Freshsuccess vs. Ion Interactive

• Natero does an excellent job of reporting and having a lot of the data available. They don't do as well when you want to track specific metrics such as ARR. (Everything in the application is currently based in MRR)
• Natero has done an excellent job for our smaller organization. I am not sure how it would work with a larger organization.

Incentivized

I don't give 9 ratings easily. Anyone wanting greater user engagement would benefit from ion interactive. I can slap together a simple interactive tool for a social post easily. I also have a plan selector with complex logic built in that would have cost me $50k to build without ion. Now I'm able to duplicate it and make adjustments to use it for various other applications. We've created a couple dozen fun interactive tools for social posts and now we simply re-purpose them easily to create new ones frequently. I just created a new page for our website that we'll want to be fluid; so the site developers suggested we simply embed an ion tool to give us real-time flexibility. Marketers in other divisions are jealous when they see all the fun stuff we're doing--they're gradually becoming ion converts

Incentivized

• Love the accounts view to see all my accounts, their health and some helpful stats!
• The charting is relevant and detailed for customers to understand their usage of our product. The look and feel is very clean and easy to understand.
• In the account, you can link to other documentation, which is great!

Incentivized

• I love that ion interactive autosaves. So many of these platforms leave me terrified of disconnection or closing my laptop.
• This WYSIWYG actually works. I've yet to have a translation or code glitch.
• Fast load times are a huge bonus, as well as mobile-optimized display.

Incentivized

• It's a complex platform, it can be hard to find what you're looking for if you don't know where to look.
• There have been a few features which work correctly but can be a bit confusing to get working correctly. Fortunately, the support team is so on it, we get an answer within an hour.
• I would have liked Natero to have a mechanism in place to nudge users of the platform to use it. This would help with getting adoption on our end. While the onboarding documentation was great, a more hands-on approach to getting users to adopt and use the platform would have helped us get up to speed earlier. It took us nearly 9 months to really start using the system which is partially due to the complexity of the integration process and partially due to the difficulty of switching over CES processes into Natero.

Incentivized

• no revert option/revision history if you make a bad mistake
• some simple styles that should be just there for you have to be made through custom CSS
• some of their template options have some pretty bad designs and are not usable beyond a basic functionality level/have to be completely reskinned

Incentivized

Because unless I find something better to replace it with, we're probably going to renew our contract. Ideally, Ion interactive can update Liveball so it's easier to use, more functionality that includes forms and javascript options currently not in place

Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported

Incentivized

Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.

The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.

Incentivized

They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.

Incentivized

There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.

Incentivized

We initially looked at Gainsight, Amity, and another which I can't remember the name of. Only Natero and Amity were within a reasonable price range. We selected Natero because the platform was significantly more polished, the reporting seemed significantly stronger in Natero, and during the sales process Natero did a better job of showing us how the functionality would work, whereas our calls with Amity were frequently filled with "it doesn't work because this is a demo account" which was a bit of a red flag.

Incentivized

I haven't had a lot of experience with templated CMS systems and was not involved in the original selection, though I was part of the renewal discussions. Most of the templates I've used have been html and created in house on an as-needed bases

Incentivized

Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.

Incentivized

• It's made my job harder.
• It's made it harder to update my customer's information.
• It's made me spend more time deleting information to satisfy the character limit.

Incentivized

• So far the impact has been positive, but as we are new to the platform that opinion is based on relatively few interactive assets.
• There hasn't been any negative reactions or impact from Ion as of yet, but as I said before it's still early for us in terms of usage (less than a year).
• We do really appreciate the level of complexity and customization available in the platform.

Incentivized