BerserkerMail review: After 101,895 emails sent here’s my honest and unfiltered opinion

Tl;dr: Use BerserkerMail if you like Ben Settle and you send daily emails. That’s it, that’s the review. If you want to keep reading, I’ll tell you about my experience migrating my personal list from ConvertKit to BerserkerMail. I’ll also tell you what sucks about it, “for now.”

By the end of this review, you’ll be able to make an informed decision based on the user experience of an email marketing practitioner, free of the influence of BerserkerMail’s excellent marketing. And if you decide to sign up for BerserkerMail using my affiliate link at the bottom of this review, you can get several exclusive bonuses to help you use BerserkerMail effectively and make more money from your email marketing efforts (details below.)

Side note: Just because I’m a BerserkerMail customer, fan and affiliate doesn’t mean I’ll be dick-riding. This is a fair review.

Contents

1. Important disclaimer
2. BerserkerMail is in beta
3. How to sign up for BerserkerMail
4. How BerserkerMail onboards new users
5. How much does BerserkerMail cost?
6. Is BerserkerMail’s premium price justified?
7. BerserkerMail’s UI is fast
8. BerserkerMail’s customer service
9. BerserkerMail help documentation
10. BerserkerMail’s email broadcasts & editor
11. BerserkerMail won’t ban you for mean words
12. BerserkerMail’s email deliverability
13. How does BerserkerMail’s deliverability compare to other email marketing platforms?
14. BerserkerMail’s email automation
15. Managing subscribers with BerserkerMail
16. BerserkerMail’s software integrations
17. BerserkerMail’s marketing claims
18. Conclusion & Recommendation
19. Free Bonuses for BerserkerMail Users

Important disclaimer

No software is perfect. They all have pros and cons. When choosing any software you have to make tradeoffs. An email marketing tool that has the most advanced automation will be lacklustre at sending broadcasts. One that has loads of features and attempts to be an all-in-one solution is probably going to have slow page load speeds.

Keep this in mind when you read my review of BerserkerMail. Also, I’m an email marketer, this is what I do for a living, so some of my criticisms may seem pedantic to a casual emailer.

BerserkerMail is in beta

Why “for now”? Because according to them, BerserkerMail is still in beta. They ship frequent updates that fix things that might suck at the moment. For example, when I signed up, the account overview – where you can see your aggregate email metrics – only showed data for the past 30 days. Shortly before writing this review, BerserkerMail shipped an update allowing you to select 30, 60 and 90-day account overviews, and request your “all time” stats compiled and emailed to you.

Any criticisms of BerserkerMail you read in this review may be fixed by them in a future software update. I will also do my best to keep this review current.

If you decide to migrate your list and they’re missing some feature you were expecting or you experience some bugs, be patient.

How to sign up for BerserkerMail

You get a 7-day free trial when you sign up for BerserkerMail. You can use it to poke around, use the email editor, send emails to a test account and so on. Use this time to figure out if you like the user interface and experience. Creating an account should’ve been straightforward if they did things like a normal SaaS. Name, email address, password, good to go.

But BerserkerMail asks you for a phone number and they text you a code to log in. This was buggy for me; I didn’t get the code. So I had to email support and they took care of it. An account signup that should’ve taken less than 5 minutes ended up taking a day.

The delay was a minor inconvenience and the friction they add before you can sign up is a good thing. Asking for a phone number reduces the likelihood that spammers will create accounts and upload scraped lists. I got a bunch of spam emails from people using beehiiv, for example, because they make account creation so easy and their free plan is so generous. Hasn’t happened recently though so I guess beehiiv spoke to the spammers and they fixed the issue.

How BerserkerMail onboards new users

BerserkerMail doesn’t allow users to onboard themselves. You can’t just import your subscribers and start emailing. Every user is onboarded manually by their customer support team. To import your mailing list, you have to mail them a csv. Their team scrubs the list of bad emails and loads them into your account for you. They also label the dodgy emails for you – catch alls, bots, complainers and the like – so you can decide whether you want to keep them or delete them.

In my case, I had to import lists from several sources, so I didn’t miss anyone whose email address I’d collected. ConvertKit, SamCart, Gumroad, Circle, Stripe, Calendly and beehiiv. To save time, I used ChatGPT to help me format the CSVs before sending them to the BerserkerMail team. Eventually, we imported 2,800+ emails in total. This list would soon be culled to ~800 by my warmup campaign, which I’ve described below.

How much does BerserkerMail cost?

