All SimplyCast Reviews
1-24 of 24 Reviews
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Mark
Verified reviewer
Construction, 1,001-5,000 employees
Used weekly for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed July 2017
Simply Awesome
Customer service works closely with the Dev team Easy to use interface Lots of video tutorials A host of useful tools for simple automation.
CONSThere is a lot of 'saving progress" prompts, mind you I've never lost work. Wish you could zoom in the canvas.
Chad
Hospital & Health Care, 10,000+ employees
Used weekly for less than 6 months
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed March 2020
Great new platform that needs more recognition!
Outstanding.
PROSThe product is exceptionally easy-to-use and the customer service is extraordinary. My Account Manager, [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN], is light-speed and generally resolves any issue (not there is many) within an hour.
CONSThere was a little bit of difficulty getting the email authentication working but I take it that this was my company not SimplyCast.
Reason for choosing SimplyCast
Unique, better customer service, more engaging, new, modern, different, friends recommending it, more options, looked more user-friendly, more captivating in terms of the marketing of the product
Reasons for switching to SimplyCast
We had friends at IWK recommending it. I also heard it in conversation one time at a Knowledge Translation conference re: digital automation tools to use
Ian
Retail, 2-10 employees
Used monthly for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
1
EASE OF USE
1
VALUE FOR MONEY
1
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
1
FUNCTIONALITY
1
Reviewed February 2017
Simply Awful!
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 realizing 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. 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 $ 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 $ 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 $ refund wasn't even close to what we'd lost during this fiasco but it was a 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.
PROSNone
CONSDifficult to say which is worse - the waste of money or the waste of time. If I could have given them zeros stars I would.
Prudence
Consumer Goods, 51-200 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed January 2020
Email Marketing with Dedicated Help
The best feature of SimplyCast is the dedicated support. It's fairly intuitive and easy to use. However, with most email marketing systems, if you get stuck you have to use online help. I actually have someone dedicated to helping me. And he is the best! Quick, efficient and very friendly.
CONSUpgrades tend to drop some fairly basic user features.
Bandorah
Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees
Used daily for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed July 2017
The best marketing software we ever you used, have been using the software for over 5 years now.
Love it and I highly recommend the software.
PROSThe software has over 20 apps built-in and the opportunity to increase the business with this type of software has been great. We used the system for over five years and have been very happy with it. The system has all the capabilities we need and it helped us consolidate our spending from six different vendors and this was great as we didn't have much staff and it reduced our spending by over 40%.
CONSThe software has many features, and we needed to invest the time to explore all of the capabilities. So overall, once we learned the software we were able to take advantage of automation capabilities and this has helped us a lot. My recommendation is spend the time to learn it, otherwise, you will under utilize it.
Anonymous
501-1,000 employees
Used less than 6 months
OVERALL RATING:
2
EASE OF USE
3
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
2
Reviewed May 2021
An Email Marketing Tool That Did Not Work for Us
In short, after sending a few emails from this system, we decided not to continue with this platform.
PROSThe biggest pro was that it was a pay per use model, which suited us at the time as we weren't sending out too many email campaigns.
CONSThere isn't as much flexibility in terms of the look and feel of your email (in comparison to other drag and drop platforms). As soon as we swapped to run our campaign on this software, our open and click-through rates dropped abysmally - unsure if it was due to our less-attractive emails or if something about the program was preventing our emails from reaching our recipients' inboxes. The software itself isn't that intuitive and there aren't many resources available to help with navigation. I ended up being charged for a campaign that I didn't mean to send - fortunately, the customer support team was very helpful and understanding, granting me a full refund.
Carina
Insurance, 51-200 employees
Used monthly for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
4
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
4
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed August 2020
A Great Email Service
After the last significant update to the interface, SimplyCast has made its software very easy to learn with drag and drop editing. It is easy to create your own templates and use them repeatedly for campaigns, surveys, and forms. Overall, we are very pleased with SimplyCast and do not foresee changing our email service provider.
