Share your experience: Provide a review of Express Email Marketing

Backeast said 2 years, 2 months ago:

This is an older thread, but I wanted to add my feedback on EMM.

Since the product upgrade, my experience as an EMM user has degraded considerably. It used to take me one hour or so to format custom html campaign, but now it takes me at least 4 hours, working through many little problems, like fonts that change on their own, images that won’t load, test emails that don’t arrive, many hours calling tech support only to be told they can’t duplicate my problems and don’t have a solution, and perhaps the problem is on my side. I sent a campaign out last night and of this morning I still have not received my test emails, or the campaign email to my own address.

The feeling of uncertainly and lack of confidence this produces is unacceptable. I’m very stressed out, and starting to dread working with EMM. I feel like I have no choice but to look into alternatives to EMM. I hope GoDaddy can eventually fix the issues, but I don’t have the time to spend on all the problems. I need a more reliable product.

bb said 2 years, 2 months ago:

@Backeast I am very sorry for your stress and frustration.

We are moving to the new editor and image gallery because they will enable us to do things that simply weren’t possible with the old editor.

The new editor and image gallery are a big change from how we used to do things. The old editor had a lot of bugs and problems, but it was so old that most of them had been shaken out and resolved over the years. To make the transition easier, we provide a button to switch back for anyone that is having trouble with the new one.

We have no plans at present to retire the old editor so you’re welcome to continue using it–I will give ample notice in this forum as soon as we have a transition date decided.

We have a great development and quality assurance team working on this product. We are actively working on fixing the bugs identified via our support system as well as the ones we discovered during the testing phase of our development. We have lots of features and enhancements planned as well.

We are doing the best we can and I am grateful for any patience you can give us. It will be rewarded–though I can’t talk about when.

Thank you for using EEM and taking the time to share your frustration.

Bill
Development Manager, Express Email Marketing

Backeast said 2 years, 2 months ago:

Bill,
Thanks for your reply. I am sure your team is working hard to stamp out the bugs. It would be helpful if we, the end users, could access a list of bug fixes, and/ or new features, old editor vs. new. Is this documentation posted in one place somewhere?

As for your suggestion to use the old editor, and it’s sometimes not a smooth switch back to it. Yesterday I wanted to switch back, pressed the button and only half of the old editor loaded onto the screen. I gave up and stuck with the new editor. Both the old and new editor run very very slow at times, and get easily confused. I wonder if you guys are making changes in the background? In any case, Godaddy needs to throw more server power at this application. I have to get up tomorrow morning at 6am EST to get my EMM work done before the app slows down to a crawl at 9am sharp. Yes, I know it’s when the internet heats up, but it’s still a problem.

Thanks for all your efforts to improve the application.

bb said 2 years, 2 months ago:

@Backeast I agree completely. We are going to post release notes in this forum with every deployment we make. I owe one post each for last Wednesday’s release and one for yesterday’s. I will post that later today. We plan to make the release notes easy to understand and list all of the bugs that we fixed.

As for the application’s slowness, yesterday was an unusual case since the data center that houses our application experienced a rather severe DDoS incident that may have been at the same time you were using EEM. That’s not the cause of the general slowness you mention, of course. For that, we have a complete server refresh on order and we will seamlessly transition between the old and new clusters soon. The new servers are beasts compared to what we’ve got now. I will put up a forum post when that happens to get your feedback.

Thanks again for your understanding and patience,

Bill

RTG95 said 2 years, 2 months ago:

After updating my Vista operating system computer’s browsers to Internet Explorer 9 and Fire Fox version 3.6.16, I find that I can not load Express Email consistently or to a usable state. Have you tried Express Email with these new broser versions and gotten it to work? Any suggestions on what might be interfering? It frequently says the “Connection Fails” when trying to load, loads incorrectly, or stops working when I take an action.

bcad said 2 years, 1 month ago:

I am not at all surprised to read negative comments here. It most surely is the worst product I’ve ever used and GoDaddy does not seem to care. In fact, they have deserted me and are now arrogant and uncaring. They would have you believe otherwise. If you consider this product, consider this:

you will not get new subscriber alerts
you cannot sort active as of the date activated
in fact you cannot sort much of anything
and so much more…

absolutely the worst experience to date. Shameful.

Stacey said 2 years, 1 month ago:

@ RTG95

We were actually seeing some issues with loading the Editor when using Internet Explorer 9. We had a new version of EEM released about 2 weeks which corrected the issue in viewing the editor in IE9. However, we haven’t seen or heard of any issues with the Firefox 3.6.16 browser. Please try again with Internet Explorer 9 and see if it’s working any better for you. If not please let us know any specific issues you’re having so we can investigate further. Thank you for being an Express Email Marketing customer.

