Emma by Marigold vs. Vero Cloud

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.

Vero is well suited for basic email marketing if you have a great developer or development team on your staff. You can expect basic tracking like opens and clicks, but do not expect additional tracking or reports outside of this. Vero truly is a basic marketing automation software hence its price reasonableness in comparison to competitors.

Incentivized

• 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 template editor allowed our developers to design emails to looks like beautiful marketing emails or basic personal emails.
• The Vero API allowed our developers to connect triggers and events from our visitors to kick start campaigns.
• Campaign flows were fairly easy to create and define.

Incentivized

• 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

• While Vero offers some WYSIWYG editing, it's on the limited side, as it mostly allows you to edit copy, but not necessarily the layout.
• The UI/UX has improved dramatically over the course of the last few years, but it can still lag from time to time and experience sluggishness.
• While reliability is really good, it does have lapses from time to time that will introduce delays into emails being sent out. Once or twice, the system went completely down for a period of time.

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

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

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

We formerly used Mailchimp for newsletter emails and Mandrill for website transactional emails. While working well, Mailchimp restructured its services a while back, making them more cost prohibitive for us. Furthermore, the two services weren't as well integrated. We chose Vero because it had both types of emails integrated into its product, which made it easy for us to manage. Customer.io was also used briefly, but it only handled drip campaigns, so it wasn't as versatile for us. We found we could do most things with Vero, so it just made more sense.

Incentivized

• 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

• The overall costs of using Vero have been much lower than using two comparable products that handle transactional emails and newsletters, respectively. MailChimp has relatively recently integrated their Mandrill product for transactional emails, so that's worth looking at as well.
• Using a single product for many things lowers the learning curve, as team members only have to learn one product well, rather than several.
• While infrequent, Vero's outages have impacted our operations at times. If absolute reliability is crucial to your business, then you may have to find a larger provider with a more robust infrastructure. As mentioned, though, it hasn't been a big problem for us.

Incentivized