Benchmark Email Review

Benchmark Email Conclusion

Benchmark received 24 out of 25 stars, the highest score in our survey. Benchmark received five stars for Email Deliverability because they have both a real person and an automated tool checking your email for spam. They also received five stars for Contact Management because of the ability to import contact lists directly from Excel, Salesforce and several email clients as well as tools that automatically remove bounces and unsubscribes. They also have flexible and easy-to-use tools for Email Creation. Another pro is that they offer both email-based and contact-based pricing.

Benchmark Email: Email Creation

Benchmark received 5 out of 5 stars for Email Creation. They  allow 10MB of hosted image space, which meets our Industry Benchmark of 5-10MB, and you can edit your custom images. Benchmark offers about 350 pre-designed templates. The templates are flexible as you can add and delete blocks from them as well as manipulate them. You can also edit and replace the images on the templates and create up to three columns. Benchmark also has both an HTML editor and a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that enables you to easily edit your email newsletter while seeing what it will look like to your readers. You are also able to drag and drop both images and content blocks. Additionally, Benchmark has full integration with Facebook and Twitter and partial integration with LinkedIn.

Benchmark Email: Contact Management

Benchmark received 4 out of 5 stars for Contact Management. You can import contacts from Excel, Outlook as a CSV file, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Salesforce. Benchmark also has an easy system of contact management. They also offer an autoresponder function, which allows you to send a standard welcome message to your new subscribers confirming their sign-up. Their system also automatically removes unsubscribers and bounced email addresses.

Benchmark Email: Email Deliverability

Benchmark received 5 out of 5 stars for Email Deliverability. One hundred percent of our test emails got through to the inboxes, except the one that was designed to bounce on purpose. Benchmark offers both a real person to check your email before it gets sent out, as well as a spam checking tool that analyzes your email for spam terms in the body or subject line and reports its findings to you. When you select “send immediately” the email is sent within 5-10 minutes.

Benchmark Email: Analyzing Reports

Benchmark received 5 out of 5 stars for Analyzing Reports. The report generated after each campaign displays opens, forwards, number of clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, spam reports, and top performing links. Reports are displayed in graphs and you can export them to an Excel file, but you cannot choose to receive them in an email.  You can also export a clean list (no bounces or unsubscribes included) if you clean your list of bounces, as unsubscribes are removed automatically. You cannot create an A/B test campaign, which allows you to test out specific demographics to determine how to get more readers to open your emails. Benchmark’s reports integrate with Google Analytics.

Benchmark Email: Customer Support

Benchmark received 5 out of 5 stars for Customer Support. Benchmark scored so high because they offer phone, live chat, and email support from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET on Monday through Friday and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. ET on Saturdays. Benchmark’s customer support was helpful and quick to respond to our questions with little wait times. Benchmark also offers both text and video tutorials as well as a searchable and comprehensive FAQ.

Benchmark Email: Pricing

Benchmark has a 30-day free trial during which you are limited to sending 250 emails. They have both contact based and email based pricing. Benchmark's contact based pricing allows you to send a maximum of seven emails to all of the email addresses in your contact list. Email based pricing allows you to “buy” a certain number of emails to send. Email based pricing is more advantageous if you want a “pay as you go” plan.  Contact based pricing is advantageous if you intend to send more than one email per month to the same list of contacts. The 1000 contacts plan costs $18.95 per month, and the 2500 contacts plan costs $28.95 per month. Six hundred emails cost $9.95, 1000 cost $12.95, and 2500 emails cost $19.95.