Because users are onboarded manually, BerserkerMail charges a one-time setup fee. It’s $100 for lists up to 30,000 contacts. The setup fee costs more for more than 30,000 contacts, but this is not listed on the website. The subscription fee is:

• $29/month up to 250 contacts
• $49/month up to 1000 contacts
• $75/month up to 2000 contacts
• $120/month up to 3000 contacts
• And so on

I should’ve taken a screenshot of this because BerserkerMail doesn’t list their pricing on the website. You can only access their pricing tiers from the billing page of a test drive account. Once you’ve upgraded you’ll never see their price list again. This makes zero sense. The prices I’ve listed for you are from invoices I’ve paid.

You can’t downgrade your plan yourself. You have to email support and ask them to downgrade your plan. I had to downgrade my plan because after the list warmup campaign I did (see below) I found 2000 gray mail subscribers I didn’t want on my list.

There are a lot of minor inconveniences in BerserkerMail they think they can get away with because they’re “in beta” or because the founder Troy claims these are “best practices.”

Is BerserkerMail’s premium price justified?

Yes and no. It’s a good email marketing platform that does what it does well and a few of its features are hands down best-in-class.

However, one of its main selling points, email deliverability (more on this shortly,) isn’t the best in the market. Campaign Refinery gets better deliverability. And there are email platforms that get email deliverability as good as BerserkerMail that are cheaper.

Bento, for example, charges $30/month for up to 3000 contacts. beehiiv charges $99/month for up to 100,000 contacts. With Bento and beehiiv you get more features and neither of them charge a setup fee.

So why am I recommending BerserkerMail? Because it’s the best email marketing platform for people who send daily emails. By design, you’re paying more for them to do less.

BerserkerMail’s UI is fast

They’ve built the app so you can get to every feature in as few clicks as possible. This respect for their users’ time is most evident when writing emails (more on this in a bit.) The different pages of the app load in a flash. This is a relief. Online business owners and marketers spend a lot of time in their email marketing software. Slow load times are excruciating. One of the worst examples of this is ActiveCampaign. Thank you, BerserkerMail.

Every page in the app has a tutorial video that explains the different features on the page and how to use them. These videos are useful but limited in their utility. They only explain the basics and there is no help documentation yet (see below.)

BerserkerMail’s customer service

The customer support team only works 9 am to 5 pm EST, Monday to Friday. I live in Dubai, we only communicated via email and I had to import several lists. The time difference meant that it took me a week to send my first email and the entire onboarding took 2 weeks to complete. The 9 to 5 cutoff is acceptable. What isn’t acceptable is the lack of support on weekends. What are users who send daily emails supposed to do if something goes wrong on Saturday or Sunday?

BerserkerMail’s founder Troy Broussard once published a podcast talking about how he “builds businesses via the help desk.” 24/7/365 support is the standard these days. Especially when you charge a premium like BerserkerMail does. Sendlane’s founder, Jimmy Kim, posts this every Sunday.

Happy Sunday to everyone, except my competitors who believe marketers operate and only need support M-F 9-5pm, their time zone.

We’re committed to being available to support you 24/7/365.

– We have real people (no virtual chat bots here)
– For all free AND paid users
– Avg 30 second live chat response time
– Especially for major holidays
– Even at 5:01pm your time

And we will never, ever pull back on that commitment to our customers, no matter how big we get ⭐️

Jimmy’s become famous online for personally helping people with their email marketing issues, even if they aren’t Sendlane customers. Anytime someone posts about an email problem, people tag him in the comments. Ask Jimmy. Call Jimmy. Jimmy will fix it for you. THAT is how you build businesses via the help desk.

BerserkerMail help documentation

They have none. They use tutorial videos, office hours and video training in the BerserkerMail mobile app instead. People can read instructions and screenshots faster than they can watch a video.

Not only that but many of the questions asked during office hours are appropriate for help docs. During the office hours I attended it was apparent that questions are repeated that have been answered on previous calls. The customer support rep either mentioned they went over it in a previous call, answered the same question again, or both. Furthermore, as of writing this review, there are 98 office hours recordings in the BerserkerMail app (more in this later). Who the fuck is going to watch 100 hours of recordings to understand the ins-and-outs of your software?

During one Office Hours call I saw the customer support rep share his screen, showing how he set up engagement tagging. The way it’s done in BerserkerMail is slightly different from how it’s done in other email software. It’s a bit fiddly tbh. Turns out he had explained how to set this up in a previous call. So I emailed support and they told me where to find it. Then I went to the app, looked up the recording, hit play and fast-forwarded until I found what I was looking for. Then I had to watch his explanation and implement what I saw in my BerskerMail account.

