SimplyCast review

This review flies in the face of our experience and that of virtually every other online review I've read from users of this service. We used Simplycast for around 4 years and it was torture from start to finish. Firstly the interface is clumsy and clunky. even when you do manage to work around the frequent screw ups it produces, it often just junks your entire email campaign with no way to recover it. You can spend hours trying to figure out ways of getting the GUI to actually render something that approaches what you're trying to achieve and then you find out after testing that it simply doesn't work. On other occasions you'd make one small change to a layout and it would break everything else you'd spent hours trying to get right. On one occasion I discovered that the email we'd composed missed out huge chunks when sent to an Outlook mail client. I contacted support to be blithely told that their system doesn't support Outlook, even though it's the single most popular email client on the planet! The final straw was when I scheduled an important campaign to run a week or so before Black Friday. After realising it hadn't gone out I again contacted support to be told they were having 'issues' (a familiar story from Simplycast). Not only had the campaign not gone out, it was stuck in their mail queue meaning I couldn't send anything else out. After several days of this we gave up and signed up with a different company. After explaining all this to their support guy he offered to refund us back the outstanding credits on the account (approx. $50). Another 3 months went by and we never received the refund or even any contact from them. When I called them I'd get another litany of excuses about the finance department having 'issues'. Finally I was told they'd basically changed their minds and weren't going to give us the refund after all. Although they never bothered to tell me any of this as they were apparently not able to email or call me. That's from a company who are supposed to be communications experts. The only reason we had such a large credit on the account was that their pricing information was misleading in the first place which led to us racking up huge bills on an account we rarely used. They offered a 'roll over' service on unused credits for an extra $0.99 a month. But somehow this meant we still paid for the rolled over credits every month. A small bill of around $16 a month ballooned to around $75 a month before we realised what was happening. After complaining they agreed to convert the outstanding credits to pre-paid and we assumed we'd eventually use them up. But as each email campaign was so difficult to launch we rarely bothered. The $50 refund wasn't even close to what we'd lost during this fiasco but it was an historical debt so I accepted the offer as a good will gesture. Although ultimatley even that was screwed up! The whole experience with Simplycast is appalling from beginning to end. From their terrible system, to their laughable customer care department. We moved to another service and it's like night and day. Everything works, it takes around and hour to set up and test a campaign (as opposed to a couple of days with Simplycast) and we're also seeing massive increases in our opening ratios. Something like 10-12% as opposed to 3-5% with Simplycast. So its not just an awful experience for you as the user, your customers don't see half of the messages you pay for anyway! Basically avoid them like the plague and check out one of the plethora of much better run and much more responsive services out there.