, BigCommerce and a handful of other platforms.
The Omnisend team asked me to focus on four things: email and SMS for ecommerce brands, automation workflows (welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase), the AI features with segmentation and personalization, and ease of use with the Shopify integration and migration support. I tested it in two ways. I first created a free account myself, without a store, to see what anyone signing up gets. Then, since most of the product only wakes up once a store is connected, the team gave me access to a demo account with a test Shopify store already plugged in. My role on that demo account blocked a few sections (the dashboard, forms and reports), so I'll say clearly where I couldn't look. Here's what I found.
Signing up is quick: a business name, an email, a password, and a question about whether your business is ecommerce or not. You land on a dashboard that says, in so many words, "Connect your store". That's not a suggestion. On my free account without a store, Automation, Forms, SMS campaigns, email A/B tests and Reports all showed the same message: this feature needs a store connection. Even the "Import my Brand Assets" button, which is supposed to grab your logo and colors from your shop, failed with "We couldn't import Brand Assets from your store."
So the first real step is the platform picker. It lists Shopify, Wix, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Shoplazza, PrestaShop, nopCommerce, Ecwid, Big Cartel and SureCart, with a WordPress option and a universal "Other" connection for everything else. Picking Shopify leads to a page promising a one-click integration, with Omnisend's own figure of "82,000+ Shopify brands" using it. On the Shopify App Store, the app is rated 4.7 out of 5 from 3,201 reviews.
Once connected, the integration is two-way. According to Omnisend's documentation, contacts, products and orders sync from Shopify automatically, and you can choose to push tag changes made in Omnisend back to Shopify. One thing worth knowing before you experiment: the same documentation warns that uninstalling the Omnisend app from Shopify triggers the deletion of your Omnisend account after 16 days.
The free plan itself is honest about its size. The sidebar showed "500 of 500 Free emails left" and "250 of 250 Contacts left to reach", with a monthly refill. It's enough to build everything and send a few real campaigns, not to run a store's email program.
This is the heart of Omnisend, and on the demo account it was fully unlocked.
Clicking "Create workflow" opens a library of pre-built automations. I counted 33 of them on the demo account, filterable by channel (Email or Email + SMS), by goal (Convert Subscribers, Recover Visitors, Cross-Sell, Build Loyalty, Reactivate Customers) and by type. All the ecommerce classics are there: several Welcome series (with or without SMS, and one tied to a Wheel of Fortune popup), Abandoned Cart, Abandoned Checkout, Browse and Product Abandonment, Cross-sell, Replenishment Reminder, Back in Stock, Customer Reactivation, Birthday, Product Reviews, plus transactional flows like Order, Shipping and Cancellation Confirmation. A few are more advanced than I expected from templates: an "Abandoned Checkout Value Split" that sends different messages based on cart value, and a "Cross-Sell Delay A/B Test" that tests two different waiting times.
To see how deep these go, I opened the Abandoned Checkout template that mixes email and SMS. It comes fully built. Shoppers enter when they start a checkout that "wasn't updated for 1 hour", and they leave the workflow as soon as they place an order. The sequence is an email ("Items in your cart are selling out fast!"), an 11-hour wait, a second email ("Your cart misses you!"), a 12-hour wait, an SMS offering 15% off with a discount code, and a last email five minutes later. The defaults are sensible too: emails go to subscribed and non-subscribed contacts, SMS only to subscribed ones, and a frequency rule skips anyone who already entered the workflow in the last day.
The builder is a vertical canvas with a palette on the left: Email, SMS, Push notification and Webhook for messages, and Delay, Tag contact, Unsubscribe, Split and A/B testing for flow actions. I dragged a Split right after the trigger and opened its rules. There are three kinds (trigger filters, contact properties and message engagement), and the trigger filters are where the store data shows: Total Cart Value, Order Subtotal, Product Title, Product Tags, Collection, SKU, Shipping Country and more. I set "Total Cart Value more than 100" and the canvas immediately drew a YES and a NO branch, with a red "You can't start workflow with empty paths" warning until I gave the NO branch something to do.
Two small tools made the builder feel trustworthy. "Test trigger", marked Beta, replays the last ten real "started checkout" events from the store and shows whether each one would have entered the workflow. And the email preview lets you render a message as one of your actual contacts, using the data from their last event, with the raw event payload next to it and an email size meter that warns when you approach the 100 KB at which Gmail starts clipping.