OR I COULD’VE JUST READ A HELP DOC TITLED “HOW TO SET UP ENGAGEMENT TAGGING” AND FINISHED IN 5 MINUTES.

Transcribe all Office Hours recordings, turn every unique question and answer into a help article, post them on the website. This is the bare minimum. You don’t even need a team to do it. You need a VA, Descript and any one of the 6 gorillion AI tools on the market.

Office hours can be useful. You have a question, you show up, it gets answered. But these should be limited to questions that aren’t covered in the help docs or for helping with one-off use cases that don’t apply to most users.

BerserkerMail’s email broadcasts & editor

This is their best feature by far. BerserkerMail crushes every other email marketing platform in the “sending email broadcasts” department. Their email editor lets you send a broadcast in 2-5 actions. Anytime you want to send a broadcast:

• Write the email
• Hit send

If you write your emails in another app e.g. Google docs, the workflow is:

• Copy/paste email
• Hit send

…All on one page! The new email broadcast page is the default when you log in. The app remembers the last segment you sent an email to. You can change segments, schedule a sending time, and do everything you need to do to send a broadcast on one screen. It’s not an exaggeration to say this one feature alone is worth the price.

If you’ve used any other email marketing software you’ll know they take 5-10+ actions. It may not seem like a big deal but when you send a lot of emails, the time savings are significant. This, coupled with their fast load times, makes sending a daily email an enjoyable experience rather than a tedious one. Because of this, you’re more likely to send emails. And the more emails you send, the more money you make.

BerserkerMail’s email template is bare bones. You can’t create custom email templates. You can’t write emails in HTML. You can’t send plain text emails. The only things you can do are:

• Choose your email width
• Choose your email font and size
• Choose your link colour and whether or not they’re bolded by default
• Choose your footer (you can easily switch between custom footers for different segments)

BerserkerMail won’t ban you for mean words

Another reason why BerserkerMail is worth the premium price. While they have user guidelines on who you can email and what you can email about, these are only related to obeying US laws. You are not going to get your account suspended over the words you use in the app or off it, or your political, religious or sociocultural views and beliefs. Examples of this happening: Roosh V and Aweber, Stefan Molyneux and Mailchimp. Campaign Refinery’s founder once suspended a user for saying in an email the Ukraine invasion was a psyop.

Here’s the deal: if I’m a paying customer and I don’t break any of your terms of service, you don’t get to arbitrarily suspend my account just because you disagree with me. I worry about this with every software I subscribe to. They’re all commies of varying degrees.

This is the main reason why I signed up for BerserkerMail. My email list is my most valuable asset. With a Ben Settle-affiliated product I’m certain I won’t have to worry about some woke, blue-haired (with one side shaved,) obese heifer with a septum piercing and they/them pronouns in the “trust and safety” department canceling me.

In addition to being anti-woke and supporting free speech, BerserkerMail sends you a daily backup of your list (you can set the frequency.) If I decide to move or they decide to suspend me, I can just download my list and take my business elsewhere.

BerserkerMail’s email deliverability

If you’re not an email geek, when I say deliverability, think “open rates.” Though that’s not precise, it’s good enough. Deliverability refers to how likely your emails are to get into a subscriber’s inbox. Superior deliverability is one of BerserkerMail’s selling points. After an aggressive list warmup and culling unengaged subscribers, my account-wide deliverability is excellent. I went from a 2.90% account-wide click rate on ConvertKit to 9-10% on BerserkerMail. Don’t care about open rates because they’re not a reliable metric anymore, but they’re up too. That means I tripled my email engagement.

NO IMAGES

You can’t embed images in your emails. BerserkerMail says this improves deliverability for all its users. But Campaign Refinery allows images and they get better deliverability than BerserkerMail (see below.) In emails to my personal list I rarely use images, so this wasn’t a dealbreaker for me. If you run an eComm brand and want to send fancy emails with lots of images, BerserkerMail isn’t for you. No idea why they even bothered with a Shopify integration tbh (more on this later.)

NO PREVIEW TEXT

This is dumb. There’s no way to add preview text in BerskerMail. Preview text allows you to write mobile-optimized subject lines that stand out in the inbox without sacrificing persuasiveness. This increases open rates. Anyone who’s heard me talk about the Perfect Subject Line™ formula knows this. Also, you can use the ‌ “trick” that turns the preview text into an empty line, which is another way to stand out in the inbox.

As a workaround, in BerserkerMail I’ve been using the first line of my emails as faux-preview text, separating it from the body of the email. No zwnj; though, sadly. I shouldn’t have to do this. Preview text is a standard, out-of-the-box feature in all email marketing software.

