Our Experience
We had the opportunity to integrate Emma (often called MyEmma) with Drupal back in 2011 while working with the Seattle chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Artists (AIGA). At the time our company CEO, Greg Bear, was serving a two-year term on the board of AIGA as their Digital Director. Over the course of his term, AIGA national made an agreement with Emma that enabled all AIGA chapters to use the system as their central email marketing tool.
In AIGA’s case, they were also essentially using Emma as the organization's CRM. It managed all the master lists for membership - via an API integration between AIGA’s national membership website and Emma - and kept membership records current.
To us here at Bear Group, Emm’a flexibility when it comes to pricing is one of it’s best features: Emma does not approach its customers with a “one-size fits all” pricing policy.
The Benefits
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Their Mission (And How it Affects Their Pricing): While other email marketing tools have focused on small businesses (Mailchimp) or enterprise (Exact Target) Emma has carved out a niche for itself through aggressive pricing deals, catering largely to the needs of non-profits and educational institutions.
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Easy Integration: Emma is integration “lite,” meaning we can simply take the drop-in code provided in their admin panel and drop it into your chosen theme layer in Drupal. This provides a small, easily customizable, email form (complete with submit button) that can pass emails directly from your website into segmented email lists in Emma.
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Simple List Segmentation: It’s quick to segment an existing list - say create a segment of members who had attended a specific event - and then generate a campaign.
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Reliable Sendibility: Emma features a reliable server that can send fairly large quantities of emails without any scheduling or data errors.
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Their Branding: Branding really matters in the email marketing space. There are dozens of email companies that all offer the same, undifferentiated feature sets. In this regard, Emma stands out with its academic and folksy branding.
When Do We Recommend Emma
Emma offers great customer service, their representatives will work closely with you to determine the email marketing plan that works best for your website and your budget. The template management in the system, however, is trickier to handle and some basic HTML skills will be necessary to create and manage templates in external tools like Dreamweaver, host image files on the production server, and then paste in the source code to Emma. For companies that are looking for aggressive pricing and can manage some HTML, Emma is a good choice for you.