Emma Review

Pros:

• High quality customer service (scored 5 out of 5 stars)
• Unlimited image hosting (Market Standard is 5-10 MB)
• Can export a clean contact list that automatically removes bounced and unsubscribed email addresses
• Flexible email templates

Cons:

• Fewer than 100 email templates available
• Cannot import contacts with cut-and-paste

Conclusion:

Emma’s customer service is outstanding, as they scored a perfect 5 of 5 stars in this category by having many types of  helpful support . Although they don’t meet our Market Standard for their number of templates, the high flexibility of these templates should make this number enough to design the perfect email campaign.

Ease of Use

Emma scored 4 out of 5 stars for Ease of Use. The service only offers 39 templates, but these are highly flexible because you can edit and replace images on the template and much more. Emma’s templates offer up to three columns which is the maximum any service offers. They allow you to store an unlimited number of images, which is well above our Market Standard of 5 to 10MB of image hosting. This is important for a beginner since having unlimited storage space means you won’t have to worry about managing your photos. Emma also has a WYSIWYG editor, which is a great tool that lets you see exactly what is going in your email as you design it. However, the email creator does not let you drag and drop images or content blocks, which would make setting up the layout of your campaign easier. Another nice thing about Emma is that they let you remove their logo from your emails for free.

Features

Emma offers an automated program called a spam checker that ensures your email campaign will not be flagged as spam by your recipients’ email accounts. They also let you take advantage of an autoresponder which allows you to send a standard welcome message to your new subscribers confirming their sign-up. Another feature of Emma is that they let you integrate your email campaign with online social networks Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This service does not offer an automatic A/B testing feature, but you can manually develop an A/B test by segmenting your contact list. Emma integrates with Google Analytics, a tool that tracks the traffic of your readers from your email campaign to (and throughout) your site.

Managing Contacts

Emma scored 4 out of 5 stars for Managing Contacts. They allow you to import contacts from Excel and Salesforce, but you cannot cut and paste contacts into their online contact list. However, Emma automatically removes unsubscribed and bounced emails from your contact list.

Customer Service

Emma scored 5 out of 5 stars in Customer Service.Their high score can be attributed to offering phone, live chat, and email support Monday through Friday between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. CST.  In additions, their support was very helpful with every question we asked. We did however encounter hold times, but these only averaged about a minute.

Campaign Reports

Emma also scored 4 out of 5 stars for Campaign Reports. Their reports accurately reflected the users’ actions in all of our tests. These reports display opens, forwards, number of clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, and the links on your emails that were clicked on the most. The reports are displayed in graphs and can be exported into a spreadsheet.

Pricing

Emma’s free trial length is 60 days. Their pricing structure is based on the number of emails you plan on sending in a month, which is advantageous if you are sending only a few emails a month to many different contacts. For $30 a month Emma allows you to send up to 1000 emails, and for $45 you can send up to 2500.