Item: Ontraport
Rating: 1
Author: Jonny Andrews

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Ontraport for our customer facing, daily newsletter. Our company is quite new and the list is very fresh.

Pros and Cons

Sales department.
Ease of customer service contact.
Look/feel of email templates.

Deliverability.
Customer service.
Data tracking.
Pricing.
Communication.
Ease of use.
Trust.

Return on Investment

Repeat overcharges.
Unable to deliver daily messages.
Customer service not willing to solve problems.
Length of time each step takes.

Alternatives Considered

AWeber, GetResponse, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, MailerLite and 1ShoppingCart

We initially selected Ontraport based on the seemingly quality reviews. While they are priced much higher than their competitors, we initially took that as a positive. Perhaps the price tag hinted at better service, more robust features and superiority deliverability.

None of that was true.

From start to finish Ontraport has failed to not only meet expectations but even to start addressing them.

We’ve had trouble linking the service, getting emails to send on time, getting any level of accurate reporting or land in our customers inboxes.

The onboarding process was combersome, lengthy and ultimately ineffective.

We have now moved to AWeber now that they’ve fixed their DMARK issue & are seeing vastly superior results with a much lower price point and higher opens.

Other Software Used

Shopify, AWeber, Zoom

Likelihood to Recommend

When we began with them we spent nearly 2.5 hours in various phone conversations to both make sure they could meet our needs and then working to connect their service to our sites.

As we are sending daily we required a more robust package which they were happy to set us up with.

Issues began from day 1. Our open rates with an optin list sending highly relevant content were almost all under 9%. Most in the 5% ranges.

This, at least for me (having well over 126k subscribers with another provider since 2004) was unheard of. It turns out they are unable to pass DMARK.

Beyond that, we discovered nearly weekly “overage” charges that should not have been associated with the plan they had put us on. When we contacted them they flat out refused to reverse them & insisted we have another call to upgrade to the service we had been told we were already paying for.

Many other issues also exist: 2x and 4x repeat sends to the subscribers and a dash that indicates our list is 25% larger than it is.

Deeply disappointed

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Ontraport