G2 Crowd report finds the two email marketing tools with the highest user satisfaction

It’s MailChimp and the email marketing part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Marketers need to be happy with their chosen email tool. Because, although email may be the old guy in a room full of younger messaging, Periscoping, and tweeting, it is also the guy who gets the job done for many campaigns.

Today, review site G2 Crowd released its fourth report on the subject. In addition to MailChimp and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, three other products got the coveted designation of Leaders — Constant Contact, iContact, and dotmailer.

The Leader quadrant in a G2 Crowd report’s visual Grid indicates strong scores on two dimensions — customer satisfaction and market presence. Although some of the assessed email tools were within larger suites, like Salesforce’s, the report focused only on the email marketing components.

High Performers are the next notch down, with high customer satisfaction but lower market presence. GetResponse, Maropost, OpenMoves Email Marketing Platform, and ExpressPigeon landed in that section.

Contenders have high market presence but lower satisfaction, and only Oracle Responsys placed there.

Products in the Niche quadrant were lower on both measures: Bronto, Launchpad, Campaign Monitor, AWeber, GatorMail, and Return Path.

Users gave “the most praise for products that were easy to use and quick to implement,” G2 Crowd director of content and research Ben Legman told me via email.

Small- and mid-sized businesses were the most represented in the user reviews, accounting for 81 percent of the 850+ assessments of 18 products. Scalability is a requirement of many businesses, regardless of size, so they can send a lot of emails monthly if they so choose.

The key factors in positive reviews were affordability, ease of setup, ease of use, and customer service, G2 said. There was also interest in specialized features like A/B split testing and more options for template customization.

Standalone email tools often integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) or other systems. Eighty-four percent of users reported satisfaction with their tool’s integration API.

While some email products offer transactional capabilities — such as password resets or order status updates — G2 Crowd has a separate category report for those kinds of tools.

G2 also broke down separate Grids for Small Business, Mid-Market, and Enterprise:

Small Business:

• Leaders: Salesforce Marketing Cloud, MailChimp, iContact, dotmailer
• High Performers: Launchpad, Maropost, ExpressPigeon

Mid-Market:

• Leaders: Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Constant Contact
• High Performers: MailChimp, dotmailer

Enterprise:


• Leaders: Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Oracle Responsys
• High Performers: dotmailer