Benchmark Email vs. Sellsy

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 like sellsy. Its not perfect and as other users have pointed out, there is and always will be, room for improvement.

If you require deep integration with Google apps and Microsoft Office 365, then Sellsy may not be for you. Sellsy just about manages to work with google in so far that it can sync contacts, calendar, sales docs and incoming email with google. There is currently no way to make sent email appear in the sent items section of sellsy unless you compose the email within the sellsy app. The O365 integration is not nearly as powerful as sellsy does not sync sellsy contacts or calendar with microsoft (in its current form).

I believe that one of the primary functions of any business management app should be the capability to centrally manage all of a company's business clients, contacts etc. and sync this data to all employee accounts with the 2 biggest players for business email (Microsoft and Google) as a minimum. This data should never be an island stored only on 1 application. The Discovery that sellsy does not currently sync contacts and calendars with O365 was a disappointment. If Sellsy started supporting exchange sync for Microsoft Office 365 we would immediately dump google and switch over. In fact Sellsy is the only reason we continue to use Gapps as we need our contacts and calendars synced to our mobile devices.

We have built up a list of small little things that do not work as expected since we started using sellsy and continually pass them on to the development team. Many are small trivial things from an engineering perspective but are still annoying nonetheless, especially to users who wish to get the job done. Employees are easily frustrated if they have to fight with software to do certain tasks. Annoyances in the user experience (no matter how small) can lead to lost productivity which in turn costs money in the business world. However based on our experience with Sellsy support we believe that they do listen carefully to their customers concerns and are on the path to deliver a quality experience to their customers through the process of frequent updates to the software. You can easily establish how good a SAAS provider is by measuring their ability to fix problems soon after they are initially reported.

In simple terms Sellsy is an incredibly feature rich application and is way ahead of the competition. It represents good value for money and is backed up by free support.

• 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.

• Appealing Design
• Easy to prepare invoices and send them
• Good tracking system
• Friendly support staff

• 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

• Training. The only real issue I have with Sellsy is that its got so many features its hard to understand them all. I looked for training videos and they are all in French. Thats a big problem for a guy who grew up in NJ.
• I would embed training videos directly into the software. This way as you add services, you get a full tutorial immediately.

Sellsy ticks the most boxes for us. While it could still do a lot of things better there is no other single app that offers the same spectrum of features at a comparable price for SMEs.

There is room for improvement.

We have not yet experienced any down time with sellsy.

Sellsy is slow to load pages for us. Sometimes waiting a few seconds. This could be due to our geographical location.

Based on our experience. We have submitted a large amount of tickets and they have proven the Sellsy development team have the ability to respond fast and implement changes reasonably quickly. (Updated July 2015)
It took sellsy a number of weeks to solve an issue with the billable hours section of their application. This delayed us from being able to invoice our client for completed works. Lots of small things like email tracking timestamps have never been fixed even though we highlighted this issue months ago. Though small it is growing more and more frustrating to be reminded every time we try to see what time a client read or opened an email from us.

If you are importing data from a CSV, Sellsy recommends you use OpenOffice. OpenOffice is an absolute disaster on Windows 8 and crashes every few mins. While no fault of Sellsy they should not recommend software which makes an already challenging task even more difficult. A small gripe in hindsight but during the process was deeply frustrating. For any users looking to format your CSV Google, try importing CSV data into Excel and your life will be much more easy.

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

For me it is close to what Salesforce did. I do not use all the options they both offer so I mostly judge on the customer / contact tool.

The license model once you understand it is very flexible allowing you to select from the modules within sellsy. This gives small companies control of the cost facilitating them with the option to only pay for the features they use.

• 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 helped us look and operate professionally even though we had started out of our homes. That's huge.