Emma by Marigold vs. PAR Punchh

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.

We launched the program quickly and on schedule, Punchh has continued to evolve and enhance to adapt to our changing business needs, importantly developing integrations with other key partners —Olo, PAR Brink POS. I think it's ideal for a brand of our size with under 200 locations, perhaps for a chain of more than 2,000 locations, it could be worth considering building an in-house solution as a potential cost saving.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Reward-based App material. Punchh is great platform for reward tracking and fulfillment. I have not found one that does a better job at customer loyalty.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Look carefully into the integrations, find out exactly what is possible. We launched when we had Monkey Media as our online ordering tool, although it was integrated, we ended up having to move to Olo just because it was such a stronger integration.
• I would re-think having Facebook as an option to allow registration and signup to our app. This was recommended by Punchh, but we ended up getting so many out of date email addresses in our system that were associated with the Facebook account.
• One thing we wanted to launch with was a gift card integration, but due to Punchh not being PCI compliant, and due to other technological limitations, that's not something we've been able to bring into our loyalty app, which would be nice to have.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The customer success people are not as invested as it seems they should be in their clients' business, at least not for the amount of money the platform costs. I am always looking for best practices to be provided or at least discussed with my AM, and she doesn't ever seem to care about what others are doing in my industry.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We were looking for a partner who would help us get a loyalty program and a mobile app launched quickly, Punchh delivered our app on-time, the cost was very competitive and Punchh was being used by similarly sized brands in the restaurant industry. The integrations were in place and Punchh offered the Product functionality and performance we were looking for.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We brought in over $7M from the app use alone in Q1 & Q2 of 2019.
• It costs a ton to keep up, especially the more modules you subscribe to. Our (not so fancy price tier) price was about $100K for 2019.

Incentivized