Benchmark Email vs. Iterable

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.

Iterable is great for any marketing team looking to ramp up the capabilities on lifecycle marketing specifically if you're a company with a lot of data and/or SKU's the product makes handling a lot of complexities much simpler and enables my team to move much faster even as a small team

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

• It is easy to onboard new users with building communications. The drag and drop editor is very intuitive to use.
• Allows for complex data structures on user profiles and in events. This is a key reason we onboarded to Iterable and have stayed with it.

• 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

• Locale management: being able to copy and past a template section/row/content from a locale to another. Also, be able to duplicate any locale to any locale. So far we can just duplicate the default locale into the rest of the locales
• Outages - I feel in the last 1 and half, more outages are happening, impacting their clients
• Image library

Incentivized

Extremely easy to use, deeply integrated into our infrastructure

Iterable is super easy to use. I have experience with competing platforms, but Iterable is by far the most intuitive platform to use. I also really appreciate the way the product team is willing to accept product requests

Incentivized

Iterable is there like 99.9% of the time. However, when it goes down, it grinds us to a halt. Most of the time, outages are an hour or less, but if that's at a peak time, it can be a nightmare. That said, when the worst does happen, there are frequent updates and an easy situation tracker that give you an estimate of how much longer you'll have to wait for the issue to be resolved.

Incentivized

The API is super quick. The UI can be a little sluggish depending on what you're loading, but overall Iterable performs great. Iterable appears to do a good job of making processes async so that one action isn't blocking another.

Incentivized

I've never experienced any issues with Iterable. As I and my colleagues have learnt the system and it's features, response to questions and advice from our account manager is always quick. Kevin knows the product well, and with the few tricky questions has hasn't been able to answer he's been quick to get back to us.

Incentivized

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

As mentioned previously, I was hired to do a migration from ActiveCampaign, and I stayed for 2 years as a power user of Itearble. Since leaving OneVision Resources, I have continued to volunteer my time in a regional user group, which I would not do if the platform, product, and company were not so strong and so marketer-forward.

We've definitely tested scalability, and it's no line - it works. The process is pretty easy. Most of the times it goes off without a hitch. Any time we do encounter issues, our support team is quick to get on the job and very communicative as they work us through a successful launch.

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

• I do not have hard numbers, as I am not in the department that deals with those kinds of quantifications of impact. However, I do believe the use of Iterable has been a positive thing for us in providing more comprehensive data that is useful when dealing with customer tickets.

Incentivized