Benchmark Email vs. DirectLync

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

Girls PACT receives regular compliments on its website! The audience for our website is potential donors. DirectLync nailed it! The design is clean, modern, professional, user friendly, intuitive and really represents our brand. They gave us some great coaching and guidance as we were creating and preparing content. It was a really fun project!

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.

• DirectLync is knowledgeable in their field, which saves us time (and money).
• They have a creative team onsite to answer questions promptly.
• Regularly updating products and services to better serve its customers.

Incentivized

• 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

• Girls PACT is located in Los Angeles. Newsletters are scheduled for PST, yet distributed on EST. It’s an odd glitch and may be a user error.

Incentivized

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

• 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

• DirectLync has saved our marketing budget thousands of dollars! They have been so generous supporting the marketing needs of Girls PACT, a nonprofit organization.

Incentivized