SimplyCast

I can't think of a single thing. The service is comprehensively awful from start to finish

The terrible GUI that breaks things with a single click. The appallingly low opening rates. The fact that scheduled campaigns would simply not run. Incompatible with Outlook. So many things. Read the review.

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.

It has to be the 360 editor, I'm able to view my entire campaign on a single interface. Automating Facebook and Twitter is a breeze. The CRM is pretty sweet because once I get the data I have so many options at my disposal to leverage it like dividing customers into different segments. I get to better know my customers and their needs.

My biggest complaint was the UI but they just released a major update that made big changes to that area. I like the new UI. Regarding customer support I used to suffer with being on hold for up to 30 mins but now I get through right away. I've noticed they deal with bugs much faster now. They have really stepped up their support services. I really like that I don't have to pay extra for support.

SimplyCast definitely has bang-for-buck when it comes to my marketing needs. One thing I learned from talking to support that isn't really advertised is that the customer support staff and programmers work out of the same office and not in another city like the big guys so when I have feature requests or major issues, support staff can talk to developers directly. I also learned that company developed every feature in their platform unlike the many of the other major players across the industry that buy startups and merge them into their service. Merging software as I understand can lead to unknown bugs and lengthier troubleshooting by developers. Since SimplyCast was designed in house, the developers know their entire software inside out. To me thats pretty cool.

This will enable you to market on different channels through the use of just one platform. SimplyCast has helped us cover a lot of different mediums as we do our marketing, using one platform to send emails, connect to social media sites, send fax and sms is definitely very convenient for us. This is definitely something that could be utilized best in Marketing.

Dislike is actually a very strong word for SimplyCast, if there is one I think they could work on it could be the software interface, it is an all in one tool thus there are a lot of functionalities that the software could perform thus prolonging learning curve, my dislike could be a like for some but nevertheless it is beneficial.

I am happy that we started using SimplyCast. It is great that we do not need to use one platform and then another to perform all possible marketing medium to one client. This enables us to perform all task necessary for us to complete all possible marketing medium just by using one robust platform. This is definitely a great marketing tool.