Feature Set:  

Pinpointe is a bit different than most email marketing services out there. This service is designed for B2B (Business to Business) contact instead of B2C (Business to Consumer). This is not the type of email marketing services you would use if you were trying to remind previous customers of you annual doorbuster sale. which usually requires a high level of opt-in and straightforward strategies. Many other services are intended for more bulk email type functions. Since this service is not designed for B2C you can create unique “on behalf of” as an exclusive sender or reply, in that way you can have the replies go to a specific email address rather than back to the account holders email address.

In terms of contacts and lists, you can easily import contacts from an Excel, Outlook or CSV file or add contacts one-by-one. You can easily group your contacts or sort them by industry, state or region, postal code, activity and more. You can also add custom fields and save additional information to a client such as a note or memo. Of course it also includes the necessary basics such as automatic unsubscribes and duplicate removal.

This email marketing services charges by email volume, their lowest price is $25 for 2000 contacts in one month, the following tier is $69 for 5,000; the next is 10,000 for $125 and so on. For those that need over 500,000 per month they require a unique arrangement. There prices are comparable to their competition and you can easily add on more emails if you need to and you do not have to sign a contract, so your can fluctuate month to month quite easily.

Although Pinpointe claims to support surveys and can create custom templates for you, we were unable to find these features in our test or advertised on their website.

Ease of Use:  

We found this service incredibly easy to use, you can easily create (or import) a contact list, design and send out your first email campaign in very little time. The WYSIWYG editor is powerful and does all of the work for you; for example, you can easily resize the images without worrying about exact pixel information. We found the service so easy to use that we only had to consult the help pages for advanced geatures like Google Analytics integration and email client testing.

Email Campaign Creation:  

Pinpointe has a great, easy to use email editor and logical steps to follow to create a campaign. First you simply name your new campaign and then choose the format and template. You can also choose to not select a template and import your own information. Then you begin editing the email to suit your needs; you can add your own images, sound clips, links, contact information and much more. You can also add custom fields such as unsubscribe links, dates, IP addresses and email confirmation links and more. It has three views, edit, source and preview. After creating and saving the email it is added to the campaign list, from there you can view, send, copy or delete the email campaign.

In terms of the specific tools we were looking for, Pinpointe has nearly every feature we were looking for. This service can help you create forms, supports email footers, can create plain text and HTML versions and much more. It also has free image hosting with an unlimited amount of storage. They also offer a wide variety of easily editable templates and you can paste in content directly from Microsoft Word, FrontPage or any other HTML editor such as DreamWeaver.

Campaign Reporting:  

Pinpointe offers a variety of report options and even supports behavior targeting based on report information. The basic reports it includes are open, link, bounce, unsubscribe and forwarding statistics. But it also offers autoresponder statistics and you can even set your own “triggers” to collect specific information for reporting such as when a link is clicked and an action performed. You can also view statistics for specific groups or even look at the actions of a single contact. All statistics can be exported instantly as an Excel compatible file. Furthermore, the service creates easy to understand charts/graphs and the service is compatible with Google Analytics. The only thing we did not see was conversion tracking, but this information could be obtained by link clicking information combined with Google Analytic tools.

Help/Support:  

Pinpointe provides volumes of useful information online and with the service through FAQs, a blog, webinars, White Papers and more. They also make an effort to conduct an online, step-by-step, personal tutorial for all their new clients.

You can contact them by email form online, or request a scheduled callback over the phone. At the moment they do not have chat support, but expect to add it soon. They report to respond to email inquiries within 4 hours.

Our top three choices, iContact, Benchmark and Constant Contact all offer live chat support.

We really enjoyed creating email campaigns with Pinpointe, their email editor is extremely easy to use and does not require an ounce of coding knowledge. We also liked how easy it was to view statistics and edit campaigns. Pinpointe offered just about everything we were looking for, and is a great option for organizing, implementing, and tracking a professional email marketing campaign, especially business-to-business.