Benchmark Email is a web-based solution that allows you to create and automate email marketing campaigns. The organization has a global focus with employees in 15 nations, offices in nine countries, and support staff that know nine languages. Benchmark’s email marketing services are a cost-effective marketing technique for firms. Benchmark combines usability, features, and cost to provide top-of-the-line email marketing tools to organizations of all sizes. In addition, Benchmark has mobile apps for both iOS and Android, making it simple to keep track of campaign results on the move.
With our simple email marketing and marketing automation technology, you can ignite consumer relationships. With our drag-and-drop email builder, you can quickly create eye-catching emails, and our email marketing checklist will ensure that every send is optimized for delivery. Using landing pages, forms, and surveys, you can quickly expand your subscriber list. You can turn subscribers into customers with our easy-to-use drag-and-drop email campaign builder with marketing automation. It’s never been easier to create email campaigns that convert. -More than a hundred employees across 15 countries – 9 languages supported – Dedicated Support available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
Benchmark takes pride in providing international service with a presence in fifteen countries worldwide. In addition, Benchmark’s customer service has earned awards, so I guess that’s something to brag about. Benchmark has done an excellent job in terms of user experience and capabilities supplied with their ‘powerfully simple’ application (along with a modern, no-nonsense design). This is especially true when considering how many of their features are available without cost. For example, although you can only send 250 emails per month, you can save an unlimited number of contacts, so it’s not a horrible value.
Benchmark is a simple email marketing tool ideal for companies trying to launch a new product or service. Benchmark’s online survey tool can collect consumer comments and suggestions to improve a product. Involving your subscribers in the creation process helps them feel important, and they are more likely to want to buy that product or service again in the future.
Benchmark Email is a lesser-known but still powerful email marketing tool that boasts of its ability to assist customers in creating beautiful, responsive emails. The platform also includes a user-friendly interface appropriate for email marketers of all skill levels and expertise. There’s also a free plan for up to 250 contacts, and the platform may be integrated with over 1500 services.
Benchmark Email features a robust set of capabilities, including visual automation, smooth A/B testing, and insightful statistics. Integrations with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Slack demonstrate a well-rounded product feature set. Also included is a cost-effective CRM for small organizations. Starting at no cost for up to 2,000 contacts, the Pro service is also quite affordable and well worth considering.
Benchmark Email was founded in 2004 in California. They provide a great range of features at a reasonable price. Benchmark is neither the price leader nor the business’s features leader, but it offers simplicity and value for money.
Benchmark Features Review
Benchmark Email editor Review
Benchmark Email demonstrates how to best create an email by displaying one step on each page. It prompts you to add a subject line after asking if you want to utilize the drag-and-drop editor, plain text editor, or code the email yourself. This method assures that you have done all of the required stages. It then shows you a checklist of things you need to do before sending the email.
You can choose email recipients from your existing email lists and easily remove persons if needed. This can be useful. People on the list who have open tickets with customer service, for example, may not want to hear from your organization at that time. Benchmark Email has many templates sorted by industry and occasion to help you build your email.
Each design is entirely customizable, allowing you to remove, change, and relocate current content blocks while adding new content like photos, videos, buttons, navigation bars, and email permission reminders. Email optimization is straightforward. Based on previous successful campaigns, Benchmark Email can recommend subject lines.
You may send test emails, examine how the email looks in different email clients, and run a spam check to see any errors, such as broken links, design flaws, or typos, in your emails. Benchmark Email’s email editor provides a few extra unique features, such as the ability to auto-tweet your email blast and immediately add it to your website’s email newsletter archive page.
Benchmark offers a variety of appealing and adaptable themes for various businesses, holidays, and email kinds. In addition, it’s simple to personalize a template with your brand’s colors, images, and logo once you’ve chosen one.
Benchmark Email Designer Review
Benchmark has tools that make creating eye-catching emails simple for any marketer. We appreciated how the drag-and-drop editor lets you generate emails from a layout or a template, so even if you don’t have any graphic design skills, you can send out a professional-looking newsletter. It’s as simple as dragging and dropping feature blocks and photos into place.
We utilized these tools in our review to build automated responses, surveys, and polls that are user-friendly. Each one walks you through the steps one by one. For example, you can alter your photos by applying effects, stickers, or a message to them. Even if you’re new to mass-mailing software, you can develop successful email campaigns.
