Emma by Marigold vs. Pinpointe On-Demand

Using Emma for weekly templated email use with minimal changes is awesome. If you want you can create a master and make minor graphic edits quickly and easily from your smartphone. Any edit is possible as long as the artwork is on the online server. Only time I hit a bump in the road is when I was asked to change the style sheet and did not know that the pricing plan I was on did not include this feature. Client had to wait to send new format until Emma performed the requested changes.

They did a good job setting up a dashboard for me with my many small accounts. It makes it easy to go from one account to the other.

• Drag and Drop Interface - I love the drag-and-drop interface used to design campaigns. It makes it easy for creative types to get the look they want, and it helps less technically and aesthetically adept users to create campaigns that still look great. After using both Constant Contact and Mailchimp, I think Emma comes out on top in terms of ease of template design.
• Master Admin Account - Having a master admin account controlled by one person allows us to deploy brand assets to each sub-account, and we're also able to push out templates for users who aren't ready or don't have the time to design their own.
• Dynamic Content - Dynamic content has proven so useful to us, especially in our Admissions Office. Making it possible for regular users to easily create emails using dynamic content is a VERY strong feature that, in my experience, is unique to Emma.
• Great Tutorials - Emma does a great job taking care of its users. The support folks are always kind and helpful, but Emma publishes an array of tutorials and resources to help with just about anything its users encounter, from how to use custom merge fields to advice on creating the best campaigns.

Incentivized

• Email editor
• Testing and reports
• Support
• Good IP reputation to ensure deliverability
• Tools to help reduce spam score for outgoing emails

• Setup of users - We used to be able to setup a user and send them our own welcome email. Emma has since set up the ability to add users where they send the welcome email. It's a great new feature, but it doesn't always work. We've had some users who never receive these emails and then we need to reach out to support anyway.
• The code to set up a configurable email is cumbersome. It's great that it is so customizable, but there is a learning curve.

Incentivized

• Depending on the amount, when I am in the middle of uploading a list of contacts I get bumped out and have to submit a request to increase my dataset. That being said, our company as a whole is happy with what Pinpointe provides us with as is.

Incentivized

Easy to use and gets the job done without too many "extras" (ex. we didn't need a full marketing automation platform so Emma had what we needed to send email marketing communications without having to pay for the stuff we didn't need)

Incentivized

Pinpointe On-Demand is a critical component of our marketing infrastructure and we will continue to use it to support our email marketing requirements

While every WYSIWYG software will experience glitches, Emma handles them well. Keep in mind they rarely happen, but they do, it can be of annoyance. Regardless, Emma allows my organization to create seamless email campaigns using fresh data. Emma makes coming up with strategic decisions very easy. The list segmentation that Emma feature allows us to easily manage a large list without issues. Overall, Emma is extremely usable with nearly no learning curve!

Incentivized

I hate that to get support I have to submit a question to a public forum and wait for a response. I just want the ability for a quick live chat to answer my simple help questions quickly or at the very least submit a ticket via email and get a status update.

Incentivized

They are quick to respond to requests, usually within an hour. If they don't have an immediate fix to a problem, they let me know what the status is and what they are doing about a request. In some cases, if the development team needs to be involved because a bug is found, they have fixed and patched the system same day. Rarely do I ever get that kind of customer support response with any other company. They don't have a premium support tier because they treat every request with the same level of professionalism and response time (again, to at least let you know it was received and an actual person is looking at it, even if they are busy with other requests).

Emma had a more robust multi-level account structure which empowered individual locations to participate at the ground-level. Additionally corporate was able to maintain oversight, template creation, marketing automation, and data reporting. The goal is to provide the locations with the ability to send their own marketing messages, saving corporate marketing time, and providing more genuine, locally-focused email campaigns. Emma was very effective at making that happen.

Incentivized

Whereas MailChimp felt very simple (both as a pro and a con), Pinpointe allowed us to achieve the same simplicity when we wanted it, and to be able to go well beyond that simplicity when we needed that instead. Constant Contact was our original platform for email marketing, but after using Pinpointe, we easily made the decision to switch given the reporting, the constant addition of new, requested features by users, and the deliverability of emails via Pinpointe. We do still use Constant Contact, but only for event management.

• It's been pretty overwhelmingly positive. Our clients are happy about the savings that we're able to pass onto them.
• We're able to better determine what headlines receive the most clicks from our client's emails based on the dashboard.
• Super easy email designer that frees up some of our graphic designers to take on other jobs.

Incentivized

• Our ROI has gone up significantly since using Pinpointe.
• We are able to use the coding to implement a join form on our website directly so we don't have to download from our website and upload to Pinpointe each time we want to add our contacts.
• Our emails show up white-labeled so it is our own branding on all emails.