Marsello: Loyalty, Email, SMS

I have been using this app for some years now and this year they increased the price by $200 making it a total of $525 monthly! Not only did they increase the price, they are saying that the other 80k sms credits that I have on my account and paid for, expire at the end of this month. I've tried contacting customer service several times and no one has responded to me. I cannot recommend this app and will be switching as soon as I find another rewards program for my customers.

Also revised 5 star review to 1 star. I've had the exact same experience as the person below - Mountain Madness Soap Co. Marsello is clearly being run by new owners. Also on a grandfather plan, my fees went up without warning. Even worse is they paused my loyalty app without telling me! I had to wait until a customer contacted me asking when our loyalty app will be back online! In contacting support they were unapologetic, didn't care why I was on the old plan and pretty much said this is the new plan, pay up if you want your loyalty app to go back online. In the process of changing apps now

love love love this app. super easy to use and customize for my business. I have think every eCommerce site should have this feature

Amazing and simple to use. fantastic integration tools. we have found that its boosted customers return purchases and their time spent on the site.

Love how it works. I have the free version and there are so many great ways to use it even at zero cost. Highly recommend!

This app helped me get my loyalty program online and in store for 1/4 the cost of the other software I used and that was in store only. Their auto email flows are great and save me a ton of time and money. New features are always being added. Having both my loyalty program and email marketing in one app makes things a lot easier. They have a great customer service team that respond very quickly and always help address any problems that arise (which are rare). Definitely would recommend this to other businesses.

SUMMARY: Well designed UI, intuitive, affordable. An excellent option for merchants looking to fast track loyalty and email without worrying about complex trigger/workflow automation and HTML email template coding. Not suited for merchants requiring custom workflow automation as you are currently limited to 5 triggers. This is sufficient for most merchants. I am willing to update this review provided the service provider addresses my in-app questions. Support started off excellent but is beginning to wane. Not offering live chat from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM ET USA is, well, unwise IMHO. Overall, this is a good service for merchants seeking an affordable, easy-to-use loyalty and email marketing solution. The design editor is promising but lacks basic features such as image overlay, saved content blocks, abandoned cart layout customization, etc. Another issue is the inability to reorder email blocks within flows. The current setup is linear/sequential; it needs to be non-linear/non-sequential. What good is a duplicated block if you can't relocate it? This service has a lot of potential provided the developers to enhance the design editor to match or surpass competing solutions which specialize in email automation. I can easily show this company what they need to focus on the drive user adoption AND retention. Kudos for the slick UI. Much appreciated. UPDATE #1: I almost forgot to comment on the loyalty program which has pros and cons. PROS: several layout options for your loyalty widget; intuitive interface. CONS: No way to change the shape of the loyalty widget button; can't upload custom graphic; no way to easily generate the embed code for a dedicated loyalty page; Instagram reward earned by simply clicking the button whilst logged in; product reviews only work with Shopify Reviews which suck; no way to hide button on mobile. All-in-all its an affordable entry-level loyalty option with much room for growth. I look forward to working with Marsello to enhance the service. UPDATE #2 — Fri Apr 26, 2019: My struggle to make AND keep meaningful contact continues. The company struggles to deliver consistent support. I'm looking forward to updating this review for the betterment of the Shopify community. Words to live by: The best customers are the ones you have.

If it's too good to be true - it usually is. I am sad that I need to update this review and warn against using Marsello for the short term. The email campaign feature is garbage. Two weeks in a row now it has crashed after attempts to send strategic marketing messages to segmented customers. I have worked with the developers but unfortunately responses are not timely (24 hours +). The rewards program is adequate for the current price point but without an effective email marketing integration you are restricted in the strategies you can deploy to exploit the program. There's no point having a rewards program for the sake of charity. One hopes the developers at Marsello know what they're doing but if they do, they are doing it at the expense of people like me. (well, not anymore)

This app is especially easy to use, and effective. Much more efficient than other similar services that we have used in the past.