PROSSimplyCast provides great training on their products and the account managers who have supported our team have been helpful.
CONSOne challenge we face is the time zone difference for support. Our office resides in pacific time, meaning our account manager is unavailable after 1:00pm local time. At first, the 360 product can be overwhelming with its options, delays, and triggers but after becoming familiar it becomes much easier to navigate. We have also experienced a couple hiccups sending 360 Campaigns although our account manager has been available to work out the issues and solve problems with us each time.
Valerio
Computer Software, 2-10 employees
Used daily for free trial
OVERALL RATING:
3
EASE OF USE
2
VALUE FOR MONEY
2
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed February 2018
Difficult to use, not so friendly
It was not a good experience. There are other simpler tools that do the same job. Simplycast has a great idea but I think it needs to work more on its interface and improve the reliability of the tool.
PROSLike other automation software, it allows you to organize marketing tasks based on the interests of your customers. Offer a free plan.
CONSI think that the cons of this tool start because it is not so easy to organize the automated flows. The tool looks rough and sometimes it is very difficult to use. Help is also required to start since it is not so intuitive. Several of the messages were not delivered due to errors.
Melanie
Publishing, 1 employee
Used monthly for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed August 2021
Been with Simplycast for over 12 years!
I needed to transfer my existing mailing list from the days when I used to send things by post! The email newsletters I send enable me to keep in touch with people who are interested in my work, to advertise events, to offer products at a discount, to sell items, and to write occasional articles of interest.
PROSBest feature is their wonderful customer service! Truly. My experience with Simplycast has mostly been trouble-free, but if there is an issue, I have found their people to be unfailingly responsive, attentive, thorough, polite and pleasant. Wouldn't go anywhere else!
CONSBit nervous about the recent 'upgrade' which I've yet to fully take on -:)
Kristen
Non-Profit Organization Management, 2-10 employees
Used weekly for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
4
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed January 2020
SKIP and SimplyCast
The various functions we are able to use, the quality of the finished product, and the hands on support
CONSThe lack of spell check to avoid typos and troubleshooting sharing links
Mark
Used weekly for less than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed August 2017
A great All-In-One Marketing Solution
When I ran my first email campaign I was able to see live metrics as people were opening mail messages. I thought that was pretty cool. I'm really excited to use the new teleconference tool for a meeting with around 60 people!
PROSThere is much bang for buck with a SimplyCast subscription. I use it to automate Twitter and Facebook for a couple of side projects I'm on. The email creator tool is great as well. There are templates to get you going but I'm creative and am able to create my own templates which I think is pretty slick. I've found customer support to be pretty great. Support sits across the room from the development team meaning my suggestions have a better chance of becoming a reality. One cool thing about this company that through some research sets them apart from everyone else is that they built their software from the ground up instead of buying up smaller companies like much of their competition. This makes new features fit together better not to mention easier to troubleshoot and support.
CONSI find there is a lot of save prompts, but I guess that is a good thing. The canvas for the 360 editor would be nice if you could zoom into it.
Jon Benn
Used free trial
OVERALL RATING:
1
Reviewed March 2013
Simplcast support is hopeless
Simplycast is supposed to offer 2000 contacts per month for free. But when trying this offer in March 2013 I setup 2 email campaigns to be sent using a total of 1650 contacts between them. The first campaign was sent but the second was held back with an error status. When contacting support their response was that I had exceeded the monthly quota. I proceeded to explain to them that this was not possible as I had only used 1650 contacts in total for the 2 campaigns. They simply responded again with some blurb about how only 2000 contacts per month are allowed on my current plan and I should upgrade to send to more contacts. Quite clearly the support staff had not read my complaint or they failed to understand the very simple mathematics of the problem. They seemed to have very little interest in the fact that their system had not worked correctly and rather than investigate the problem and offer a solution, their response was to ignore it and reply to a question that was not even asked. It is a bit like going to the shops for a pint of milk and coming back with a pot plant - completely irrelevant to the requirements. Of course, this may not be the stupidity that on the surface it appears to be. A cynic could point out that it may not be a system error but a well designed ploy to get any users on the free plan to upgrade, at a cost, to a higher plan with more contacts. Either way, the fact remains that a teenager could quite easily work out the mathematics of this issue and very quickly come to the conclusion that something is awry. It is quite telling that the support staff at Simplycast were unable, or unwilling, to do this and instead replied with canned responses which are, at best, of little help to anyone and, at worst, a ploy so transparent a child could see through it. Simplcast should be avoided at all costs.
