Benchmark Email is a fitting name for this email marketing service because it sets a benchmark for the type of performance you'd expect to help you improve your email marketing campaigns. With Benchmark Email, you can create newsletters, surveys, event information and coupons quickly. Your marketing pieces can include your logo and color scheme, as well as images and video. Whether you're skilled at web design or have talents in other fields, you'll be able to create documents, send them when you want to and see how your customers respond to them. For these reasons and more, Benchmark Email is our TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award winner.
Benchmark Email provides you with elements that make your email campaign interactive, such as links, video and social media buttons. You can begin by selecting a themed or blank template, or by entering HTML code. When you click on options such as Greeting, Anchor and Document, Benchmark Email gives you a prompt to help you understand the function of the buttons.
Adding contacts to the Benchmark Email database is as easy as downloading a file, importing an address book from your email account, copying and pasting email addresses from a document or adding them into the system one at a time. To download a file, you need to have a document with a file extension from Microsoft Excel (XLS), comma separated values (CSV) or text format (TXT).
To import an email address book into Benchmark Email's database, the contacts need to be from Gmail, MSN Hotmail, AOL or Salesforce. Another convenience that this email marketing service includes is the ability to segment contact lists. This is helpful if you want to send out an email campaign according to demographics such as the subscriber's age, location and so on.
This email marketing service also helps you keep track of bounced messages, contacts who have unsubscribed from your mailing lists and more. With this email marketing service's product, you can also create and send surveys and even emails with videos in them to your subscribers. Through Benchmark Email's email creator, you can personalize your newsletters with visual elements such as images and video that will support your brand and get your customers to visit your webpage or YouTube page.
Another great feature of Benchmark Email's email marketing services system is its advanced email delivery. This service ensures that your messages don't carry any spam characteristics that might trigger your subscribers' spam filters. Benchmark Email is a member of two prominent email delivery organizations: ESPC (The Email Sender and Provider Coalition) and Return Path. Partnering with these trusted organizations for email delivery means that your email marketing messages will reach your subscribers' inboxes with less chances of them being routed to the spam folder.
Benchmark Email also allows you to create subaccounts within your main account. These subaccounts have their own usernames, passwords, emails and lists of contacts. You can take templates from one account and push them to any of the subaccounts, thus allowing multiple users access to create and contribute to your email marketing campaigns.
While using Benchmark Email, you may think, "This would be so much better if…" or "Wouldn't it be nice if they offered…" Benchmark Email wants to hear those ideas and what ifs, so the company has incorporated an in-dashboard Feedback Forum tab that you can access whenever inspiration hits. We really appreciate this inclusion.
This email marketing service's product includes advanced options to help you customize, organize and optimize your email marketing campaigns. Creating an email marketing campaign in Benchmark Email is relatively quick and easy. Each part of the campaign-creation process, from inputting your mailing list to creating the email, is organized efficiently in sequential tabs.
Once you've organized your list, click on the option in this email marketing service's product to create your message and the wizard will guide you through the necessary steps to complete your email. If you wish to edit a particular step, you can easily navigate to a specific part of the email. You have the option to create a message with a customizable template, and you can make use of the HTML editor if you want to do the coding yourself.
Email Benchmark's templates are adequate and provide a solid selection in various themes, including cards, newsletters, promotions and event invitations. You can easily add pictures or logos via a simple drag-and-drop function, and performing edits such as resizing is straightforward.
If you want to take advantage of email marketing but you don't have the time to do it yourself, this email marketing service can create, manage and implement two campaigns per month for you that are set to your specifications. Simply provide your email contacts list and the emails' text, pictures, logos and information related to your campaign, and the company will handle the rest.
In Benchmark Email's reporting tab, you'll find all of the reports that are available, including an active campaign summary, click-throughs, contact statistics, email forwarding, survey results and email abuse reporting. On the downside, Benchmark does not offer conversion tracking within the software itself. However, it has not neglected to address this need in email marketing campaigns; instead, the company offers integration with Google Analytics to track conversions through purchases or paid accounts.
The important stats and records in the tracking and reporting section help you evaluate your email marketing campaigns. Graphs and summaries help you to determine the success of the campaign and identify where there is room for improvement. You can see reports for both emailed messages and surveys.
From the dashboard, you can compare multiple reports that update in real time. The reach of your tracking doesn't stop there, however. Your dashboard also keeps track of your social media campaigns and displays likes and wall posts on Facebook as well as tweets on Twitter. Your marketing campaigns can expand their level of reach with integration options for Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, YouTube, Blip and Vimeo.
Benchmark Email allows you to build your email marketing campaigns at your own pace, and it includes helpful tools and step-by-step instructions to assist you in creating and monitoring your emails. You can also create an email marketing campaign in advance and then schedule it to be sent at a later time.
Benchmark Email's email marketing services are intuitive and streamlined. The user interface facilitates creating and monitoring an email marketing campaign from start to finish without any difficulty. Even with a cursory understanding, you can start working on an email campaign. To learn even more, you can watch easy-to-digest tutorials and read FAQs.
The email marking service includes a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, which gives you control over the design and layout of your email campaigns. To make the deal even sweeter, you can send yourself a test email to preview how it will look to your readers. Benchmark Email utilizes universal email formatting, so your recipients will all get an identical message, regardless of which email service they use.
This email marketing service provides a truly comprehensive support portal for customers. Some of the features offered include tutorials that walk you through the set-up process, a comprehensive FAQs database, a searchable knowledgebase and a glossary of terms. In addition, this email marketing service adds more than 20 user manuals on a monthly basis. Its content library includes a company blog in addition to monthly corporate and partner newsletters. You'll also find well-researched articles that include best practices and how-tos, as well as information on building an email contact list, spamming and current marketing news and trends.
If you need further help or tech support, you can contact the company directly via email or phone, or you can chat live with a representative. Support is available on a near-24-hour basis and is free. All of these individual factors from this email marketing service's product contribute to an exceptional scoring for Benchmark Email in the area of technical support. We are impressed with the extent of the company's efforts to inform and educate its customers.
Benchmark Email provides everything that you'll need to target your audience with a professional email campaign. Through its comprehensive service offering, you can monitor the results of your emails with excellent reporting capabilities. We are impressed with the feature list, easy-to-use interface and excellent help and support. This is one of the top email marketing services available, and it provides an excellent software product that will add power and greater reach to your marketing efforts.