Edit: Launched 1 week ago I am already seeing the benefits of Marsello. Made life easier with tons of automations and many positive feedbacks from my customers as well. Highly recommended. ------------- Fantastic customer service even while on trial period! My experience has been nothing but awesome. Will give more feedback when I launch. ;) Thank you so much.

i am still ne to this app, but its very misleading, there is nothing in the free version of this app? i don't know why they are claiming that with free you can do so and so, unless i don't know how to use it

I've been having an issue with fake accounts being set up on my site. Initially, I suspected they might be coming from the app or developers themselves in order to boost my customer numbers in order to collect higher fees. They have actually been quite helpful in figuring out where these are coming from, and have gone above and beyond with regards to customer service in trying to help solve the issue. Thanks.

Although the app itself has great features, the support is the worst I have ever experienced. I have been waiting over a month (close to two) for technical resolution of a problem the Marsello tech caused and they keep blowing me off by rewriting my complaint in their own words or just telling me they are too busy or by not bothering to reply at all for days. If you think you may need assistance with the app, look elsewhere. They re really not interested in helping existing clients. While the issue above was resolved, the company randomly claimed that their "prices were too low" and they raised the cost of my subscription by like 1,000%-- it went from about $30 monthly to over $160. So, BEWARE... if you think this it it available at a "good" price, they may decide again to "make their prices match competitors" and mark up what you're paying by orders of magnitude. And at this point, like me, you may find that you're in too deep to change. BEWARE. Beyond that, their site does NOT work well on mobile. If you're looking for something you can manage on the go, this is not the app for you. Furthermore, they charge you based on customers but offer no method to determine if those customers are active (even though they have a Lost Customers segment). Once a name is on your list, you pay for it forever, even if it is "lost." They should have an opt-in preset email flow so clients can regularly audit their lists to keep costs low.

Pop up form is not capturing emails from subscribers which is horrible only realised it after 9 months of using it, which means we have lost tons potential customers orders. Last but not least, loyalty rewards point have been set to a minimum purchase, and have saved the setting, but our customer still allow to redeem without minimum purchase! It is causing chaotic at our backend. Interface is nice and really wanted to like this app but that's a complete deal breaker. And their tech support to rectify issue take forever to reply and solve the problem! Updates: They managed to solve the problem, would give a 5 stars if they can reply and fix it earlier

We used Marsello with our ecommerce website for a couple of years and have been happy with the service and the platform. A couple of months ago, they introduced a new pricing scheme and put our account on hold so we couldn't access any of our data until we upgraded our plan. Unfortunately, there was no way for us to upgrade our plan other than contact customer service using their chat. A week went by with one message a day being answered and in the end we weren't able to upgrade our plan ($29 per month) because we had been loyal customers for a long time and our plan had been grandfathered and was being discontinued. Their customer service advised us that they would have to convert our plan to the free version and we would have to sign up again to the pro version which started at $49. A quote was provided based on the number of customers we had which was higher than previously but still realistic considering the company's growth and new added features. Once we were able to upgrade to the pro membership level, our new monthly fee was $299. We were told that we were being charged for 4 sites plus the customer base we had when in fact we've always only had one site. The bottom line is, our account was frozen and forced to upgrade from $29 to $299 a month. We are a small business tried to work with and support another small business, but it's become clear that Marsello has found a way to increase their pricing without taking into consideration the scalability of their longtime customers. Our interaction with their customer service has been nothing but frustrating and we decided to leave the platform and sign up with one of the other several great options available through the app store. It takes a great amount of time and effort to create and nurture a fidelity program. Before choosing one for your business, make sure it's one that will allow you to scale in a fair and realistic way and you are not forced into a plan that is 10x more expensive than what you signed up for—which is what Marsello has done to us.

This app is so much more customizable than all the other rewards apps I've tried, and their customer service is great!

