If you are a bit passionate about SEO and online marketing, you have probably already heard of SEMrush, an extremely sophisticated platform that offers solutions to manage all aspects of your website in terms of SEO, PPC, content, social media and competitive research: we're talking of a company trusted by over 6000000 marketers worldwide (or so they say).
To be honest, I've always wanted to try SEMrush myself, because I know a lot of people who thinks it works well: the main reason I've avoided to do that is the fact that SEMrush is really expensive: the first tier (PRO) starts at 99.95$/month and from there you can only go up: the GURU tier is no less than 199.95$/month, and the Business tier features a whopping fee of 399.95$/month.
However, since the site periodically offers the chance to subscribe to a trial subscription of variable duration (usually from 7 to 15 days) I eventually decided to try it.
I will not go into details on how the service works: for that you will already find countless reviews that will explain the many features of SEMrush better than I will ever be able to. I'll just say that I found the service pretty good, full of really interesting tools and features.
However, there's a single important thing about SEMrush that I want to share with you: a service platform that contains over 60 different and very complex tools, definitely takes a lot of time to be explored; it's not something you can reasonably do in 7 or 15 days, unless you spend several hours a day exploring each feature and report in detail. Furthermore, since each site has different purposes, scopes and purposes, it is also difficult to understand which tools can be useful and which not.
For this reason, I personally believe it is essential for such a complex and multifaceted reality to have a customer service that is up to the challenge: I'm talking of people that can understand the difficulties that customers might experience to properly understand a so complex (and expensive) product, and do whatever they can to help them to understand what type of investment to make.
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case: despite the situation connected to this peculiar historical moment (to say the least), with most companies losing tons of money and struggling to bring their business back, I was not able to obtain neither an extension of the trial period, nor a reasonable discount on the monthly fee for the first months: eventually I managed to pulloff a mere 10% discount for a minimum of three months. I was tempted to accept it, but I needed some additional time to evaluate the product, therefore I've chosen to pay a full-priced monthly fee instead (99.95$) to see if making such a commitment was really worth it.
And that was the mistake I made: ironic as it may seem, choosing to pay a full month (without any discount!) resulted in killing my chance of accepting the 10% discount offer, which was intended to be reedemed before the ending of my 7-days trial period.
If you don't believe it, here's the full customer service e-mail I've received (minus the personal details):
Good morning XXX,
The offers were valid only in the phase of the first purchase.
I can only offer you the discount for upgrading to the GURU version at this point.
Best regards,
XXX XXX
Sales Executive
SEMrush
Yes, you've heard it right: they refused to keep the offer active and apply the 10% discount because I've already paid full price and, therefore, prevented such offer from taking place.
Ever.
In 2020.
During these unprecedented times.
Well, what can I say? So long SEMrush, and thanks for all the fish: it has been fun :)
