iContact Pro Select (formerly Outmarket) includes email marketing, landing pages, social media management, press outreach, and analytics. The software was originally Vocus Marketing Suite, and then was known as Outmarket. It was acquired by Cision
$300
per month
OutboundEngine
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
OutboundEngine provides a hands-off way for small business owners to market and grow their business. The product aims to provide small businesses with what big companies have achieved with marketing automation. The service aims to help users keep in touch with clients and prospects with professionally designed, branded campaigns. Benefits include: driving engagement, surfacing warm leads from current contacts, generating referrals and repeat business from their existing contacts, social…
$199
per user
Pricing
iContact Pro Select
OutboundEngine
Editions & Modules
Basic
$300
per month
Plus
$600
per month
Pro
$1,000
per month
Enterprise
$2,500
per month
Essential
$199
per user
Value
$299
per user
Premium
$499
per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
iContact Pro Select
OutboundEngine
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$99 per user
Additional Details
—
More information is available on the vendor's website.
If you use PRWeb already and are looking for a tool that integrates well with that program and offers additional functionality with email and social media then Vocus is great. If you don't use PRWeb or prefer an email tool with more functionality and ease of use, Vocus is not the best choice.
OutboundEngine does a referral campaign and I've been able to close a couple of deals based on getting in touch with people who engage with this campaign and state they could use my services in the next 6 months. This is a great follow up tool for those you may or may not know are going to be needing your services.
Social Media Listening e.g.: Recommendations, Identify influencers for a selected topic, based on actual influence, or number of reposts and/or references, rather than the number of followers.
Campaign Management - Landing Page and Web Form Templates
Email Marketing -Delivery Tracking and Spam Analysis
The content that they generate to send to our clients is relevant and the clients want to engage with us. It makes us appear more professional and consistent, even though we are a smaller company.
It helps us stay in touch with clients and helps us stay top of mind. We are able to generate more new business leads if we are in consistent contact with current, former, and potential clients.
Their customer service and support is outstanding. All my questions were answered and I went into the program feeling confident and knowledgeable.
Vocus can do a better job communicating with us. The representative made promises to us that I have not seen be fulfilled such as getting us national media hits through connections that he had.
I do not like the use of drawings to attract new customers, and they have ignored my requests to eliminate that for my personal emails.
I do not like it when a competitor in my immediate market has the same posts. It cheapens the service or makes it appear that I am simply sharing another's post.
Now that we have had the opportunity to try an enterprise wide marketing solution, I think we should look at other tools and programs that have greater flexibility and ease of use. If the tool does not happen to have PR Web then so be it. We may not see the cost savings with PR announcements but if the other tools have increased email functionality then we can part with more money on the PR side like we have in the past
The biggest issue is poor ROI. The second biggest issue is rigid customer service process, lack of a sense of urgency, and inability to reach out to upper management with issues.
Overall, OutboundEngine is very user friendly. It is simple to set up and explore, and if there are any issues or questions, the customer service team and account managers are always available to help. They are very knowledgeable and were able to explain everything in detail to me. The program is easy to navigate and helps me stay organized, and an uncomplicated and straightforward solution was exactly what I was looking for
I haven't had to contact Outbound Engine because I haven't had any application errors or unplanned outages. I basically have had such a trouble free experience with them that I haven't had to call. Everything is automated and I get a notice to review every isse. I suppose if I personalized the newsletter a bit more and added some of my own articles, I would need to contact them, (which I should really start to do) but so far things have been so on point, I haven't felt the need.
The customer service was excellent! Everyone I spoke to was kind and knowledgeable. My account manager was easily reachable. Setup of the OutboundEngine program was explained really thoroughly, and we knew how we could best use the product to meet the needs of our clients and get our online and social media presence off the ground.
I've used MailChimp before to generate emails and found Vocus to be a better option because it is an overall suite providing the tools to create customizable emails as well as many other features including press releases, social media etc. Vocus is an all-in-one platform for marketing which makes things more efficient for the user by being able to handle all marketing through one outlet.
I selected it for the ability to have an automated system do 3 things all at once, social media posts, emails and the instant communication with the chat box. I have never seen a chat come through that lead to a helpful client touchpoint. I have never used another product but have since begun to weigh some of the less expensive options.
It has provided a consistent email message to my clients
It has provided a consistent social media presence for my past clients
It has helped me obtain and correlate customer reviews
Unfortunately I cannot say that I have any direct information that a sale was generated directly as a result of OutboundEngine. I feel that it has but I have no measurable proof of this