PROSNone
CONSBugs in the system Poor support What you see is not what you get
Judith
Computer Software, 11-50 employees
Used monthly for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
4
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
4
Reviewed September 2020
Great Marketing Automation for Small Businesses
Besides having the functionality I needed the most important thing that has made me stick with Simplycast is their customer service. Whenever I have a question, they are helpful and quick to respond. To me service is everything and Simplycast stood above the rest.
PROSI use this software for sending email newsletters to my clients and prospects. I like the WSIWYG email design abilities as I make my own emails with images and words and it makes it easy to make it look nice as if a professional marketer had done the set up. I like that I can see who opened it and any bounced emails as well as satisfy the requirements of the unsubscribe button for sending mass emails.
CONSI found learning the 360 automation ability (the ability to segment your market and set up predetermined campaigns to send emails based on specific times or conditions being reached) tricky to wrap my head around at first. However, I eventually got the hang of it as they patiently helped me understand this set up. The price goes up with the number of people on your list, but they have to make money somehow.
Reasons for switching to SimplyCast
I wanted to deal with a Canadian company and I went out searching for the combination of functionality and service I was looking for.
Karen
Automotive, 201-500 employees
Used monthly for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed October 2020
VERY PROFESSIONAL & USER-FRIENDLY EMAIL MARKETING SERVER
Since I first began using SimplyCast in late 2016, they upgraded their Email Editor features & expanded their Marketing Automation tools many times – offering various channels of communication (including social media). And no coding or sophisticated computer skills were required for this comprehensive user-friendly system. With the SimplyCast system, my communications always look very professional and made my contact list management simple.
PROSThere were many layouts from which to select & customize for my regular email newsletters. I always uploaded my own photos and could save content in a re-usable template for future messages. The analytics were also helpful with stats on how many opens & clicks occurred for any particular email campaign, as well as specifics on soft & hard bounces and any unsubscribes. And most of all—I LOVE THEIR CUSTOMER SERVICE & SUPPORT! SimplyCast was always responsive to any email inquiries or requests, so I didn’t feel like a “number”!
CONSNot really a "Con" - but there were way more marketing automation tools & choices than I even needed!
Monika
51-200 employees
Used daily for less than 12 months
OVERALL RATING:
1
EASE OF USE
1
VALUE FOR MONEY
1
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
1
FUNCTIONALITY
1
Reviewed December 2017
Awful, 0 stars if I could
Terrible software. It took months to set up and never worked property. The customer service reps would say it was a glitch they have never seen before. I was charged every month even when it didn't work. So far, it hasn't worked for more than 24 hours. There is easy integrations for a variety of different products however they don't work.
Bernadette
Consumer Goods, 2-10 employees
Used weekly for more than 2 years
OVERALL RATING:
5
EASE OF USE
5
VALUE FOR MONEY
5
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
5
FUNCTIONALITY
5
Reviewed July 2021
Easy to Use, Excellent Customer Service
We used SimplyCast for email marketing. Any time I encountered an issue, my account manager was there to help.
PROSUpdates in the email marketing program have made it really simple to create impactful eblasts.
CONSSometimes it takes a few seconds to load a few pages.
Anonymous
Used free trial
OVERALL RATING:
1
Reviewed October 2014
Cludgy and Bug-filled software and TERRIBLE customer service!!!
