Benchmark Email vs. CleverTap vs. Constant Contact

For low volume non-profits, Benchmark Email provides a respectable free service. Ease of use is high and customization of the email is good. The discount for 501(c)(3) organizations and fully free use for non-profits that help children is commendable. Although the GUI editor is flexible and easy to learn, it does have some issues with certain detailed formatting concerns, like properly showing the newlines between paragraphs. Image/photo processing and presentation is similarly both easy to use, but frustrating due to some capability gaps and quirks, like specifying image sizes and display on hi-resolution devices.

Overall, Benchmark Email provides a good service that is easy to learn to expand your communication reach; however, the ROI and satisfaction may not be as high if paying fees comparable to other offerings.

Incentivized

It is quite suited for all the SMS, emails, and other in-game campaigns, but wherein the delivery rate I personally feel it is less, and it has [a] limitation on 5 pins for the day for 1 user, it should be unlimited.

Incentivized

Constant Contact is an excellent tool for sending out flyers and newsletters. However, I feel the content's appearance is typically all the same. When I receive an email from Constant Contact, I can immediately identify it - the templates usually all look the same. When sending out communications with images, it is easy to use Constant Contact and link webpages. However, the email layout is always vertical and can get very lengthy. I prefer a more flip-book approach with options to flip the page.

Incentivized

• 2,000 contact list space available with no time limit to those who can't upgrade.
• The AB Testing feature helps to improve the performance of your emails by experimenting with different content and send times to determine what works best. Thus great emailing objectives are easier to achieve.
• There is a feature where website and email engagement trigger an automatic email series. For example, the automatic flow of a subscriber from a leads list to a customer list upon making a purchase is awesome.

• User communication: it provides a single dashboard to help us reach out to our users via email, push, web push, SMS, in-app and now even WhatsApp. Not just that, we can set up various types of targeting, such as one-time, recurring, date/time based, etc.
• Analytics: it offers various views and cuts to analyze the user data, be it in the form of trends, funnels, recency-frequency, user cohorts and segments, etc.
• Tracking: it helps us track the impact of various paid and organic marketing channels, through which we can adjust spends and focus on the channels that make an impact.

Incentivized

• Market segmentation is great: my main segmentation is by region because that's how our sales team is divided.
• Lists: making customized email lists is easy and intuitive; the custom fields allow some flexibility in case our fields don't exactly line up with Constant Contact's.
• Campaigns: creating campaigns is quick and simple. I especially appreciate the 'resend to non-openers' option. I am constantly using this feature.
• Subject line generator: I like using the recommended subject lines. I'm able to plug in their recommended ideas, or sometimes, this feature helps me generate my own ideas.

• List maintenance -- navigating multiple lists is a cumbersome activity.
• Analytics about user engagement could be better. It's not super robust, especially if you're used to Google Analytics.
• Customer support is kind of slow to get back to us.

Incentivized

• Customer service isn't that great [from my experience], most of the time the team is puzzled or will leave the client puzzled.
• Price is very high with respect to the features available. MAU based pricing with a flawed sense of MAU calculation.
• The way they calculate MAU is morally wrong. If a customer opens my email that I am sending via AWS, and they don't even come on my app, how can you consider them as active user?

Incentivized

• It would be nice if we had more customizable options for emails - like moving around pictures and text boxes, rather than a set spot for everything to go.
• I would like it if multiple people could work on a document at one time. So if I'm in charge of graphics, I can get those updated while someone else is entering content, etc.

Incentivized

There is no doubt that we are going to renew Constant Contact. We have not just invested a lot of time in learning and creating a great looking product but we have developed a strong database of information that allows us to track how we are doing for each newsletter. This supports our goals of creating products that residents desire and are excited to receive.

There is always room for improvement. I don't know how they test their systems, but they should invite not-so computer savvy people to test it. If I, as an expert have problems, they need to think like the technophobe. Since I've used Constant Contact in the past as part of my former employment, I have not viewed any of the tutorials and just jumped in to work on my client's newsletter. With that said, I found some areas easy and some a bit cumbersome

No major problems in sending out the email campaigns and accessing the analytics

Incentivized

The system seemed quite slow sometimes. Specifically, there was sometimes a delay in sends if it was during a high traffic period. There were time-outs when uploading new code for an email, and a lag in reporting analytics which was sometimes as long as 72 hours

For their expertise and timely resolution to our issues.

Incentivized

I think the overall support for Constant Contact has always been incredible; I have nothing negative to say. Our customer support representative was attentive, easy to understand, and very knowledgeable. I never felt like I wasn't a priority of his and my issues, while very small, were fixed in a very short time frame.

Implementation is very easy for someone who wants to send out the “batch and blast” type newsletters. If you want to use their templates with no customizations, the product works fine. However, the more customizations you get into involving link color, etc, that’s where things can get tricky for someone who may not be familiar with coding

I stated this plenty of times in my previous responses but we moved to Benchmark from Mad Mimi. Mad Mimi's feature set is extremely basic and only suited for start-ups or very small businesses. Benchmark provides enough customization to take the next step in your email marketing program. It's also fairly affordable

Incentivized

Edit: Clevertap added attribution tools to its features, making it possible to track your user acquisition sources. CleverTap is as complete as Localytics. It provides us good segmentation, analysis and engagement tools for a good competitive price. T̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶l̶y̶ ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶s̶i̶d̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶C̶l̶e̶v̶e̶r̶t̶a̶p̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶a̶t̶t̶r̶i̶b̶u̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶o̶l̶s̶,̶ ̶w̶h̶i̶l̶e̶ ̶L̶o̶c̶a̶l̶y̶t̶i̶c̶s̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶. One other major advantage of Clevertap is its customer service. They are always standing by to promptly respond to any question you might have regarding its usability or its development. This kind of careful attention is really appreciated.

Incentivized

Constant Contact is much more intuitive for people who are not tech-savvy. Also, while sendgrid offered more options in it's drag and drop interface, it displayed differently across different email clients, which made it very cumbersome to use. It also took much longer to upload contact lists and it was harder to manage existing contacts. Performance in sendgrid was much slower as well, and the Preview feature was quite buggy. Our team initially chose sendgrid because of the integration options that it's API offered, but we ultimately switched to Constant Contact because it was much easier to build campaigns and better suited our requirements.

Very reliable in sending email campaigns and controlling the recipients so that no contact is sent the same email more than once, even if they are on a resent list

Incentivized

• If we think particularly on the ROI then benchmark email gives you a definite amount of ROI. But it takes time, you will see the results after a six month span of time. Because sending an email itself is a slow and steady process to follow.

Incentivized

• Our additional revenues from additional in-site promotions during a festive sales jumped 40% after using Clevertap pop-ups that targeted people at the product & category level.

Incentivized

• I have had nothing but positive impacts from using Constant Contact.
• The church is large, and there are many subgroups and axillary groups within the church. Setting up specific groups based on responsibility, interest, member goals, and service needs allows me to send information quickly, saving valuable time for other tasks.
• Constant Contact allows leadership to stay personally engaged with the members I work with, without over-taxing my time. It feels so seamless.

Incentivized