Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

How MaroPost Cost Me Tens Of Thousands Of Dollars

Posted: 09 May 2016 07:37 AM PDT

This post is not designed to persuade you not to do business with the Maropost email marketing company or Marpost Marketing cloud.

This blog was built from me being honest and transparent about what I am doing. I owe it to my readers, and the internet marketing community, who look at this blog as an authority in the space to tell my experiences working with various companies both good and bad.

In April of 2016 I was finalizing the sale of my email marketing agency – PAR Program and was looking for something new.

Long story short I came up with an educational product to actually pay people to learn how to make money online. If you want you can read more about that here.

For this I was looking for a new platform and saw some internet marketers using Maropost (not anymore though) so I thought I would give that a try. I thought these guys used it because it was the best. One had a similar experience that I have/had.

This program looked very promising although I found it very odd they do not show any screenshots or have any information about the “inside workings” of the platform.

When I did get a demo of the platform they told me I could not record the session in any way even if it was only for my own team. They did say I could take screenshots though. Very strange though.

The sales guys sold it very well using their “demo account”. The workflows and the wysiwyg editors mixed with integration with social networks and SMS integration blew me away. This platform was the next evolution for email marketing… or I thought.

I signed up and we started going I got all the content in for various funnels.

Once I got access in I thought it was a little odd that many of the features said “coming soon”.

The demo with the sales guy definitely did not show any “Coming Soon” and this was in the signup agreement of services we would receive.

But I signed a year contract and figured we would figure that out when we got to it.

I was in a big time crunch as I was using a sendgrid sub account (from PAR Program) and with the sale that would be going away.

The way it worked is when people signed up it would trigger an initial workflow.

The first email in that workflow was critical in that it was the email which users would click on to set their password and finish their set up of their account. Again an extremely critical step.

Past that we had a CRAZY set of very very complicated funnels based on the user’s behavior. We had hundreds of hours of development resources to figure this out. We were fully vested in this platform.

That first email was crucial as without that we can’t obtain the user… But equally as important was the funnels work correctly as that was our primary form of monetization. It’s hard to monetize users that never get an email…

However we quickly discovered issues. First being deliverability. Almost all of the emails going out we’re going to spam. Not good, but we could pay for our own ip and whitelabeling. So we did and allocated our development resources to that. Deliverability was now better.

Next we discovered a lot of bugs… all over the place. I was speaking at Ryan Deiss’s Traffic & Conversion conference and I met a guy named Roland Fraiser. I am not sure what his involvement with the company was but he said he was aware of issues and to work with the team with any ideas we had.

He seemed like a nice guy but honestly I was not paying thousands of dollars a month to help you improve your platform.

The bugs were super annoying. You would spend hours setting up a funnel and when you try to save it, it would say error. That’s it… just error. No mention of what the error is. Sound frustrating?

Their support is even more frustrating. Forget calling them. You talk to some guy who is on a very bad VOIP connection and has a very thick accent (indian I believe) and my team and I had to ask him to repeat himself many times.

In all the times we got on the phone with their support we never got a clear answer. It became a running joke in our office. There was never a “Hey here is what you do”. The answer was always a puzzled 5 different ways to do or fix what we are doing but it was all “hacks” to make it work.

Well we coped with it and built out our own infrastructure fixes to overcome their platforms incompetency.

But the title of this is how it almost cost me my business. Not that it’s a alpha/beta platform.

So let me get to that.

For our business we paid for traffic many ways. Most of it was traffic buys on a CPC level. Next was affiliate traffic in the form of single opt in (when a user signs up) and double opt in (when a user signs up and completes their account setup).

Our double opt in rate was always about 80-90%. Very high. Affiliates love the lowest point of friction so being the double opt in rate was so high we paid out a lot of them on a single opt in and factored that into our affiliate payout.

On many occasions we would see that double opt in dip down drastically. After tracking it down and making test accounts we saw none of the account activation emails were going out from Maropost. We immediately would notify them and they would pretty much always reply with there was no issues with their system. Then we would present them with facts and they said they would “look into it”. Then eventually they would come back and say there was X wrong and it’s fixed now.

Ok first time is a fluke… but the downtime started happening with more and more frequency.

Each time costing us more and more money. We hit up their support every time and almost every time got the same response train… We are not having any problems –> thanks for bringing this to our attention –>we fixed it.

But many times in fact they had no fixed it. Sometimes even when they said they “fixed it” they also explained that because of the problem (which they were not even aware of) email was very backed up. Sometimes the backup was over 4 hours.

It got so bad that with the funnels we constantly seeded them with “monitoring emails” and measured the response time. When the delay was over 10 minutes or so we would failover to our (now paying for) sendgrid account.

But here is the thing. We always found out they had a problem before them.