For the post-purchase side, I opened the Cross-sell template. It starts when a customer places an order, can be narrowed to specific products (the picker listed the test store's Shopify catalog), waits three days, then sends a "Discover more great finds from our shop" email. I'll come back to what goes inside that email in the personalization section.
SMS isn't bolted on: it lives in the same workflows and has its own campaign type.
In the workflow I dropped an SMS step on the NO branch of my split. The editor offers three personalization shortcuts (Unique discount code, First name, Last name), and inserting the discount code opens a whole discount panel. Omnisend generates a unique code per contact through the store, can reuse the same code across every message of the workflow, and lets you choose a percentage or a fixed amount, an expiry in days, and whether the code can be combined with product, order or shipping discounts. That's the kind of thing you'd otherwise set up by hand in Shopify. A yellow banner at the top also reminded me that some SMS destinations need extra setup before customers can receive your messages, which is a fair warning given how regulated SMS is.
The SMS campaign editor is clear. You write on the left, and a phone preview on the right shows the message as US and Canada recipients will see it, with a separate tab for everyone else. The counter includes the mandatory opt-out text: my Black Friday message, its link and "Reply STOP to opt-out" together read "Estimate: 1 SMS (128/160 characters)". Links are shortened automatically to Omnisend's own short domain, with an option to use a branded one, and images or GIFs can be attached as MMS for US and Canada recipients, up to 500 KB. The campaign then moves through Recipients, SMS credits and Review before anything is sent.
SMS is billed separately from the plans, as credits on the Pro plan, which I'll cover in the pricing section.
Omnisend groups its AI features under the name Omnisend Agent, and they show up in several places rather than in one big assistant.
Subject lines and preheaders. Next to the subject line field there's a small green button. I described a campaign in keywords ("Black Friday, 30% off Japanese skincare, ends Sunday") and got three suggestions, one of which already included a first-name variable with a fallback: "Discover Japanese skincare, [[ contact.first_name | default: 'friend' ]]". Below the suggestions sit buttons to change the tone, translate, shorten, rephrase or simplify, plus a free prompt field. On my free account I asked for an "urgent" tone on a test about ceramic mugs and got "Last chance: Black Friday mug savings end Sunday", which is exactly the register I asked for. This one works on the free plan. I didn't find an AI writer inside the text blocks of the email editor itself: the AI help sits on the subject line and preheader.
Segments from a sentence. This is the most useful AI feature I tried, and also the one that taught me the most. The segment page has a box where you describe who you want in plain English. I typed: customers who ordered at least twice in the last 6 months and spent over $100 in total, but haven't opened any email in the last 30 days.
On the demo account, with a store connected, the agent got it right in a few seconds. It named the segment "Repeat buyers over $100, no recent email opens" and built three readable rules: total spent more than 100, placed order at least 2 times in the last 6 months, and has not opened an email message in the last 30 days. You can refine it in the chat below or continue in the regular builder.
On my free account without a store, the same sentence went differently. The agent quietly replaced "placed order at least 2 times" with "viewed page at least 2 times". When I pointed it out, it explained that it couldn't find a "placed order" event in my account and only saw page views and email events. So the agent only knows the events your account actually has, and the first time it substituted one without saying so. The builder does show a banner asking you to check the rules before using an AI segment, and Omnisend notes that the agent can make mistakes. With real store data it behaved, but read the rules before you hit save.
Other places. The free account also has 18 pre-built segments (at risk to churn, high-value subscribers, recent buyers, celebrating a birthday, and so on). There's an "Omnisend Agent" chat in the reports to ask questions about your stats in plain English, but it's locked on the free plan, and on the demo account it answered "We couldn't generate a response" twice, on an account where my role also blocked the reports. I can't judge that one. Finally, Omnisend has an official MCP server, with a connector in Claude's directory and a ChatGPT app, so you can ask questions about your campaigns, automations, segments and revenue from your own AI assistant. I didn't connect it for this review.
Back to the Cross-sell email. The editor's Products panel has two families of blocks. Standard recommenders show everyone the same products (best sellers, recently added, most viewed). Personalized ones change for each recipient: "Recently viewed products" and "Similar to past purchases".
