dotMailer reviews

A living breathing nightmare

I spend my whole life using email tools: campaign monitor, vertical response, mailchimp and dotmailer. dotmailer is a basket case. Poor response to support questions, sullen and sarcastic replies, and hours and hours to respond. Cases get deleted off their Zendesk system rather than answered. Online documentation is poor and out of date, so even if you can find what you want, it doesn't help. Product is unnecessarilly complex, which is a real shame, because it is highly capable. I only use dotmailer because my client requires me to. Otherwise I'd sooner use almost anything else. This is a pity because dotmailer is a UK business, and I would dearly love to support them and promote them to my many global software clients.

*WARNING* ONLY USE DOTMAILER IF YOUR A MULTI MILLIONAIRE!!!!

So i am pretty new to the email marketing system etc.
I found dotmailer and joined up after a free trial as i found there easy editor useful. There sales team are brilliant they just dont tell you everything you need to know.
So i joined paid around a £500 join/licence fee average of (£100 with most others providers) then as time went on all of the below happened! Please read if you want to avoid been ripped off!

1) So after 2 months my contacts list was growing i clicked add another address book because i was seperating the lists by regions and a message appeared saying your only allowed 5 address books "please call to upgrade your account"
so i called and they requested over £500! To upgrade my account to a enterprise account!!! (Most other providers i have found dont have address book limits if they do its no less than 50 all the way up to a 1000 address books)

2) I rang to change my price plan i had gone from sending 1500 emails per month to just under 2000 so currently paying £29 per month i didnt think there would be a big difference in price, they said the new price would be £59 per month thats one hell of a jump for a extra 500 emails. (That price £59 per month with some other providers gets you up to 500,000 email sends a month).
They give you very little at the begining knowing you will require more sends,address books etc thats when they get you with massive price increases and charging for the smallest things!

3) I rang dotmailer for support nothing major something easy for them they could have resolved in 2 minutes but the guy wouldnt help me over the phone because i wasnt eligible for phone support!! And youve guest it "you need to upgrade your account"

4) Dotmailer wont allow you to use your own email address as a from address (i cant find one provider on google who prevents you from doing this) So i paid the £250.00 for a custom from address because the free one they give you just lands in most peoples junk mail! They set me one up with the word 'news' in the from address which is a keyword for some/most spam traps!
There supposed to be more personal ie tom@wizardofoz.com. I called them to request another from address expressing my concerns to be told yes we can do you another but it will be £250.00!!
Dotmailer say this is incase your email address is blacklisted a number of very experienced email marketers have assured me its so they can charge you for a custom from address.
So to sum everything up if you have very very deep pockets and like to over pay for services join Dotmailer!

Matthew Graham found this review useful

05 April 2013

Reply from dotmailer.co.uk

Hi Lee. I need to get to the bottom of the problems you are experiencing. can you please call me directly on 0207 654 8655. Thanks. Cliff.

Simple, Effective... and helpful when you get stuck!

I've used other mailing platforms (iContact, Mailchimp...) and whilst they're all good, Dotmailer really shine with the support they give. Our Account Manager is ace and the on-screen chat window has saved me many a wasted hour.
I send out mailers in my day job, contacting corporate buyers with messages which have be right, look right and have the right deliverability. Dotmailer helps me to do this and lets me see how things have gone.
It's an excellent tool.

This is a brilliant product

I have been using DOT Mailer to communicate with our Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, Cardfight!! Vanguard and MTG customers (www.koolkingdom.co.uk) for just over a year and have sent out over 70 campaigns.

After a bit of trial and error with the first couple (and the support team were excellent) I can now create a campaign very, very quickly and the results are instant. Send e-mail - customers click on a link and buy – what more could you ask for!

I love the WYSIWYG easy editor and how easy it is to build campaigns. I was very pleased with the change introduced to the way images are stored which came out earlier this year and the re-mail facility was another brilliant enhancement.

I am 100% satisfied with DOT Mailer, it is a great product and I would recommend it to anyone.

Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful

Easy to use, great customer service, overall a really good product.

