Feature Set:  

Boomerang includes most of the standard features you’d expect to see in an email marketing service including importing your mailing lists. You can place some contacts on hold from campaigns by “suppressing” them. Boomerang will retry to send your campaigns to soft bounces.

They also include blast scheduling, a SPAM test and test messages. Test emails are automatically sent to your account for approval prior to being sent to your contact list. Unsubscribe links are required to appear in your emails. You can add one manually or let Boomerang and one of their own automatically. However, during the setup process we were never prompted to add a custom unsubscribe link. Instead we had to go back and change it manually.

Ease of Use:  

Boomerang’s ease of use is questionable. When the service is working properly it is easy to use; however, we encountered difficulties using the Mozilla Firefox Internet browser including broken links and sign-in problems. This concerns us because if Boomerang can’t design their site with multiple browser in mind we question how do their campaigns fair on less popular browsers. Perhaps limiting the reach of your list.

Additionally, Boomerang’s Blast Wizard functions as a “pop up” window. We found this to be cumbersome because, we like most of the computer using world, have “pop-up” blockers installed. It took us trying to login three times before realize we needed to disable our pop-up blockers.

Otherwise, the site is simple to navigate using the left-hand navigation and the wizard will walk you through most steps of the campaign building process.

Email Campaign Creation:  

The creation wizard will take you through most of the appropriate steps to building an email. You can upload your own HTML design or modify one of their 60 templates. Boomerang includes a typical HTML editor that allows you to change basic formatting and some style elements, but it does have a learning curve.

Boomerang includes 25mb of free image hosting with images needing to be less than one 1mb to upload. This is more free hosting than most of the services we reviewed.

Campaign Reporting:  

Boomerang claims to have more than 60 different reports including click-through tracking; sent, bounced, opened and forwarded email tracking, and the ability to view your unsubscribed contacts.

They do not included conversion tracking, complaints, undeliverables or the ability to integrate with Google Analytics.

Help/Support:  

Boomerang includes a lot of training videos for beginners. However, the “getting trained” video takes a little while to load. They also include demo for the HTML editor, list building and reporting. Boomerang also has webinars, a blog an FAQ and contextual help. Along with email, phone and chat support.

We did encounter some problems when using the help section and Firefox. The contact us link wouldn’t work and the FAQ page rendered incorrectly. Additionally, every time we tried to use the live chat there weren’t any operators available.

Boomerang is a standard email marketing service that will create and track your campaigns with few problems. However, if you are new to the business and would like a service that is easier to use and has less cross-browser problems we suggest iContact.