Emma by Marigold is an email marketing solution. Its key features include mobile-ready design templates, email automation, audience segmentation, and dynamic content. The software includes integration with third-party CRM solutions, ecommerce platforms, and social networks.
$500
per year per user
Fin by Intercom
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Fin is Intercom’s AI Agent for customer service, designed to deliver high-quality answers, even for complex queries. It works with any helpdesk, or it can be paired with Intercom’s next-generation Helpdesk to get the full Intercom Customer Service Suite.
$0.99
one-time fee per outcome
Intuit Mailchimp
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Mailchimp is an email marketing and marketing automation platform. Beyond just tracking how campaigns perform, Mailchimp takes it a step further by analyzing data from over half a billion emails to show why campaigns perform, driving informed decisions.
$0
per month
Pricing
Emma by Marigold
Fin by Intercom
Intuit Mailchimp
Editions & Modules
Basic
$500
per year per user
Fin with your current helpdesk
$0.99
one-time fee per outcome
Copilot add-on
$35
per month per user
Pro
$99
per month For analysis of 1,000 conversations
Fin with Intercom’s Helpdesk
from $39 + $0.99 per Fin outcome
per month per seat
Free
$0
Essentials
starts at $13
per month
Standard
starts at $20
per month
Premium
starts at $350
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Emma by Marigold
Fin by Intercom
Intuit Mailchimp
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Fin comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. Here's how it works:
Intercom states that users who sign up for the Fin Guarantee Success Program and do not achieve at least a resolution rate of 65% will be paid $1M. This program is designed for high volume customers.
Eligibility criteria:
High volume customers (over 250k monthly conversions) in North America and Europe. Intercom states that phase one of this program will admit customers on Intercom Helpdesk or Zendesk.
Why I chose Emma over Constant Contact: I felt like I got lost in the sea of people/customers at Constant Contact... plus I felt like their own email marketing messages that they sent weren't very good... in an essence they weren't practicing what they preached well.
We chose Emma in addition to Sendgrid to protect the integrity of our transactional email deliverability. Emma's delivery rates were good. We later found MailChimp a bit cheaper and easier to work with in our specific use case but I still think it's worth testing Emma if you're …
Our internal competitors are the individual email platforms our stores have signed up for. In general, they need to take our HTML and upload it themselves, making Constant Contact and MailChimp very cumbersome. Emma, on the other hand, allows us to take charge of that. Users …
At the time we made the decision to move to Emma, my organization was using both MailChimp and Constant Contact. Emma's drag-and-drop template editor surpassed both, and even editing the pre-made template HTML in Emma was easier. List management was much smoother than the …
Mail Chimp: the price was better, but the platform was not predictable. You did not get the same support with MailChimp. Constant Contact: This is an outdated system that does not make it easy to design modern, clean emails and I consider it a dinosaur.
MailChimp seems to offer more customizable options than Emma, but Emma is far less buggy. I used Constant Contact while working with another nonprofit organization and did not anything about it.
Emma is a good alternative, but I think MailChimp may be a better and more affordable alternative. Especially since MailChimp is continuously releasing new features and improving their product.
I use MailChimp a lot, and while I like it, at the end of the day Emma simply is the most cost-effective. There's not a HUGE learning curve, compared to MailChimp, which is nice, since our non-designers can take a proverbial 'whack' at an email and we can trust that it will get …
I like Emma much better than MailChimp because of the flexibility and ease of the user interface. I used MailChimp for a previous position and I felt like the home page was definitely more cluttered and it had a clumsier navigation portal. I also think Emma's email design …
Emma is a step up from Constant Contact and two steps up from Mailchimp. Emma is affordable and easy to use for all types of companies, but especially for smaller firms and startups. It’s in compliance with SPAM laws, but has an advanced platform to keep your emails from going …
Emma had a more robust multi-level account structure which empowered individual locations to participate at the ground-level. Additionally corporate was able to maintain oversight, template creation, marketing automation, and data reporting. The goal is to provide the locations …
Emma is the easiest to use platform I've tried so far. It was easy to setup and send the first enewsletter. The functionality is very user friendly and it "makes sense" as you go through to add content and users. It's made being a marketing team of one very efficient.
Emma was the perfect solution for what we were looking for due to its easy to use interface, relatively low cost and basic functionality. We were not looking for expensive, complex tools to send out multiple campaigns with various controls and tests. We also were impressed with …
None of those platform were good for an agency and their clients. Managing multiple email clients in one system isn't something you find everywhere. It's also not easy to pay for the other platforms since they are built for the enterprise and not SMB.
Constant Contact and MailChimp do not offer a white label option so they were out of the running early on for us. Campaigner does offer white labeling but their pricing is outrageously higher than Emma, their customer service isn't nearly as good and their tool isn't as …
Verified User
Professional
Chose Emma by Marigold
We chose Emma because at the time we didn't need a full marketing automation platform like Pardot or Marketo and just wanted an easy to use, well priced email communications tool that integrated with our CRM Salesforce.
We used to use HubSpot to communicate with leads via their live chat tool and also message our client points of contact. We then used Mailchimp to communicate with our entire user-base. With Intercom we no longer need either of those tools.