Have only recently been using Dotmailer, but have found it thoroughly easy to use once you get into the swing of things. All the tools are pretty usable and are comparable to a regular desktop publishing platform. Have sent a couple of campaigns so far, without any issues. Love the reporting section, really in-depth, great information about who views your mails, where they are, the click throughs to links, overall a really good bit of kit. Looking forward to using it a lot more in the future for more promo work.

Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful

Dot Mailer Deals With The Mundane

And thankfully it does it very well.
Without their list management services, the horrendous and time consuming unsubscribe and associated services would be a nightmare to manage.
The campaign manager automatically inserts the email profile management into every campaign I send, (which incidentally, I often create, copy the content in, review and test and send out immediately or by timed delivery ... and it only takes me minutes to complete). The format is always consistent and easily changed to address the differing sized elements and I am more than happy with the service.

Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful

So easy, so effective. Its a win win!

dotMailer is so easy to use that even I managed to do it. I was really pleased with the support I got and the online system is so intuitive. I managed to create a really successful campaign on our first go with easy to review stats. No fuss, not complicated and very, very effective. Then I learnt I could create landing pages as well... dotMailer is a real one stop shop.

Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful

dotMailer - What More Do You Want?

Title says it all really. I haven't come across a single gotcha from using dotMailer.
Everything I've tried to do has been supported and the learning curve/pick-up time is very short. (I'm an intermittent user with weeks between mail shots sometimes.).
If there's a more capable service out there it must be doing stuff I've never dreamt of.
Inexpensive, good support; can't fault it.

Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful

So far so good...

We have very recently opted for the DotMailer platform (beginning of July 2012) and are very pleased with the system and service we have received.

We had a number of key requirements which needed to be met (mutiple logins and the ability to manage users amongst others) which we all adequately met. Also the way it handles data is very straightforward.

We are now in the process of putting together our 'Easy Editor' templates in-house which is coming along well. My only suggestion would be to support mobile email in this area, you can't add CSS styles or @media queries it appears, which is a shame. But overall for the functionality, slick interface and price Dotmailer is a very competitive solution. We are very happy with it.

Easy to use, effective and Free to try - what more do you need

Having started a company in late 2011 which is eccommerce based, it was obvious I need to keep customers updated with new products and offers.

My first concern was uploading our mail list, and it took seconds. It also cleaned it up for duplicates too.

Creating a great looking mail template was a sinch too. Drag and drop images, add links for them and a few words and that's it, hit send.

You can also send at a certain day and time which is cool for delivering the email at the best time.

My contact was Alistair, very responsive and helpful.

All this, and I haven't paid a single penny, and I know it works as the reports show who and how many opened, read and clicked through to our website.

Dotmailer for my small business has been invaluable. Awesome stuff!

Ah, ps my company is Purity Fragrance...if you don't like spending a fortune on plug in air freshener refills take a look....never miss a trick! :)

us!

Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful

efficient, easy and ever-so-helpful

The charity that I work for started using dotmailer 18 months ago. We send regular email campaigns, run surveys via dotsurvey and have also just launched our online training shop via dotcommerce.

Dotmailer provide a service that is efficient (you know exactly who is reading your emails and whether they are clicking your links - plus you get reports that help you constantly improve your email marketing effectiveness), easy (all the services are created to make using them simple) and the support / sales staff have always been helpful and reliable when we have needed them (because we have messed up!).

Try dotmailer - and revolutionise your marketing!

Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful

A big fan of this system!

A big fan of this system, the user interface is really easy to use and the drag and drop features make it simple to create bespoke email campaigns.

I have been using dotmailer for getting on 6 months now and am yet to experience any real problems and with the continuous updates and improvements I doubt I am likely to!

As I am unable to write code the editable templates are great and offer our company loads of control over design and layout and once the campaign has been sent the analytics and tracking systems are really useful in analyzing success and ROI.

I would thoroughly recommend dotmailer to anyone looking to carry out email marketing whether they're a beginner or seasoned pro!

Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful

Great people, sometimes buggy

I have been using dotMailer for nearly two years, and on the whole I have been happy with the service. The interface is slick, deliverability is good, the employees are easy to speak to (particularly the sales people!)

The reason I have not given a higher rating is because we paid for a bespoke email template to reflect our corporate branding and email best practise. Unfortunately, the template consistently fails to deliver in inboxes as it appears in the 'easy editor' on the dotMailer software. I have been in contact several times about this, and despite dotMailer trying their best to fix it, they have never really succeeded.

Similarly, in the two years we have been with the company we have had 3 different account managers. This isn't really a big problem, but it does feel like just as an account manager is getting to understand our business and our needs, they get changed.

On the whole though, it is a nice platform to work with that does the job. The analytics side of things is the best we have seen on any email platform.

Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful

Good robust platform

The updated plaform is a million times better than the old platform. A good robust platform, possibly suited for companies with larger emailing requirements.

Customer service has improved vastly in the past few months. Definitely worth looking at now.

Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful

Excellent Pre and post service

The interface is far superior than other marketing companies we have used and the information provided after each compaign is fantastic. It is a little more expensive than some other companys out there but it is well worth it for what you get. Sometimes marketing is something that should not be scrimped upon.

Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful

Good system, great service!

We use Dotmailer at work to send out free newsletters, rather than sales campaigns. I wasn't involved in the choice of software but in the 18 months I've been using it I've found it quick to get the knack of. The interfaces are clear enough and the reporting is really pretty, as well as being intuitive - a massive plus when there's pressure to get results but this can be tricky to understand!

On occasion I've found the tool a little buggy compared to other, simpler web interfaces. Though I'm not a coder I've had to go into the HTML as some things seem impossible to resolve from the front end. But one thing that's outstanding about Dotmailer is the customer service - it is great to be able to get help with cleaning up the code and ironing out any problems.

Our Account Manager Lili has also been phenomenal - we hugely appreciate her focus on our needs and her helpful suggestions!

I also really like Dotmailer's flexibility - allowing us to have multiple users within one account and keeping us updated with developments in the social media field rather than being driven by our demands.

CopyKat looks great too - as a Comms coordinator I was delighted to see it was that easy to brand our surveys and generate website click-throughs!

Thanks for everything - keep up the good work :)

Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful

Excellent!

Great system! We've been using Dotmailer for a year now for a variety of mailshots. It's easy to use and if you get stuck the support team are great! The packages offer real value for money, i'd recommend to anyone!

Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful

Simple; the leading email campaign platform!

The dotMailer platform is by far the best I've used in the past 5 years Ive spent in digital marketing position. The staff are always keen to help and they are always upgrading servers for better results.

I just can' fault them!

Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful

Great system and good service

I have been using dotMailer for 10 years and can't rate it highly enough.

Over the years the tool has grown to keep up with new email developments, integrated with social media and allowed increasingly complex segmentation and personalisation.

The system is very reliable, there is rarely unplanned downtime, they give plenty of notice of system upgrades, and the system developments get covered quickly in the training manuals and webinars.

The support is excellent and the acount managers are helpful and friendly.

The set up costs and monthly send costs are competative with the other email system providers given the enterprise level tool you get.

Happy to speak to anyone, potential customer or white label, who wants to discuss...

Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful

Rip off merchants

Read the small print very crefully and DO NOT believe what the slick salesman tells you.

£350 for a 'licence' and then you pay extra on top. Not a good company, not honest or ethical

Matthew Graham found this review useful

23 August 2012

Reply from dotmailer.co.uk

Glad this has now been resolved, Gill. Thank you for your comment and for your continued use of dotMailer. Peter is always happy to help with any account issues in future.

Best,

Cliff Guy, Head of Marketing

Great email delivery platform

We have been using DotMailer for a few months now. We've found their customer service and support second to none.

Unlike other email delivery platforms they are good to deal with and have helped us delivery our email marketing on time and on budget.


Thanks
cleverboxes.com

Rick Ingham and Luella Ben Aziza found this review useful