Unisender
Unisender is a cloud-based email and SMS marketing platform founded in 2008 by Alexei Kachalov and Konstantin Gushchin in Moscow, Russia.[1] It enables businesses to create, send, automate, and analyze personalized marketing campaigns across email, SMS, and web push notifications, serving over 870,000 companies worldwide and processing more than 800 million emails monthly as of 2025.[2] As a multi-channel marketing automation service, Unisender offers tools such as drag-and-drop email constructors with over 200 templates, audience segmentation, A/B testing, detailed analytics, and integrations with more than 40 platforms via API.[3] The platform provides 24/7 customer support and subscription-based pricing starting from the Lite plan at 672 RUB per month as of 2025, making it accessible for small to large enterprises worldwide.[4] Notable clients include major brands such as TELE2, TEZ Tour, HIPP, and Copiny, highlighting its role in optimizing customer communication and driving business growth through targeted outreach.[1]History
Founding and Early Development
Unisender was founded in 2008 in Moscow, Russia, by Alexei Kachalov and Konstantin Gushchin as a startup aimed at providing email marketing solutions.[1] Initially operating under the name MailHelper, the service was developed by the two entrepreneurs to offer a straightforward platform for businesses seeking to manage email communications efficiently.[5] The founders recognized a gap in accessible, reliable email tools tailored to the needs of companies in the CIS region, where digital marketing infrastructure was still evolving.[6] From its inception, Unisender's early development centered on creating a core platform that enabled users to design, send, and monitor email campaigns. By 2009, the service was rebranded as Unisender and quickly attracted its first 500 clients, marking the official launch of these foundational capabilities.[5] In 2011, the company opened its first office and recorded its first profit. This period involved intensive efforts to establish robust technical foundations to handle growing volumes of emails without compromising reliability. The startup's initial operations were bootstrapped through the founders' resources, allowing for agile development without external investment in the early stages.[1] These years laid the groundwork for Unisender's positioning as a leading email service in the CIS, setting the stage for later expansions into SMS and automation features.[5]Key Milestones and Expansion
Following its founding in 2008, Unisender rapidly expanded its offerings and user base, achieving significant scale in the CIS region through organic growth. In 2010, the company introduced SMS functionality alongside API support, marking a pivotal shift from email-only services to multi-channel capabilities that enabled businesses to engage customers via text messaging. This expansion was supported by the development of local servers in Russia and Belarus to ensure compliance with regional data protection laws, such as Russia's 152-FZ, facilitating broader adoption across CIS countries.[5] By 2013, Unisender's platform processed 400 million emails monthly, demonstrating robust infrastructure capable of handling high-volume campaigns for growing enterprises. The service solidified its position as the leading email and SMS provider in the CIS region by the mid-2010s, with clients sending millions of emails daily as reported in company profiles from that period. In 2015, further enhancements included the launch of an SMTP/API service, coinciding with the user base surpassing 300,000 clients, primarily serving small and medium-sized businesses in Russia, Belarus, and neighboring markets.[5] Unisender maintained an unfunded, bootstrapped model throughout its development, relying on reinvested revenues rather than external investments, which allowed for steady, self-sustained expansion up to 2025. Key product evolutions in subsequent years included sender ratings and payment integrations in 2017, followed by the addition of a landing page builder and chatbots in 2021, integrating these multi-channel tools to streamline customer interactions across email, SMS, web push, and conversational interfaces. By 2021, the client base had grown to over 870,000, reflecting strong regional penetration and trust among CIS businesses for automated marketing solutions. In 2022, Unisender joined Russia's Skolkovo innovation center, enhancing its technological ecosystem while continuing to prioritize scalable, compliant services for the CIS market. As of 2025, the platform supports over 1.5 billion monthly emails and serves a diverse array of companies across the region, underscoring its evolution into a comprehensive multi-channel leader without venture funding.[5][1]Services and Features
Email Marketing Capabilities