ONLY 3 LINKS PER EMAIL

Another dumb limitation. Again they say it helps with deliverability but my MuslimMan™ newsletter sent using beehiiv is often filled with dozens of links, sometimes 40+, and it gets the same deliverability as BerserkerMail. It has nothing to do with the number of links but has to do with the ratio of links to content. Even so, several newsletters that are a collection of links with sparse content end up in my inbox just fine.

If you insert non-hyperlinked URLs you can get around their 3-link limitation, for now. The links will be clickable in your subscriber’s inbox.

How does BerserkerMail’s deliverability compare to other email marketing platforms?

Caveat: The assessment below is experiential and not scientific.

My gold standard for email deliverability is Campaign Refinery. I’ve migrated 3 clients to it who were having email deliverability problems and their deliverability shot up. I’m talking 80% open rates and 20% click rates (not a regular occurrence but it happened on more than one occasion.) I asked Travis Ketchum (no relation to Ash,) founder of Campaign Refinery, to share a few screenshots of account-wide metrics from different clients so we can compare.

Campaign Refinery review coming soon…

As you can see, deliverability on Campaign Refinery is better. This isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison because my list is tiny and the accounts shown may be in different verticals. But as a rule, the bigger the list, the lower the engagement. So accounts with bigger lists than mine should show lower open rates and click rates. Not only that, but even if Campaign Refinery’s deliverability were merely similar to BerserkerMail, the fact that they allow images and don’t limit the number of links per email puts the kibosh on the latter’s marketing claims.

BerserkerMail currently has a tiny user base. I expect that as they grow, and their users maintain a good sending reputation with email service providers because of these constraints, BerserkerMail’s deliverability will improve.

BerserkerMail’s email automation

BerserkerMail’s schtick is simplicity and they take it to comical lengths. With their automations (Berserkermail calls them campaigns,) this is both a good and bad thing. The only thing that can start an automation is a tag being added. The only thing that can stop an automation is a tag being added. In fact the entire platform runs on tags (more on this later.) These constraints can be helpful because fewer things can go wrong and because guardrails allow you to be more creative (surprising, I know.)

The only actions you can perform in an automation are

• Add or remove a tag
• Send an email
• Fire a webhook

That last one is confusing because webhooks are not simple. So it’s missing 99% of the automated actions that nearly every email marketing platform can do. Once again, this is due to their Beta-ness, so I have no doubt that the automations will improve fast.

One thing about their automations I cannot excuse is the lack of email “sequences.” I only have one campaign that’s long-ish, but it had 20 emails and I had to add each node, configure it and write the email, one by one. This is always time consuming on every email platform that handles autoresponders this way. It’s fucking annoying, not a good experience and makes you NOT want to set up automations. “Sequences” allow you to write several emails in quick succession in one place and then add that email sequence to an automation. It also reduces the number of nodes in an automation, allows you to be more organized and the automation page to load faster (important when making changes.)

Bottom line: if you’re a Brennan Dunn-type who automates all the things, BerserkerMail is not for you. Several email marketing platforms have better automation features. I personally recommend Bento. Having said that, Ben Settle doesn’t automate shit. Doesn’t even segment his list. He sends the same broadcast email to everyone, every day, without missing a day. And it works. That’s where BerskerMail excels.

At the moment, the only automations I’ve set up are my list warmup campaign and my engagement tagging campaign. I’ll add more automations when the need arises but for now, I only use BerskerMail to send daily emails. Note: if you sign up for BerserkerMail using my affiliate link I’ll give you all my automations as a bonus. See below.

Managing subscribers with BerserkerMail

Out of the box, BerserkerMail gives you all necessary contact fields.

• Personal info
• Business info
• Billing and shipping addresses

Plus a couple of others like lead source and date of birth.

You can also create any custom fields you like. There’s a handy quick-edit feature that in one click allows you to update the name, email and phone of a subscriber from the contacts overview page. You can also see a summary of the subscriber’s recent activity via a dropdown menu in the contacts overview page.

Each subscriber has a dedicated info page with their entire history. This dedicated contact details page is also the only place where you can create and manage custom fields for your account – an odd placement (unless I missed the option somewhere else.)

BerserkerMail’s forms only allow you to collect a subscriber’s name, email and phone. There is no way to automatically populate any of the other fields with subscriber data. Job title, company, website, birthday, address etc. have to be collected by a 3rd party tool and pushed to BerserkerMail using Zapier or Make. Ditto for customer info like billing address, products purchased etc.

