You’ll Be Set Up to Fail - Marketing Director WonderDads Employee Review

I was initially impressed with the company and hoped I could retire from Wonderdads / Parentfile / Aspatore family companies. As time passed, the company’s shortcomings became obvious. I (and anyone else who is tasked with being the email marketing specialist) will be set up to fail. For example, I was tasked with tracking sales yet not given access to the member database. After several requests for access, I was granted it. I thought that was odd but it gets worse. When you are hired they will tell you your goal is to increase the email click rate to 3%. Easy enough, right? No. The owner and manager write all content as well as design all emails. There is no room for creativity. One day I decided to “go rogue” and create an email on my own. Admittedly, this was risky on my part but I’ll explain why I did it. This company is hyper-focused on sales and they give zero attention to retention. The phrase “hit it and quit it” comes to mind, as crude as that seems. Frustrated by the fact that the members felt completely shortchanged and weren’t delivered even 1/4 of the features they were promised, I wrote a customer appreciation email to try and soothe the members a bit. That email’s stats were better than any email they’d written during the entire time I was there (2x industry standards for open and click rates). Instead of allowing me more creativity over the email content, it irritated them. I took a chance and it didn’t pay off. So I resigned myself to simply being a drone and copying and pasting the text written by the owner & manager and using their boring designs. As long as I was receiving a paycheck, I didn’t mind because it was easy although incredibly boring. Things steadily got worse. The software used (BeePro, MailerLite and active campaign) didn’t always place nice with each other. The owner would be livid when issues would pop up and I feel as though he felt I had caused the problem when they were 100% caused by incompatibility between the platforms. There were issues with the images not displaying when the email was sent yet in test mode the images displayed perfectly. Because the volume of emails were so high (all sales emails), I never really got an adequate opportunity to investigate what was happening so to avoid image issues, I skipped using BeePro and created the emails right in active campaign and mailer lite which was time consuming and it made it more difficult to get approval of drafts. There are unfortunately many other issues within the company though. The Wonderdads website is literally just landing pages strung together so no SEO can be done. There are frequent complaints from members on their social media accounts which are obviously quickly deleted (this isn’t meant to insult the employee who handles the social media; that person is excellent at her job). The app doesn’t work properly and has an awful rating in the App Store (I should have looked at that before I was hired and taken that as a clue). Instead of having a good marketing mix, they literally spend thousands of dollars a day on Facebook ads which do generate leads, but once those leads see how awful the product is and how many sales emails they get, they get angry and unsubscribe (or if they’ve signed up, the cancel). There were many, many days when there would be far more refunds/cancellations than sign ups. This company is not using sound strategies to guarantee long term success and I genuinely feel it won’t be around for much longer. Another huge draw back is that the company changes their marketing weekly and sometimes even daily. If a new message is used, they don’t give it time to see if it’s effective or not. When multiple employees had concerns with that strategy, the employees were told to give the managers stats and justification on why they shouldn’t change it. In the course of 6 months, they completely changed the abandoned cart flow at least 12-15 times. I will say they do have a great customer service rep who is genuinely concerned and takes care of the members when they call to cancel. The Parentfile website is a great concept but it is painfully out of date. They are building an AWS app for it but what I didn’t understand is that they aren’t calling it Parentfile, it’s going to have a different name. That makes no sense since they’ve spent so much on marketing the Parentfile brand. There are many other issues with the company including how the manager “seems” great but in reality is less than forthcoming. Without a doubt I made mistakes while I was there and I fully admit it. One time I scheduled an email (because I’d been tasked with setting up 3 weekly emails for members which was sorely needed). One weeks worth of the member emails were sent but then they decided they didn’t want to do that anymore. They failed to tell me that they didn’t want to send them anymore so the email went out anyway and it angered the manager. I screwed up and forgot to cancel the next weekly email that I’d worked to get done ahead of time (because I was tasked with changing the abandoned cart flow, again so I dove into that and forgot to cancel the next email). So that really sent the manager over the edge when it went out. It did absolutely no harm to the company at all, it just contained helpful information for dealing with elderly parents and had a decent open rate. Yes, I forgot to turn it off but it really was a no harm, no foul situation. To complicate matters, I have some significant health issues and was in the ER multiple times during my tenure but only missed 2 days of work in 7 months. The manager was fully aware of my health issues and pretended to care, but I suspect they were just irritating to her. The company certainly doesn’t practice what they preach when it comes to being family-oriented. They advertise that you get to take off at 3pm every Wednesday to spend time with your kids but never once did that actually happen. To sum it up, I’ll say that whomever takes the email marketing specialist job will be set up to fail because you’ll receive no training, you’ll be blamed for when the chosen software has glitches, and you’ll be held liable for increasing the click rate to 3% with no ability to make changes to make that happen. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Well, as long as the manager and owner keep writing the same ineffective content for the emails, they’re never going to reach a 3% open rate. To be successful here you’ll have to go rogue on the content and be strong enough to continue doing so to prove your point that what they are writing isn’t working. Also it would be in your best interest to not have any health issues, nor have any family to be an employee here. TLDR; company doesn’t stick with one idea long enough to see if it’s effective; you’ll be held responsible for things out of your control; owner and manager write all content for emails then complain that the stats aren’t improving.