AI email marketing writes the campaign, chooses who should receive it, schedules the send and A/B tests itself, then reports what actually earned. DoubleDown AI runs it on your own contact list from South Africa, with unlimited sends and POPIA-aligned consent and opt-out handling built in.
It starts at R1 299 a month plus a R2 000 once-off setup fee — R3 299 taken at checkout, month-to-month with no contract. It goes live in 30 minutes during business hours.
Every campaign tests itself on the first few hundred, then sends the winner to everyone else. You read the report.
It writes the copy, picks the segments, schedules the send and A/B tests itself. Then shows you what earned.
Subject lines, copy and calls to action are A/B tested every time. The winner is kept, so the numbers improve month on month.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up properly, the domain warmed, every send scanned for spam triggers before it goes.
Segments by behaviour, engagement and purchase pattern, so a lapsed customer and a new one never get the same email.
Live in 30 minutes, Mon–Fri 08:00–16:30 SAST. Outside that window, 08:30 the next business day.
Pick your product and tier, answer the onboarding questions, and settle setup plus your first month in one go.
Trained on your business, your products, your tone and your FAQs — automatically, while you wait.
It lands in your dashboard. Test it, tweak the tone, change the answers from your phone.
One line of code, or a number you already own. Then we monitor, update and scale with you.
Month-to-month. Cancel anytime. No contracts. Setup and your first month are taken together in one payment at checkout — R3 299 on Minimum Package.
It starts at R1,299 a month plus a R2,000 once-off setup fee — R3,299 at checkout, then R1,299 a month by debit order. No contract. Tiers are priced on the number of contacts and sends are unlimited. On a pure per-contact basis Mailchimp is cheaper and we will not pretend otherwise; what it does not include is somebody to write, segment, schedule and test the campaign, which is what you are actually buying here.
Almost always no. Section 69 of POPIA prohibits electronic direct marketing without prior consent, unless the person is an existing customer who bought something similar and was given a chance to opt out when you collected the address. The Information Regulator's December 2024 guidance added that you may approach somebody once to ask for consent and that a refusal is permanent. We do not send to bought lists. This is not legal advice.
Buying the list is not the offence; marketing to it electronically without consent is what section 69 prohibits. In practice a purchased list fails on every front — no consent record, high bounce rates, spam complaints, a wrecked sending reputation, and exposure to the Information Regulator. We will not load one. If you have an existing customer base, that is a different conversation and we will help you work out which part of it qualifies.
Usually authentication rather than content. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are DNS records that prove the mail is really from you, and Gmail's bulk sender requirements now expect all three plus one-click unsubscribe and a spam-complaint rate under a hard threshold. Add a cold sending domain, a stale list and no bounce handling and delivery collapses. We set the records up, warm the domain and clean the list before the first send.
Yes, it is part of setup. We generate the records, tell you exactly what to add at your DNS provider or do it with you on a call, then verify that all three pass before anything goes out. If you would rather your IT person made the change, we give them the exact values.
It writes the first draft — subject line and body, per segment, from your products, your tone and what your list has responded to before. You review and edit anything that does not sound like you, and it learns from the edits. The value is not that a machine writes English; it is that the campaign gets written at all, on a Tuesday when nobody had time.
Yes, and it is the default. Every campaign waits for your approval, and you can see the segment, the copy, the test variants and the send schedule before anything leaves. Recurring sequences can be set to run on their own once you have approved the pattern.
Yes, provided those contacts opted in or are existing customers. We clean it on import — remove duplicates, fix obvious typos, verify addresses and quarantine anything that looks bought or scraped — and tell you what we removed and why. A list that has not been emailed in two years is warmed up gradually rather than blasted.
Hard bounces are suppressed immediately and permanently. Soft bounces are retried on a schedule and suppressed if they persist. Every unsubscribe is honoured globally across all future campaigns, not just the one it came from. This is not housekeeping — an unmanaged bounce rate is the fastest way to be classified as a spammer.
You are priced on how many contacts you hold, not on how often you email them. Send weekly, send a campaign and a follow-up in the same week, split-test three versions — the price does not change. Most platforms charge on sends, which quietly discourages the exact behaviour that makes email work.
Yes. Campaigns can be written and sent per language across all eleven official South African languages, with the right version chosen per contact where you hold that information.
Opens, clicks, replies, unsubscribes, bounces and revenue attribution per campaign and per segment, plus the A/B test result and what the AI changed as a consequence. The reports are built around what earned rather than what looked busy.
Yes, entirely. Your contacts, their consent records and their engagement history are yours, and we export the lot in a standard format whenever you ask, including on the way out. Nobody should be locked into a vendor by their own customer list.