So you have all these contact fields and no way to fill them unless you use middleman software or do it manually. This flies in the face of BerserkerMail’s “simplicity” marketing. Some features of BerserkerMail are so simple even tech-retarded boomers can use them while others require you to be an advanced digital marketer. Nobody wants to or enjoys daisy-chaining several apps together – via yet more apps – to get their tech stack to work, except the most autistic of automatoors.

BerserkerMail lets you block individuals via email address, phone, device ID and device IP. They also let you block groups of people via country, country calling code, domain and keyword. For example, you could block the entire country of India or any email address that matches the keyword “swipe.” This is a cool feature.

BerserkerMail’s software integrations

If you use any shopping cart other than ThriveCart, Shopify or ClickFunnels 2.0 you’ll have to integrate it with BerserkerMail via Zapier or Make. If you use Learnistic as your course hosting platform, BerserkerMail can update contacts based on in-app purchases.

The Shopify integration is weird af. Why bro? Shopify = eComm. eComm = emails with images. That’s how they roll. I’d love to know which Shopify customer is using BerserkerMail for email marketing so I can shake his hand for being so avant garde.

The ThriveCart integration makes sense but have you seen the ThriveCart user group on Facebook? They’re going down in flames. So many problems. It would be comical if they weren’t costing entrepreneurs so much money in lost sales. Don’t fall for the software lifetime deal psyop. PSA, if you’re a ThriveCart user, switch to SamCart. You’ll pay a monthly subscription but their software works.

The only BerserkerMail integration I’ve enabled for now is WordPress. I’ve connected it to my website and it’s supposed to automatically publish my email broadcasts as blog posts. Except it doesn’t work. And I’m pretty sure I set up the integration correctly. None of my broadcasts are getting pushed to my WordPress website. I haven’t reached out to customer support yet but I will. Probably a minor issue.

As of writing, these are the only native integrations in BerserkerMail. All other integrations have to be implemented via 3rd party tools. So that’s something else you need to figure out.

BerserkerMail’s marketing claims

BerserkerMail claims they have “the absolute highest inbox delivery in the entire industry.” Based on my experience, this is not true. BerserkerMail does get excellent delivery but Campaign Refinery is better and the latter allows images.

BerserkerMail likes to use the word “advanced” in their marketing. Many of the features they claim are advanced are industry standard. Everybody has them. And BerserkerMail does not have some features that are industry standard, like preview text. Some of their features are rudimentary and not advanced, like their automations which are limited.

BerserkerMail has simplified the most common email marketing activities, broadcasts and automations, and they are easy to use. After using software like ActiveCampaign aka SlothfulCampaign, sending email broadcasts with BerserkerMail is a delight. I cannot stress this point enough.

Conclusion & Recommendation

After migrating my personal email list to BerserkerMail and using it for several months, I’m able to conditionally recommend it to you. It’s good software, it works, and it simplifies several email marketing activities. The more simple it is for you to send emails, the more emails you’ll send and the more money you’ll make. That is the point of email marketing.

Despite what they say on their website, BerserkerMail is not for everyone.

SWITCH to BerskerMail if:

• You send daily emails
• You don’t care that you can’t embed images
• You don’t want your email marketing provider to arbitrarily suspend your account for saying mean words on the internet

DON’T SWITCH to BerserkerMail if:

• You don’t send daily emails
• You need to embed images in your emails
• You need to send more than 3 links in your emails
• Your email marketing is automation-heavy

BerserkerMail’s email broadcast feature alone makes up for all its faults. And because they’re still in beta, I’m inclined to be patient and overlook their problems. They ship new features and updates frequently enough that the software keeps getting better everyday.

Free Bonuses for BerserkerMail Users

If you sign up for a paid BerserkerMail account using my affiliate link below, I’ll give you the following bonuses.

• The exact list warmup campaign I used after migrating to BerserkerMail. I’ll guide you through the setup step-by-step in a video tutorial.
• The exact engagement tagging campaign I use to segment engaged subscribers in BerserkerMail. Also a video tutorial.
• A complimentary copy of Profitable AF Emails, my email marketing course which in the past has sold for $299. It’s yours, gratis.
• A 30-day scholarship to CopySkills™, my membership community where you can get copywriting and marketing help from Yours Beardly, which costs $19.99/month. Use this membership as “extended customer support” so you can get setup on BerserkerMail fast and start making that sweet email money.

To claim your bonuses, email a copy of your receipt to hello@dropkickcopy.com.

GET A FREE 7-DAY TEST DRIVE OF BERSERKERMAIL 👉