Benchmark Email vs. Epsilon PeopleCloud

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

Appropriate for large organizations who want customization in their emails. The tool - while intuitive if you have previous background - is hefty and large in scope of capabilities. It's great for organizations who have multiple users and shows the name of person who last made changes. The reporting is really good - but may be a bit overwhelming for organizations who don't need a lot of detailed information

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.

• Fairly intuitive if you have previous experience with high-end email tools.
• The training opportunities are good - they offer both online and/or live training.
• The support we receive is very good.
• The reporting feature is good - a lot of detailed information.

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

• The tool could be improved to "remember" where you last left off (specific user). Having to constantly retrace steps if you get logged out is annoying.
• Hitting the "back" arrow sends you back to a main section, when it should send you back to where you previously were.
• It would be nice to see performance reports available within the campaign itself, as well as within the reporting section.
• Ability to NOT be able to change anything in a campaign after it has launched. This has happened multiple times. We usually copy a previous campaign to start a new one but often, we end up changing content on the version we are copying from -- this is very annoying and dangerous.

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

While both Epsilon Agility Harmony and Oracle Responsys are great for larger organizations that send a lot of emails, I think Epsilon Agility Harmony is more robust than Responsys and is easier to use. It is significantly more complex than HubSpot and requires previous knowledge of using an email tool that has content blocks and or dynamic content.

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

• Increased email production = more communication to customers.
• Better reporting = determine areas for improvement or scale up efforts.
• Working on getting our triggered emails optimized - there's a great opportunity for this with this tool.

Incentivized