Benchmark Email vs. Instapage

Their free option has no time limit and accepts an email list of 2,000 contacts. That's generous considering that some similar software have free trials limited to a month or less and will allow only about 1,000 contact lists, if not less. With that 2,000 contact space available for free on Benchmark email, I can gather 2,000 leads or buyers into my email program without paying. Thus, Benchmark Email is suited for profitability, especially for a start-up business.

If you aren't too picky about having precise control over your page designs, Instapage is a great tool that will make it easy to build and publish pages quickly. It's easy to set up and intuitive to use. It seems like that audience (prioritizes speed over precision) is their target -- for control freaks like me, it comes up a little short. The pricing is pretty good for what you get -- a super-fast path to getting campaigns out quickly so that you can test and iterate your way to profitability. It plays really well with most other tools designed for the small, scrappy startup marketing team, too.

Incentivized

• They have the option to incorporate email automation.
• HTML is available if you want to use your own templates.
• They give you the ability to edit some HTML on their drag and drop version.

Incentivized

• I love how easy the setup was. The drag and drop design is easy for people who don't know code but it also allows coding options for those who do.
• Customer service has been easy to contact. They are quick with their response times and have suggested workarounds or provided videos to help fix any issues.
• They are constantly working on improvements to the interface and additional features.

Incentivized

• Glitchy editor - powerful drag and drop features, but precise formatting can have issues.
• Stagnant platform - few notable features or fixes over the past two years.
• Delivery Success - anecdotal customer reports suggest high percent of emails are diverted by spam filters.

Incentivized

• Originally, we used Pardot and Instapage and I had to pull the coding from our Instapage landing pages and throw that into Pardot to get nice looking landing pages. When we transitioned to HubSpot, they took our existing pages and did this for us. But now they added an integration with Instapage and I am guessing this will solve any issues with using Instapage going forward for our website's landing pages.

Incentivized

I've tried all of the other landing page services on the market, and this is literally the easiest to use. I am not a designer or software developer, just a simple guy and if I can learn how to use it, anyone can. That's what won me over. Their support and pre-made templates are awesome, but the usability is what I love!

Again, support is just awesome. I've never had any issues go over 24 hours and the people are friendly and speak English really well.

At the time of the decision, we anticipated a larger audience and a high potential cost of MailChimp. We also believed that Benchmark Email would be less complex and therefore quicker to implement and learn. Given the current needs and pricing, I believe MailChimp may be competitive and provide a more refined UI

Incentivized

We also use Mailchimp's new functionality to build landing pages. It has some advantages since we use Mailchimp as our email marketing system. However it is not as user-friendly as Instapage - and we only use it for certain simple campaigns that don't need us to be creative with the landing pages. I wouldn't recommend Mailchimp as an alternative to what Instapage brings to the table!

Incentivized

• We were able to reduce recurring costs by 20% per year by buying an extended contract plan.
• Benchmark is more robust than our previous software, and we've been able to increase newsletter sales by about 10% per year.
• We were able to introduce split a/b testing into our newsletter mix, as it's a native feature of Benchmark.

Incentivized

• My company was so disorganized, calculating ROI was never going to happen. However, Instapage did allow us to meet our goal, which was to acquire a specific number of leads within a month.
• Instapage allowed me to make quick changes based on lead collection progress. When we were behind on our numbers, I could quickly make changes and A/B test different page layouts.
• I'm not sure if they continued to use Instapage after I left the company, but it was a very helpful lead collection tool and allowed us to meet our goals.

Incentivized