Emma is a USA based email marketing platform with some nice, up-to-date features that give email marketing an air of sophistication without making the process too complex.

If you were thinking of launching a new Saas, (software as a service), package today you might think twice before deciding that email marketing was the thing to go for. Why? Well, because there is a lot of competition and a lot of it is very good!

With the likes of Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, Infusionsoft, Maropost and many more out there with loads of top-end email marketing and marketing automation functionality, Emma certainly didn’t dodge a challenge when it decided to enter that space.

It also decided to adopt a name for their product that was fraught with danger as well – calling your product by a name that is the title of a Jane Austen novel which has been made into a film of the same name and which, along with a lot of famous people called Emma, seem to dominate Google’s first page listings, asking for trouble. Clearly the publishers of Emma didn’t talk in any depth to a branding adviser and can expect to pick up little online traffic from name searches.

It seems that there are actually two levels of the Emma product, Emma and Emma Plus, the latter having more sophisticated email automation facilities – and a much higher price tag. It is Emma Plus that I would consider to be up there with some of the sophisticated email automation packages mention above but a side-by-side comparison has yet to be done.

Much of the website content used to promote Emma seems to suggest that it is geared towards e-commerce and offers integration with Shopify and other e-commerce platforms with the ability to send emails based on customer’s behavior both in mail and outside of mail, e.g. on your website.

If you are running an organisation that needs clever, good looking emails to support an e-commerce operation then Emma could be the one for you. The level of integrations is good, including Salesforce and Eventbrite plus many more so there’s a lot of scope for implementing a top-end email operation in your business.

The standard version weighs in at a starting price of $89/month whereas the more sophisticated Plus version will relive you of at least $369 monthly, (that’s the entry level rate and gives you the ability to work with up to 25,000 contacts and send unlimited emails). As 25K contacts is small potatoes for many e-commerce operations, the actual price paid could be substantially more.

Make a date with Emma
Nonetheless, this is an impressive email platform, with very strong design and presentation features in the bit that the customer actually sees – the email itself. I’d advise to to put Emma on your shortlist, but keep Jane Austen at a distance!