Email Message Template Editor: Emarsys vs Our platform Comparison

Emarsys is a closed system; information about this service on the net is scarce. Their website doesn’t even have a “Sign Up” button — you can request a demo by phone, but to work with the system, you’ll have to purchase an annual package. However, thanks to the customers who have switched to our platform, we’ve learned quite a few things about the Emarsys’ platform. And we’re ready to share them with you.

What is Emarsys?

Emarsys is a set of products with a functionality way beyond your average ESP. A number of add-ons makes it possible to control personalized multichannel communication with customers as well as store and analyze huge amounts of data in a single unified system.

In theory, this sounds awesome. But keep in mind that each add-on is charged additionally, and it isn’t cheap.

Price

The basic pricing plan costs €750 for 25,000 contacts and 100,000 emails per month. It includes:

• Email marketing automation (all types of email campaigns, analytics, template, and workflow editor);
• Send time optimization based on AI algorithms;
• Web tracking;
• Customer support.

Our email marketing agency offers a similar pricing plan for €73. Besides the price, the our offer differs in that it includes unlimited emails and send time optimization.

To add channels like Facebook, Google Search, YouTube, and Instagram to Emarsys, you’ll have to pay €460 more monthly.

Additional channels provided by our platform include SMS (starting at €0.35), Viber (starting at €0.0069), and Web Push (starting at $10 per month).

Customer support for the basic Emarsys package costs €250 a month. Each customer has a manager who helps with settings and cases.

Our platform provides customer support for free.

Keep in mind: With Emarsys, the minimal pricing plan starts from one year.

Emarsys vs our platform: Functional Difference

Since Emarsys is a set of modules, comparing it with our platform directly might not be the correct way to go about it. However, if you look closer, you’ll see that many our basic features are on par with the ones offered by Emarsys. It’s especially true when it comes to editors of email campaign templates. So let’s compare those.

Template Editor: Emarsys and our platform Comparison

A template editor is one of the most important tools that marketers work with every day.

Both Emarsys and our platform allow you to compose the email in one of the three ways:

• with a built-in template;
• in a block editor;
• based on HTML and CSS.

Template Library

In Emarsys, you can upload your own template or customize a prebuilt one.

Our email editor has a large selection of templates — for triggers, promo campaigns, newsletters, etc. A marketer only needs to fill the template with relevant content.

You can save every created email template in the Message templates tab.

Just imagine how much time and effort you save!

Building Banners in Emarsys and our platform

Emarsys has no built-in banner creator. Although they promise to add it in the near future, for now, you’ll have to hire a designer.

Our email editor has everything you need to compose a banner in a matter of minutes. If you want to add text on the image, you can change its size, color, and font without leaving the editor.

You can edit each banner you’ve created: change text, its size, and font, customize filter, and so on. When the banner is saved, the layers are merged so that the image is displayed correctly in any email client.

Adding Images: Emarsys and our platform Overview

You can add images to Emarsys in three ways:

• The company can provide you with image hosting, where you only need to upload any images you want.
• You can upload images yourself and provide links to them.
• You can use the links to the images stored in the third-party services.

With our platform, in addition to all the three options above, you can also use a built-in image bank. There’s a user-friendly search engine to find images by topic: New Year, Black Friday, Nature, and more.

Image Editing

The main image editing option Emarsys offers presupposes using HTML. The company’s website has a detailed guide with code examples.

Our editor, on the other hand, provides all the tools for image editing right in the email editor.

You can crop your photo, rotate it, add filters, etc. without employing additional tools!

Working with Email Blocks

When creating a template in the Emarsys' block editor, you won’t be able to edit some blocks. For example, you can’t edit a preheader in a template, only in the email itself. For add-ons like this, there’s a Mark editable content button.

There are no prebuilt blocks, so to create your own template from scratch, you’ll have to either use HTML or contact Emarsys’ support.

Our editor has a built-in library of prebuilt custom blocks. And you can save the elements you create there, too.

Just imagine: you don’t need to compose a banner, a button, a product card, a footer and a header from scratch. They’ve already been built for you.

