I like email better than any other means of communication. It’s simple, quick and cheap. Unlike a telephone call or a face to face meeting, you can handle emails at your own convenience too. If you take spam and email overload out of the equation, I’m sure a lot of people feel the same way about email too.
Email marketing is one of the cheapest and most effective ways reach out to your audience. At the very least you get to track the clicks, which is one sure analytics you can root for. There are so many email marketing solutions out there in the market, most of them with a generous free usage tier. Emma is one among the lot which focuses on style and simplicity.
Overview
Emma helps you create, send and track great looking emails and surveys. No matter what you send – monthly newsletters, invitations, promos etc. – your organization’s emails will stand out in style. The web app makes it easy to send with a click, schedule an email in advance or create an auto-responder that sends automatically based on your subscribers’ actions. Combine this with comprehensive reporting, you have got yourselves a email marketing powerhouse.
Pricing
Pricing
Unlike most other players in the market who charge you by the number of subscribers in your lists, Emma charges you based on the volume of emails sent. Unfortunately, there isn’t a free tier available, but all plans come with a full featured sixty day free trial period.
Signing Up
Signing up for Emma isn’t the quickest thing to do. You will have to fill a form and wait for the representative from the sales team to let you in. I got my test drive account fairly quickly after pinging the Emma Twitter account.
Creating a List
I gotta admit, the dev team has nailed the organization part of the app. I’m accustomed to seeing multiple tabs and sections to navigate between various functional parts of a web app. In Emma, the entire app is contained in just three sections – audience, campaign and response.
Adding a New Member
All list building happens in the audience section of the app. It goes without saying that Emma allows you import email lists from CSV files or if you are planning to build everything from scratch, it isn’t tough to do so either. When you are creating a new list, you can customize the fields to boot and create as many fields as you need to collect all the necessary data.
Checking Member History
New members can be added to multiple groups by just checking off the appropriate ones. Click on the member name to see their account status info and a detailed history of mails sent to and the responses received from them.
Customizing the Template
Creating a New Mailer
One of the star attractions of Emma is the custom designed stationery from the in house designers. Unfortunately, test accounts aren’t privy to this awesome feature (totally understandable) and have to make do with blank or sample template.
Stationery Editor
Every single part of the mailer is customizable and you can edit it using a powerful WYSIWYG editor. You can preview all the changes and makes adjustments as necessary. The ability to save multiple placeholder text is a handy addition. Once the mailer is ready is you can either send it out instantly or schedule it for later.
Reports
Reports
With Emma’s real time response tracking, you’ll see who’s opening, clicking, signing up and more, helping you gain vital analytics about your marketing campaigns every step of the way. The reports are immensely helpful and offer valuable insights and help spot trends early. However, the graphs and charts could have been a bit better looking.
As a matter of fact, the entire user interface could use a facelift with Web 2.0 elements. But, the app is so intuitive and feature rich, it’s barely noticeable.
Final Thoughts
Emma emphasizes on sending out stylish marketing emails. And taking into account the poor attention span of the users of the Internet age, it only makes sense to send out emails that are as engaging as possible. I was ticked off by the unusual sign up process of Emma though. Even to buy a basic plan or to try out the app for sixty days, you have to fill out a form and wait for the customer service rep to get back you.
This check is probably in place to prevent spammers and freeloaders, but is definitely not a customer friendly policy. And I couldn’t recall any other popular email marketing company that employs a similar policy. That said, Emma is a perfect app for those planning a marketing campaign that makes an impact on the target audience.
Share Your Thoughts!
Which email marketing service do you use for your business? Have you ever considered migrating from one email marketing solution to another based on merits alone?