Short version: everyone sells you the editor. Nobody sells you the person who was going to sit in front of it.
What this is, and what it is not
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.
Can I email people who have not opted 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.
Why do my emails go to spam?
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.
What it does that a blank editor does not
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.
What it costs
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.