To some this conversation with their CEO on skype might seem funny… until you know it has cost you another couple thousand dollars..

[3/31/16, 1:45:32 PM] Jeremy Schoemaker: Just heads up your workflows have been down for 4+ hours. We working with support but just wanted to let you know.
[3/31/16, 2:02:26 PM] Ross Andrew: they are down now?
[3/31/16, 2:57:58 PM] Jeremy Schoemaker: Not sure totally down but we have hours of delays still
[3/31/16, 4:27:58 PM] Ross Andrew: sorry am at a conference nothing should be slow
[3/31/16, 4:30:21 PM] Ross Andrew: did you guys tell the team, there wasn't any issues at all today
[3/31/16, 4:30:42 PM] Jeremy Schoemaker: ?
)
[3/31/16, 4:31:04 PM] Ross Andrew: i just checked the log sheet, there weren't any API's down or delayed… did support advise anything?
[3/31/16, 4:31:41 PM] Jeremy Schoemaker: (sent this image here)
[3/31/16, 4:32:41 PM] Jeremy Schoemaker: You guys should use our alert api. We have real time delay stats.
[3/31/16, 4:33:35 PM] Ross Andrew: looking into it
[3/31/16, 4:33:47 PM] Ross Andrew: yeah we seriously need this, its getting stupid.

When the CEO of a service admits, well…, that quote should speak on its own.

With the downtime with from Maropost and other factors we estimate the company lost close to $30,000 in March alone.

If you mix in the fact that we had to build in technology AND pay for another service because of their unreliability it has cost us a SUBSTANTIAL amount of money deciding to go with Maropost.

Now you’re probably thinking to yourself “Why the hell would you stick with them?” – which is obviously a great question.

The primary answer is that we run on a VERY small team. In this business we have less 3 employees. A full time developer, accounting, and customer service. March was an odd month in that I bought a ton of traffic and I wasn’t aware of the severity of Maropost’s downtime until the end of the month and ABSOLUTELY was not aware of the related loss in revenue until early April.

The secondary answer is that we already had a TON of content inside of Maropost all working through these complicated workflows and to take a step back from our everyday stuff and start over seemed overwhelming.

The humbling answer is that I really have no good excuse. There were red flags all over from the beginning.

The scientology like – you can’t see or know anything until you join.
The “coming soon” for items you had in your agreement.
The first (or second or 3rd or 20th) of downtime in the platform

Ya I will own up to that… As embarrassing as it is I should have cut the cord a lot long ago.

Oh before I go on remember I said those items were “coming soon” that were in our agreement?

Here is the SMS and Social Integration Features as of April 30th (last time I logged in).

I have been told that this alone is a breach of contract and should entitle us to a full refund…

Anyway – In early April with the losses sustained in March I was done with this. I got hit with a giant 2×4 to the face with those losses. Then after talking with my team, some of which volunteered to work for free because they believe in what we are doing so much, I decided to continue on with Aweber.

I knew it would be painful to move but Aweber’s staff made the move so simple it was done in a couple days. I informed Maroposts CEO, Ross Andrews, giving 30 days notice that we would be moving off of Maropost:

[3/30/16, 12:41:50 PM] Jeremy Schoemaker: right now we are going to move to aweber for a lot of the heavy lifting
[3/30/16, 12:44:10 PM] Ross Andrew: got it!

So 30 days later (April 30th) when we let them know they could shut down our account we got a bill for SIX THOUSAND DOLLARS. wtf??

After we informed them that not only will we not be paying them that but also will be invoicing them for a refund they quickly got their legal counsel involved.

Now this Maropost “CEO”, Ross Andrews, is super cocky and thinks he’s the shit so I fully expect him to pursue legal action.

But, unlike others he has bullied with legal threats, I am no stranger to the legal system and have had some of the most expensive and most publicized cases in the internet marketing world. Money comes and goes… principals are priceless.

I actually love the legal system and to date, with over 12 cases on both sides of the coin, (plaintiff / defendant) we have never even LOST A MOTION let alone a judgment. Not because we do some magic. Because we are right.

This morning (of writing this) Ross Andrews, Maropost CEO, messaged me with this on Skype:

[5/2/16, 11:09:49 AM] Ross Andrew: im sure this will get posted somewhere but more than a few people told me not to sign up your company and now I can see why.
[5/2/16, 12:23:53 PM] Jeremy Schoemaker: That’s good advice. If you have a bad product or service you should not do business with me it won’t go well for you.
[5/2/16, 12:24:53 PM] Ross Andrew: Happy not to be Best of luck!
[5/2/16, 12:25:53 PM] Jeremy Schoemaker: Don’t need luck when facts speak for themselves. Not a fan of luck.