Benchmark Reviewer's Comments
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Benchmark is one of the most budget-friendly email marketing services, and is one of the best overall services on the market and deserves the "TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award." This service has all the tools you'll need to attract a robust client base and ultimately improve your bottom line. Just one of many features includes an email creation section complete with templates and solid report lists.
However, Benchmark is missing a few additional features that we felt would make it a more complete service like the a SPAM test, the ability to compare reports for correlation, and although Benchmark has email templates we felt their quality was inferior to the #1 and #2 services.
Benchmark Screenshots. Click to Enlarge
Feature Set:
Benchmark has many valuable features to help you develop, mail and track your bulk emails. It's easy to import an email you've designed from scratch or modify one of their pre-made templates to fit your marketing campaign.
Benchmark is really strict about the source of your lists. If you are importing your list from a previous source Benchmark needs to approve your list. Our approval took about an hour and a half. Benchmark promises to have you list approved or denied within four hours.
This service makes it easy to add an unsubscribe link to the bottom of your email. You can also build an autoresponse mechanism that will automatically respond to emails received.
Some practical features we would like to see Benchmark include would be the option to create web forms like an opt-in page, running a SPAM check test to see if your campaign will be flagged as SPAM, creating an alias account to send your emails and a few minor email creation features.
Ease of Use:
Benchmark's web interface is very straightforward, perhaps a little too straightforward. Although the interface is easy-to-use and understand we think Benchmark could benefit from a minor facelift integrating a dashboard homepage much like the #1 and #3 services.
Benchmark includes the ability to build your campaigns at your own leisure, or if you select the “Create & Send My Campaign” link you can choose to utilize “Quick Campaign” wizard. Again, with a better interface we would suggest this button be located on the client’s homepage.
However, we especially liked the progress bar displayed in the center of the screen. It shows you what step you are on, and it makes it easy to navigate back to a step that you need to edit.
Simply click on that step. Overall, the whole service is simple to use and doesn't require a lot of computer knowledge.
Email Campaign Creation:
Benchmark makes creating an email marketing campaign quick and easy. Each part of the campaign, from inputting your mailing list to creating the email, is organized in tabs.
Once you've organized your list, creating your email is simple. Click on the option to create your message and the service will guide you through six steps to complete your email. If you wish to edit a step, easily navigate to where you need to be. You have the option of creating a message with a pre-made template, or uploading an HTML file into the program.
We found Benchmark’s templates were adequate and they provided a solid selection in various themes. We were disappointed that Benchmark charges an additional $5 for 25K of storage for image hosting. Which isn’t much space and means if you choose not to purchase the additional space, every time you build a new email you have to use images located locally on your desktop.
Campaign Reporting:
In Benchmark's reporting tab, you'll find all of the reports that are available with this service. The reports include an active campaign summary, click-throughs, contact statistics, email forwarding, surveys and email abuse reporting.
Conversion tracking and report comparisons are the only reports missing from this service. In the future, we would like to see Benchmark integrate with Google Analytics.
Help/Support:
Benchmark’s support includes invaluable tutorials walking you through several steps of the setup process, a comprehensive FAQ, searchable knowledgebase, live chat, a glossary of terms and some additional articles about spamming and list building.
Although Benchmark includes all the appropriate support features we found the knowledgebase to be fickle and frequently had difficulty turning up results.
Summary:
If you are looking for a great email marketing service, Benchmark is at the top. This service has everything that you’ll need to target your audience, create a compelling email, monitor results and boost your sales. However, it could benefit from a design overhaul.
©2008 TopTenREVIEWS, Inc.