I dragged "Similar to past purchases" into the email. Its settings let you set a minimum price, a fallback when the system has nothing to recommend (recently added products by default), a layout, the number of products and columns, a category filter and a list of products to exclude. The block also has a "Choose who can see this block" option, which, together with the "Dynamic Content" section of the editor, lets you show different content to different contacts in the same email.
This is where the free plan stops, though. On my free account, both personalized recommenders carried a crown, and clicking one opened an upgrade window: the Standard plan plus an "Agent Pro: Personalized content add-on" for product recommendations and dynamic content, listed at $5 a month on top of Standard's $16 for small lists. The countdown timer block in the editor was also marked as paid. So the AI and segmentation tools you need to get started are free, but the personalized product blocks are not.
I couldn't run a real migration, since that needs an existing account full of data on another platform, but I looked at the two paths Omnisend offers.
The self-serve one is in Audience > Imports. Besides adding contacts one by one, uploading a file or pasting rows, there are two dedicated options: "Import contacts from Mailchimp" and "Import contacts from Klaviyo". The Mailchimp one opens an app that signs you into Mailchimp and keeps your contacts in continuous sync, which is handy if you want to run both tools side by side for a while.
The other path is a service. Omnisend's pricing page advertises a free migration "in up to 5 days", in which its team moves your automations, forms, segments and templates for you after you give them read access to your old account. Its migration pages cover Klaviyo and Mailchimp specifically. The pricing FAQ adds that Standard and Pro customers spending $400 a month or more get a dedicated account expert who helps with the migration and the first automations. Support is announced as available 24/7 by email and chat.
A few more things worth knowing:
Omnisend has three plans, priced by the number of contacts. The Free plan covers 250 contacts and 500 emails a month. Standard adds email volume (12 times your contact count each month) and the first Omnisend Agent tools. Pro adds unlimited emails, SMS, more Agent tools, priority support and advanced reporting. Prices are shown in US dollars, and paying three months upfront takes 30% off those first three months.
Here are the monthly prices I read on the pricing page for a few list sizes:
| Contacts | Standard | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| 500 | $16 | $59 |
| 1,000 | $20 | $59 |
| 2,000 | $30 | $59 |
| 3,000 | $50 | $70 |
| 10,000 | $132 | $150 |
| 26,000 | $288 | $425 |
| 75,000 | $650 | $1,044 |
Pro starts at a 2,500-contact tier, which is why it stays at $59 below that. Above 150,000 contacts, pricing moves to a custom quote.
SMS is a Pro feature, bought as credits on top of the plan. The pricing page starts SMS at $0.007 per message, with rates that vary by country and volume: its estimate for a $50 monthly pack was 5,882 messages at $0.0085 each. Omnisend also claims you'll save up to 35% compared to Klaviyo; that's their comparison, based on their Standard plan against Klaviyo's email plan, and I didn't check it.
If you don't sell physical or digital products through a store, Omnisend isn't really for you. A newsletter, a SaaS product or a blog will hit a wall of "this feature needs a store connection" on day one, and a general email tool will serve you better.
As for the alternatives, Klaviyo is the name most Shopify stores compare it with. Both are built on store data and behavioral flows; Omnisend leans on ready-made workflows and SMS in the same builder, and puts its price comparison with Klaviyo front and center. Mailchimp comes from the other direction: a general email tool that added ecommerce features, where Omnisend started from the store.
What I liked most about Omnisend is that the ecommerce parts are genuinely built in, not stitched on. The workflow templates arrive complete, with sensible waits, exit conditions and frequency rules, and the builder speaks the language of a store: cart value, products, collections, shipping country. Generating unique discount codes from an SMS step, or recommending products similar to a customer's past purchases, takes a few clicks. The AI segment builder is the AI feature I'd actually use every week, as long as you read the rules it writes, and the subject line helper is a nice free extra. The main limits are the free plan, which stays small and locks the personalized blocks and the reports chat, and the fact that almost nothing works until a store is connected.
If you run an online store and want your welcome, cart and post-purchase emails to finally work for you, Omnisend is worth trying on the free plan with your store connected.
What I liked:
Things to keep in mind:
Connect your store to Omnisend and let the cart reminders write themselves.
Reviewed product
Email & SMS marketing platform for ecommerce brands on Shopify, WooCommerce
Category
MarketingPricing
Freemium
