Benchmark is a rich featuring yet easy to use email marketing app that allows you to create great looking campaigns, surveys, polls and event pages in minutes. Recommended as for beginner marketers (due its intuitive UI and very helpful Getting Started area) as for more experienced ones, this service is very focused on the design of newsletters to make them look great everywhere.
Usability
Probably the first thing you’ll notice once you have signed up on Benchmark will be the wide range of languages it supports: Japanese, Italian, traditional and simplified Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English. Not only the dashboard but even the confirmation emails you’ll receive immediately after your sign up are whole translated in each of these languages. This isn’t a so frequent feature to find in other email marketing service and makes you quickly comfortable with the user interface. Then it’s very easy to start your first campaign following the clear instructions and also if you aren’t a skilled web designer you’ll be sure to create a beautiful layout for your newsletter.
You can choose from a plain-text tool, a classic editor or a drag&drop email creator. You can pick one of Benchmark templates (they offers a robust selection of themes, like cards, promotions, event, etc.) and customize it selecting a color scheme, adding pictures, text elements, logos, images and video. You can also opt to add Google Analytics to your email to track URLs and try some social media automation connecting to Twitter and Facebook (but this kind of integration are quite limited on Benchmark).
Create and arrange your contact list it’s equally easy: you can import contacts via .txt, .csv, .xls file, from your Gmail and Google account and even via Salesforce, you can manage the lists segmenting your contacts through many data such as location, age, signup date, interest, etc. And the wide range of useful integrations with services like Highrise, Zoho and Shopify will make easier the marketing data collect and so the segmentation of your lists.
Features
Benchmarks provides a lot of interesting features like the possibilities to create professional online surveys and polls (and tracking them), schedule a list of emails to automatize the sending or edit specific ones before special events, send multiple newsletters targeted for different area of your contact list.
Of course, you also have all the required tools to track your email statistics in real time: on your dashboard, you will find the active campaigns summary with click-throughs reports, contact statistics, email forwarding, email abuse and your social media campaigns results. With your account, it also comes a useful and very intuitive dedicated app for iOS and Android to deal your email marketing on the go.
With Benchmark you can also launch A/B tests on both email subjects and content and run the Inbox checker that lets you see how your emails will display in various email clients, helping to avoid spam filters too.
Benchmark also provides a dedicated email server with dedicated IPs for users who send more than 1,00,000 emails every month to get better deliverability for your emails.
Support
Benchmark provides a quick and friendly customer support that includes phone, email and live chat so you can choose what option works better for you. Immediatly after you’ve signed up you’ll receive an email from an account manager who will redirect you to help videos and send his/her contact informations to promptly answer your eventual questions. Anyway, Benchmark offers much more to its customers, for example a whole website called Getting Started that includes video tutorials for the setup process, a rich FAQs database, a knowledgebase and a glossary of terms, exhaustive articles about email marketing best practices, how-tos, news and trends.
Price
Benchmark, like others email marketing services, offers a “free for life plan” that gives access to all the basic features and let you send up to 14,000 emails per month to 2,000 contacts. The following plans after the free one are quite affordable and based on the number of emails you plan to send per month, on the number of users on your contact lists and on your need if you are a large sender (from 150,000 to 4,000,000 of emails per month). Higher-volume plans are available too by contacting the company. Benchmark also provides a 25% discount to registered non profit organizations.
Deliverability results
Using Benchmark email marketing tools, we sent a communication to our custom list made of 500 contacts chosen between all the major free email platforms. Although Benchmark Excel report export is pretty stripped down, its deliverability scored an impressive 87%. Keep an eye on our deliverability test to compare Benchmark to its competitors!
Conclusion
If you are serching for a rich featuring, powerful service (combining email marketing with event management) to improve your business, Benchmark is totally fine for you. This service provides everything you need to create, target and track your newsletter through a clean UI that makes all the process simple also if you are a beginner marketer.
Usability: 8.5 /10 | Speed: 8 /10 | Features: 8 /10 | Support: 8.5 /10 | Pricing: 7.5 /10 |
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