Precipitous Decline In 2012, I used Vertical Response to raise funds for a narrative short film, which was a project of a California nonprofit. The VR interface lent nearly endless flexibility, the e-mails landed where they were supposed to, and the campaign was successful. Seven years later, I returned to VerticalResponse to fundraise for a new narrative short, also a project of a nonprofit. The experience has been quite different from 2012. The current message creation interface does not provide for true “from scratch” design. The “content block” templates do not interact well with each other (e.g., they do not left-align consistently with each other), the content blocks do not retain user-selected style changes, plus other problems. The results are embarrassingly amateurish. Worse, an apparently known issue regarding VR-dispatched messages going into recipients’ junk mail was not surfaced to me at any point during development of the five messages I’ve sent over the past eight weeks. Worst of all, the message that does get retrieved from a junk folder can look nothing like what I dispatched. That canned language distinguishing VR from Mail Chimp is not available to support representatives probably requires immediate rectification.

I like the user-friendly platform, but... I like the user-friendly platform, but I find it frequently freezes, which make me have to refresh, losing anything I haven't saved. Text selections are limited, so a weekly mail-our gets a little redundant. This is also the case for formatting. Perhaps I haven't completely explored all the features, but as a small business owner, I don't have time. The platform could be more flexible, for example like Vistaprint, which allows you to place your own images and text where you want.

Not the results I had hoped for A lot of emails went straight to spam...but that may not be fault of Vertical Response (not sure how that works). Biggest issue was that I had a small number of Bounces according to VR, when in reality, a much larger number of email addresses were undeliverable--which I discovered after sending emails manually. Pros: interface is easy to use; pricing is competitive.

The worst Customer Service The worst Customer Service. We have been an account for the last 10 years and are pretty low maintenance & self serve. Now we are growing & have some simple questions. They disabled their live chat, you sit on hold forever I believe there is ONE single person to manage all their account and it takes weeks for a response and no phone number at all. We even tried calling parent company Deluxe and again no response!

Started using VR free and keep using it paid Started out using VR free when our organization was smaller. Everything worked perfectly. When we crossed the pay threshold, we kept using VR because it is so easy and reliable - and economical.