Mail+ vs. MailPro: A Fair Comparison

In the market of ESPs (Email Service Providers), Spotler has secured a prominent position in Europe. This is not only due to the number of customers using Spotler’s email marketing software or the volume of emails sent annually via Spotler’s servers to inform, motivate, or inspire recipients. It is also because Spotler actively develops, promotes, and sells two distinct email marketing products in the market: Spotler Mail+ and Spotler MailPro.

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How can you objectively compare Mail+ with MailPro?

Spotler, as a developer, also struggles with this question. If you look at the main use case of email marketing software, both products do essentially the same thing: they deliver commercial email messages to the inboxes of recipients who have subscribed to receive such emails.

 

Efficiency first in Mail+

As you can read on both product pages, the products do differ significantly from each other. The product owners and developers of Spotler Mail+ proudly highlight that Mail+ is an off-the-shelf email product that is highly user-friendly, quick to learn and adapt, and therefore enjoys a large customer base of marketers and communication specialists. These users apply the software effectively and efficiently every day to inform members, sell products, and convert leads.

They’d argue that the more that can be customised within databases, HTML, and CSS, the greater the chance of errors, the more complex things become, and the less a marketer actually achieves.

 

Full control with MailPro

On the other hand, the product owners and developers of Spotler MailPro argue that this standardisation within Spotler Mail+ limits email marketers in their creativity and freedom. Why not offer more options within the application and email templates to tailor everything better to the user’s needs? This is precisely what Spotler MailPro provides.

With Spotler MailPro, it is possible to set up and manage accounts (officially called campaigns in the application) within one environment for multiple countries, brands, business units, or locations. It also allows easy switching between these campaigns to copy-paste emails and lists as needed.

When looking at how user roles and permissions are structured, as well as how automations or event-triggered campaigns are set up, you will notice that Mail+ is designed to efficiently support a large user base in a standardised manner. Meanwhile, MailPro offers much more flexibility to customise these aspects per client.

 

Midmarket+ vs. Enterprises and Agencies

The way software is developed and how functionalities are made available tells a lot about which target audience the product is most suitable for. While Spotler Mail+ is widely used by practical, ambitious marketers and communication specialists in SMB or SMB+ organisations, MailPro is more often utilised by tech-savvy, ambitious email marketers in larger enterprise organisations or by specialists at online marketing agencies managing campaigns for clients.

The differences in how these two email marketing packages are used, along with the distinct target audiences of Mail+ and MailPro, mean that few customers have experience with both products. As a result, not many users know what it’s like to work with both Mail+ and MailPro.

However, we have found a customer with an expert who knows what it takes to succeed with Spotler Mail+ and how to achieve results with Spotler MailPro. This person can, therefore, make a genuinely objective comparison between both products.

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‘With Mail+ you can discover and easily implement a lot yourself, but the possibilities are finite. On the other hand, MailPro gives us more opportunities to work with all available data.’

Tom Meijer Online marketer at XXL Nutrition

A Customer’s Perspective

That expert is Tom Meijer, online marketer at XXL Nutrition, where he has worked with both Mail+ and MailPro. His role has since evolved, and he is now focusing more on specialising in the use of the customer data platform that XXL Nutrition employs (Spotler Activate). However, he still possesses the knowledge and experience to compare Spotler Mail+ and Spotler MailPro from an e-commerce perspective.

 

Strengths: Mail+ vs. MailPro

In our conversation with Tom, we first asked him to highlight what he sees as the strengths of Spotler Mail+ and Spotler MailPro. We then delved deeper into how he has used both solutions for different purposes at XXL Nutrition.

Looking at the strengths Tom mentioned, we can immediately draw an interesting conclusion. Tom confirms what we have already described above as the USPs of both Spotler Mail+ and Spotler MailPro. In other words, the reasons why Tom enjoys working with Mail+ and MailPro align with what we consider their strong points. Essentially, the products fulfil their intended purposes, and we see our development philosophy reflected in how customers experience our products:

Perks of Spotler Mail+

  • User-friendly, strong on simplicity
  • Very manageable as a user
  • Getting results quickly

Perks Spotler MailPro

  • Quickly change & copy between store views
  • Great way of managing email sending intervals
  • Advanced filtering

Use Case Spotler Mail+

When we delve deeper into the situation at XXL Nutrition, we see that the organisation—due to the maturity phase it was in a few years ago as an e-commerce company—greatly benefited from an email marketing solution that could quickly deliver results and boost conversions.

 

Integration with Magento

Through a direct integration with the Magento e-commerce platform, contact, order, and product data were automatically synchronised with Spotler Mail+. This allowed Tom to make selections based on data to populate his newsletters with direct conversion links to XXL Nutrition’s Magento store. Additionally, he could easily exclude people who had made a purchase in the last two weeks, preventing them from receiving new offers or annoying discounts on products they had just bought.

