In looking for an alternative to Feedblitz, who during the summer was undergoing some massive changes and growing pains, we stumbled upon Zookoda.
This newsletter service seemed to offer everything we wanted …
- Adding it to your blog was easy
- You could customize the newsletter’s design to match your blog without additional fees
- The content was automated from your newsfeed
- Sending broadcasts were fairly intuitive; and scheduling them to send when you wanted was a nice feature
- It was free
So, we signed up a client and what started like a dream, slowly evolved into a nightmare. The feeds wouldn’t refresh, stories would be re-sent if we didn’t manually delete them, and emails to tech support went unnoticed. Then came November, a blank newsletter was sent, the recurring schedule was deleted, and any broadcasts would not be delivered.
While we were willing to put up with some of the quirks of Zookoda, we had hoped to overcome some of the obstacles that we were continually running into. When we went to BlogWorld last month, we were happy to see that the newly-named IZEA (formerly Pay-Per-Post) had a booth at the show. We wanted to find out what they had in mind for the seemingly unsupported service. Unfortunately, no one was there to talk to “tech” to us – oh, the red flags were waving.
During all this, a client who trusted our judgment was now (rightfully) upset. We scrambled to keep up with the issues, but we finally ran out of answers for Zookoda. We performed a fairly simple conversion to Feedblitz for them today – fingers crossed that their newsletter woes are behind them.
Then, we read today’s Problogger’s post on Zookoda and why he doesn’t recommend them anymore. In serendipitous solidarity, ContentRobot doesn’t recommend them either.
Are you looking to send newsletters from your blog? We suggest Feedblitz. Thanks for being responsive and reliable – everything we really want!