I used this product for Fax Blasts, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You have to purchase credits to send faxes. The product estimates the cost of a fax blast and EVERY time the Actual cost vs the estimated cost is WAY off. It is generally 3-4 times the estimate! A complete rip-off. If you are sending a fax blast and your estimate shows you have enough credits to complete the job, don't assume your fax was sent. I just had a fax job that I assumed was sent and it turns out it never went out because the estimate was wrong and there weren't enough credits. The software doesn't even notify you that your fax never went out!!! On another note, the "customer care" people don't seem to have the IQ's to form a complete sentence much less help you with whatever issues your having. Don't bother with this product.
PROSNone
CONS-Bad software -Bad service -Unreliable metrics
Madeleine
Used free trial
OVERALL RATING:
5
Reviewed January 2014
Great App!
I've been using SimplyCast at my office for the last month and I've only had good experiences with it. The sales team is very polite and helpful and will always get back to you. The interface in 360 is easy to use once you play around with it a little bit. One feature I really enjoy are the tutorial videos that are on the website. They are very helpful. I use SimplyCast for social media more and more and I love how it is so easy to use. The pricing is decent. My one complaint is the bugs that came out with version 8.5 but they have seemed to cleared up. If you email them they can usually get it resolved quite quickly.
PROSTwitter and Facebook app Good customer service Pricing Easy user interface
CONSOccasional bugs
Don G
Used free trial
OVERALL RATING:
5
Reviewed May 2013
Easy to use, friendly support staff
The site works great - I was able to send almost 30,000 messages in a month to my list of customers (it was under 2,000 as they require for free accounts). Using their editor and working with their helpful support team I was able to create a nice newsletter without knowing a thing about design. I haven't checked out the other tools, but I will try SMS shortly!
PROSEasy to use, friendly support staff, it was 100% free for me to do my email promotions, who can complain?
CONSNot always enough documentation, sometimes the editor can be a bit slow when working on my project
TomD
Used free trial
OVERALL RATING:
5
Reviewed August 2013
Great new version
Their new version is a great improvement - much easier to use. The template builder in email is pretty foolproof much better looking all round. Haven't had a chance to look into their 360 tool yet, but it looks pretty cool and haven't seen anything like it at any of the other automation companies.
PROSLots of variety - 15 or 16 channels Easy to use good template builder Have a full white label
CONSSome glitches on old version broad platform so not all channels up to top performance yet
Jenna
Used free trial
OVERALL RATING:
5
Reviewed January 2014
Easy to use, Great and friendly support staff!
I had a few difficulties at the beginning but called them and had very helpful and friendly staff help me through it. They have since updated the software and it is even more user friendly so I don't think I would have ever encountered those problems in the first place. 100% recommend it! Fast, and efficient! Sent voice calls, automated tweets and sent SMS alerts to over 25,000
PROSUser friendly Affordable Friendly staff
Peter
Used free trial
OVERALL RATING:
1
Reviewed March 2013
Horrible service!
I've used them few times but the experience is pretty bad. Their system is very user unfriendly, things don't work, editor is crap and slow, very unintuitive. I sent 2 campaigns but the delivery rate was terrible and they seem to have some bugs with displaying statistics. After 3rd test campaign and my feedback about their bad service they simply terminated my account! AVOID!
PROSnothing!
CONSeverything!
Anonymous
Used free trial
OVERALL RATING:
1
Reviewed November 2014
Stay away
Terrible software and the support is worse. There are too many providers out there to settle for this type of buggy software and people who just don't care. Very poor open rates - you would be much better off spending a few dollars more to get your emails read.
PROSPrice, but no one sees your emails. So no pros
CONSWaste of $500 a month.
Joe
Used free trial
OVERALL RATING:
1
Reviewed June 2013
Stay away
The service is horrible. Open rates are terrible and customer service is never around. AVOID!
PROSNONE
CONSEverything about their system.