On Shopify, email marketing is a highly effective sales promotion method. There's the built-in Shopify Email, and plenty of email marketing apps are also available.
But which email marketing tool actually drives the most sales?
In this article, the author, who has run both Omnisend and Shopify Email on their own Shopify store for over six months, compares the two email tools. Using real data, we examine which tool actually delivered better results!
For more details on Omnisend, check out the article below.
What's the Difference Between Omnisend and Shopify Email?
Both Omnisend and Shopify Email are popular email marketing tools on Shopify. Let's compare them based on their feature differences and hands-on experience.
| App Name | Omnisend | Shopify Email |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing and Sending Limits | Free plan: ・Up to 250 contacts ・500 emails/month Standard plan $16/month: ・Up to 500 contacts ・6,000 emails/month Pro plan $59/month: ・Up to 2,500 contacts ・Unlimited emails |
Free for up to 10,000 emails/month ※Beyond 10,000 emails and up to 300,000, an additional $1 USD per 1,000 emails |
| Design Quality | ◎ | ◯ |
| Ease of Email Creation | ◎ | ▲ |
| Support | ◎ | ◯ |
※Comparison based on the author's personal impressions
Pricing and Sending Limits
Shopify Email's biggest advantage is that you can send up to 10,000 emails per month for free. If you have a mailing list of 3,000 contacts, for example, you can send up to 3 emails a month for free, and from the 4th email onward each one costs only about $3, making it very affordable to run.
Omnisend's free plan, on the other hand, has a low sending limit, and depending on the size of your contact list, you may not even be able to send one email to everyone. If you're considering putting real effort into email marketing, it's advisable to sign up for at least the Standard plan at $16/month, or the Pro plan at $59/month depending on your list size.
Since Omnisend involves fixed costs, it can become an unnecessary expense in months when your sending volume isn't consistent. When it comes to pricing and sending limits, Shopify Email has an overwhelming advantage.
Design Quality
This partly comes down to personal preference, but Omnisend has better design quality overall. It offers a wide range of templates and many customizable elements — for example, while Shopify Email offers just one heading style, Omnisend lets you choose from six styles by default.
That said, Shopify Email does cover the essential elements, so with some creativity in layout and structure, you can create emails that hold up well against Omnisend.
That said, from personal experience, the impression left by the actual emails sent differs quite a bit. Because of how Shopify Email handles spacing, its responsive layout tends to stand out more strongly, which makes emails created with Omnisend feel more polished. Also, Shopify Email's footer customization options are fairly limited.
If you're particularly committed to consistent branding and design through your email campaigns, there may be things Shopify Email simply can't achieve.
Support
Omnisend has chat support, so you can ask questions in real time from the admin page. However, the exchange happens in English, and while chat is available 24 hours a day, perhaps because the support center is based overseas, responses can sometimes take a while depending on the time and content of your inquiry.
Shopify Email also comes with official Shopify support. In addition to a Japanese-language help center and email support, there's also a robust community. Both tools offer solid support, so you can use either with peace of mind.
Based on actually using both support channels, my impression is that Omnisend's responses were faster and the proposed solutions were easier to understand.
Ease of Email Creation
Both tools let you build emails by dragging & dropping elements into place, among other methods, so the basic operation is very simple and doesn't differ much between them. Omnisend has a wider variety of elements, giving you more design freedom when creating emails.
However, one thing to watch out for is **"instability in how typed text is reflected."** Both tools autosave, so whatever you type is saved as you go without needing to press a save button each time.
With Omnisend, text tends to be reflected relatively smoothly, whereas with Shopify Email, there can be delays in reflecting keyboard input, or characters sometimes get scrambled for no apparent reason.
Depending on the situation, this can be stressful, and there's a real chance that text you've written gets lost, so we recommend drafting your content in a separate note-taking tool first and then copying and pasting it into Shopify Email.
Omnisend vs. Shopify Email: Which One Drove More Sales?
We compared average data from about 5 email sends per month over six months for each tool. Keep in mind this is based solely on results from the author's own store, so please treat it as a reference only.
Omnisend Had a Better Open Rate
Shopify Email...32.47%
Omnisend…41.15%
Omnisend had a better open rate by around 10 percentage points.
Send times were consistently set to 8 PM on weekdays for both, but since the email subject lines differed each time, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what caused the difference in results.
Omnisend had a slightly higher delivery error rate, but since the difference is only a few percentage points, we consider it within the margin of error.
Omnisend Had a Better Link Click-Through Rate
Shopify Email...2.11%
Omnisend…7.23%
Again, since the email content and featured products differed, this isn't a straightforward comparison. Since email content can also cause quite a large difference in results, it's fair to say that the content of the email is what matters most for click-through rate.
Omnisend Had a Better Purchase Conversion Rate
The purchase conversion rate was about 15% better with Omnisend. However, just as with the click-through rate, the purchase conversion rate likely comes down mainly to the content of the email.
Overall, my impression is that Omnisend made it easier to create emails with a stronger narrative and sense of atmosphere, which may have led to purchases by better conveying the appeal of the products to users.
That said, since we're still in the process of testing with Shopify Email, it's entirely possible to bring its purchase conversion rate up to the same level as Omnisend going forward.
Conclusion: Omnisend Is Great, But Shopify Email Gets the Job Done
Looking at the data above, Omnisend appears to be better overall. That said, purchases certainly do happen through Shopify Email as well, and when you factor in the fixed operating costs, it's not necessarily true that Omnisend is always more profitable. In fact, we did switch from Omnisend to Shopify Email, and for now we have no plans to switch back to Omnisend.
Ultimately, effective email marketing depends less on which tool you use and more on strategy — the content of your emails, how often you send them, and targeting through detailed segmentation.
Note that the ideal sending frequency and email content will vary depending on your customer base.
To understand what kind of email resonates best with your own customers, the most important thing is to keep testing by varying the content, frequency, and timing of your emails, and to build up your own data over time.
