Autopilot Review

Part email marketing service and part CRM, Autopilot offers many features, a modern user interface, and enough low monthly costs. Once subscribed, you’ll see a rich dashboard showing sent emails’ number, active automation, and feed with stats on sent/opened emails and SMS. You’ll see also CRM features and a Tutorials section you’ll surely need: Autopilot is too complicated for most marketers, mostly for novice users.

Tutorials page will help you through every step, even importing contacts. You can do it from a spreadsheet (CSV, XLS, XLSX, ODS), boast a third-party app or add them one by one. You can easily map contact’s data adding fields such as true/false, whole number, date, and text. Autopilot handles duplicate quickly letting you update, replace, or don’t modify existing contact.

You can set up a campaign using an Autopilot guide or, if you feel brave, from scratch. Autopilot calls “Journeys” your campaigns: they are more complicated than a basic email campaign you may be accustomed to. You can’t start your campaign creating and sending a newsletter: first you have to build a Journey via drag and drop interface. You’ll be forced to choose triggers, conditions, autoresponders, and actions. Now you can create an email or send a preexisting one. It’s possible to upload your HTML template or pick one from six offered. Template editing options are quite narrow: it’s not possible to drag and drop new elements, but you can only change text and images.

Stats and analytics with openings, clicks, and unsubscribes are available in the activity feed; reports are available for more in-depth analytics with charts. An exhaustive knowledge base will help you, but if you need human help, you have to write an email to support. No live chat or phone support available: that’s a significant turnoff since Autopilot complexity.

Even Autopilot pricing plans are quite complex: it offers monthly plans starting from $5 per month/500 contacts monthly, $25 per month/1,000 contacts, $65 per month/3,000 contacts, up to $3,000 per month/500,000 contacts. If you need more, you can contact Autopilot for a high-volume account. If you pay annually, you can save a 20 percent off for every plan. A 30-days free trial on the 500-contact plan is available.