Benchmark Email Review: Features, Pricing, and Alternatives

Email marketing remains one of the most powerful forms of marketing for small businesses. There are over 4.03 billion people actively using email across the globe in 2021, and -- far from slowing down because of the increasing use of social media and messaging — by 2024, that number is projected to reach a whopping 4.48 billion.

Email marketing tools are in demand now more than ever. One tool that looks to leverage its global focus to help businesses internationally, is Benchmark Email.

In this detailed Benchmark Email review, we take a peek at some of Benchmark Email's key benefits and features and point out a compelling reason to look elsewhere to its competitors in the email marketing space:

• What to Consider Before You Purchase Email Marketing Software
• What is Benchmark Email? 
• Benchmark Email Features and Benefits
• Benchmark Email User Reviews
• Benchmark Email Pricing
• Alternatives to Benchmark Email

What to Consider Before You Purchase Email Marketing Software

Email marketing software providers occupy several points along a rather broad spectrum: there are those that are very simple to use and just have some core creation and sending features, and then there are those that have elaborate and complex possibilities for automation, segmentation, and analytics. 

To determine which is right for you, you need to identify an email marketing strategy that's suited to your business goals (i.e., the reason you are doing email marketing in the first place). Here are a couple of examples:

• Personalization: This strategy entails "meeting your audience where they are at" in the purchasing journey and ensuring that emails are personalized to them as much as possible. The goal here is to make your audience feel closer to the brand. Simple tactics for this include using dynamic fields to input someone's name in the email subject line or greeting, and using other data you have about them (for example, their town/city and birthday) to send special offers or greetings on certain days. For this strategy, you'll need software with segmentation capabilities.
• Welcome Series: If someone signs up to your email list, buys a product from you, or has another significant interaction where they share their email, you can continue to nurture that contact by sending them an automated series of communications via your email marketing software. For this strategy to work, you need to consider what your customer might experience and try to pre-empt their next questions or needs. Once you've figured that out, you can draft content for email campaigns that are suited to the action they took (for example, a series of emails on getting started with a new product, if they just purchased from you). To do this, you will need a tool with automation features. 

Invest the time into thinking about what you really need your email marketing software to do for you, and how much time you want to spend managing each of your campaigns. Tools have (seemingly) infinite feature lists, so it's important you figure out what matters and what does not before you make a purchase.

What is Benchmark Email? 

Benchmark Email is an email marketing tool that prioritizes simplicity and time-saving over complex feature sets and campaign options. The company's goal is to free you from the fiddly administrative work in setting up and managing email marketing software so you can focus on your audience and your business. With Benchmark Email, you can:

• Create beautiful email campaigns with customizable templates and drag-and-drop blocks.
• Set up automation so you never have to remember to send that "Thank you" email when someone purchases ever again.
• Use surveys, polls, and list builders to generate leads for your business.
• Design attractive landing pages to help you grow your email list.
• Track and produce reports on your campaigns for your own use or to share with colleagues
• Conduct analyses of your efforts and the results you're getting from each campaign

Importantly, Benchmark Email offers several integrations, enabling you to pair up your software tools and build out powerful email marketing workflows for you and your team, including: 

• Google
• PayPal
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Zendesk
• Shopify
• Zapier
• Zoho
• Tumblr

As with many tool providers, Benchmark Email also provides free resources for business owners to help you make the most of the tool and your other marketing efforts. 

Benchmark Email Features and Benefits

The core of Benchmark Email's feature set orients around five key activities that any email marketer should engage in to make the most out of their campaigns (and their audiences):

Email Builder

The Email Builder tool is one of the most attractive things about Benchmark Email. Striking visuals and video demonstrations on Benchmark Email's website show how easy it is to generate stunning emails quickly and simply with no existing design skills or external graphic design software. If you are an advanced user, you can customize your emails further with HTML, which is helped by the fact that Benchmark Email offers a live preview on its proprietary HTML code editor. You can even edit your photos directly in the app, which is immensely helpful if you do not have access to editing tools like Photoshop.

Marketing Automation

If you really want to get big results from your email marketing, you need to be adopting marketing automation best practices. Use every opportunity you can to streamline your workflows and automate key elements so that you can spend your time creating better content and doing all the other things your business demands of you. With Benchmark Email's Marketing Automation tools, you can set up campaigns to run automatically depending on certain triggers and to change if a subscriber interacts with your campaign, or even your website in a certain way (if they abandon their cart, for example).

Lead Generation

Lead generation is an essential activity for any business, yet all too often it gets left by the wayside. With Benchmark Email's Lead Generation tools, this can be a concern of the past. It is straightforward to build pop-ups, embed forms, and create custom sign-up processes to build your email list. You can even have a combination of these in action at once, which is an excellent way to fill the top of your sales funnel with leads.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are a whole feature in their own right, despite technically belonging to the category of lead generation tools. With Benchmark Email's advanced landing page builder, you can design bespoke pages for your business, a product launch, a giveaway, or any other special requirements you have. Templates are available, and the drag-and-drop editor makes landing page creation as easy as email campaign design.

Reporting

Whether you own your own business or are managing marketing for someone else's, the marketing budget is probably front and center of your mind. Having robust Reporting tools at your disposal makes it considerably easier to run analyses on your existing efforts and determine where your spending is paying off. Understanding your audience is key to any successful marketing campaign, and in the email realm, this is especially important because of the need to maintain high open and engagement rates to ensure your email reliability and deliverability scores. 

Benchmark Email User Reviews

Benchmark is among the quieter of competitors in email marketing (among the monoliths like MailChimp, Sendinblue, and ConvertKit), yet it has a healthy user base with many of them sharing their opinions online. Here are some positives:

• "Excellent for working on creating sales-related email and marketing solutions. Contains one of the easiest dashboards to learn and use. Allows for easy sharing of content on social networks."
• "The email benchmark platform is a fairly robust service. The service is perfect for use in any organization because it adapts very well to the standards required by its users."

As for places where Benchmark Email needs to improve, users say:

• "The program presents some functionality problems, templates are one of the functions that have details. It does not contain automatic spell-checking. Email formats may not be as stable when received by customers."
• "Sometimes I feel limited when customizing campaign templates because there are segments in the template design that I cannot add colors, letters or designs to, and that frustrates me because I want to have the designs the way I want them to be; this is something that needs to be improved."

Benchmark Email Pricing

Benchmark Email is free to use if you want to send fewer than 250 emails a month and you don't need robust features. For more emails and increased feature access, you will pay 13 USD per month for unlimited emails as a Pro user, or can get custom pricing on their Enterprise plan.

Alternatives to Benchmark Email

One major concern with Benchmark Email is its poor email deliverability rates, which kind of defeats the purpose of having email marketing software. Consider some alternatives:

• MailChimp — best for beginners
• ActiveCampaign — best for automation
• GetResponse — best for advanced features for complex campaigns
• Moosend — best for pay as you go, users,
• Drip — best for e-commerce

About Scripted Writers

If you're ready to get started with email marketing but need content to send to your audience, look no further than Scripted Writers. Our end-to-end content marketing solution is suited to any industry and can keep your campaigns fresh, and your audience engaged, without you having to lift a finger. Join today!

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Published by Ciara Antolini on Friday, March 18, 2022 in Marketing Agencies, Tool Review, Tools, Tools Reviews.