Bijouxbela review for Omnisend Email Marketing & SMS

Oct. 31, 2016

Updated review 10/31/2016: I am sorry to have revise this review but we wasted so much time and money I want to make other shop owners aware. It all started very well, we had conversions and it is very easy to set up. The app is nice, the marketing plan is very good. However, and this is a big issue, it does not provide double opt in! THIS IS A SERIOUS PROBLEM! Who at this day and age, doesn't have a double opt in option?! Please read on. Our shop has been hit with a huge number of bot/fake customer subscriptions. It's nearly impossible to tell which is real and which is not inside the app, the emails are real but they are not subscribed by the address owners. We paid another service to have the email list checked, many of the fake subscriptions returned valid email addresses. The only clue is the subscriber name, which is not visible on the dashboard. Actually, very little information is available on the app dashboard. We had our account suspended 3 times and were on the verge of being blacklisted with high percentages of bounces and complaints. Although the rep is excellent, they seemed to not think this was a big deal. I personally spent 2 weeks trying to figure out what was going on. Waste of my very scarce time, and money. We have our own domain, they told me that DNS records were not necessary at the beginning. Not knowing why we had such problems with our list's deliverability, I asked for the records to change the settings with the Registrar in hopes this would help. All other email marketing companies we worked with in the past (we've been on line since 1998) will provide this for free. They charged us an extra $59.00 for it and obviously, it doesn't solve the problem. We had to move our list to another provider with the holiday season just starting. Spent hours manually cleaning it up as we don't send unsolicited emails. We LOST OVER 500 legitimate SUBSCRIBERS when we moved to another service, which requires double opt in. Since I had just sent a newsletter days before, guess they thought confirming was not necessary. These were actual returning customers, some had been with us for years. It's a shame because the marketing plan is good, but the email list managing is very lacking and the support seems to think nothing is a real issue. It hasn't stopped the bots but at least those subscriptions don't get confirmed and are not sent emails. We had just paid for the monthly app charge and the DNS records. When I asked for a partial refund (it was just a gesture after this mess), they denied it. It took me almost a week to complete the move because of the outage, otherwise we would have uninstalled immediately. Yes, all this went down during the big outage in October 2016. It was a nightmare. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I love this app! It does everything you need for ideal email marketing. Great customer support, super easy to set up and run, easy to create campaigns, automated flows that bring results. Reasonably priced too! Only wish there was a bit more customization to the sign up forms (pop up and page) but I'm pretty sure it won't be long before these are added. If you know a bit of code you can do it, I just don't know enough to do it on my own. Other than that it's perfect. Try it out - I'm pretty sure you will love it too. Thanks, Soundest, I see great results everyday!