To compete with Salesforce, the main point is the pricing. Intercom has a very different budget when it comes to start ups and up and coming companies, which helps. To compete with other platforms, Intercom has a more developed interface and a super completa arrange of tools, …
Zendesk was very slow and clunky to operate. The system often bugged out and the assigning of emails was poor at best, once assigned it would be very hard to find that ticket again unless it was assigned to you directly. The search function and live chat function of Zendesk were …
Intercom, although significantly more expensive than Zendesk, is just simpler and easier to use. The startup easing in for me was an absolute necessity also. In a technical sense, I feel that api access via intercom is such a necessity also, and will be more so as we evolve, …
It was a difficult comparision but we sticked to Intercom because of the overall chat interface that it provides. On top of that, Intercom has a great appstore to integrate the products that we were using earlier.
We selected Intercom because at the time, it was the only tool available that offered inbox functionality, help docs, and campaign features all in one product. We stayed with them for so long, despite the convoluted and expensive pricing, because it would have been equally …
Both Intercom and Drift are comparable in terms of their abilities. Although Intercom came into the market first, Drift has done well to keep up with Intercom's updates and offer similar services of its own. Intercom edges out Drift in terms of its abilities and wealth of …
More powerful and more costly than Drift thanks to its incredible UI and mobile application. Less feature-rich, but more cost-effective for small startups than Zendesk.
We still use some of the above for specific tasks, but overall it comes down to being able to do much of the above in a single portal, as a team. Time and quality is of the essence, and Intercom is built for scale which as a tech business is hugely appealing.
I have used a lot of email marketing tools over the years and Intuit Mailchimp is one that I keep going back to, it simple and easy to use, no messing around and it does what it says one tin.
Emma might be better if you need personal account management, custom made emails, etc. Mailchimp works great for a DIY team or project with less complex needs. Not a fan of Mad Mimi.
Using Emma for weekly templated email use with minimal changes is awesome. If you want you can create a master and make minor graphic edits quickly and easily from your smartphone. Any edit is possible as long as the artwork is on the online server. Only time I hit a bump in the road is when I was asked to change the style sheet and did not know that the pricing plan I was on did not include this feature. Client had to wait to send new format until Emma performed the requested changes.
A prospect lands on my site to ask about building profile sizes, wind/snow ratings, installation timelines, or warranty coverage. What Fin does well is deliver instant, consistent answers, pull from approved specs and positioning, and keep the conversation moving without human involvement.
For any E-commerce related needs, like you need to see a list of customers who have added products to cart but did not purchase, this can be done really easily, but if your e-commerce provider provides integration, then it is best suited. Most of the systems in the Market provide out-of-the-box integration. Their API is also very easy it can be integrated to any language. You can integrate it into your custom developed system and use the features, like adding customers to specific lists. Also, if your lists become really big, then their system can get a bit slow to respond via API, so you might need a strategy for how you are gonna fetch the data using API.
Enterprise-level email marketing with multi-level account structure allowing for multiple users at different levels to send campaigns
Easy-to-use WYSIWYG email template editors to create dynamic emails with enhanced personalization through merge-fields
A large API index that connects to many different platforms and the ability to work with Emma support to create new connections to new platforms as needed
Mailchimp allows you to manage your mailing list really well. You can subscribe people, unsubscribe people manage the mailing list directly into segments, and what not.
Mailchimp has features where you can create campaigns based on your mailing lists and send out newsletters to your subscribers based on a multitude of parameters that you can setup. Such as send email daily, weekly, monthly and they also have event based mails that you can send out.
Mailchimp also has a feature where you can design your emails. The look and aesthetics are very important when sending emails to your subscribers and all those needs are addressed here.
Their customer service leaves something to be desired. We ran into an issue with one of our campaigns, and we decided to reach out to support, but they didn't get back with us until 3 hours later! Time is money!!
We don't like that their photo editing capabilities are limited, you can only choose small, medium or large photos with no way to resize to exact dimensions. Makes emails a bit of a pain
The upgraded premium tools are buggy and leave something to be desired as well – it's a shame.
It seems some users really struggle to figure out how to escalate to a human (especially through email).
Not excited about how "soft" resolutions still count as resolutions and are paid for. Though some abandoned cases appear to be able to be concluded as "the user got the answer they needed", there are others where they clearly didn't, because they just open up another chat (or even more), trying to get more info. This pads the resolution stats and makes it seem more effective than it actually is.
Cost -- Fin is quite expensive. It helps us with scaling coverage, but we're not really saving money.
Emma has been a great tool for our marketing. It's easy to use and I've had no issues in the almost two years we've been with them. It's really been a great way for us to stay connected with customers that takes no time to setup and send
We have been and will be continuing our journey with Intercom and nothing too concerning has happened that I have experienced or heard of that has us on the edge yet. If it ever happens it will be something along the lines of "Outgrowing" the use of need of the platform.
We've had Mailchimp for about ten years, I want to say. I started with the company about four years ago, and I don't see us ever diverting to another source. It's easy for us to use, and we have all our clients already built into the database. I imagine we'll use them for as long as we have the company.
