Uh ... I want to love it
The Idea of Rasa.io is great and the first look is nice.
But when starting to work with it, there are so many annoying glitches:
1. There is no usefull way to switch between different newsletters. The onliest indication is the graphic shown as a logo, but if you don´t upload a logo (which is used in the newsletter!) there is only an empty space. Ad you can´t even change the newsletter through a dropdown, you have to navigate to "manage newsletter", then select the other newsletter and then you (hopefully) are in the correct newsletter.
2. The language-terms are terrible and can´t be changed. In June they sent out a newsletter with the line "Great news! rasa.io now supports more languages. Languages that rasa.io now supports are English, French, Spanish, German and Portuguese. ". Sadly it´s not true: The languages are not really translated, there is a lot of english wording in the german setting, the terms are terrible and you can´t change them.
3. Articles can´t really be customized. Most annoying: The link of an article can´t be updated. That´s sad, because this way you can´t use an Affiliate-Link for example for an Amazon-Link or anything else. Links ... just are not changable.
4. Switchy is named as an integration. So I tried it with Switchy. I inserted about 10 articles, but only one shows up in switchy. Why that? No Idea. It seems like the Switchy-Integrations works in about one time out of ten.
5. The promised "AI" is not really intelligent. The onliest thing it does is: Tracking how much a subscriber clicked on an article with a certan tag and then sent him more articles with the same tag. That´s it. In my opinion, this is not really "Intelligence" but just some kind of "measuring" and "adjusting".
6. There is nearly no control about which articles are used for a newsletter. I can mark an article as "boost" so the article is forced to be sent to EVERY subscriber, but besides that I don´t even understand how old is an article allowed to be to be sent out.
7. There is only minimal modifications possible at the layout of the newsletter. There are three templates that you can use, on those templates you can define the number of articles, you can sort them differently, you can change colors and logo or add an own HTML-Block. But that´s pretty all you can do.
So while the first look is nice, the usability is really limited. But still ... when all this stuff would be adressed and the AI would more "intelligent" and not only a "tag-measuring-system" it would definitely get great.
However, I keep it. I don´t expect that much from the AI, it´s more like an "article-carusell" then a real AI. And don´t expect too much in the customizations. What I do will be: I set different newsletters up and start them on autopilot, so I can watch an audience growing while waiting and hoping for the ongoing developement. ;)
Elizabeth_rasa.io
May 9, 2024Hi Julian,
We SO appreciate this feedback! You make some very good points that our team is going to address. This is why we love our Sumo-lings, they always help us find where we need to improve :) If you'd like to meet with us to discuss any of these things further, email us! It might be a good idea to chat about some of these things in more detail but I've added to responses below.
1. Totally understand the frustration here. We do have an 'internal display name' option in the settings which would allow you add a unique name for each newsletter so that when you click the dropdown menu, it will show there. That might help in avoiding some confusion but again, this is great feedback for us to keep in mind for our UI.
2. Our multi-language options are very new so you are right that there is certainly room for improvement.
3. I know we discussed this in the Q&A but again, we understand that use case for sure but changing URLs on posts that we bring in automatically could have some negative impacts on our system.
4. Noted! We will be looking into these issues with the Switchy integration.
5. That is a fair evaluation but to give you a little more background...e use IBM Watson for our AI recommendation system which is an advanced natural language processing tool and we are constantly doing work to make our recommendations engine more sophisticated.
6. We give you full control over the pool of articles that are eligible for a newsletter. Anything you don't want in there, you can toggle off, if you want to edit an article title/image/description, you can click into it and adjust. Each time you send a newsletter, the Upcoming pool gets reset and only articles published since then will aggregate so you don't have to worry about old articles popping in unless you explicitly add them back into the pool.
7. With you AppSumo plan, you do have access to upload a custom HTML template if you want to customize further than what is shown in the Design.
Again, we appreciate this feedback and would be happy to meet and discuss anything further. We really hope we can turn that 3 taco review into a 5!