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SMA Communications Daniel Merchant, SMA Communications is a huge scam, they do not send out emails! Fort Lauderdale, Florida
SMAcomm.com promised 100,000 targeted opt-in emails would be sent to small business owners in our geography. We were told replies would come directly to our email address. Having done email marketing previously, we had experienced numerous bounced emails from expired accounts, vacation responders, people replying asking to be removed from our list, and people who were interested also emailed us. The blast they claimed to have sent resulted in none of the above. We received not one single bounced email, out-of-office reply, not one lead by email. Additionally, no-one called to complain or sign up. Our phone lines were silent, and we have phone records to prove it.
On the email there was a call to action with a huge button. It was to view our Youtube video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6j0PF3FWdk We had no increase in YouTube hits. Their report claimed 20 hits out of 100,000 emails sent, but the actual YouTube report for the same time period showed less than half that number. I mean it is there for everyone to see, check out the hits from April 5 to April 9 of 2011. We have before and after screen shots to show the daily trickle of about 1 view per day, as does YouTube.
We saw no real website traffic. Only proof of 654 hits all from svrtrack.com which are computer generated with an average 1 second stay on the website over a two day period without any trailing hits typical of professionals who didn't all react to the email on the first and second day. Their computer program isn't sophisticated enough to have the hits last longer than one second. So you know they are phony if the average time on the website is 1 second, meaning half are less than 1 second, I don't know if it is even possible to visit a website for less than a second manually.
I might add this was not the call to action that was the focus of the advertisement, the Youtube video was, (and remember less than 10 hits) they just chose to run their robot hit generating program on our website. We have Google anaytics reports to show the 1 second hits with 98% bounce rate. this means the computer visited the site and left immediately without navigating through to any other pages. We have other stats like browser mix, etc that also demonstrate fabrication from SMA Communications.
The lesson of this is that they have a program to make phony hits for websites, but that same program doesn't work to get phony YouTube hits.
We communicated all of the concerns and this was the response from Daniel Merchant with SMA Communications was the following.
"This has taken up way to much of my time! Our company policy states no refunds, and we stand by our policy. Your campaign was delivered, we have sent you our tracking reports already."
"As far as all of your questions, we were contracted to do an email blast and that is what we did. I am sure when you go to purchase a bicycle for your kids, you do not expect the store to teach them how to ride it. Finally, I am requesting that you cease and desist in any further communication..."
We never had a single question resolved. Daniel didn't address a single issue, and the bicycle comment was more stupid than it was insulting. They did not in fact send out a single email in the campaign. This is a fraud, and we suggest you steer clear of this group.