Rating: 5 stars

Benchmark Email is an excellent email marketing service that helps businesses and organizations with something to sell or a cause to promote get their message out to their loyal customers or constituents. While social media has been gaining relevance, email marketing remains the official method of communication with constituents. It is important to select a technology that fits your needs. Avoid the common pitfalls of non support, inability to track marketing statistics, unfriendly or overly complex user interfaces, and premium costs, by going with a well balanced solution such as this one. Call the California based staff to see just how good their support is.

Rating: 5 stars

I am one of the developers of this plugin.

Benchmark describes email marketing best on their home page: “Have something to sell, a cause to promote, a service to provide? You need email marketing to do things right. Create quality, eye-popping emails that work. Save time. Save money. Get your message out to the masses.”

The businesses and organizations that need to reach out to their customers or constituents must choose a technology that fits their specific needs. Benchmark Email has the best support and user interface that I personally have ever seen, and at a very reasonable cost. They offer a free for life plan level as well.

Consider this and the alternatives and what is better or worse about each option, details to consider include:
– Email blasting deliverability and cap limits on sending directly from your web server with some alternatives
– SMTP relaying (bulk) options won’t always catch duplicates, opt outs, or track valuable statistics such as soft versus hard bounces, open rates, link tracking, campaigns, etc. with some alternatives
– Overly complex services can be difficult to use with some alternatives
– Many solutions are more costly than Benchmark Email
– Call customer support (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese) to ensure the support you need is available with the providers you evaluate
– Benchmark and others offer a considerable nonprofit organization discount
– Benchmark operates a generous affiliate program for small businesses and consultants to research products and share their precious client base
– Benchmark uses USA based support staff during business hours

Rating: 2 stars

Installed with no problems, has good features BUT the free version only works for 30 days, then what? PAY. Otherwise the free version reverts to a catch: “The only catch is that you may only build your list with users who subscribe from your signup form.” This makes it a poor program if you get a lot of other contacts you want to send the newsletters to.. So I keep looking for something else, especially that the High Volume version costs a whopping $399 a month!! Crazy.. Thanks for reading, Groggo