VerticalResponse.com rates 5 Stars for Self-Service Email Marketing
VerticalResponse
A client recently asked me to find them the best newsletter and email list management solution for their business I could find. They wanted fully-customizable features, no outside branding, and money was no object. Fortunately for my client VerticalResponse.com was not only ideal for meeting all their needs, but also happens to be very inexpensive.
I thought it would be a great time to write a review for this solid company with a reputation for keeping their own servers free from spammers (a valuable plus for legitimate business owners) and even offers their services free to 501(c)(3) nonprofits.
VerticalResponse.com has been providing online direct mail marketing services since 2001. Affordable, feature-rich, user-friendly, and fully-customizable, WIB rates VerticalResponse as a great choice for email marketing.
Full Service Review About VerticalResponse
Have you considered MPZMail? Its the same sort of thing but its probably a bit cheaper. We use it quite a bit.
Bottom line: Stay Away….looks can be deceiving
I spent a week designing a fancy email newsletter on their service. I thought the features and the price were great. I had been doing my own designs on software that allowed me to design a newsletter and do bulk mailing
I thought that for the price & features that Vertical Response would be a better choice. Understand, I am not a computer illiterate. I design websites, work in photoshop,etc so I know my way around this arena.
i found their design templates to be bulky and non intuitive and although they have pretty good basic phone support , they rely heavily on web based tutorials and videos to get you up to speed. That’s all great if you have the time to spend watching web videos but I need to get my newsletter out on time and want to spend time designing and NOT watch their tutorials to get answers to simple questions that might take one minute of a tech support persons time.
There system allows you to preview your emails easily and even send test emails to yourself for no extra charge BUT….and this is HUGE…if you have customized your recipients salutation, like Hi Joe, you have to use a merge field code. No biggie. You just insert the proper merge field info in the design template….BUT when you send the test email you can’t see if the system picked up the code properly. You have to send out a real email to confirm this.
Big mistake on my part. I sent out my whole 3000+ list and the merge field custom salutation was not picked up. So each recipient received an email that said
Hi {FIRST_NAME}, Very embarrassing I must say. Tech support told me that the merge field had been improperly formatted but I had used the one inserted from their design program. Thinking that it was fixed I sent out some more emails the next day but…nope…same problem.
I called tech support, asked to speak to a supervisor, and, you guessed it, he was in a meeting.
So overall bad service, email tech requests went unanswered, the interface is clunky and unintuitive, and basically I got the feeling that no one there really cared.
I guess that;s why people pay the big bucks for Constant Contact