Benchmark is an email marketing platform on a global mission to help businesses everywhere ignite relationships with their customers, from the company of the same name in St.Louis, Missouri.
$0
per month
Robly
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Robly is an email marketing solution designed for small businesses. It's key features are its ability to auto-resend unopened emails, pop-up widgets, and proprietary AI-powered software that sends emails based on schedules specific to each recipient.
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.
I would absolutely recommend Robly to my colleagues. I have used Robly for over six years now and have found so many positives over my years of using it! It provides an easy way for us to keep our contacts organized, and we can easily embed forms into our website. When comparing Robly's pricing options with other email platforms, it won by a landslide. Some small aspects of the program may seem a little outdated, but I have everything I need and more!
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.
Robly constantly updates the status information of each email that is sent from its platform, which helps to ensure that there are no problems reviewing the number of people among the targets that could be interested in our service or product, and become customers, when it is necessary to identify them from those who are not, and that otherwise would cause high error margins in the reports.
The software has a visual power that is very easy to extend through third-party platforms, allowing us to create content in services such as Photoshop, which we can then include in mailings, although it is also feasible to import the content in the traditional way, through image formats. Among these, the best one to work with is PNG, which allows us to remove the background content so that the important section of the image fits better with the format of the e-mails.
Robly works with services based on the optimization of group projects, whose integration serves to send emails to all participants equally, and that these are kept constantly notified about updates to the work, and can be coupled well in advance to these updates, so that no confusion arises at the time of unifying the work sent and points within the same should not be exposed.
In reality, Robly's technical support is something we have never had the opportunity to interact with, as the platform is not so buggy that we would need to contact them for advice. In any case, they are likely to show promising results considering the quality of the service.
It has been very easy to get familiar with the functions Robly has to work with advanced email address database configurations without losing track of the progress of each campaign, and this is thanks to the well-optimized structure of the platform.
I don't have many cons for Robly. One thing that would be helpful is concerning adding a set of emails to the contact list. It would be nice to receive a list of emails that are not added and a reason why (e.g., duplicate, etc.).
I have noticed that when I am editing an email campaign, at times it will unexpectedly stop showing me the text editing menu bar, and there doesn't seem to be a way to call it back up. This can be resolved by saving and exiting the campaign and then reopening, but it breaks into my work flow and is an inconvenience. I have not been able to find a pattern for the occurrence of the glitch.
Because we like the price and value. The annual subscription model allows us to maximize usage without worrying too much about cost, being a small mom and pop outfit.
We feel that allowing the USER to interact with templates more readily is NOT there. The social media APPS could be simplified and marketed better to allow users to discover ROBLY through our Facebook page or TWITTER account in order to subscribe.
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
Robly has much of the same functionality as Constant Contact. I find Robly's interface to be more intuitive. Robly allows us to upload as many images and documents as we want, without charging us extra. Robly's subscription price is lower than Constant Contact. Their newsletter archiving is also more robust. With Constant Contact, I felt "nickled and dimed." Not only is Robly's base price lower, it's the price! You can upgrade to unlock more sophisticated features.
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.
