Omnisend vs. Jilt: A Feature-for-Feature Comparison

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Despite the myth that email marketing is spam, it’s a channel that continues to generate sales.

But serious marketers know that they need something that is fast, powerful and flexible enough to fit all types of ecommerce businesses.

And all of that needs to come with a great ROI. So that’s usually when smart marketers have to decide: Omnisend or Jilt? 

That decision may have already been made. On June 9, the ecommerce email marketing platform Jilt announced that it is shutting down. It is no longer accepting new customers, and existing customers have less than a year to find a new email marketing solution.

But how does Omnisend compare to Jilt? That’s exactly what we’ll be looking at today—comparing Omnisend vs Jilt in a pound-for-pound, feature-for-feature showdown.

Let’s get started.

Omnisend vs. Jilt: Who Is Each Platform Built for?

When choosing the best email marketing platform, it’s really important to understand who that platform is built for. Enterprise solutions, for example, may offer 1000x more than what you’re looking for, but it is most likely way out of your budget and you won’t get a good return on your investment.

On the other hand, some platforms are free or really low-priced, but they may not be built for ecommerce and may miss some important high-ROI features like automation, segmentation, and multiple channels like SMS and push notifications.

Again, you won’t get a good return on your investment.

Jilt is built for smaller ecommerce businesses using Shopify and WooCommerce, and it definitely shows. The platform is relatively easy to use and the pricing is fine for smaller companies (although certainly not the cheapest we’ve seen). However, since it was built for smaller businesses, this platform may not have the power to scale as your business grows. 

On the other hand, Omnisend was created specifically for growing small and medium sized ecommerce businesses. The key word here is “growing,” as scaling up is at the core of Omnisend.

When it comes to features, Omnisend and Jilt offer necessary features, although at different levels. Let’s take a deeper dive.

Email Marketing—How Does Each Platform Fare in Its Core Feature?

Email marketing is at the core of both Omnisend and Jilt, and this is great since email has the best ROI of any channel.

Omnisend and Jilt both have visual email composers that allow you to drag and drop various blocks or elements into your email campaigns. Both of these platforms also offer lots of templates to help you design better emails, faster.

In Jilt’s email editor, you have the option to add various content blocks, rows that include things like product recommendations, and basic settings.

Jilt also has the option to add your own custom products to the campaign, but with a lot more steps than Omnisend’s offerings.

In Omnisend’s email builder, you have quite a lot of options for customization using either a variety of templates or starting with a blank page. 

Omnisend also offers the Product Picker feature that lets you easily pull products from your store directly into your campaign. In fact, this can be done with one or two clicks, and it is certainly the easiest way, of any email marketing platform, to add products to your campaigns.

Omnisend also offers a lot of ecommerce-friendly features, such as unique discount codes, scratch cards, gift boxes and other gamification that all give your customers the chance to win their discounts in a fun, more dynamic way. 

Email Builder Features	Jilt	Omnisend
Drag-and-Drop Builder	Yes	Yes
Email templates	Yes	Yes
Mobile responsive	Yes	Yes
A/B Testing	Yes	Yes
Saveable content blocks	Yes	No
Product recommendations	Yes	Yes
Discount codes	Yes	Yes
Gamification	No	Yes

Which Platform Is Better for Building Your Subscriber List?

When working with email marketing, it’s crucial that you build up your perfect subscriber list for amazing sales.

Both Omnisend and Jilt have ways to collect subscribers, but this is one area where Omnisend absolutely blows Jilt out of the water.

Jilt offers a popup form that can be triggered by a timed delay or that shows on exit-intent:

And…that’s about it. It’s very basic, and it doesn’t offer much in the way of design or customization.

There’s no way to add images or adapt their popups. There are no other options for different types of popups, signup forms, or landing pages. There’s no way to really target your browsers and provide, for example, discounts to people who’ve visited a specific page.

For the most part, to have flexible popups with Jilt, you’d need to use one of a handful of email collection integrations. With Omnisend, those features are already baked in.

Omnisend allows you to add embeddable static forms that you can place anywhere on your site. You can also create highly customizable popups that appear when a customer spends a certain amount of time on your page, if they scroll a certain amount of your page, or if they move to exit your page.

You can even add extra fields for data to collect, such as phone numbers, dates of birth, etc.

Omnisend also offers landing pages with templates and the same easy to use drag-and-drop builder that you’d use for emails. The landing pages are also fully customizable.

Even more, Omnisend has the gamified Wheel of Fortune signup form that presents a fun way for your customer to sign up and spin for a discount.