Working Simultaneously in Visual Mode and HTML

Unfortunately, right now, creating a beautiful adaptive email from scratch in Emarsys is rather challenging if you’re not a savvy HTML user. The reason for this is that not all blocks are editable in visual mode, some can only be changed manually in HTML. However, there are some good features, too, like a built-in validator that will detect mistakes in your code.

Commentary by Emarsys: "It is possible to edit blocks in visual mode if you’re making a template using Emarsys Scripting Language. Customers can create a template like this based on our documentation so it’s not necessary to order it from us. For a standard interface, there’s only one template available and it’s more of an example, it’s not really intended for direct use. We don’t have any prebuilt blocks or library since our customers usually come to us with completed designs, they don’t need prebuilt templates."

As an alternative to Emarsys, our email campaign service allows users to edit any element both visually and via HTML. You can even switch between modes with a single click.

Also, the changes are visible instantly. You can be sure that the email structure is undamaged.

Editing in Сollaboration

Emarsys enables simultaneous editing by several users, like the work in Google Docs. You can monitor what changes were applied to the template, when and by whom.

At our platform, we’ve implemented this feature in our in-built template editor supported by Stripo.

Responsiveness

In Emarsys, there’s a Mobile View feature. With it, templates are adapted for mobile devices. It’s also possible to open specific sections when the email is shown in the mobile view. In this regard, there’s little difference between Emarsys and our platform — both systems offer one-click responsiveness.

Dynamic Content

All Emarsys’ features related to personal recommendations, conditional blocks, and personalized customer data can be used right within the block editor.

For example, it is possible to display certain blocks to only a specific portion of users. Like, only customers who have bonuses will see the block with info about bonuses.

You can disable parts of blocks in the Optional content settings.

Our platform also allows you to set displaying options depending on the recipient. The data about customers’ preferences is collected via web tracking.

In addition, with certain integration, the system can be configured to take into account the users’ offline behavior.

Email Text Version

Some email clients — Gmail and Rambler, for example, — can’t display emails composed in HTML. For these clients, in our editor the HTML is automatically converted into text. If the email client can’t display HTML, it will display the text version.

Emarsys also generates text version automatically, but only if you use new content editors. Some customers use the old HTML editor out of habit and such auto-conversion can be faulty. However, Emarsys plans to remove the old editor soon.

Preview

The Emarsys’ block editor offers an advanced preview — when you create a template, you can check how the email looks on a desktop computer, in a mobile browser, and even on a smartphone.

In our editor, you can compare how an email is displayed on a desktop and on a mobile device with a single click.

Links in the Email

In Emarsys, to be able to track links stats, you’ll need to set up the feature additionally; it’s not active by default, so clicks are not counted until you add the feature manually.

This may be inconvenient when you need to use the email code once more without copying the email itself — all links are encoded and you’ll have to edit them manually.

Commentary by Emarsys: "Link tracking does work in Emarsys. When you set up your campaign, add the index of GA or another third-party analytics service. Tracking inside the Emarsys Marketing Platform is also possible. When the content is created, you can choose which links Emarsys should track. You can also set a category to each link; categories can be further used for behavioral segmentation. For each campaign, a click map is made".

In our platform, you’ll receive a click map report on the number of click-throughs. The map is created for each campaign.

A click map allows you to analyze where to place your links in the email to attract more users.

Template Editor Comparison

Emarsys is, without a doubt, a superb system with the top-shelf feature set. It’s hard to top their ads management where everything is in the same system — email, SMS, Facebook, Google Search, YouTube, Instagram. And throw in the statistics from all those channels, which you can unify all together or combine partially.

But, every extra feature you want to have will cost you more money.

Yet, the cost-effectiveness is not the only benefit our platform offers. Our partners also get a more flexible workflow — we’ve made integration simpler, and our reporting feature is more convenient.

And if we’re talking about specific tools, like a template editor, — well, every system implements them differently, but they are all professional-class tools. It’s up to you to decide which one is the most useful.

How to Migrate from Emarsys to our platform

The top task is contact export. Remember to save all those contacts you will no longer send emails to — unsubscribers, spam reporters, and inactive users — in a separate file. So that you have two files in the end.

If you need to save groups or segments that you have set up in Emarsys — contact our customer support, we’ll help you save all the data.

And remember that upon signing up with our system, you receive a free template in your corporate style! The subscription form is integrated with our platform automatically or can be created as a gift.