Elite Email Conclusion

EliteEmail offers a couple of unique email creation and contact management features but is rather limited in deliverability and reporting. EliteEmail has a couple of useful, unique features that we like and hope more email marketing companies will offer. However, their imperfect email deliverability rate as well as reporting limitations contributed to a lower overall score.

EliteEmail: Email Creation

EliteEmail's greatest strength is their email creation features. They are one of the few email marketing companies that include unlimited image hosting with your monthly plan. They also offer a custom online image gallery that features thousands of images you can use to customize your email templates, as well as a basic online image editor, which lets you resize, rotate, bevel, etc. Although they don't offer a WYSIWYG editor, they do offer an easy-to-use design editor with template fields and a preview screen. They offer 231 email templates, and they claim to add more templates on a weekly basis. The only limitation is the one-time fee of $249 to remove the very prominent EliteEmail logo from your email campaigns. But, in general, EliteEmail offers rather intuitive and straightforward email creation tools.

EliteEmail: Contact Management

EliteEmail lets you add email contacts in a variety of ways; however, they lack a few desirable automation features. With EliteEmail, you can import your email contact lists from XLS or CSV files, cut & paste your contacts or add them manually. A cool feature is the ability to automatically sync the contact lists you've exported onto your computer with your online contact lists. List cleanup is automatic in the sense that bounced emails will appear on a single page that you can easily delete from your list(s) with a single click. You can also export the bounce list to your computer or do a partial remove to delete addresses from specific "interest groups," or segmented lists. However, list segmentation, or sorting your contacts into different groups, is a manual process. The inability to automate list segmentation is probably due to the simplicity of the website sign-up form they provide. The form has just one field to capture email addresses of site visitors, and you cannot customize the form to include other information. However, you can contact your account manager in order to request a custom sign-up form. They also offer special MySpace-specific sign-up forms. Although they claim that the process of handling unsubscribes is "automatic," it is actually a manual process in which you must download a "Remove Subscribers" file, fill in the subscriber information, and re-upload the file. Also, you are unable to edit the unsubscribe button at the bottom of your emails.

EliteEmail: Email Deliverability

Emails sent using EliteEmail had a 75% deliverability rate to all major email servers that we tested. This means that two out of eight of the email servers to which we sent test campaigns did not receive the email in their inboxes. Although spam flags can be attributed to a number of issues, reputable email marketing companies will handle this in one or all of three ways: 1. by providing a spam checker that rates your email content prior to sending, 2. by offering a deliverability guarantee, 3. by touting their relationships with major ISPs. EliteEmail lacks the first two options, but they claim to offer the third one. However, when we called customer support to inquire about the deliverability issues, they instructed us to call the email servers ourselves and tell them to add EliteEmail to their email whitelists. However, if we were to have done so, it would have taken up a significant amount of time. The response we received was rather unexpected, since we had read that all email campaigns are manually reviewed prior to being sent out. (During this time, you will see a "pending review" message next to your email campaign in your online interface.) Our review time took approximately 2 hours.

EliteEmail: Analyzing Reports

EliteEmail shows you the basic stats in tracking and reporting. You are able to see sends, bounces, opens, clicks, forwards, total clicks, click distribution, new subscribers and subscribers who opened the email. Interestingly, the reports will show you the total number of opens, which include multiple opens in the same email address. The reports can only be viewed as numerical data (i.e. there are no graphs or charts). EliteEmail does not offer integration with Google Analytics or the A/B testing, the ability to split-test your email campaigns to see which performed better. One advantage is that reports update rather quickly, compared to those of other email marketing companies we have tested.

EliteEmail: Customer Support

EliteEmail has prompt customer support with short wait times. When we contacted phone support, our wait time was nonexistent. We were transferred to the appropriate tech support contact immediately. Customer support reps seemed knowledgeable and helpful, although they did not offer to personally resolve the issue we experience with Deliverability (see corresponding section above). EliteEmail offers an online Knowledgebase but does not offer Live Chat support. They are available M-F 8a-5p EST, which means that it may be difficult for those in areas with Pacific Time zone to contact customer support before they close.

EliteEmail: Pricing

EliteEmail charges a monthly fee, based on the number of emails you send per month. If you would rather pay a standard monthly fee with unlimited sending ability, you can contact EliteEmail to create a custom plan. If you would like to send more than 1,000,000 emails per month, you can contact EliteEmail to create a custom high volume pricing plan. If you sign up for the free trial, you are able to send up to 1,000 emails through your fully functional online account for free.