10-second breakdown:
Affordable for all business sizes and scalable so it can grow with you, Benchmark provides a great email marketing service with quite a few features that many competitors won’t include or charge extra to use.
Benchmark is used in small (0-50 employees), medium (51-1,000 employees) and enterprise companies (1,000+ employees).
The good:
Benchmark has a free plan that is great for anyone starting out. They allow you 2000 contacts and the ability to send out 14,000 email per month. This is a great option while you grow your list.
Lots of great features are available to you such as autoresponders, A/B tests, email campaigns, spam filter avoidance, and inbox previews.
Benchmark has great customer support. They have phone, email, and chat options as well as help videos and tutorials that they send you when you sign up.
The bad:
No direct importing of contacts from third party sites is available. You have to import a list file, enter them manually or do a lot of copy and pasting.
Social media integration is more limited that with other providers. Benchmark only integrates with Facebook and Twitter and even within those platforms you have limited functionality.
There can be a delay between when an email was scheduled and when it actually arrives to your list. This is due to Benchmark monitoring all emails for spam and broken links.
How it works:
As an email service, Benchmark covers everything you need. There’s an email designer for all of your newsletters, you can set up autoresponders to engage your clients and you can run reports to see how your email campaigns are doing, including things like open rate, click-throughs and unopened percentages.
The email designer is worth taking a second look at, it’s head and shoulders above the competition. If you’re not a designer but you still want to send out nice looking emails, Benchmark has your back. They included hundred upon hundreds of beautiful email templates for you to play around with. The templates are broken down into categories such as newsletters, product promotions and event invitations. There are even specialized templates available for certain business types like religious organizations or real estate offices.
Once you pick out a template, modifying it won’t be difficult. If you do know some coding, or have a web wizard on staff, you can modify the HTML and CSS coding of the emails directly. Or for the rest of us, they included a visual editor that’s very similar to how word processor looks and functions. When you’re finished, there’s even a spam check feature that will scan through your email real quick to check for any red-flags most spam filters will look for.
Another strong point of Benchmark is their integration options. There are quite a few available that are focused on getting your existing data into the system. A few of the more popular ones are Salesforce, Easy List and even Shopify. They also offer Facebook apps you can use to put sign-in forms on your page. If you really want to get technical, they even offer their own API that you can use to roll up your sleeves and build your own tools and plug-ins with.
One downside you should keep in mind is that occasionally customers report that email campaigns have been wrongfully suspended. If too many people mark your emails as spam, Benchmark steps in and suspends the campaign while they make sure the emails were opt-in and relevant. All email services will act in a similar method, but Benchmark comes off as a little more aggressive.
Getting started with Benchmark is a snap, they offer one of the most comprehensive video tutorial libraries in the industry. They walk you through everything in the system, everything in the entire life cycle from designing emails to checking how they did after you send them out.
Benchmark really only offers two plans, a free one and a paid one that scales based on the number of list subscribers. The ‘free starter plan’ is worth noting, it’s by far the best in the industry. You get full access to all of the features of the paid plan, up to 2,000 subscribers and 14,000 emails per month for no cost at all. The free version used to have a restriction that you couldn’t import subscribers in, only through organic sign up, but Benchmark tossed that out the window. If you already have a list or are just getting started there’s no reason to skip the free version.
If you have a larger list, Benchmark also offers a paid plan. They break it up based on how large your list is, starting at $11.95 a month for 600 subscribers all the way up to plans that include over a million subscribers. If you just out-grew the free plan, Benchmark offers 2,500 contacts for $28.95 a month. All paid plans include an unlimited number of emails per month.
There are a few extra features the paid plan offers in case you decide to upgrade. Benchmark offers an ‘Inbox Checker’ that allows you to view what your emails will look like in any web browser and email client – mostly used to check compatibility. While the free version does include A/B testing, the paid plans step it up and let you test subject lines, from names, send times and more.
One thing to note, although the prices are competitive as listed, Benchmark doesn’t offer discounts for agreeing to a one-year term. A lot of competitors will offer deep discounts if you agree to one or two years up front. It’s not all rainclouds though, if you run a nonprofit, Benchmark offers a flat 25% discount on all of their services.
Benchmark is definitely the most affordable email service on the list. Packing some of the best email designs built in, it isn’t lacking any features you need and they even offer an astounding free-for-life plan. If you run a small operation, nothing beats a fully featured suite for free!
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