I’ve always had a good open rate, but I notice that my open rate has gone up 10% since I began using BenchmarkONE in December.
I like to say that I’m a serial entrepreneur – Compass Strategies is my third business. Our services include web development, maintenance, email marketing and other digital services. I also have a secondary business, DeannaFenton.com, where I teach other entrepreneurs how to do digital marketing themselves, including coaching and training.
Really great. I just love the application. It works great for my business, and I’ve even recommended it to one of my largest clients.
Like Kim Doyal, I had used Infusionsoft, and I had tried it twice. I tried it for about 18 months the first time and gave up on it. I waited another year and tried it again, but I just wasn’t happy with it. I’m a techie person. I’m used to working in this world and have done so for pretty much my whole career. But it wasn’t even just difficult for myself. If I had virtual assistants or others working for me, it was very difficult to get them up to speed to get the work done that I needed.
I was really looking for something that provided marketing automation that was easy and would give me the ability to do the type of tasks I needed to do, get the reporting and be able to see the results easily.
In the meantime, I had spent thousands of dollars on Infusionsoft with so-called experts, and it was a tremendous waste of money. I was looking for something that would have the flexibility to do the the things I wanted, and to integrate with other applications I use such as LeadPages and GoToWebinar, but that would also be easier to use.
One of the things I like best is that it is a very visual application. The dashboard is intuitive. Where I used to search and click and click to find reports for example, it’s very easy for me to pull up reports in BenchmarkONE. When I was looking to be able to segment my list and target a specific group, it felt like I had to go through a lot of different steps with Infusionsoft. It was not as intuitive or as visual as BenchmarkONE.
The way BenchmarkONE’s campaigns are laid out and the ability to create campaigns, get the emails staggered, track the click-throughs on links in emails and trigger other actions – I found BenchmarkONE to be really, really easy to use.
It was amazing because as I went through the demo, even the most basic function that was shown to me set off an “ah-ha! I can do this with that.” The light bulb kept going off.
The campaign builder was extremely important. I can respond to how my subscribers are reacting to the content of my emails, tailor the content for them, know what interests them and be able to react to that.
Along those lines, the webpage tracker is phenomenal. It’s neat to me that I can see if someone has gone to a particular page on my site a certain number of times, I can trigger an action to start sending them content or trigger an action to let me know that I need to reach out to them. For example, if someone is interested in SEO, I can reach out to them to see if they have any questions or trigger another campaign to start sending them information that they’ve shown an interest in.
The email templates are so easy. When I suggested BenchmarkONE to my largest client, I was able to mock up three examples of templates so that my client was quickly able to see a few layouts right away and make a decision about how they wanted their templates to look.
I also like being able to pull up my list and segment so easily. I can quickly tailor my list.
I’ve also noticed that my list has grown. I think that’s primarily because, quite honestly, I’m more motivated now because BenchmarkONE is so easy. I can integrate with squeeze pages and create multiple offers on my own website. I’ve been more active in doing that, so that’s certainly helped contribute to list growth. BenchmarkONE is so easy to use. It makes it easy just to throw up a new opt-in or squeeze page from Leadpages, integrate it, and just start generating traffic.
Ease of use. BenchmarkONE gives you, in a very visual format, access to reports and your subscriber activity, allowing you to make decisions very easily. I can quickly react and implement a new campaign or start a promotion and use BenchmarkONE to support that, and it’s not something that takes a lot of time. On top of that, it’s simple to train virtual assistants and others in my organization because it’s a very easy to use application, yet very powerful.