Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Sendblaster is a great tool for any environment. It's particularly good in organizations that do not have a full featured CRM that manages bulk email marketing and communication. Even if an organization has a great CRM, Sendblaster is still great for those marketing or communication campaigns that go out to recipients who are not already in the CRM, custom groups, bulk sending that you want to keep separate from your other CRM(s), etc.
Read full review Pros 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 Read full review Rendering HTML source code Managing mailing lists You can control the speed of email broadcasts Ease of importing lists Read full review Cons 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. Read full review The user interface could be more polished. It's very easy to use, but the appearance of the user interface looks a little old fashioned for a desktop software. Of course recipients don't see that interface, so that is not very consequential. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Usability 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!
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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
Read full review Doesn't apply.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Customer service was greatly improved because of Sendblaster. We were able to design our communication exactly the way we wanted to improve communication effectiveness. Sendblaster helped our brand because email recipients have been very impressed by the polished visual appearance of our outgoing messages, consistent branding and use of logo, wordmark, and other identifiers, etc. We saved a lot of money with Sendblaster. Our organization can send unlimited messages, and the Sendblaster software we paid for places no limit on messages sent. So, since there are no ongoing subscription fees or volume fees after paying for the the software, we saved a lot. Other "software as a service" options would have cost a minimum of $50 per month, and potentially a lot more than that for high-volume email communication. Read full review ScreenShots Emma by Marigold Screenshots