Unisender provides a suite of tools designed for efficient email campaign creation and delivery, enabling users to build and distribute targeted messages to large audiences. The platform emphasizes user-friendly interfaces and robust data handling to support businesses in engaging customers through email without requiring advanced technical skills.[7] Central to Unisender's email marketing is its drag-and-drop email editor, which allows users to construct messages using pre-built modules such as text blocks, images, buttons, and separators. This visual constructor enables the assembly of emails in as little as 15 minutes, with options to incorporate videos, animations, AMP components, social media widgets, and custom HTML code for enhanced interactivity. Additionally, the platform offers over 100 responsive templates tailored to various industries and purposes, which adapt seamlessly to mobile devices and include access to a library of 500,000 free stock images. Users can save custom elements like headers or footers as reusable templates to streamline future campaigns.[8] For bulk sending, Unisender supports mass distribution of emails to extensive subscriber lists, facilitating automated chains for scenarios like welcome sequences or promotional blasts. The campaign setup process involves selecting recipient lists, defining send parameters, and scheduling deliveries for optimal timing, ensuring messages reach audiences at predetermined intervals. Recipient lists can be managed through built-in tools for importing contacts via CSV files or API connections, with support for deduplication to maintain clean databases.[7] Segmentation capabilities allow users to divide subscriber bases using various criteria, including geography, demographics (such as age and gender), behavioral data (like purchase history or link clicks), and lifecycle stages (e.g., new versus loyal customers). This enables precise targeting to deliver relevant content, improving engagement by addressing specific audience needs, such as localized offers or interest-based recommendations. Personalization is integrated by pulling subscriber data—such as names, locations, or past interactions—directly into email content, creating dynamic messages that feel individualized without manual editing for each recipient.[9] To ensure compliance, Unisender adheres to Russian Federal Law No. 152-FZ on personal data protection, implementing organizational and technical measures to safeguard information from unauthorized access or misuse. Features include mandatory unsubscribe links in emails, allowing recipients to opt out with data processing cessation within 10 working days of request, and built-in spam complaint tracking to monitor and mitigate delivery issues. The platform stores data on secure servers without transboundary transfers, promoting ethical use and reducing legal risks for users.[10] Integrations enhance list management and data flow, with over 50 ready-made connections to popular CRMs, CMS platforms, and e-commerce tools like Bitrix24 or Google Analytics, enabling seamless import and export of contacts. Users can also leverage the Unisender API for custom integrations, automating the transfer of subscriber data from external sources to populate and update lists efficiently. Subscription forms can be embedded on websites to capture new leads directly into segmented lists, supporting ongoing campaign growth.[11]SMS and Multi-Channel Marketing
Unisender enables users to create SMS campaigns through an intuitive interface that supports bulk messaging to targeted contact lists. Contact databases can be uploaded in formats such as TXT, XLS, XLSX, or CSV, or imported via integrations with CRM, CMS, and e-commerce platforms.[12] Personalization features allow for dynamic content insertion using variables like customer names or promotional codes, ensuring tailored messages that enhance engagement.[12] The campaign workflow begins with registering a sender identifier, followed by contact upload, variable setup, message composition, testing for delivery, scheduling, and post-send analysis.[12] Messages adhere to SMS standards, supporting Unicode for multilingual content, with limits of 160 characters for Latin alphabets or 70 for Cyrillic per segment; longer texts are segmented automatically.[12] To comply with regulations, Unisender incorporates opt-in consent management tools, requiring users to obtain explicit permission from recipients before sending promotional SMS, aligning with anti-spam laws in regions like the CIS.[13] Short links can be embedded directly in SMS texts to drive traffic to websites or landing pages, with Unisender recommending third-party URL shorteners for optimal character efficiency and tracking, as outlined in their resources on link management.[14] This facilitates clickable calls-to-action within the constrained message length, improving response rates for marketing efforts. Unisender's multi-channel marketing capabilities integrate SMS with email and web push notifications, allowing businesses to orchestrate unified campaigns across platforms from a single dashboard.[15] For instance, a promotional sequence might start with an email, follow up via SMS reminder, and reinforce with a web push alert, leveraging over 48 pre-built integrations with tools like Telegram, VK, and various CRMs to automate cross-channel delivery.[12] This synergy extends briefly to email integration, where SMS serves as a complementary channel for time-sensitive follow-ups. API access further enables seamless automation, connecting SMS triggers to external systems for dynamic workflows.[12] Pricing for SMS services operates on a pay-per-message model, varying by volume, country, and mobile operator, with competitive rates tailored for the CIS region to support high-volume campaigns.[12] Delivery in Russia and Belarus benefits from direct operator partnerships, ensuring reliable reach without intermediaries. Representative rates include:| Country | Operator | Price per SMS |
|---|---|---|
| Russia | MTS | 5.8 ₽ |
| Russia | MegaFon | 8 ₽ |
| Belarus | All | 0.048 BYN |