Zookoda And I Agree to See Other People

Those of you who've followed the blog know that I was once one of Zookoda's biggest supporters. When I started using it in April or May, it was one of the snazziest blog to newsletter tools out there. I immediately started using it for this newsletter, as well as three different corporate newsletters.

Previously, I'd been a free FeedBlitz customer, and while their service over the years had been good, Zookoda had some features that FeedBlitz either offered for a fee or - in some cases - not at all. So I jumped on the Zookoda bandwagon.

Around mid-June, the problems started, as when my newsletter was first delayed. I'm not going to spend time rehashing Zookoda's lack of response to this issue, other than to say they didn't seem to care. Service only got worse from there, and by this month, the Zookoda success rate for me was somewhere less than 50%.

In the past couple weeks, I've certainly driven FeedBlitz crazy, as I asked Phil (their CEO, who actually reads and responds to his mail!) about a hundred questions in preparation for my move to them. Even so, I was hesitant, as I wanted to understand - from a technical perspective - why Zookoda used to rock and now sucked.

Finally, a week ago, I stumbled onto this blog post which was all I needed to see; someone smarter than me explaining why my newsletters weren't going through.

That was what it took for me to finally fork over some money to FeedBlitz. Zookoda can have all the cool features in the world, but if they can't deliver the e-mail, what's the friggin' point?

Today, FeedBlitz delivered my first two newsletters, and my open rates are more than 25% better than I was getting from Zookoda... hmmmm, wonder if that has something to do with reliability?

I've noticed other bloggers have left Zookoda for Feedburner, and I have no real opinion on them. Like everyone, I have a couple unique needs and Feedburner can't handle those, so it wasn't an option for me.

Special thanks to Phil from FeedBlitz - this guy answered all of my questions like my business mattered to him. Unbelievable, given the low cost of the service.

Which reminds me - I also toyed with AWeber during this process. While the feature set was ok, here's my advice for them:
1.) If you promise me a free test-drive, don't send me a letter justifying why you're not giving me one. That's called a bait-and-switch and it ain't cool.
2.) If you send me six e-mails from "Tom" and I happen to write back to you, don't shift the correspondence to some female customer-service rep. You've just lost all of the rapport you worked so hard to build.

All of which goes to say, if you'd like to get email updates from this blog, put your address in the little FeedBlitz box on the right.

Comments

  1. Anonymous7:47 AM

    Have you tried Rmail?
    http://www.r-mail.org/

    ReplyDelete

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