Benchmark Email vs. Marketo Sales Connect

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

We are solving our small sales team problem. I am the only SDR in the company and Tout helps me manage, send and follow up with many of my leads automatically. Tout is more focused on “success or failure” of emails than Yesware is. They are going in different directions – as you can see that they’ll probably have some features from one another.

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.

• Track leads opening emails and clicking links. We could easily see if a lead forwarded an email to a large group of people for instance, because the stats would show it.
• Connect our email and CRM to log email activities onto Leads and Contacts.
• Keep users inside of our email system instead of copying and pasting email templates from multiple places.

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

• Reporting is clunky and challenging to use at times. They were recently purchased by Marketo, so I'm hopeful that Marketo will be able to address some of these concerns.
• The ToutApp interface is not the most intuitive and does not provide a deeper understanding/analysis of the data.
• The ToutApp integration with Outlook has created intermittent problems in usability/access.

Incentivized

It was tough to reach their support team. On average, it would take over 24 hours to get a response. Agents would ask us to perform repetitive tasks and take lots of screenshots instead of looking at our system and helping us fix issues.

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

Marketo Sales Connect (ToutApp) was nowhere near as dynamic as the other listed tools that I mentioned. There was not any Sequence or Cadence you could follow. It was missing dynamic fields. A bit cumbersome. The other tools had much prettier interfaces too.

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

• It's enabled more efficiency for our SDR team to track and monitor emails.
• Increased our ability to better target prospects as we learned more about their behaviors.
• The automation tools for email, and the ability to get glimpses into how that impacted pipeline development, were worth the cost.

Incentivized