Talon.One, from the company of the same name headquartered in Berlin, is a promotion engine that enables users to create targeted and customized marketing promotions built around customer and session data. WIth it, users can create, manage and track discounts, coupon codes, referral, loyalty and product bundles in one platform.
Anyone that has a business with a high NPS score should take advantage of this acquisition channel. If your business isn't promotional in nature (i.e., doesn't offer discounts), this type of program may not be as effective. It is important for both the advocate and the recipient to get something out of it. If only the advocate gets rewarded, it will likely diminish your returns.
I see Talon.One as best suited for small or medium sized businesses - less than 50k customers. The reason being, I do not see the scalability of the tool; it is the classic what-you-see-is-what-you-get. On the positive, because you get all of it out of the box, it makes it very simple to have one or two people dedicated to administration and development. Additionally, Talon.One won't be contacting you for more money just to use a feature
Lacks geo filtering capabilities (i..e, ability to serve refer a friend only to visitors from specific countries). Our team had to put that logic in place on our side instead of relying on Extole.
Platform requires assistance from account manager for some actions/features that should be in the hand of the client.
Quality Control has been an issue at time. Our program has gone down because a new global platform update went out and affected our implementation. Extole has been responsive in these types of incidents, but that should not happen.
For clarity, I am only comparing the discount code feature from Salesforce vs. the entire platform. In Salesforce, creating a code was an arduous process, then we had to wait for the sync job to run with our web services engine (every 10 minutes) to see if what we had created was functioning correctly. Do the math: If configuration takes 10 minutes, you have to wait a total of 20 minutes to test it, then if it doesn't work, try again in 15-20 minutes. Over an 8-hour day, you aren't accomplishing anything! TalonOne made it so simple. 10-15 minutes of configuration time, then near immediate testing time. We were able to create and troubleshoot a discount code in a couple of hours rather than a couple of days
It took a few months to become ROI positive with Extole, but the ROAS has been good since. It probably represents about 2% of our new customers per month.
