Remarkety ‑ Email, SMS, Social

Finally decided to give the app a try today, cool concept however ran into some issues that made it a deal breaker for us.

Did not handle multiple stores very well, almost send a newsletter to the wrong store. Had to call support to clear up and get correct store shown on account. They were helpful.

The main issue is the email template editing, it caused my chrome browser to crash over 5 times. Currently I am unable to save my campaign. I decided to leave the review in hopes these issues will be fixed for other users. Wasted over an hour today trying to build the same template 5 times. This is an hour I won't get back and now need to skip lunch to get this done with another app.

Remarkety feels half baked.

Unhelpful support bar ----> There's a customer support bar down to the right that is always there, but appears to say on workdays and weekends alike that customer support is not available right now. When you send them a customer service response, there is no email indicating it was received or indicating when they will get back to you or when. There is a generic message. They have a generic Zen Desk "page through our catalogue of files yourself" Zen Desk support bot, which is of minimal help and generally annoying to deal with. That's when you turn to Google for help, but Google doesn't seem to care much for Remarkety, so Google searches are not helpful either.

Of particular frustration ---> When attempting to save a campaign, there's an error message that says "You may not send this campaign from a gmail.com address." It makes perfect sense why you can't send from a gmail.com address. Unfortunately, the message does not report to the user "You cannot save this file with a gmail.com address, please change your address to gmail.com." This unfortunately resulted in our team losing quite a bit of work that we thought was being saved. When I pointed that out to customer service, I felt like I was talking to an evangelist on why it was bad to allow anyone to save a file if a gmail address is connected to the file. That was frustrating. I pushed the issue and he said lukewarmly that he would contact the product team about improving the error message. I don't expect that email to the product team to be sent. Other spots in the program, such as the settings page advise against using a Gmail address, but don't instruct that you cannot save or send with a gmail address, they indicate the exact opposite - that you can actually send with a gmail address (which would be a bad practice, but this is an indication of the product being half baked when one page says on thing, the error message says something else, and the zen desk bot, google, and a search of the website have no easily accessible commentary on this topic).

More generally ---> The files and tutorials explaining how to use the product are not very thorough, and don't have great SEO so that I can't find what I need easily on google the way I can with other email marketing programs that are more established. The online tutorials done by third parties are not very expansive, probably because this company is not very established as an email platform. Some email platforms have extensive how to coverage by third parties. This lack of in house explanation and the lack of 3rd party desire to explain the program add a layer of difficulty in using this for anything but the boilerplate sending of boilerplate emails. Over two days of work, my team encountered this problem 10 or 15 times. That's a high number, and makes it hard to use this program. Effectively, this program does not have any easily searchable or easily accessible user manual. So, using remarkety is kind of like the opposite of buying IKEA furniture - it's like buying furniture by mail order in the late 1990s and it comes with instructions for assembly written only in Chinese, and then you frustratingly stumble through the process with half a dozen parts awkwardly left over that you can't make sense of.

Their marketing ---> Some of their marketing to me, an existing customer, doing a 14 day trial run (I'm on my 3rd day of the trial run) are not very sophisticated, and I would like to see more sophistication from an app that exists to teach me how to market better. It's sort of a "do as I say, not as I do approach to marketing."

Inflexible software ---> The software is not very flexible in what it can do. That's been a bit of an annoyance, which feels like it is perhaps not designed with significant user input. That would be okay if it were easier to understand it through guides and tutorials.

They pickup the phone during New Jersey business hours ---> To the benefit of this company, they are reachable at the phone number 800-570-7564, and then pressing 2 gets you to customer service. There wasn't any queue to reach them, there wasn't any prolonged attempt by a computer to have a phone conversation with you. To my discredit I was disheartened over the weekend when I say the customer service is not available message and didn't bother to call. I should have tried to call immediately. Monday morning when I saw the same customer service is not available message, I decided to call. It would have been good to call sooner, it's possible someone would have picked up the phone for me at that number over the weekend. They might have phone support outside of New Jersey business hours. I credit them for the easy phone support. Phone support could smile more. It felt like it was a rough Monday morning and probably raining in New Jersey when the guy picked up the phone. Phone support possibly smiles more on other days.

Conclusion ---> Sort of a Meh experience with Remarkety. It's neither intuitive nor well explained. I need either a good UX or a good manual. One or the other. I think it's time for us to try another platform. I think they need 2-3 more years of work. Not sure if I want to be the beta tester calling them once a week to offer them feedback as I struggle through the half baked software - which is what will inevitably happen if we incorporate this into our business more fully and push the limits some with this software. Using them unfortunately feels like I am working with people who want to make a quick buck selling a startup, or who maybe see their software as a lifestyle product, but it doesn't feel like I'm working with someone who actually wants to deliver a high quality user experience, which is really all I want from marketing software. The software is a free trial, but if we use it across all stores, it will end up being something like $1200 / month that it will cost us. This software is not worth the $1200 per month for this amount of trouble, and ideally with scalable software the 14 day free trial, and the $25 intro rate, and the $1200 rate are all able to provide the same level of robustness to the customer. I'm not seeing it. Blundering through Remarkety with no saved email campaigns at the end of the process was not how I would have liked to see anyone on my team spend their weekend.