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 Vero tends to play nice with companies that have their websites as the primary source of truth. This allows them to send as many events as they need and develop more complex workflows that introduce conditionality into Vero emails. However, for those that rely more on Salesforce, it might have more limited applications. The product is fairly easy to use, so it's easy for multiple people on the team to pick it up and do what they need for their respective groups. On the other hand, creating email templates will require some knowledge of HTML/CSS, unless those are copied from another source. That would require another product of course that provides more robust layout editing features and templates.
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 Email template editor allowed our developers to design emails to looks like beautiful marketing emails or basic personal emails. The Vero API allowed our developers to connect triggers and events from our visitors to kick start campaigns. Campaign flows were fairly easy to create and define. 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 While Vero offers some WYSIWYG editing, it's on the limited side, as it mostly allows you to edit copy, but not necessarily the layout. The UI/UX has improved dramatically over the course of the last few years, but it can still lag from time to time and experience sluggishness. While reliability is really good, it does have lapses from time to time that will introduce delays into emails being sent out. Once or twice, the system went completely down for a period of time. 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 Vero's price tag is far more attractive but for what you will find to be clear and obvious reasons. Vero has no CRM unlike
HubSpot and
Infusionsoft . Vero also has limited tracking unlike the seemingly endless possibilities offered from
HubSpot which as we all know comes with at a significant cost, often not feasible by a small startup company.
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 The overall costs of using Vero have been much lower than using two comparable products that handle transactional emails and newsletters, respectively. MailChimp has relatively recently integrated their Mandrill product for transactional emails, so that's worth looking at as well. Using a single product for many things lowers the learning curve, as team members only have to learn one product well, rather than several. While infrequent, Vero's outages have impacted our operations at times. If absolute reliability is crucial to your business, then you may have to find a larger provider with a more robust infrastructure. As mentioned, though, it hasn't been a big problem for us. Read full review ScreenShots Emma by Marigold Screenshots