Emma by Marigold vs. GetResponse

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.

GetResponse is good for marketing automation newbies that want a powerful platform without a steep learning curve. It appears to have a strong set of tools for creating automated sequences, but it's not your solution for large enterprise usage. Also, seeing as how competitive the market's become, while it's not expensive per se, it is a bit on the pricey side relative to some.

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

• If you understand coding the ability to use dynamic content based on smart searches was very useful.
• The drop and drag workflows were very easy to create and use
• Allowed for simple automation and nurture campaigns to occur off of events

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

• Lists are rejected on baseless grounds.
• They recommend a service to clean lists and even after being cleaned, emails and lists are rejected.
• They purged 80% of our email list because they were not interacting regularly enough with our emails.
• Their drag and drop editor is set up poorly, if you have similar look and feel emails there is no way to know which you are in.
• Often email templates do not save and you have to start over.
• Sometimes scheduled emails don't even send.

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

As I mentioned before. I believe that the platform is easy to use. Simple and easy process from start to finish. Email efficient and get to the client quickly. Catch errors that would prevent getting to where i need it to go. Overall great experience and would renew without question

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

Excellent general support. However, in case of an escalation, their turnaround time over email (follow through) can go higher

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

Over the years we have worked with quite a few email platforms. We feel that GetResponse is a solid competitor. The CRM side is not as strong as a product like Keep but we don't expect it to be. If we are really being fair and comparing apples to apples, then GetResponse is as good as any of these other products. Especially in the area of the visual builder, I honestly think it is just about as good as Keep. And it is better than some of these other products. Again, keeping in mind the cost and the niche GetResponse fills, it stacks up very well against the other products we have used.

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

• Our marketing emails have been much more professional, scheduled, beautiful, and manageable since switching AWAY from GetResponse, so in that sense the platform did not provide the kind of ROI we'd prefer.
• For delivering our regular daily newsletter, GetResponse has served us well and has delivered at an above-average rate to our mailing list.

Incentivized