Mediaboss Marketing

By Molly McLaughlin

Email marketing should bean important part ofevery business strategy, and Benchmark Email is a goodchoice. Like Vertical Response, Benchmark Email offers a free plan that givesaccess to most features, so you can give it a try while you grow your subscriber base. Its free plan includes twice as many contacts as Vertical Response's plan and creating emails and adding users is much easier with Benchmark Email, too. Editors' Choice MailChimpalso offers a free plan, however, and neither it nor Campaigner, with which it shares ourtop rating,showed the same sort of glitchiness I saw with Benchmark Email in my testing.

To understand how Benchmark Email stacks up against the competition, I calculated how much it would cost a small business with 2,500 contacts in its marketing database to sign up forthe service. The price tag would be $28.95 per month, similar to that of iContact. While many email marketing tools have a cap on how many messages you can send in a month, a List-based subscription from Benchmark Email (more on this in the next section) means there are no limits on the number of messages you can send per month, which is also the case with iContact.

Pricing and Features Benchmark Email's free plan includes up to 2,000 contacts and up to 14,000 emails per month. This is similar to MailChimp's Forever Free plan. If you opt for a paid plan, you can pay by the number of emails sent each month or number of contacts you will contact each month. Send-based plans start at $9.95 per month for 600 emails and max out at $375 for 100,000 emails per month, while contact-based plans start at $11.95 per month for 600 contacts and go up to $4,000 for up to 4 million emails per month. Higher-volume plans are available, but you have to contact the company for pricing.

You can also create auto-responders, such as welcome emails or confirmations, and you can conduct A/B tests on both email subjects and content. Inbox checker lets you see how your emails will look in different email programs, and it helps you avoid spam filters, too.

Creating a Subscriber List You can add subscribers to BenchMark Email by copying and pasting from a list, importing a list file, or manually adding entries one at a time. If you want to import contacts from another program such as Gmail, Hotmail or Zendesk, you have to first export your contacts from that other program. Other competitors, including MailChimp and GetResponse, can grab contacts directly from Gmail and other third-party sites.

I uploaded an Excel file and my contacts showed up in seconds. Once you've added contacts, you can create segments of contacts based on many factors such as signup date, zip code or any other information you've collected. You can't create custom fields, though.

Setting Up a Benchmark Email Campaign Benchmark Email offers several ways to create a campaign You can choose from a drag-and-drop tool, a plain-text tool, or the classic editor. I opted for the drag-and-drop tool, which is relatively easy to use, except thata few times it hung,and I was forced to refresh the browser and start over. Before digging into the templates, you can edit the email's permission footer; that is, the "you are receiving this email because" messaging. You can also opt to add Google Analytics tracking to all URLs. Social media integration is limited in that you can connect to Twitter and Facebook. The only thing you can do on social media is to auto-post a message when your newsletter is sent. iContact offers far more in the way of social media integration, covering more services and allowing you to schedule and track your social media posts.There's also an option to allow commenting on your campaign and to include a Web-based version of the email.

Creating an email is easy for the most part. You can drag images and text elements into the newsletter and remove them easily. If you're adding images, you can connect to Flickr, but this didn't work in my tests. (Flickr's error message referenced an "unrecognized oauth token.")

When I got to the send screen, I was surprised to not find an option to send a test email. It turns out you can only send a test from within the editor, which I found a bit odd. You can preview your email easily, but only on desktop, not mobile. My test email went to my spam folder in Gmail as did the official newsletter. The email successfully got to my Hotmail inbox, though. You can also use Benchmark Email to create event invites (including ticket sales), polls, and surveys.

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Benchmark Email Marketing