Based in Los Alamitos, CA, USA, Benchmark Email was established in 2004, has a subscriber base of over 500,000 users, has over 100 employees in 15 countries and supports 9 languages with local offices in 9 countries. Visit Benchmark Email website here.
Features: 4 out of 5
Benchmark Email offers most of the features that an email marketer needs. Benchmark Email staff actively solicits feedback if a user needs a new feature and works on implementing it. Right from creating sign up forms to viewing the results of your campaigns after mailing them, Benchmark Email offers a lot of flexibility to users to customize its features. You can insert your logo in the sign up form and change its color schemes. However, you can’t change its width or height unless you know HTML.
Social media sharing lets your subscribers easily share your newsletter with their contacts. Newsletters are archived online where they can be viewed by your subscribers and even non-subscribers if you wish to share them. This feature is offered free of charge.
An Example of Benchmark Email Georgraphic Data Report that Shows Opens by Location
Real time reporting lets you review delivery, bounces, opens, click through rates and unsubscribes. You can even check from which part of the world and specifically from which area of a certain country your subscribers read your newsletters. Surveys and polls feature (FREE!) lets you send survey questions to your subscribers and view real time results. You get 10MB of free Image hosting, which is upgradable by paying an extra charge of $5 for which you unlimited storage. Discounts are available if you prepay for 6 or 12 months. Other features include Google Analytics integration, video emails, integration with several other apps like WordPress, SalesForce, Pinterest, SurveyMonkey, Eventbrite and more.
Benchmark Email does not offer any iPhone or Android app because it’s web interface is fully responsive.
Photo Editing feature allows you to edit your images right in the email editor.
They do not offer stock images (free or paid), which would be a nice feature to get. You can do split testing and segmentation to test the success of your email newsletters. For $28.95 per month, you get your own IP address from Benchmark and won’t have to share with any of their other customer. And if you don’t send any spam, then you will have much better deliverability rates.
Benchmark Email’s marketing automation tool Marketing Pro is available with all paid plans. With this feature, you can send automated email series that are triggered by website and email engagement. This feature is quite easy to use and after using it a few times, you can be a pro in no time. Marketing Pro can help you increase your sales if used correctly. There are a number of tutorials and videos available explaining how to use this feature.
Other optional add-ons that you can purchase are List Verification for $3 per 1000 contacts that can help you remove unwanted contacts and Inbox Checkers that let you check how your message will appear in every device and browser for $14 per 100 tests.
Price: 4 out of 5
Benchmark Email offers a flexible structure of price plans based on your list size and the pricing is competitive. For all plans up to 50,000 subscribers, you can send unlimited emails per month to your list. For plans with more than 50k subscribers, you can send messages 14 times per month to the entire list. If you need to send more emails, more paid options are available. The price plans include free surveys, polls, 10MB image hosting and web archives. If you pay 6 months in advance, you get 10% discount and if you pay 12 months in advance, you get 15% discount. Non-profit organizations get 25% off their pricing.
Deliverability: 5 out of 5
This score will give you an idea about whether your messages will make it to the inbox if your subscribers. The higher the score, the better are the chances. We checked the deliverability scores of most of their IP addresses on a third part website. The overall score is good. The following image shows an excerpt from one of our reports for Benchmark Email IP ratings after analyzing over 175 IP addresses that belong to Benchmark Email.
Email Editor: 3 out of 5
Benchmark Email offers a flexible drag and drop email editor that makes it really easy to customize your email messages. Creating a newsletter and making changes to it is a breeze with Benchmark’s email editor. Mobile preview is a free feature and lets you see how your email will look like in a mobile device. Benchmark’s newsletter creation tool includes a huge collection of a variety of templates and checks spam score before your email goes out. Spell check feature is also available. Several options are available to customize text boxes that include adjusting padding, adding columns and changing background colors. Messages can be sent immediately or scheduled for later.
You have complete control over the template colors and change them easily. RSS to Email lets you automatically send newsletters when you update your blog/RSS feed (with option to choose the frequency). You can auto update your Facebook page and send out a tweet to your followers and also add social sharing buttons to your emails.
You can edit your images right in the email editor. Enhance your images by adding effects, stickers, or even by adding a message with beautiful fonts over your photo. Preschedule your emails if you need to send them out at a later date and time.
Benchmark Email does not offer stock images, so you need get your own images.
Inbox Checker feature displays how your emails look like in different email clients and mobile devices, however this feature is not free. You can try it once and then pay $14.50 per 100 tests. For viewing how your email looks like in each client/device, it costs you 1 test.
Benchmark Email’s Drag and Drop Editor is powerful, yet quite easy to use
Ease of Use: 5 out of 5
Like other providers, it takes a couple of days to get used to Benchmark Email’s interface and features, however with eye catching icons and user friendly layout, you will be cruising through them in no time. Overall easy to use, flexible and intuitive interface. They offer one of the most user friendly experiences.
Support: 4 out of 5
Support staff is friendly and you can contact them via live chat right through your account or call them on a toll free number or via email. Benchmark Email offers technical support via live chat available 24×7. Phone support is only available during the weekdays in most countries. We have tried their live chat several times and we find staff is professional, friendly and helpful.
Overall Score (Benchmark Email Review): 4.2 out of 5
Conclusion:
CONS:
- No free or paid stock images offered
- Pay extra to send more than 14 email campaigns per month (for over 50k subscribers)
- Pay extra to store images over 10 MB.
PROS:
- Free surveys and polls
- iPhone/Android apps to access your campaigns
- Free email archives
- User friendly
- 24×7 Technical support via live chat
- Flexible email editor (newsletter creation tool)
Benchmark Email is one of the most user friendly email marketing software. The newsletter creation tool is flexible and can be learned within a few minutes. We find it quite impressive. Even if you are a beginner, you won’t have any problems using their system. Most features that are needed for email marketing are available with Benchmark Email. Higher plans (50k+ subscribers) have limited free emails i.e. 14 times per month.
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