Business Choice Awards 2018: Email Marketing Services

 

Email marketing campaigns are a great way to stay in touch with customers, both to build a relationship with new ones and to nurture loyalty to build repeat business. Combined with a strong content marketing program, email marketing is a powerful tool for providing compelling, useful, and timely content to bring readers to your site or physical business.

This edition of the PCMag Business Choice Awards focuses on email marketing, the services that help businesses design, write and send direct email campaigns, track open and click-through rates, and maintain subscriber lists. Email marketing is a hugely popular tool used successfully by a variety of businesses ranging from local retail to multinational e-commerce sites, from a small doctor's office up to healthcare corporations, and any other business you might consider.

For Business Choice, we survey readers for feedback about their overall satisfaction, reliability, and tech support experience with the email marketing solution they use, plus the likelihood they would recommend it to others. As you'll see below, ease of use is the key factor when businesses choose an email marketing solution.

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Looking for an expert opinion on email marketing services? 

Check out PCMag's roundup of the Best Email Marketing Software.

The past few years have brought consolidation to the topsy-turvy email marketing world. We went from 25 nominated providers two years ago to 139 last year, to 46 this year.

I believe what's happening is that large businesses simply use Salesforce for marketing because they're already using Salesforce for SFA, and then small to medium businesses seek out best-of-breed solutions like Mailchimp and Constant Contact. This consolidation also explains why only three companies (the three aforementioned) received enough votes to be considered for top honors this year.

This year, Mailchimp sits at the top of the email marketing tree, munching away at the only things tastier than ripe bananas: top scores in overall satisfaction and likelihood to recommend, combined with the lowest percentage of respondents requiring tech support.

Hot on Mailchimp's tail is the runner-up, Constant Contact.

For all of the Curious Georges out there, Mailchimp is a perennial favorite. With a 7.8 in overall satisfaction, up from last year's 7.5, 2016's 7.1, and 2015's winning 7.7. For the second year in a row, Mailchimp fell just short on reliability, scoring an 8.2 compared to Constant Contact's 8.4 (similar to last year's 7.9 compared to Constant Contact's 8.0).

MailChimp also tied Constant Contact in likelihood to recommend with a 7.9 (up from last year's 7.6 and 7.5, respectively). Mailchimp had an amazingly low 3 percent of respondents requiring tech support, a clear advantage over Constant Contact and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and a sizeable decrease from last year's 12 percent.

Drilling down into likelihood to recommend, we leverage the responses to the critical question "How likely are you to recommend your email marketing solution to a colleague" in order to calculate the accompanying Net Promoter Score. 

Here's where we find something extremely insightful about email marketing solution providers: No one has strong NPS in this category of the Business Choice awards.

My take on this, and the market consolidation supports my theory, is that email marketing services are so widely used and sold at such aggressive price points that they have become commodities. As a result, readers refer their colleagues to their email marketing solution with a distinct lack of enthusiasm as Constant Contact (40 percent compared to last year's 6 percent) edged out Mailchimp (38 percent compared to last year's 8 percent), distantly followed by Salesforce Marketing Cloud at 7 percent.

Tech support is a very important factor when selecting an email marketing solution. Compared with the other services we rate, relatively low percentages of readers reported needing tech support. Our winner, Mailchimp, enjoys a very low 3 percent (an improvement over last year's great score of 9 percent, while Constant Contact improved from last year's 20 percent to this year's 10 percent).

Salesforce Marketing Cloud brings up the rear with 16 percent. So few respondents required tech support that we did not have a statistically significant number of responses to rate tech support satisfaction.

 

WINNERS: EMAIL MARKETING SERVICES

MailchimpMailchimp once again bests the rest of the troop, though not by such high margins that the company can rest on its banana peels. 

However, PCMag readers make it clear, Mailchimp is certainly the email provider to pick if you don't want to be spending a lot of time on tech support.

Methodology

We email survey invitations to PCMag.com community members, specifically subscribers to our Readers' Choice Survey mailing list. The surveys are hosted by SurveyMonkey, which also performs our data collection. This survey was in the field from April 2, 2018 to April 23, 2018.

Respondents were asked to rate their email marketing solution using multiple questions about their overall satisfaction with the solution, as well as experiences with technical support within the past 12 months.

Because the goal of the survey is to understand how the email marketing solutions compare to one another and not how one respondent's experience compares to another's, we use the average of the email marketing solutions' rating, not the average of every respondent's rating. 

In all cases, the overall ratings are not based on averages of other scores in the table; they are based on answers to the question, "Overall, how satisfied are you with your email marketing campaign provider?"

Scores not represented as a percentage are on a scale of 0 to 10 where 10 is the best.

Net Promoter Scores are based on the concept introduced by Fred Reichheld in his 2006 best seller, The Ultimate Question, that no other question can better define the loyalty of a company's customers than "how likely is it that you would recommend this company to a friend or colleague?" This measure of brand loyalty is calculated by taking the percent of respondents who answered 9 or 10 (promoters) and subtracting the percent who answered 0 through 6 (detractors). (For more, read PCMag's Top Consumer Recommended Companies for 2018.)

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