Email List Building Features	Jilt	Omnisend
Popups (immediate, exit-intent, on specific URL)	Yes (limited)	Yes
Embeddable forms	No	Yes
Full customization	No	Yes
Landing Pages	No	Yes
Gamified Popups	No	Yes

Which Tool Has the Best Segmentation and Targeting?

Both Omnisend and Jilt let ecommerce marketers target their subscribers and customers with segmentation to send the right message to the right person at the right time.

Both platforms have, in some form or another, the ability to segment contacts based on:

• Profile data: using the information you have collected about your customer
• Campaign activity: this includes whether a subscriber has engaged (opened or click on) one or many of your campaigns
• Shopping behavior: if the customer has added to their cart, browsed and abandoned, purchased in the last 30 days, etc

Unfortunately, Jilt doesn’t offer the ability to sync your subscriber segments to Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Retargeting Ads in order to draw your customers back to your store.

Segmentation Features	Jilt	Omnisend
Profile data	Yes	Yes
Campaign activity	Yes	Yes
Shopping behavior	Yes	Yes
Custom Properties (tags)	Yes	Yes
Facebook Audiences	No	Yes
Google Retargeting Ads	No	Yes

Which Tool Offers the Best Automation Workflows?

Automation is one of the most important parts of any email marketing (or marketing automation) platform, and this is where you’ll see the big differences between Jilt and Omnisend. 

Jilt offers a good set of marketing automation features, allowing you to create simple, straightforward workflows for your email drip campaigns.

Jilt has a good list of emails with the trigger you can have for each. You can filter your segments and triggers from each email. 

This is pretty good for basic email automation for smaller ecommerce businesses, it isn’t particularly visual and can be quite difficult to understand in the beginning.

Omnisend has much better automation, not only in functionality and flexibility, but also in usability. The first thing you’ll notice is that Omnisend’s automation workflow is much more visual, and you can follow along easily at each step.

This way, you can clearly see what message is being sent, what and where the delays are, and how many customers are currently in each step of your workflow.

Beyond that, Omnisend’s automation also stands above Jilt’s in that it allows adding multiple channels: not just email, but also SMS, push notifications, Facebook Messenger and more. All of this in the same workflow. This will allow you to create straightforward or even very complex automation workflows for better customer engagement.

Even more, you can also add conditional splits to personalize your workflow based on your customers’ engagement, demographics, and shopping behavior.

You can simply drag and drop a conditional split in any existing workflow and decide if the split happens due to profile data or an event trigger.

In Omnisend, you can add up to 10 conditional splits per workflow. Doing the same in Jilt would take untold time and work.

In general, both Jilt and Omnisend provide lots of automation templates to get started, but Omnisend provides what you will need to take your automation, targeting and personalization even further.

Features	Jilt	Omnisend
Visual Automation Workflow	No	Yes
Automation splits	No	Yes
Cart Abandonment	Yes	Yes
Browse Abandonment	No	Yes
Channels
Email	Yes	Yes
SMS and MMS	No	Yes
Browser Push Notifications	No	Yes

Pricing: Which Platforms Give the Best Value for Money?

There is a bit of difference between Omnisend’s and Jilt’s pricing plans. At their core, these pricing plans are based on how many subscribers you have and what kind of features you need.

Jilt has (had) two different types of plans: free (Limited) and paid (Growth).

The free plan is free up to 300 active contacts, but has other limitations. The Growth plan is $29 up to 1,000 active contacts, with all of the features unlocked.

Omnisend, on the other hand, has just three different pricing plans that generally reflect their customers:

These plans include:

• Free plan: Basic email marketing with full SMS, automation, segmentation, reporting and other features
• Standard: Starts off at $16/month and 24/7 chat and live support, plus a dedicated Customer Success Manager
• Pro: Starts off at $59/month and includes advanced reporting, unlimited email and push notifications, and a dedicated Customer Success Manager

While Omnisend has more flexible pricing (based on how many contacts you have), which one wins will largely depend on what your ecommerce goals are.

Omnisend vs. Jilt: Key Takeaways

Both of these email marketing platforms are user-friendly and can be a great choice—but, as always, it depends on your situation and business goals. 

However, since Jilt no longer accepts new customers and will stop working for existing customers in April 2022, you can be sure that Omnisend not only matches Jilt, it goes beyond it.

For more ambitious, growth-minded entrepreneurs and ecommerce marketers, Omnisend is a better option due to their flexible marketing automation and broader possibilities to convey an omnichannel, highly-personalized marketing experience for your customers. 

You can get started with Omnisend for free today to see what it’s all about.