My Bad Experience With Sendlane

So, first off..

I want to say out right it’s not usually my style to bitch about other tools.

When I use a tool and it bites me in the ass, I own it.

It was my decision to use the tool and I’ll wear the hat.

Today for the FIRST time ever, I’m going to do both:

Bitch about it and wear the hat.

Yesterday, Sendlane p*ssed me off.

A bit of background…

I use (up until yesterday) 3 ESP’s. (Email Service providers).

I have to.

I have sizeable lists across multiple niches, I can’t just use one.

The 3 ESP’s I use are

Aweber

GetResponse

Sendlane

And formerly Active Campaign. (but they aren’t very keen on affiliates so I ditched them)

I needed something with the automation power of ActiveCampaign, but they had to be affiliate friendly.

Enter: Sendlane.

I wanted to move a partial list of some of my BEST customers from GetResponse into something that would suit my business and Sendlane seemed to fit the bill.

I was about to do the same with Aweber, but I didn’t get that far…as you’ll soon see.

So, what I did was I exported this list from GetResponse into Sendlane and waited for Sendlane’s compliance team to approve the import.

I waited and waited and finally received this email that my list had been imported.

“Great”.

Then I opened the email and saw this:

66 contacts in “suppression”!!

That’s well over 10% of my freaking list I imported from GetResponse.

Most of these customers have spent $100 or more on various fitness products through me in the last 12 months.

These are all REPEAT buyers.

If you don’t know, “suppression” in email marketing means that the ESP have taken issue with those contacts.

And you can’t communicate with them.

I contacted Sendlane support and asked why they had taken issue with 66 people from my BEST customers from GetResponse.

Their reply:

“We were cleaning your list for you”.

I hit the roof.

I‘ve been online since 2012 and I’ve never known an ESP…ANY ESP do this of their own accord.

It’s the responsibility of the list owner for their own list hygiene, not the ESP themselves.

(unless you’re up to really questionable shit, which I wasn’t.)

These were my some of my best customers.

I even provided sendlane with PROOF.

I sent them full compliance information:

Such as:

subscription date,

tag,

Subscription status

Optin status

Optin IP.

and just about every possible thing compliance asked for.

They still wouldn’t clear them.

Seriously, if an ESP is going suppress 10% of my f*cking list they better have a mighty good reason for doing it.

Their response “It’s highly unfortunate”.

Hmmm..“highly unfortunate” would be 10 or maybe even 20 (if I’m being generous) but nowhere near 70 odd.

The REAL kicker here is that I was warned about sendlane by several known marketers and I ignored their advice, because I didn’t truly believe that an ESP would be that idiotic.

Boy I was wrong.

I immediately deleted EVERYTHING from my Sendlane account.

I have to.

I can’t trust them.

I might wake up one day next week and find another 70-odd shaved off my list for ahem “cleaning purposes” and I can’t risk that.

So I deleted EVERTHING from Sendlane, including all lists, tags, contacts, automations EVERYTHING.

I’ve also asked for a full refund on my last invoice. (I’m not holding my breath on that one).

Thankfully I didn’t get to exporting my best customers out of Aweber too.

BOTTOM LINE: If you’re thinking of using Sendlane for your affiliate marketing, my best advice to you is DON’T.

I would like to say more than I have in this post, but I don’t fancy being potentially litigated so I’ll leave it here.