Emma |
Emma Review: a small business email marketing services company with a web based service that manages email newsletter marketing and surveys, including organizing contacts, creating and building design templates, with statistical reporting capabilities.
It’s a great small business email marketing platform for any business with a small list of email subscribers that just wants basic design features and ease of use. Emma was founded in 2003, with corp HQ in Nashville, with satellite offices scattered around the US, with just over 100 employees and 30-40K small to medium sized businesses and agencies around the world. Our Emma Review – we really like their overall terms of services.
Emma makes basic email and newsletter marketing easy to do – they handle all aspects of your email marketing except the actual messages you create. They will provide a custom template for you and also have selected custom templates that feature drag and drop customization, making it very easy to add a logo or image to any business email marketing campaign.
Once you create an account, you will be given access to three primary areas on their web site; i.e. Audience, Campaign and Response. The Audience area is used to import and store your email contacts, import can be done via a simple Excel spreadsheet file (no cumbersome API issues) and the service will even clean up your duplicate emails and/or bounded addresses in an automated manner, saving you time.
We like the basic well designed user interface, the Groups Feature is well designed, enabling you to segment your audience into multiple groups (these can be geographical targeted as well). We also like their sign up tool, which is designed so you can create an instant sign up form (just paste the HTML code in your web site) that will enable web site visitors to be instantly added to your Emma contact group of your choice.
Emma’s small business email marketing statistics are helpful and well done. They provide basic email campaign management, showing how many people opened your email, which links were clicked most frequently and where, the number of emails forwarded and more.
Small business users will find a number of different ways to use Emma email marketing. It’s ideal for newsletters and marketing emails. The triggers and autoresponders make Emma a great way to interact with customers in an automated fashion, such as through birthday coupons and sales responses.
Key Small Business Email Marketing Features:
A custom-designed email template: This is perhaps one of the most interesting features offered by Emma. No other email marketing management provider offers this service directly. This is great for any small business just getting started out, but may not be as interesting to someone who has experience building email templates or who wants to be able to frequently change templates.
Email creator: The Emma email creator includes a WYSIWYG editor, enabling users who don’t have experience with HTML to create professional-looking emails every time. In addition, if you do have a working knowledge of HTML, you can also customize the back end, giving your emails a more customized look.
Autoresponders: Interaction with your subscribers is one of the main factors in subscriber retention – Emma has a nice built in autoresponder that pings a new signup back immediately.
Triggers functionality: Like autoresponders, triggers are part of the big picture when it comes to customer interaction. Using triggers, you can have certain actions take place in response to a customer action. That means sending out custom birthday mailings, or sending follow-up emails when a customer clicks a newsletter link but doesn’t complete a purchase.
Social media integration. You can include buttons for your social media profiles in your newsletters using Emma. You can also add a sign-up form on your social media profile or your blog.
Email list management. Emma offers a number of ways for you to import subscribers, including directly from SalesForce and via a basic Excel spreadsheet, which good for most small businesses.
Reporting. There are plenty of email marketing statistics reporting options in this program. You can get statistics in regard to email responses including both clicks and opens. You can segment your reports by groups or by individual emails. Emma includes a variety of charts and graphs for visual representation of your data. All reporting is available in real-time, which gives you the ability to respond and be more agile in the way you carry out your campaigns.
Emma email marketing uses a tiered, per-email rate pricing structure. Here’s a look at their current rates:
Emails per month |
Price |
Price per email over the threshold |
|---|---|---|
1,000 |
$30 |
$.03 |
2,500 |
$45 |
$.018 |
5,000 |
$70 |
$.014 |
7,500 |
$100 |
$.013 |
10,000 |
$125 |
$.0124 |
17,500 |
$170 |
$.0097 |
25,000 |
$210 |
$.0084 |
37,500 |
$280 |
$.0075 |
50,000 |
$350 |
$.007 |
75,000 |
$480 |
$.0064 |
100,000 |
$600 |
$.006 |
Emma also offers a 60-day free trial.
It’s obviously important to know how many emails you intend to send out during a given month, as going over your allotted emails can result in significantly higher charges than what you might expect.
Emma’s email marketing pricing is on the high end when compared with other email marketing platforms that use a volume pricing model.
Emma review: an attractive small business email marketing solution with great core features:
The custom-designed template service is great for most small business; but see costs issue below.
They have a clean user interface that is easy to work with and we like the way their three main access areas (Audience, Campaigns and Response) are set up.
Unlimited image hosting, unlike some of their competitors.
An excellent reputation for customer support that is second to none in the industry – they garner consistent stellar reviews.
Flexible templates that can be customized.
Excellent reporting and email marketing statistics.
Long 60-day free trial; most of their competitors only offer 30 days or less.
There are also some things that users won’t like about Emma:
There are less than 100 pre-configured templates, making working with multiple campaigns or brands a bit challenging.
No cut and paste contact list importing.
You have to pay an initial fee of $99-399. for the custom template.
Like other vendors, if the email recipient has HTML turned off when receiving an email you won’t get statistical information for this user.
Emma review earns 8.5 stars out of 10 as a small business email marketing solution.