Emma by Marigold vs. ReachMail

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.

The free Reachmail account (which I have used for several small organizations) is a good tool where there are limited or zero email marketing dollars, a contact audience of up to 5,000 subscribers, and a max of 15,000 monthly emails. The pricing levels are really reasonable for volume requirements, including custom plans for infrequent mailings. If there are constraints (time and/or design experience) that require a large choice of ready-made contemporary templates without graphic or font modifications, then this probably isn't a good email marketing tool.

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

• I have a $10 account, but customer support treat me like a princess. They even added a feature to one page to remedy a problem I was having with that page. They care about their customers.
• ReachMail Features (or at least, these are the ones I know they have): WYSIWYG Email Editor, Template Management, Mobile Optimized Emails, Dynamic Content, Subscribe/Unsubscribe, Mailing List Management, Drip Campaigns, Auto-Responders, Image Library, A/B Testing, Customer Surveys, CAN SPAM Compliance, Reporting/Analytics.
• These folks know what they’re doing. I can’t speak highly enough about ReachMail.

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

• There are no batch report downloads. When I have multiple variations and waves in a campaign, I have to download reports individually. I'd like for a way to download one report of all sends during a certain time period, or given another set of parameters.
• It would save a lot of time if we had the ability to upload multiple images or assets at once.
• There's only a two-level "tree" of organization of lists and suppression lists. It would be great if we had the abililty to nest lists into better categories, rather than having to scroll through one giant list of suppressions or deployment lists. Something like a 2015 folder, then inside that a Business Unit folder, then inside that, a Campaign folder, etc. This would make things much easier to find.

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

Their team is knowledgable and willing to help offer insight and support to build out the right campaigns to fit our business needs and goals

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

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

In my opinion, ReachMail is a good competitor to Mailchimp, probably has more features though and analytics to help organize information. There are also a lot more third party integrations that have helped us compared to other apps that we've tried before, but ReachMail has been the most useful, for me personally and my team

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

• None. I signed up for a pay account so only had to spend a dollar for the first month. Even that was a waste as I simply can't send emails out with their forced unsubscribe header. If it was the typical CAN-SPAM footer it would be fine, but it just looks awful.

Incentivized