Emma's glasses aren't the only lovable thing about her.
December 13, 2017
Emma's glasses aren't the only lovable thing about her.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Emma
Our college uses Emma for communications with--and e-mail marketing to--prospective students, donors, alumnae, and (soon) parents of current and prospective students. For us, Emma solved some branding issues across those different departments with the master admin account, and it made collaboration on designs and campaigns between departments much easier. Also, before our adoption of Emma, our institutional advancement, student life, and admissions offices were all using different e-mail marketing platforms. Emma made it possible to streamline the efforts of all of those departments, as well as to measure the impact of our campaigns by the same standards and with the same kinds of metrics.
- Drag and Drop Interface - I love the drag-and-drop interface used to design campaigns. It makes it easy for creative types to get the look they want, and it helps less technically and aesthetically adept users to create campaigns that still look great. After using both Constant Contact and MailChimp, I think Emma comes out on top in terms of ease of template design.
- Master Admin Account - Having a master admin account controlled by one person allows us to deploy brand assets to each sub-account, and we're also able to push out templates for users who aren't ready or don't have the time to design their own.
- Dynamic Content - Dynamic content has proven so useful to us, especially in our Admissions Office. Making it possible for regular users to easily create emails using dynamic content is a VERY strong feature that, in my experience, is unique to Emma.
- Great Tutorials - Emma does a great job taking care of its users. The support folks are always kind and helpful, but Emma publishes an array of tutorials and resources to help with just about anything its users encounter, from how to use custom merge fields to advice on creating the best campaigns.
- One room-for-improvement area I've encountered is related to custom template design. In addition to "locking" certain portions of templates our master admin account pushes out, from a branding perspective, I'd like to "lock" certain font styles for use (or not) in my templates. I talked with Emma's support team about this, and it seemed like something that might be possible in the future.
- Sometimes I can't remember where to find the Image and Document assets, because you have to be in a certain tab to see their links as an option. I'm not sure what the solution for this is, but not having those as easily accessible as most everything else has been a pain point. (Not a big one, just an inconvenience sometimes.)
- In terms of internal effectiveness, Emma has freed up a lot of staff time that used to be spent agonizing over template design and the frustration of managing lists. Because it allows us to cut out wasted time on logistical tasks, Emma has made it possible for our staff to focus on the real ROI-improving tasks of creating better campaigns, as well as making our e-mail marketing efforts more strategic based on Emma's reliable metrics. That value doesn't have a number, but it's VERY high in our estimation. Probably the most important impact Emma has had on our organization.
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.