APSIS Pro vs. Emma by Marigold

Works well, relatively easy to use - but lacks some up-to-date and modern features as well as look and feel. The support provided is OK but not world class. It is too bad as APSIS as a company is quite good at inspiring and providing insights into trends in email marketing.

Incentivized

Using Emma for weekly templated email use with minimal changes is awesome. If you want you can create a master and make minor graphic edits quickly and easily from your smartphone. Any edit is possible as long as the artwork is on the online server. Only time I hit a bump in the road is when I was asked to change the style sheet and did not know that the pricing plan I was on did not include this feature. Client had to wait to send new format until Emma performed the requested changes.

• We have a pre-designed template and pre-build elements and thus it is quite easy to compose nice looking newsletters.
• Doing split-tests on subject, clicks etc. is quite easy and requires no tech help.
• Imporing new contacts and adding to the list is straight forward.

Incentivized

• Enterprise-level email marketing with multi-level account structure allowing for multiple users at different levels to send campaigns
• Easy-to-use WYSIWYG email template editors to create dynamic emails with enhanced personalization through merge-fields
• A large API index that connects to many different platforms and the ability to work with Emma support to create new connections to new platforms as needed

Incentivized

• The user interface is not good. Too much scrolling and too many menues to navigate. Half of the pages are updated to a "new" look with the rest still being the (really) old design. This badly needs a make-over.
• There is no one-click "send reminder to those who did not open". To send reminders, it is nescessary to build a filter a do a new send using the filter. Such a simple and often repeated task should be automated.
• It is not possible to add a "Why did you leave us?"-page for opt-outs... Really misses this.
• The statistics are too limited and to difficult to use - mostly due to the UI design as described above.

Incentivized

• Their customer service leaves something to be desired. We ran into an issue with one of our campaigns, and we decided to reach out to support, but they didn't get back with us until 3 hours later! Time is money!!
• We don't like that their photo editing capabilities are limited, you can only choose small, medium or large photos with no way to resize to exact dimensions. Makes emails a bit of a pain
• The upgraded premium tools are buggy and leave something to be desired as well – it's a shame.

Incentivized

Emma has been a great tool for our marketing. It's easy to use and I've had no issues in the almost two years we've been with them. It's really been a great way for us to stay connected with customers that takes no time to setup and send

Incentivized

While every WYSIWYG software will experience glitches, Emma handles them well. Keep in mind they rarely happen, but they do, it can be of annoyance. Regardless, Emma allows my organization to create seamless email campaigns using fresh data. Emma makes coming up with strategic decisions very easy. The list segmentation that Emma feature allows us to easily manage a large list without issues. Overall, Emma is extremely usable with nearly no learning curve!

Incentivized

I hate that to get support I have to submit a question to a public forum and wait for a response. I just want the ability for a quick live chat to answer my simple help questions quickly or at the very least submit a ticket via email and get a status update.

Incentivized

MailChimp offers more flexibilty but also seems a bit more complicated to use. We did not use it long enough to really get an idea of the positive and negative.

Incentivized

At the time we made the decision to move to Emma, my organization was using both MailChimp and Constant Contact. Emma's drag-and-drop template editor surpassed both, and even editing the pre-made template HTML in Emma was easier. List management was much smoother than the clunky Constant Contact and MailChimp lists we had. From a design perspective, we chose Emma for its ease of use in creating templates and modifying existing ones, as well as the ability to push out branded templates and brand assets through its master admin/subaccount capabilities. Emma's analytics and reporting were much less frustrating to navigate and understand, such that, rather than spending all of our time trying to make sense of the metrics from a campaign (which we were definitely doing), we were attracted to being able to report easily and then move on to determining how to make real improvements

Incentivized

• We are still trying to figure out how to use this medium for sales. We have had some success with Black Monday sales, but in general we do not have much response to our emails.
• We have increases our visibility with our customers by making sure to land in their mailbox regulary with nice looking messages.

Incentivized

• Stores using the platform have seen good deliverability stats. Open rates and click-through rates are high with the templates that Emma creates. We still face the challenge of getting more users on the platform.
• User satisfaction is high for our users who are regularly using the platform.

Incentivized