No developer. The build takes 30 minutes, Mon–Fri 08:00–16:30 SAST, SA public holidays excluded. The one thing that can take longer is DNS: if your domain records need changing, delivery waits for that to propagate, which is usually a few hours.
Short version: everyone sells you the editor. Nobody sells you the person who was going to sit in front of it.
Email marketing — bulk email, an email campaign, a newsletter, an email blast, a drip campaign, whatever your team calls it — is still the highest-return channel most South African businesses have, and the one most of them abandon after four sends.
They abandon it because the tool was never the problem. Mailchimp, Everlytic and Mail Blaze are good mailing list software; every one of them is an excellent email service provider. What they hand you is a blank editor and a Tuesday afternoon. Ours writes the copy, chooses the segments, schedules the send, runs the test and tells you what earned. Compare us to the person who would have done that, not to the software they would have done it in.
Almost always no, and this is where most SA campaigns go wrong before the first send. POPIA governs electronic direct marketing. Under section 69, marketing to somebody who has not consented is prohibited unless they are an existing customer who bought something similar from you and was given the chance to opt out when you collected the address.
The Information Regulator's direct-marketing guidance of December 2024 tightened the practice: you may approach a person once to request consent, a refusal is permanent, and every message must identify the sender and carry a working unsubscribe. So the answer on a bought list is no.
The existing customer exception is narrower than most businesses hope. It covers somebody who actually bought from you, for something similar to what you are marketing now, who was given a reasonable chance to object when you took their address. A person who downloaded a guide, entered a competition or left a business card is not an existing customer. We run double opt in where it matters, record consent with a source and timestamp, and enforce suppression globally. POPIA email marketing rules are not decoration here — they are wired into the send path. We are not attorneys and this is not legal advice.
Because sending is easy and arriving is not. Most campaigns fail on authentication rather than on content. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are DNS records that prove the mail came from you; without all three, Gmail and Outlook increasingly will not deliver at all.
Google's bulk sender requirements now demand authentication, one-click unsubscribe and a spam-complaint rate under a hard threshold for anyone sending meaningful volume. We set the records up, warm the sending domain rather than blasting from cold, clean the list before the first send, and handle every bounce so a dead address is removed instead of quietly poisoning your reputation. Email deliverability is the actual product; the editor is just where you look at it.
The AI email copywriter writes subject lines and body copy per segment in your voice, from your products and your history. Email list segmentation happens automatically on behaviour — who opened, who bought, who has gone quiet — rather than on a spreadsheet somebody maintains for two months and then stops.
Email a b testing runs on every campaign, on a slice of the list first, and the winner goes to the rest without anybody deciding. Email marketing automation covers the sequences that matter — a welcome series, an abandoned-cart nudge, a win-back for dormant customers — and drip campaign logic keeps them running. You get branded email templates in your colours and logo, and reporting built to increase email open rates rather than to look busy.
It starts at R1,299 a month plus a R2,000 once-off setup fee — R3,299 at checkout, then R1,299 monthly. No contract. Tiers are priced on contacts, and sends are unlimited sends — you are never punished for emailing your own list twice in a month.
Be clear-eyed about the comparison. On a pure per-contact basis, Mailchimp and Omnisend are cheaper than us and there is no argument to be had about it. What their price does not include is somebody to write the campaign, choose the segment, run the test and read the result. That is the job we do, and it is why email marketing cost in South Africa is the wrong number to compare — the right one is what an agency retainer or a marketing hire costs. For email marketing for small business that comparison usually settles it quickly.
We are an email marketing company in South Africa, based in Vanderbijlpark, working remotely with clients in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. Clients often run it alongside lead generation, so the list you are emailing keeps growing instead of slowly burning down.
No brand names and no competitor prices — those go stale and we would be quoting somebody else’s numbers. This is the shape of each option.
| Doing it yourself | An overseas platform | DoubleDown AI | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it costs | Your team's time | Typically billed in US dollars | From R1 299 a month, billed in rands |
| How it starts | Someone writes and sends each campaign by hand | You configure the platform yourself | We build it, trained on your business |
| Time to live | However long it keeps taking | Days of setup, done by you | 30 minutes, business hours |
| South African languages | Whatever your staff speak | Rarely tuned for South African phrasing | All 11 official languages |
| POPIA | Your responsibility | Usually governed by foreign law | Aligned by design, data in your account |
| Support | Nobody to call | Overseas time zone, usually email | South African hours, on WhatsApp |
| Commitment | None, and no system either | Annual plans are common | Month-to-month. Cancel anytime. No contracts. |