Revised 5 star review to 1 star. I do not know what has happened with Marsello and am honestly dismayed by our recent experience with them. We have been a customer for 3 years and have had a good relationship with them, have been beta testers, and have even been a success story for their marketing department. Yesterday I needed to do some manual account maintenance and discovered that we were locked out of the admin interface because we had exceeded 10,000 customers. In addition, the customer facing rewards interface was no longer working on our web site. We were apparently on some grandfathered plan at $59/month and they randomly decided to do away with that and wanted us to switch to their new "pro" plan based on number of customers. Sure, no problem UNTIL they said our pricing would go from $59 to $559 PER MONTH. An 800% price increase and the hobbling of our installed (and paid for) software is absolutely inexcusable. At this point we were essentially being held hostage until we paid. After getting the same "I know this is a bit of a shock" circular run-around from the support chat person, I asked them to have someone contact me ASAP. Well, I have not heard back from anyone at Marsello and we have customers emailing, calling and messaging about their rewards account. So, today we made the decision to simply dump them and switch to a different rewards application. On the plus side, Marsello made it easy for me to export our customer data along with point balances and I was able to import that into a different reward app that I had up and running in a few hours. Marsello has seemingly gotten too big for their britches. When we first signed up, it was just a loyalty program and did a good job at it. Then, over time, they made it into a customer relationship management software and email and SMS marketing software. Some of their automations are good, such as abandoned cart emails, but for the most part we continued to use it only for loyalty purposes since we have other applications that handle those aspects of our business. Bottom-line: growing eCommerce businesses, watch out for the bait and switch. Despite their response here indicating that there was a resolution, there was not one.

okay app, too expensive when you have multiple POS locations and bigger contact list. the estimator indicates somewhere around $250 per month, we've end up being charged for $429. We had to pause the app last month and you know what, the bill just kept coming even though you are not using anything.

The best app, the best support, TOP NOTCH! Boost sales as never before. If you dont install the app, you will miss out!

My ROI with Marsello 94x. Yes. I've brought in $94 for every $1 I've spent on the app. Hopefully that's caught your attention. I have been using Marsello for a few years now and would like to highlight the things that I've often found lacking in other applications. Things you wouldn't notice until you start using other apps and think- "But Marsello can do that.." The biggest one is generating unique coupon codes for customers. I have a few other misc apps that send out things with coupon codes. It's frustrating sending out a static coupon code because sure enough, it's going to get into a coupon aggregator like Honey and then everyone will be using the code. It's ok to change codes here and there for things, but if it's an automation, do you really want to have to go into shopify and create a new discount code every week? No. You don't. The second thing I really like about Marsello is the all in one design. Usually all in one's end up being one good thing and a few average ones. Marsello really does a great job with points management, email automation flows, and email campaigns. The VIP points thing is actually a really big deal for some customers. Some care about it, some don't- but there's nothing better than that little extra nudge to buy more to get to that next tier. Turns out the credit card companies and airlines are on to something... Also- you know what's better than giving a refund? Giving them points. There are a lot of other email management services out there, but you know what? They are more expensive and typically much harder to use with endless feature creep that always equals spending more and more each month. For a wordpress site I own, I have used mailchimp and active campaign. Marsello is better than mailchimp across the board. I'm sure you can do more things with ActiveCampaign, but it costs 3-10x more, and you really need to be an expert at it. If you're doing 500k a month in sales, or just closed $3M in funding for your series A, be my guest and hire an expert full time. If you're a one-man-band just starting off- Marsello is easy enough to use, and has enough functionality to do anything I've ever wanted. I started with Marsello on shopify when 2k was a good month. Now, we always bring in more than that on a single marsello email campaign. It has grown with us and I couldn't be happier. If you are still reading, high five. The only downside I've found with Marsello is the lack of integrations with other misc apps. Has it ever been a deal-breaker? Not even close. It's not the 800 lb gorilla like the other's I've mentioned before, and the other apps that I could integrate with it are typically small or start-ups. I hired someone to build out the email marketing flows because I just didn't want to do it, and felt someone with experience would do a better job. You can't search upwork or fiverr for Marsello implementation. That said, I found an expert in email marketing and they hadn't heard of Marsello and said they'd give it a shot. Well guess what- he was able to do everything he wanted and, to paraphrase, "Wow, this is actually a really good platform. I'm surprised more people aren't using it." In summary- Marsello is great. I've only had a few technical issues in the past couple of years and their support has been top shelf. In some doomsday scenario where I'm being held captive and have to delete all my apps, Marsello would likely be the last of the 25 to go.