Email Marketing Reviews

Benchmark Email Conclusion

Benchmark Email makes it very easy for you to create and track your email newsletters. Benchmark Email scores well in all five main email marketing categories in our survey; Creating an Email, Loading/Managing Contacts, Analyzing Reports, Customer Support and Deliverability.

Benchmark Email: Email Creation

Benchmark Email is a great choice for people who want to use pre-made email templates as well as for people who want to build their email template from scratch. Benchmark Email features 189 templates in 15 categories. They offer a WYSIWIG/point-and-click editor, which is a simple, drag-and-drop system, and if you know HTML, you can include your own code in any section of the template. From the beginning, Benchmark Email's email editor is very intuitive. You can easily insert images, videos, and even a survey into the email templates. Although you are only given approximately 8 images of hosting space with your plan, you can upgrade to 20 MB of space for an extra $5/month. When you sign up for a paid account, Benchmark Email will remove their logo from your email newsletters at your request.

Benchmark Email: Contact Management

Benchmark Email has an excellent contact management system. You can import your contacts from your Gmail, Hotmail, or AOL email address, from Salesforce, from CSV and Excel files, and by copying/pasting contacts into Benchmark Email's interface. Should you accidentally add an email address that already exists as part of your list, Benchmark Email automatically removes the duplicate entry. Benchmark Email also automatically removes people who have unsubscribed to your newsletter from your list. There is also a “clean list” button that will remove email addresses that bounced from your list. If you want to segment your lists, you can easily do so by the date the email address was added or by filtering by subscriber field. In addition, Benchmark Email gives you a customizable sign-up form to put on your website.

Benchmark Email: Email Deliverability

Benchmark Email had a 100% deliverability rate to all major email clients that we tested. But we weren't able to add our @mail.com email address to our list. We were given an error stating that it was a suspicious email. Benchmark Email is strict about the email addresses that can be added to your list, but this allows for them to optimize your deliverability rate. Another feature they give you to improve your deliverability rate is a spam checker. You can check your email newsletter before you send it to see its likelihood of being affected by spam filters. You can also choose to either send your email newsletter immediately or at a later date. If you select the “send immediately” option, expect it take to take 5 to 15 minutes to hit your subscriber's email inboxes.

Benchmark Email: Analyzing Reports

Benchmark Email gives you many in-depth statistics: who opened your email, what links were clicked, who clicked them, which email addresses bounced, who unsubscribed, who forwarded your email, and who didn't open it. You can also compare campaign statistics against each other to see which of your email newsletters performed best. Although it was difficult for us to find, you can integrate your email newsletter with Google Analytics in the Describe Email section (step 1). Click on “Show Advanced Options” and a box will toggle open where you can turn Google Analytics tracking on. Benchmark Email lets you export your tracking reports to either an Excel or CSV file. Benchmark Email does not offer A/B (split) testing, but you may not necessarily need this feature. Although their tracking reports don’t update automatically, there is a relatively short lag time.

Benchmark Email: Customer Support

Benchmark Email's support is available on week days from 8a-7p ET. They offer phone, email, and live chat support and were helpful in answering our questions. An account rep even personally contacted us to see if we had any questions while using their service. Benchmark Email also features a knowledgebase that includes video tutorials to help you create your email newsletters.

Benchmark Email: Pricing

Benchmark Email charges a monthly fee based on the number of emails you send per month. Benchmark will charge an overage fee of $0.0080 per additional email. You can choose to prepay for a year’s worth of service and receive a discount of 15%. Nonprofits are eligible to receive a 25% discount. If you sign up for a free trial, you can test all of Benchmark Email’s email marketing features for 30 days and send up to 250 emails.