The integration with Magento also enabled the triggering of campaigns from that platform, which were highly conversion-oriented in addition to product newsletters. Consider, for example, the abandoned cart campaign. Since carts were left before checkout in Magento, Magento could automatically notify Spotler Mail+ to send an email (after a configurable delay) reminding the user of their pending checkout.

Spotler Mail+ was also used by XXL Nutrition to send new customers a friendly, automatically generated welcome message with a personal discount code for their next purchase. Additionally, Win-Back campaigns were developed to re-engage customers who had not made a purchase for a while. These campaigns were triggered by Magento based on the last purchase date plus a specified number of weeks or months.

 

Reaching the Limits of Possibilities

As XXL Nutrition grew, the increasing number of customers, campaigns, and emails created a need for better email pressure regulation. This means ensuring that individuals receiving multiple campaigns do not end up getting overwhelmed with too many emails in a short period. While this was an understandable need for XXL Nutrition, it was challenging to implement with Mail+.

At that time, XXL Nutrition partnered with Yellowgrape from Amsterdam to take its e-commerce to the next level. Investments were made in the Spotler Activate customer data platform, and the transition from Spotler Mail+ to Spotler MailPro was made to allow for greater customisation, more flexibility in HTML email templates, and better control over email pressure regulation. Simultaneously, Spotler MailPro was integrated with Spotler Activate to synchronise triggers and audiences and enable more personalised email marketing automation—something that, to be fair, is also possible with Spotler Mail+.

 

Use Case Spotler MailPro

After transitioning from Mail+ to MailPro, XXL Nutrition, in close collaboration with Yellowgrape, worked intensively to set up the MailPro environment with the correct store views (campaigns), develop new templates, and configure all automated campaigns. Integration between Activate and MailPro was also established to build customer segments based on purchasing behaviour and online activity, making these available as email lists in MailPro for more targeted product offerings.

Naturally, Tom also worked on properly configuring email pressure regulation, ensuring that people enrolled in multiple campaigns could be excluded based on different rules, and prioritising campaigns accordingly.

Scaling Up Automations

As a result, XXL Nutrition expanded its number of automated campaigns from three to over ten. A key addition was the Browse Abandonment campaign. If a known visitor leaves the site and has given opt-in consent, an automated email is sent after a set time with an offer for the last viewed product—made possible through the integration between Activate and MailPro.

Another successful campaign is the Calorie Calculator Campaign. Users complete an initial online calculation to determine their daily calorie intake and then subscribe to personalised advisory emails based on their results.

Finally, a new New Customer Flow was developed within MailPro. If a new customer has not made a repeat purchase within three months, a campaign is triggered:

 

  • A push notification is sent via the XXL Nutrition app if the app has been downloaded.
  • If the app has not been downloaded, a WhatsApp message is sent if permission has been granted.
  • If no WhatsApp permission is available, an email via MailPro is sent, provided there is an opt-in.
  • If there is no email opt-in, an SMS message is sent if the mobile number is known.
  • In all cases, a standard discount is offered to encourage the customer to make another purchase. In the future, Tom plans to use Trendskout or Predictive AI within Activate to optimise this campaign by targeting customers through their preferred channels and predicting the right discount based on previous purchases and behaviour—moving away from a standard one-size-fits-all discount approach.

 

Conclusion: Mail+ vs. MailPro

From an e-commerce user perspective, the choice between Mail+ and MailPro was influenced by the growth phase of XXL Nutrition. Mail+ was an excellent fit when rapid expansion, increased reach, and conversion growth required a standardised approach. Thanks to its Magento integration, Mail+ provided the ability to send product newsletters quickly and launch essential automated campaigns efficiently. Its high degree of standardisation ensured ease of use and rapid adoption, allowing email marketing automation to be implemented swiftly and effectively.

However, as the limitations of Mail+ became apparent and the organisation entered a new phase, MailPro emerged as the logical next step. The need for better email pressure management and more flexibility in creating complex automations—coupled with integration with the Spotler Activate customer data platform—made MailPro a valuable addition to XXL Nutrition’s tech stack.

“Of course, we sometimes miss the speed at which we could set up and launch campaigns in Spotler Mail+, but we also recognised that we were pushing its limits. At some point, you have to make a choice,” says Tom Meijer. That choice has proven to be a good one, although Tom does note that the number of e-commerce users for Spotler Mail+ remains significantly larger than the e-commerce community for Spotler MailPro. “That’s why it can sometimes be difficult to connect with like-minded users and exchange experiences. So, if any MailPro users are reading this and want to share insights, feel free to reach out!”

Discover Mail+

Send newsletters and automated campaigns that increase loyalty and lead to more conversions.

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Manage your brand(s), enjoy reliable delivery at high volumes and fully customise the Spotler MailPro platform.

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