Individuals who want to conduct their coding should use the code editor. It was simple to write our HTML and copy and paste from another source. Using the plain-text editor, you can compose text-only emails with no pictures or styling. You can create your own email from scratch or alter the HTML in a template if you know HTML. The dual-view displays the email’s design while you’re still working on it.
Benchmark Email Campaign Analytics Review
You may immediately examine a report that shows the total number of recipients, opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes when you send an email. The data is graphed in an easy-to-understand way in the report. This dashboard displays the link performance of your campaign, as well as the URLs that were clicked and a click map. Open rates can also be viewed by location.
Benchmark Contact Management Review
You can manually enter contacts, upload a list, copy & paste from another document, or import contacts from another application with Benchmark Email. In addition, benchmark Email allows you to create sign-up forms to expand your contact list; however, it isn’t particularly advanced or straightforward and difficult to adjust. On the other hand, the list cleaning tool in Benchmark Email is quite beneficial.
You can look at recipient activities after you’ve sent an email, then use the feature to remove addresses depending on the following options:
- Bouncing (hard, confirmed, and soft).
- Unsubscribed.
- People who have not opened a newsletter in a certain amount of time.
Benchmark Email simplifies establishing segments, as it does with most of its features, by breaking it down into small steps. After naming and describing the segment, selecting an email list to use, and filling out those boxes, you specify the criteria.
To establish your segment, you can apply as many conditions as you like. Still, these requirements only apply to demographic data, particular dates, such as when the client was added to a list, and custom data you receive from your consumers. It lacks purchasing history, online surfing history, and contact source information, such as social media, website, trade exhibition, etc.
Benchmark List Builder Review
To have successful email marketing, you must first build your contact list. Then, to attract users to subscribe, you may use Benchmark’s pop-up and embeddable email sign-up forms on your website, blog, or social media accounts.
The list management tool allows you to categorize your audience and import and merge your email contact lists, according to our findings. To send the most relevant material to each consumer, segment your lists by demographics, likes, dislikes, or geographic region. You can manually add contacts to your list by copying and pasting email addresses, or you can import XLS, CSV, and TXT files in bulk.
Benchmark interfaces with various third-party programs, making it simple to import existing lists from other providers. When you register contacts, you can also enter a lot of information about them, such as their address, phone number, and important dates such as their birthday, to create detailed customer profiles. This data is very useful for drip campaigns.
You can automatically send emails depending on each contact’s information, such as a birthday discount or other event-related mailings. You can also automate activities in email campaigns based on client opens and clicks.
Benchmark Autoresponders Review
You can use Benchmark Email’s autoresponder templates or create your own.
Benchmark Email continues the trend by breaking down autoresponder implementation into digestible steps so you can quickly design complicated email sequences to engage your consumers better. Before adding the emails to use in each sequence, you must first choose your list, then your trigger, and the time delay to use. If you haven’t done so already, you can generate these emails manually.
Benchmark Reports Review
Benchmark Email generates different results for your email campaigns, automated email sequences, and A/B tests. These reports keep track of the following:
- Opens
- Clicks
- Bounces
- Unsubscribes
- Email forwards
- Shares on social media
- Opens by location
These stats may be compared side by side in the A/B testing reports, which demonstrate which subject lines and delivery times fared best.
Benchmark A/B Split Testing Review
You can compare campaigns to see which one is the most effective. You could, for example, compare two different subject lines and send the one that performs best to the remaining subscribers. A/B testing for delivery timings is also offered. Benchmark will determine the most likely times for your subscribers to open your email campaigns. It also allows you to quickly test A/B subject lines to determine which ones perform better.
Benchmark Marketing Automation Pro Review
Marketing Automation Pro from Benchmark allows you to send automatic email series based on website and email engagement. We found it simple to construct a customer journey using this tool and not worry about sending follow-up emails.
Marketing Automation Pro works by allowing you to choose a trigger, such as when a consumer signs up for your newsletter and is added to your mailing list. Benchmark then sends the email you choose – in this case, a welcome email – and follows up at the appropriate time, which is usually a few days later.
Using Benchmark, we generated various automated journeys for our hypothetical consumers. We loved how we could choose from various marketing automation templates or develop our own. For example, welcome messages for new subscribers, promotions that target follow-ups based on opens or clicks, and feedback requests are featured templates.
