iContact is an email marketing solution that was acquired by Vocus in 2012. The product is integrated with Facebook and Twitter and is aimed at SMBs with unlimited sending as a key feature.
$14
per month
Qualaroo
Score7 out of 10
N/A
Qualaroo Insights allows you to survey or nudge site visitors at various stages of their visit, to gather insights and generate sales leads.
I would only recommend it if someone was a small business. I think they are the best suited for companies who will send out a coupon or offer here and there. The most recent updates made it more complicated to use for more complicated processes. It is easy to train someone on the program, and so quick to learn. But I would also only stick to the simpler things. I also think the colorful templates are great, and show great creativity. But again, it is hard to justify recommending the program when it isn't WYSIWYG.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
It makes it easy to move from design to development. We collect highly targeted feedback without organizing a meeting to discuss every iteration, saving time and effort. The comments are open-ended and unorganized. But with survey Nudges, we can ask additional questions about design UI/UX.
Contact management. iContact is really great for entering all your contact. You are able to put them onto different lists, and let them choose which lists they would like to be a part of as well. There are many data fields provided to fill in information.
Emailing. We use the email feature at least once a month. They are always improving and adding new features, which is very helpful in presenting content in a new and exciting way to our readers. There are many options with remade templates and themes, or you can add your own.
Insights. It is really helpful being able to have the data to see what is working and what isn't. It is nice to be able to go back and see how things went in the past compared to now. Opens, clicks, shares, etc.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Qualaroo’s question engine connects fragmented data points spread across all the customer feedback gathered from varied sources.
Qualaroo allows us to connect with our customers’ questions directly so that we can focus on the most important ones on priority.
The insights we get from Qualaroo surveys help us prioritize which hypotheses to formally run as an experiment first, and which to implement straight away.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I wish the dashboard was a little more interactive so that you can do some deeper analysis - things like filtering out people who answered a certain way
I wish the building of the survey "nudge" was easier and more visual - it's a bit clunky and hard to reorder questions.
I wish there was a way to add more logic into questions, as you have to duplicate questions to get around this which can make the building process difficult
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
iContact has been a quick and easy way to send any announcements and news directly to email and social media subscribers. Its tracking and reporting capabilities turn a simple email into a marketing campaign that can be used as a tool to efficiently gauge reader response and customer satisfaction, and ultimately to reach potential customers. The consistency and excellent customer service is what makes this program a pleasant experience.
The micro-survey landscape is evolving very quickly and it seems like there is a new entrant almost every month. I'm generally happy with Qualaroo (we got what we expected) and I like the folks on the Qualaroo team (support is fast and friendly and rarely needed), but there haven't been real improvements to the platform in the last eight months. We will be re-assessing Qualaroo's features and price versus other competitors when our current contract is up.
I rate iContact as an easy to use program due to its user friendly dashboard and user interface. Most companies of small to medium size do not have a dedicated marketer, therefore it is someone multitasking who may or may not have this kind of experience. iContact makes it relatively simple and can actually expand one's knowledge in the area of business promotion.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
We know the value of consumer feedback and believe that users actually want to be a part of the process. With Qualaroo, we have learnt that people like answering certain types of questions, especially if you ask them something about themselves — like what they want most and their motivations behind purchases — they can’t resist typing a response.
iContact is regularly up and running. Only once has it been unavailable for maintenance, which is to be expected and even desired for optimal performance when needed.
I've never experienced an outage where Qualaroo was unavailable. I don't think I've even gotten notices for scheduled down/maintenance time. The platform is always available.
Our developers complain that Qualaroo is just one of several similar site add-ons that slow down our site performance. I'm skeptical that Qualaroo has any measurable impact on our page load times, but don't have any hard evidence either way. The Qualaroo admin interface and reporting mechanisms are all quick and reliable.
They have always been responsive to any issues or concerns that have arisen with our account. Our customer account manager participates in our monthly county-wide communicators meetings via telephone to ensure that we are getting the most from the service. He also analyzes our lists to help us weed out inactive contacts.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I have only contacted customer support twice, and they have managed to solve my problem every time. There is a slight waiting time between the query and resolution, but other than that I don’t need to contact them time and again to understand things since their help section is sufficient most of the time.
Qualaroo doesn't offer full-blown online training, at least not that I've used or needed. The online help documentation is adequate and Qualaroo-sponsored webinars are informative.
Have your technical team set up the "Identify" feature right out of the gate - this is a "fire and forget" feature. Once it's set up, your data is much more valuable. Also, if there are very specific kinds of page targeting you might imagine doing, have a technical person set up and test at least 2-3 examples of using Qualaroo's regular expression features to achieve this targeting. With a couple good examples in place to work from, it becomes much easier to create your own regular expressions for custom targeting.
I didn't have a say in the decision because I wasn't with the company at the time. I listed HubSpot here because I know we used it in conjunction with iContact for email automation, but HubSpot Email was only recently built-out to the point where it is today. Now, iContact and HubSpot are no longer integrated.
Qualaroo makes it very easy to launch a quick survey based on templates or custom questions with an intuitive user interface. It is also very flexible and can be easily integrated with AB testing thanks to the advanced options. Reports are getting better but analytics wise it's still not up to the refinement level of SurveyMonkey but it does beat the latter in terms of UI experience. When compared to SurveyGizmo, the flexibility on surveys is what stands out and how easy it is to create different survey flows.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
iContact stays the same with the number of users added or taken away. It certainly remains reliable despite increased usage, and so, can be considered scaleable in that aspect.
Qualaroo's simplicity has its down sides when it comes to scaling. Managing multiple nudges across multiple domains, at least in the Pro edition, is challenging. The active nudges all appear as a single list on the admin home page, automatically grouped by domains. Archived nudges are on a separate tab. It would be helpful to have a folder system to organize nudges. Also, once you have multiple active nudges that are targeted to different sections of your site using regular expressions, it's difficult to keep track of what is appearing where. It's also difficult, if not impossible, to figure out where you may have competing nudges. And there's no ability to assign reporting or configuration access to other members of your team. The Pro edition has a single login, which must be shared if you have multiple staff who want to use Qualaroo.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Qualaroo has proven to be extremely useful when it comes to improving conversions.
We deployed Qualaroo on our website to survey visitors and uncover their pain points about our landing page.
Using the feedback, we made several critical changes to our page, including the visibility of the CTA button, information on the page, and the quality of pictures. Since the implementation, there has been a significant increase in conversions, and our visitors have been getting a lot more value from the landing page.
