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Benchmark is one of our favorite email marketing software solutions for small businesses and nonprofits because it offers free surveys, polls and event marketing, as well as the option of purchasing a private IP address ($28.95/month). Most email marketing service providers don’t offer these features.
Benchmark has a great reputation and pricing is reasonable (they also have a limited free plan — read details below). Read further in our Benchmark Email Marketing Review to see why it might be the best fit for your email marketing needs.
Article Overview
- Pros & Cons
- Key Features
- Price (With Promo Code)
- What Is Automation Pro? (Video)
- Customer Feedback
- Is Benchmark Right For Your Business?
Benchmark
Pros
- Fantastic customer service
- Intuitive marketing team will assume all responsibility and create marketing campaigns for you with only an email list, pictures, and an idea of what you want to say
- One of few providers with a free forever plan
- Interactive video and links make email campaigns look great and stand out from other template designs
- Fantastic systematic approach and drag and drop features make designing and producing templates easy to understand and easy to do
- 10mb image hosting, 50mb for high-volume accounts
- Social sharing with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn
- HTML template archive
- Split A/B testing, inbox preview
- API access, RSS to email
Cons
- Limited phone support (hours are unlisted), but they do offer live chat 24/7
- Private IP address costs an extra $28.95 per month, regardless of your subscriber plan
- Does not allow for the use of attachments in marketing campaigns but they do give you up to 10mb per file to store and link to them on their server
- Built-in import features for third-party address books are very limited
- No social media or sales tracking
8 Key Features
- Great option for small business and nonprofits
- Free for life plan, unlimited contacts and 250 emails/month (does not include full features for A/B testing, sub accounts, engagement email and automation, data security pin or inbox checker email client preview)
- Dashboard includes marketing campaigns, social media and other activity
- Can upgrade image hosting from 10MB, which you get for free, to unlimited for $5/month
- Event marketing, polling and survey features with easy to use templates
- Dozens of app integrations, including Google Analytics, Zapier, PayPal, Salesforce and more
- Solid tracking and reporting features and list management
- Mobile apps for iPhone and Android
Pricing
Below is some of the Benchmark Email pricing. Visit Benchmark’s website for a full pricing list.
| # Of Contacts | Cost Per Month |
|---|---|
| Free Plan | Up to 500 contacts/month 3,500 emails/month |
| Lowest Price Plan/Month | $9.99 (500 contacts) |
| Up To 2,500 Contacts | $29 |
| Up To 5,000 Contacts | $49 |
| Up To 25,000 Contacts | $199 |
There are 251 email marketing service providers out there, and demand for services is at an all-time high, so email marketing is anything but dead. But is Benchmark your best option? Automation Pro is a feature from Benchmark Email that creates “journeys” for your subscribers to help you create a series of tasks for your subs to do without having to do a thing. See how it works below in this short video.
Consumer Reviews
Hearing how customers feel about an email marketing company before spending any money is always a good idea. We recommend this for any product or service. Below are a couple of good and bad reviews for you to consider.
Positive Reviews
The steps for creating email campaigns are easy to follow and the Editor for the email campaign is easy to use for someone with no design or coding background. You can either do their Drag and Drop feature or the HTML feature. – Administrator in High Education, G2Crowd 1/10/2018
Negative Reviews
My emails usually end up in Junk or spam boxes even though I am certain that they are clean of any problems. It doesn’t directly integrate with e-commerce programs. I don’t like to having to purchase Zappier when other CRM’s integrate automatically. It also has an issue with WordPress integration. Email collection plugin is not customizable enough. – Johnnie U., G2Crowd 8/10/2017
Who Do We Think Benchmark Is Best For?
We think Benchmark is excellent for those of you just getting started with email marketing. Benchmark has great customer support and a phenomenal reputation. With the various plan sizes, you can get started with any number of contacts and test out the waters. See how Benchmark compares against 20+ other email marketing service companies in our extensive email marketing comparison.
What appeals to you most (or least) about Benchmark? Let us know in the comments!
Tagged With: Email Marketing, Reviews