Benchmark Email Ease Of Use Review
Benchmark Email’s software is built to break down each task into small portions that you must finish before going on to the next. These tasks are generally hidden until you finish the prior one, either by switching screens or using a checklist. It remembers your progress between sessions and allows you to return to the same spot. Completing more complex tasks becomes a lot easier as a result.
Benchmark Email alerts you to features you might not be aware of in-app pop-up messages in the form of in-app pop-up messages. This is especially beneficial for those who have never used email marketing tools.
It also gives you digital marketing advice and one-line descriptions of features as you use them, as well as recommendations for how to improve your results. It recommends that you avoid using all caps, excessive punctuation, and being spammy when composing your subject line, for example.
Benchmark Email’s user interface and general user experience are similarly kept to a bare minimum. For example, only four menus are available:
- Contacts
- Automations
- Reports
These menus offer several submenu options, such as “segments” and “A/B” testing, that have clearly stated functionality. Benchmark Email describes all of its features in simple language so you can locate what you’re looking for easily. Then, at any time, you can go back to the dashboard.
Benchmark Email Support Review
Benchmark Email has a sticky help button at the bottom of its main menu that you may use at any moment, regardless of the feature you’re working with. The level of assistance varies depending on your package. Benchmark representatives can be reached by phone, live chat, or email. Benchmark’s customer service was excellent; the employees we spoke with via live chat were prompt, professional, and addressed all of our inquiries. A blog, a monthly email, and videos demonstrating how to utilize each function are also available.
You can only obtain online (email) help with the free plan from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. PST Monday through Friday. Premium help, including live chat and phone support and access to the knowledge base, is included with the Pro plan. The Enterprise plan provides priority assistance and managed account setup, email deliverability monitoring, and semi-annual health checks. If you’re having trouble, Benchmark Email’s extensive in-app hints and assistance can help. There are also excellent support options, like live chat, phone support, and email assistance, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Benchmark Email’s Features for Enterprise & Ecommerce Review
Benchmark Email also offers small businesses a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. However, this amount of capability is unnecessary for most small email marketers.
Benchmark does include several enterprise features:
Benchmark Multiple User Accounts & Collaboration Review
Benchmark Email allows you to host several accounts to improve marketing department operations and collaboration. You can create many versions, each with its own set of permissions. You either have administrator or contributor privileges, and that’s it.
Benchmark CRM Review
Benchmark Email also offers a CRM service. At the same time, it isn’t quite enterprise-ready; it has some useful features, such as the ability to log all user actions and interact directly with Gmail (through a plugin) to tag leads now from your inbox.
Benchmark Email Integrations Review
Benchmark Email does not offer native payment processors or eCommerce features, but it does have a set of sophisticated integrations that allow for this functionality.
Benchmark Email’s approach is to establish integrations with a small set of 3rd parties rather than creating a fully integrated solution. They also have a Zapier integration, which gives them access to 1,500 services. As a result, you can rest confident that all of the standard payment processors and eCommerce services, such as:
- Paypal – Payments
- Stripe – Payments
- Shopify – eCommerce
- WooCommerce – eCommerce
- LinkedIn – Social
- WordPress – Web Hosting
Benchmark Security Review
Cybersecurity is critical at this moment in the evolution of the internet. Businesses that fail to protect their customers’ data appropriately face significant fines resulting from high-profile data breaches and hacks.
Benchmark Email is certified under the EU-US Privacy Shield and the Swiss-US Privacy Shield. Companies that earn this certification must adhere to strict data protection guidelines and procedures to ensure that client information is kept securely. The certificate must be renewed every year.
SSL encrypts all sensitive information sent to and from the Benchmark Email website. On supported email inboxes, Benchmark Email sends emails using Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3.
If you have a paid plan, you can add a security PIN to your account, which requires a password for customer list downloads. This additional layer of security is especially beneficial to firms with numerous personnel using the same Benchmark Email account, as it makes it much more difficult for unauthorized people to steal client lists.
Benchmark Email’s Pricing Plan Review
Benchmark’s range of service plans, based on the number of customers your company has, is a unique feature. A simple drag-and-drop email editor, responsive templates, sign-up forms, basic drip campaigns, RSS email campaigns, email delivery management, Google Analytics tracking, list management and segmentation, list hygiene, reports, surveys and polls, unlimited video storage, and 10MB of free image gallery storage are all included in all plans.
All options come with various connectors, including social networking, e-commerce, email templates, and existing contact lists. Also, check out our ActiveCampaign review for another email marketing solution with a wide range of connectors.
