Looking for an easy way to send newsletters out to employees or clients? Blue Juice takes a look at 3 industry leading EMS platforms vs our custom template solution.
Sending out a large number of emails doesn’t have to be a hassle anymore. At Blue Juice we’ve become well acquainted with various Email Marketing Systems available to both large corporates and small businesses. Here are our top 3 EMS platforms compared to our custom template solution.
For those of you who haven’t heard of them before, Email Marketing Systems (EMS) are online communication platforms that allow a user to send fully responsive HTML emails, newsletters that allow you to manage your distribution lists more efficiently online. Some EMS systems even allow you to track the sent content and provide analytic reports about each mail sent out. You can even integrate your communications with social media. Currently, there are 3 EMS platforms that are dominating the digital communications and marketing scene. The Blue Juice team has recently begun developing media in all 3 and have come up with a list of pros and cons for each:
Newsweaver:
Newsweaver is currently considered the most comprehensive and advanced EMS platform available. It is aimed toward large corporate entities as it provides in-depth analytics reports and has a host of features aimed at increasing and tracking employee engagement for basic content such as surveys, invites and informational newsletters.
Pros:
- Allows users to embed rich media such as images, videos and PDFs (users won’t need to download images to view your content).
- Allows for multi-page newsletters.
- Integrated with large corporate intranets such as SharePoint.
- Advanced cross-channel analytics (allows you to monitor traffic and stats on mails and your SharePoint intranet in 1 place).
- 12-hour support.
- Allows for social media style interaction on basic newsletters in the form of real-time commenting and ‘liking’.
Cons:
- Newsweaver is one of the most expensive EMS platforms on the market.
- Designs are limited to templates provided on the platform.
- HTML coding and customisation is not a commonly available or supported feature.
Mail Chimp
Mail chimp has quickly become one of the most popular EMS systems on the market. Its simplicity and user friendliness is exemplified in its drag-and-drop content builder. It has become the go-to for many large corporates as well as small businesses due to its cost effectiveness and flexible structure.
Pros:
- Mail Chimp allows for HTML coding and advanced customisation capabilities.
- The platform provides a user with basic tracking reports.
- Minimal cost to use the service (free if you have less than 2000 subscribers to the content you are distributing).
Cons:
- Handling content such as invites and surveys requires 3rd party software.
- The Mail Chimp signature is attached to all posts, mails and newsletters (this can be removed on a paid account).
- Recipients are required to download images and rich content.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor is by far the quickest EMS platform on the market when it comes to releasing a HTML coded newsletter to a large group of people.
Pros:
- A drag and drop content builder that allows for basic HTML customisation and editing.
- Basic email tracking and reports within the platform itself.
Cons:
- Difficult to embed rich content or building (images need to be downloaded by recipients).
- Limited interactive functionality on newsletters.
- Subscription costs.
The Blue Juice team have taken a hands-on approach to these 3 platforms and have become confident in customising content to best suit our client’s needs.
Our passion is developing design and communication strategies that work for our client’s individual needs so many years ago we created a custom Digital Newsletter Template which is a huge hit.
Pros:
- We create a template that’s embedded into the body of an Outlook message with fixed images and editable text.
- Majority of our templates are set up to expand with the content inserted making them very easy to use.
- They are affordable – a once off design cost and no ongoing maintenance or licencing plans required.
- And the best feature – images are embedded into the email and are a very low file size so recipients don’t have to download the images. This simple solution makes all the difference – visual impact the minute you open one of our mails.
- We can use your Google Analytics account to set up tracking links and run reports for each issue to see number of clicks per story.
- You can use your existing distribution list.
- Reuse the template as often as you like.
Cons:
- No subscribe or unsubscribe feature – this template is simple and manually operated.