Stacey said 2 years, 1 month ago:

@ bcad

I am very sorry to hear that you have had a negative experience using our Express Email Marketing product. GoDaddy prides ourselves in the customer service we provide and I apologize if you were treated with arrogance or uncaring. We appreciate your business and would like to help you out in any way possible. You mentioned that you will not get new subscriber alerts but we do have a feature that you can select in our Sign up form builder that will send you an email each time a new person subscribes. Is there another type of subscriber alert you were wanting to see? You are correct that we do not currently have the capability to sort subscribers by the date they were activated but we are aware that this is a feature our customers are asking for. We are planning to expand our sorting options in upcoming future releases. Please let us know if you have any more questions or issues with the product. We appreciate having you as a customer and we take your feedback and suggestions very seriously. We will do whatever we can to improve our product and its features for our customers.

artg95 said 2 years, 1 month ago:

Stacey, I have continued to try Express Email using Internet Explorer 9 / Foxfire 3.6.17 without success. I am SOMETIMES able to get to the black web page Express Email’s logo, but then the connection is reset, i.e. ended. I’ve tried website compatibility mode, turned off computer security, called the help desk a couple of times, cleared cache, etc. to no avail.

Stacey said 2 years, 1 month ago:

@ artg95

Your issue sounds like it is related to something account specific and not browser related. In order to further investigate I will need to have you provide the domain name associated to your account so I can access your account info and forward the issue on to our developers. You may also call into our customer support @ (480) 505-8877 and provide them with your account info and they can also escalate your issue to the correct department. We’d like to figure out the issue you are having and get it solved for you as soon as possible. Thank you.

ericn said 2 years ago:

You asked for my experience, so here it is: I’m really, really disappointed.

I moved to GoDaddy recently from another hosting service because I’d heard such good things about its support. And, with respect to hosting and email issues generally, it’s been fine (though there haven’t really been any complicated issues).

Meanwhile, I’ve been a Constant Contact user for about 5 years. Great product and easy to use, tbough a little pricey. But Constant Contact soon won’t support IE7, so when I saw Go Daddy had Express Email Marketing, I figured I’d look into it. Here’s how that’s worked out.

Before signing up, I tried calling sales to talk about EEM. I had a list of thought-out questions. But, although teh sales rep was nice, she had never used EEM and didn’t know anything about it. Nor could she transfer me to anyone who did. My only option was to give her a list of questions and have her act as a go-between to try to find answers. That rarely works out when more than one or two simple questions is involved. I thought I’d call the next day and see if I could get to someone who knew the product.

The next day I called again and got a different sales rep. Though this one had actually seen EEM once, he wasn’t familiar with it and, again, couldn’t transfer me to anyone who did. However, he said if I bought the product and didn’t like it I could cancel.

So I went ahead and bought the product and spent some time on it to see if I could figure it out. Most of it I could, but I still have questions.

Finally I tried calling tech support. He didn’t know the product either, but pressed me to give him a list of my questions. Ok, so I listed my questions. But instead of listening, while I was talking he was emailing me the same tutorials that are on your website and that I’d already read. He couldn’t offer any further help.

Now, I could probably figure it out with a lot of time. But these emails are important to my business; they aren’t a hobby. And I don’t think I can trust them to a company that doesn’t seem to know it’s own product or have much of an interest in trying to support it.

I’m frugal with a dollar and am always interested in a good deal, but decent customer service is a “must.” This product doesn’t have it. Meanwhile, there are a number of other companies who do. So, again, I’m disappointed, but am moving on.

jsfurman said 1 year, 11 months ago:

Overall, I like the way it functions however, there are still some bugs. 1) Tech support still cannot resolve why I do not get emails sent to my own address. 2) when writing in HTML, there is no way to skip lines to move down the page. This makes it very difficult to lay it out the way you want. 3) There is no way I can ‘verify’ my email if I do not get them yet it may not be delivered until I do. Any advice would be welcomed.

nothappy1 said 1 year, 4 months ago:

Let’s see if they delete this post since it has accurate non flattering information:
Signed up for express email marketing to begin marketing to our customer database. Received less than 0.1% spam complaints from the list of current clients. Service was shut down. Now I understand that GoDaddy can set up what ever criteria they want, even if it is way too strict.

My real complaint is that they REFUSE TO ALLOW ME ACCESS TO MY DATA!
I finally found a phone number for the abuse department, and they seemed shocked that I would even want / or request the return of my data.

The abuse department does state that they have the data, and could provide it, but chooose not to. To add insult to injury, we signed up for this service to manage the unsubscribes and “do not email requests” from those we marketed to… Now without the data, we don’t even know who we should not email to in the future.
Before signing up, I tried to check to see the specific criteria regarding use of their service (% of spam complaints, bounced emails etc) and no one could give me this info.

Bottom line, no defined guidlines to meet, but when you exceed godaddy’s secret programed triggers, they shut down your account and refuse access to your data!

I have a long history of using godaddy services and have NEVER come across something so flawed. What does godaddy have to gain by not allowing me access to MY DATA?
Now I am looking for another provider for the several other services and the 50+ domains I have registered here. Any suggestions?

mike42 said 1 year, 4 months ago:

@nothappy1,

Sorry to hear that you’ve had some issues with Express Email Marketing, however, if your account was locked, there had to have been a reason for doing so. If you haven’t already done so, I would recommend contacting our Abuse Department for more information at abuse@godaddy.com.

–Mike

j1 said 1 year, 3 months ago:

Thanks all for the input. Based on these negative reviews I think I’ll pass on EEM and look at either Constant Contact or MailChimp.