While every WYSIWYG software will experience glitches, Emma handles them well. Keep in mind they rarely happen, but they do, it can be of annoyance. Regardless, Emma allows my organization to create seamless email campaigns using fresh data. Emma makes coming up with strategic decisions very easy. The list segmentation that Emma feature allows us to easily manage a large list without issues. Overall, Emma is extremely usable with nearly no learning curve!
The platform is overall clear and intuitive. As with any new platform, there's a learning curve, but that wasn't an issue for our team (and it shouldn't be an issue for others). Fin options are scattered across several submenus, and I'd like them grouped together, but I also like having all those training-related tabs open at all times, so it's not much of a real issue for me.
The interface is a bit complicated, and I need to spend some time to learn new functions and understanding how it works. I don't like working with email templates because of the limited customization options. However, functions like AI for generating emails, segmentation, and analytics still work well and are very useful.
I have, in the 4+ years that I've used Mailchimp, never seen an issue that restricted the use of their software/tools. I don't know of a single time when they're system crashed or went down. I could be wrong, but I honestly haven't experienced any issues with outages, errors or unplanned downtime
I haven't noticed any slow speeds from Mailchimp or their tools. I think the landing pages load quickly and look nice. The email reports and editing operates smoothly and doesn't take time to load. Additionally, when I use Mailchimp in conjunction with Zapier + Hubspot I don't notice any drag between any of these tools
I hate that to get support I have to submit a question to a public forum and wait for a response. I just want the ability for a quick live chat to answer my simple help questions quickly or at the very least submit a ticket via email and get a status update.
I can get help by asking Fin questions about itself. It answers accurately, citing its own Help Center resources with visuals. It can reason and dialogue well. But when it comes to getting human support for Fin, it is not as quick. It can sometimes take a few days. They are polite and well-meaning. Some things aren't their fault (product limitations), but there was one occasion where something took a long time to resolve with lots of back and forth but it was I who found out the error in the end that they missed, so they didn't really help resolve it.
Website tools were easy to use and understand so a novice can easily meet or exceed their client's expectations! Loved that we were able to totally customize so that the e-mail we created conveyed our client's overall messaging consistent with their branding! Client love that we can provide turnkey services to support their sales and marketing teams!
It's pretty easy to get up and running! There's a slight learning curve on a few things, but once you find where everything is located, you can import your list and send your first email. It really makes our clients feel great to see how quickly they can get that first email out.
At the time we made the decision to move to Emma, my organization was using both MailChimp and Constant Contact. Emma's drag-and-drop template editor surpassed both, and even editing the pre-made template HTML in Emma was easier. List management was much smoother than the clunky Constant Contact and MailChimp lists we had. From a design perspective, we chose Emma for its ease of use in creating templates and modifying existing ones, as well as the ability to push out branded templates and brand assets through its master admin/subaccount capabilities. Emma's analytics and reporting were much less frustrating to navigate and understand, such that, rather than spending all of our time trying to make sense of the metrics from a campaign (which we were definitely doing), we were attracted to being able to report easily and then move on to determining how to make real improvements
There are so many AI platforms available, and you could theoretically build a system using the available AI API's from any of the big platforms. However, I dont think it's as easy as this. Intercom is deliberately built for customer service, the features they are releasing a based on providing the best customer experience. If we were to build this ourselves or to use another platform we would be taking on the upkeep, using Fin is just much simpler as it's also our chosen ticketing platform so anything that Fin is not able to answer yet and escalated directly to our team with no extra effort required from our side.
I don't think they are comparable; we use Google Ads to put our website at the top of the list when someone googles certain words. We use meta business to manage our social media. Google aims to gain customers, while Mailchimp is used to interact with both existing and new customers.
Mailchimp over the years I've used it has grown in leaps and bounds. They have added so many additional features than were previously available. They are truly an all-in-one marketing platform now. If you're a small operation and just want to add email to your marketing efforts, they're there for you. If you're a larger operation and want to start sending postcard advertisements, they can do that. If you'd good with that and want to kick up your marketing by going social, you can do that on their platform. They are truly able to be as small as you need, but also get quite large in whatever it is you'd like to do through their system.
Stores using the platform have seen good deliverability stats. Open rates and click-through rates are high with the templates that Emma creates. We still face the challenge of getting more users on the platform.
User satisfaction is high for our users who are regularly using the platform.
New role opportunities — Using the “Fin-first” approach has reduced the workload for our Tier 1 team, giving them more time to focus on their own career growth. It’s also opened the door to a dedicated, AI-focused role, where a team member regularly reviews Fin’s answers and makes updates to help it perform even better.
Enabling Fin has also reduced our response time and allowed us to meet SLA's.
One of my retail web store clients was sending out email specials and notices about once a month. After clicking the send button, we would watch Google Analytics and the current site users would light up immediately. Often, the current site visitors would pop up to 20, 30 or more after the email was sent. On a normal day, seeing 1 or 2 online users would be OK.
Pretty much in all cases, we could see an uptick in positive activity after sending out a Intuit Mailchimp email to a list.
