Benchmark Email Review

Pros:

• High quality customer service (scored 5 out of 5 stars)
• High quality campaign reports (scored 5 out of 5 stars)
• Excellent email creation tools (scored 5 out of 5 stars)
• Can import contacts from email accounts (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail)
• Can export a clean contact list that automatically removes bounced and unsubscribed email addresses
• A real person manually reviews your email campaign before it's sent

Cons:

• At the time of this review, we did not identify anything that we felt should be labeled as a con.

Conclusion:

Benchmark scored 5 out of 5 stars in three categories and is an excellent email marketing service. We were very impressed by their solid contact management and statistics reporting, as well as the quality of their customer service. They also have excellent email creation tools that make designing and sending your campaigns very easy.

Ease of Use

Benchmark received 5 out of 5 stars for Ease of Use. They offer more than 400 email templates that provide up to three columns for text entry and the ability to edit and replace images. Benchmark provides 10 MB of image storage, which meets our Market Standard of 5 to 10 MB. They have a WYSIWYG editor, an email creation tool that shows what the final content of your email campaign will look like to your readers while you are editing it. Benchmark allows you to remove their vendor logo from your messages.

Features

Benchmark offers both spam checking software and someone to approve your emails before they’re sent out. Benchmark also provides autoresponders which allow you to send a standard welcome message to your new subscribers confirming their sign-up. Additionally, they provide integration with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in order to maximize your marketing efforts. Benchmark does not offer A/B testing, but they do integrate their reports with Google Analytics, which is a tool that tracks the traffic of your readers from your email campaign to (and throughout) your site.

Managing Contacts

Benchmark scored 4 out of 5 stars for Managing Contacts. You can import contacts from Excel, email accounts, and Salesforce, as well as manually cut and paste.You can also import contacts from Outlook as a CSV file. Benchmark automatically removes unsubscribed and bounced emails from your contact lists.

Campaign Reports

Benchmark received 5 out of 5 stars for Campaign Reports. Their reports accurately reflect most user actions, but under testing, Benchmark failed to report a bounce. The reports display opens, forwards, number of clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, top performing links, and spam reports. While Benchmark does not send reports to your email, they do display them graphically in the online interface and allow for exportation to spreadsheets.

Customer Service

Benchmark received 5 out of 5 stars for Customer Service. They offer phone, live chat, and email support Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. ET. Their customer service was quick and detailed in their responses to our questions and had little wait times.

Pricing

Benchmark offers a 30-day free trial during which you are limited to sending 250 emails. Their pricing is both contact-based and email-based. Contact-based pricing is advantageous if you intend to send more than one email per month to the same list of contacts, while email-based pricing can be used if you predict your list size to be variable during a pricing period. Benchmark charges $18.95 per month for 1000 contacts and $28.95 per month for 2500 contacts. You may also purchase 600 emails for $9.95 per month and 1000 emails for $12.95.

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