Benchmark Free Plan:
With the free starting plan, you can send email campaigns to an unlimited number of subscribers and up to 250 emails per month. This free version has many features, but it lacks some key ones, like behavior-based email follow-up and list management automation, website engagement automation, automated customer journey templates, automated responses to shopping cart abandonment, targeted emailing, master accounts, and subaccounts, and A/B testing. You can begin with the free plan and upgrade whenever you like.
Benchmark Pro Plan:
Packages for 500 customers start at $13 per month. Every subscription plan comes with features, including Benchmark’s automation tool (Marketing Automation Pro), unlimited email sends, and a 10GB photo storage increase.
Packages start at $20 per month for 1,000 to 2,499 subscribers, $30 for 2,500 to 9,999 subscribers, and $76 for 10,000 or more subscribers each month. Benchmark offers programs for companies of all sizes, including large contact databases. You can chat with a sales representative about pricing if you have more than 200,000 contacts.
Benchmark Add-Ons Price Plan
Any plan can be supplemented with add-ons. The list verification add-on, for example, ensures that you have the best subscribers and deliverability. For every 1,000 users, this feature costs an extra $3 per month.
For an extra $5 per month, you may upgrade your image hosting storage from basic to unlimited. You can also get a dedicated IP for $28.95 per month, providing additional control over your sending reputation and inbox delivery.
You can add inbox checkers for $14 per month for 100 tests to see how your email campaigns will look on any device and in any browser. Although Benchmark does not provide a free trial, you can use the free version before subscribing to a paid membership.
Benchmark Email’s Pros and Cons
Benchmark Email’s Pros
- Benchmark is suitable for small to midsize enterprises searching for affordable email marketing software because of its low price.
- Choose from three distinct email builders, depending on your demands and ability level: drag and drop, HTML editor, or even RSS emails.
- Benchmark offers a wide range of capabilities for creating eye-catching, one-of-a-kind email campaigns.
- Benchmark’s customer service professionals are responsive and pleasant, and they can be reached through various means.
- Benchmark offers a free subscription that includes an unlimited number of contacts.
- There are over 1500 integrations to select from like WordPress, Facebook, Google, Shopify, Zapier, and a slew of more platforms, as well as the possibility to develop your own.
- Email campaigns are pretty simple to create.
- Three separate lead-generating tools – the platform’s signup form, landing page, and poll and survey capabilities may all help you expand your email list.
Benchmark Email’s Cons
- Benchmark’s paid products do not come with a free trial.
- Benchmark emails may occasionally end up in spam boxes.
- The free edition has a restriction of 10MB for image storage
- More pop-up form templates would be fantastic.
- Extra media storage is available on extra cost.
- Even though there is a free plan, it only allows 250 contacts. As a result, it may only be appropriate for very tiny firms.
- Low deliverability rate — the platform has a lower deliverability rate, with approximately 5% to 10% of emails ending up in spam folders on average.
Should I go for Benchmark?
Benchmark Email is an excellent service in general, with only a few minor shortcomings in its feature set. Even a novice might easily create a modest free newsletter and build it over time with its reasonable free plan. The Pro/Enterprise feature set should not surprise a seasoned email marketer in the least.
Benchmark Email is simple to use, has after-sales solid support, and its automation options are flexible and powerful. On the other hand, Benchmark Email is priced at the higher end of the market and suffers from lower email delivery rates than its competitors. However, it does provide a free plan that does not require a credit card, so try it out for yourself before committing to a premium plan.
Benchmark’s paid plans, compared to those of its competitors, fall between the medium and higher-end, depending on subscriber numbers. As a result, they can compete in terms of simplicity of use, particularly for the editor and template versatility. Considering factors like their delivery concerns, though, Benchmark loses some of its charms.
Its automation pro feature allows users to create simple yet effective automated programs, making it excellent for firms who are new to marketing automation. However, it should be emphasized that it pales in comparison to ActiveCampaign’s sophisticated automation. However, you can try out Automation Pro for free before upgrading to a subscription plan to activate your campaigns.
Benchmark’s picture and file storage are somewhat limited: 10 MB won’t go you very far. When calculating the cost of their plans, keep that in mind, as you’ll almost certainly have to pay an extra $5 for extra storage.
Benchmark is a sophisticated tool with a user-friendly interface that is simple enough for newcomers to use. With their free plan, you can see if their marketing automation and email capabilities are a good fit for your needs.