iContact vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (discontinued)

iContact is a great option for small businesses. It doesn't have enough features to create the demands of a large corporation. Of course the price goes up exponentially with more subscribers, which would also make it beneficial for small businesses. If you have too many lists to add people to it can get a little crazy too.

Incentivized

Social studio is well-suited for environments where multiple social media channels are being managed by more than one individual, allowing for shared access and collaboration. There's no reason it wouldn't work equally as well for an individual user without a team needing shared access.

Incentivized

• Customer service is wonderful! They are always helpful, guiding and available for any odd question, even if those questions are training for a newbie to the email world.
• Building forms for data collection and the code generator the for the site is very easy.
• Ensuring double opt-in is extremely straightforward.
• Including unsubscribe on every message automatically means we never have to worry about CAN-SPAM.

Incentivized

• Social Listening - boolean search queries that can be narrowed down by source and language, as well as location, to ensure it's relevant to the brand.
• Owned Channel Monitoring - pulling owned content/comments into streams for moderation, engagement and review.
• Publishing - scheduling, drafting, tracking brand owned social posts.

Incentivized

• Every time you edit or sometimes open an email it brings it to the top of the list. I would prefer my email to go to the top only after I send it out to my subscribers.
• When I add a new contact I sometimes copy and paste the email. This is not allowed sometimes and I have to manually type the email in.
• LinkedIn will not allow you to add pictures anymore when sending emails out.

Incentivized

• The export or raw data can be tedious. Currently, the tool exports a 10,000 mention bulk CSV file. When dealing with larger brands like Nike, you are looking at well over 300K posts for a year. Parallel to this, is the lack of an exportable sample of data.
• Each widget can only showcase 3 months worth of data. So creating a trend line of volume of mentions must be done in 3 separate widgets and requires the user to manually piece them together.
• Though the tool consistently brings back the most volume, the data is not always clean. Within the data crawl, twitter user names are also scraped for your kewords, so going back to the above example, if your keyword is nike, and someone's twitter handle is @IhateNike, the post is often irrelevant to the brand.
• Though I find the tool quite easy to use, new users often tell me that the tool is incredibly confusing and not an intuitive process.
• Lack of Facebook posts, though this is a limitation of all social monitoring tools given the privacy settings of the social network
• Lacking the ability to input Boolean Syntax limits the depth of the keyword queries.

After 4 years of using iContact we finally cut the cord. It was hard to justify staying with them when it seemed like they had some of the most outdated software in the industry, some of the worst deliverability, and were in general extremely lacking in customization. They are a decent ESP for a great price point, so if that is your main concern it may be worth it, but if you want to have your emails you are paying for hit inboxes (not spam folders) then look into someone else that guarantees great deliverability.

Incentivized

Our company's contract with Radian6 was up in January and we came to the unanimous agreement that we would look for another software. For the 18 months we had Radian6, very few employees knew how to use it and we were ready to try something new

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.

Incentivized

• Would rate this a 6. The User Interface is pretty intuitive, but the platform was still considered pretty intimidating by our non-technical staff when they first saw it. It took a while to get used to it and feel comfortable. There was quite a lot of setup work in the beginning (for example, we had to build our own reports using a canned report as a template, and this was not simple). Although it took a while to get it setup correctly, it’s quite intuitive once that work has been done.

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.

The platform is rarely down

No issues with performance.

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.

Incentivized

As mentioned previously, it can be hard to get through to people who can help you. On occasion when I have spoken to customer service/tech support, they all seem nice and try to be helpful, however instead of admitting the system cannot do certain things, they will persist it saying that it can, which results in many wasted hours overall.

The templates are difficult to customize, and they don't render well in email platforms

• We initially received dedicated online training for our team which was delivered by our account rep. This was pretty effective since it happened after our data had been loaded into the system and it had been configured for specific needs our organization. The training was perhaps a bit shallow though, as it was only an hour long. Online videos are available to be taken individually, and these have been useful.

i wouldn't be using it if i wasn't satisfied. time is money

Implementation was pretty simple. Just a matter of giving the account rep a list of our search terms and having him set the system up to pull the data we wanted to see. Once this had been done, we tweaked it with his help. Process was pretty smooth, although there was some back and forth until it worked the way we wanted.

We selected iContact because it was available at the time, and in our price range. I inherited it at the school. If it had been the program it is now back then, I would not have chosen it. At the moment, we are too busy to fully vet another program, so we are stuck with this one. It does get the job done. It is great for a small business with small needs, but once you start expanding and having more intricate needs, it does not compete with others like MailChimp

Incentivized

Radian6 is one of the popular social media monitoring tools, There are many features of the Radian6 that I can vote for over other tools. The important ones are the seamless Salesforce integration, The data presentation capabilities, Multiple profiles feature, keyword cloud. Despite the fact that the license is costly, the features and the integrations(specially SFDC) provided are very handful and worth the money.

Incentivized

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.

• Increased Employee Efficiency - once a template is created, it is very easy to edit the content within the template with minimal or no assistance from developers.
• Domain Reputation - if you aren't careful, it is very easy to hurt your domain reputation when using iContact. Make sure the person in charge of email marketing knows the risks of email marketing or is willing to closely work with iContact's customer service to follow best practices.
• Increased Lead Conversion - through the use of automated email functionality, you can stay in the forefront of your customer's minds. This increases conversions by reminding customers that you are there to provide the goods or services that they may need periodically or in the future.

• Monitoring social brand awareness is not something you can consider to have a meaninful impact in your business ROI short term, however it's a must for taking care of long term relationships and customer intimacy.
• Radian6 connects with other analytical tools like webtrends, Google Analytics, etc..however it's not directly linked to a revenue driven platform, you can´t see the immediate ROI generated in the tool.
• If you bet for social relationships you should consider this tool, no question on that. Social Commerce might be of course impacted postively by the proper use of this tool.

Incentivized