Emma by Marigold vs. Pinpointe On-Demand

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.

Pinpointe is perfect for managing large numbers of contacts, including gathering new contacts and storing them throughout your databases, which can further be broken into lists and then individual tags for sorting and sending. Where it really excels is in the email marketing sector. We are able to send as many as several hundred thousand emails per hour, making sure all of our customers get time sensitive marketing material quickly.

• 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

• The detailed statistics page is really helpful.
• Excellent and flexible Builder.
• Customer Service responds within one hour.
• Stock photos included.
• Database separation & sub-accounts.
• Excellent multi-inbox previewer available.
• Responsive templates.
• Invaluable webinars and training.

• 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

• Depending on the amount, when I am in the middle of uploading a list of contacts I get bumped out and have to submit a request to increase my dataset. That being said, our company as a whole is happy with what Pinpointe provides us with as is.

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

Pinpointe On-Demand is a critical component of our marketing infrastructure and we will continue to use it to support our email marketing requirements

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

They are quick to respond to requests, usually within an hour. If they don't have an immediate fix to a problem, they let me know what the status is and what they are doing about a request. In some cases, if the development team needs to be involved because a bug is found, they have fixed and patched the system same day. Rarely do I ever get that kind of customer support response with any other company. They don't have a premium support tier because they treat every request with the same level of professionalism and response time (again, to at least let you know it was received and an actual person is looking at it, even if they are busy with other requests).

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

Pinpointe is a great #2 for specialty campaigns. Our bounce rates were higher than with other providers. Pinpointe's detailed reports and interface are a step above the competition.

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

• Our ROI has gone up significantly since using Pinpointe.
• We are able to use the coding to implement a join form on our website directly so we don't have to download from our website and upload to Pinpointe each time we want to add our contacts.
• Our emails show up white-labeled so it is our own branding on all emails.