Ion Interactive vs. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing vs. Percolate, now part of Seismic

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

Appropriate if an organization is already using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement products like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service etc. Not appropriate for a big enterprise where has a separate marketing department, and the lead / contact for marketing information / marketing list can come through different applications in the organization, not just Microsoft Dynamics 365 Apps if they have one.

Incentivized

Very useful for the management, planning, and programming of all social networks, as well as marketing campaigns. One of the best tools to make life easier for community managers and automate daily tasks such as content publishing. It is my favorite for managing my clients' networks.

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

• Builds dynamic audiences using real-time CRM and behavioral data without manual list maintenance.
• Triggers communications based on actions such as purchase, visit date, or post-visit timing.
• Manages high-volume transactional and lifecycle emails with consistent governance and compliance.

Incentivized

• You can schedule all the planning done for each social network, with the date and time you want to publish, without any inconvenience.
• It has many templates of campaigns and content for social networks, which facilitates the work and the workload of designers and community managers.
• The management of the marketing campaign is very efficient, as it monitors the progress, performance, and progress of the campaign also presents a complete statistical report that helps to improve the plans and strategies used.

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

• Tracking billable time into F&O is not available
• CRM does not have visibility into DevOps progress, only status
• Some elements of the support ticket are not user friendly

Incentivized

• Data is a mess. So unreliable. Takes so much time to create a concrete report.
• There is no ability to export anything. No calendar PDFs, no data Excel sheets, nothing.
• No paid management functionality.
• Hated their listening tool abilities relative to other tools I've used.

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

I wouldn't even think of renewing our use of Marketing 365. It's worthless

As we have grown to implement Percolate with more and more people within our company, we have also run into more features we'd like to see in the app. The Percolate team has been extremely understanding about these requests, and even visited our offices to sit and listen to exactly what we are looking for. Assuming these new features make it into production with them, we'll definitely stay with Percolate for the long term

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

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing is extremely usable in order to manage all of my organization's customer information across the organization. Further we use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to manage all of our marketing campaigns from beginning to end. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing makes my organization more able to run a professional marketing strategy.

Incentivized

Easy to set up approval flows, but not always necessary to follow all the requires steps

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

Like all Microsoft corporation products, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing comes with the extremely high-quality customer support that Microsoft corporation has become well known for. Whether it is the availability of twenty-four/seven customer support or the highly-trained, very friendly customer support personnel, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing has the support you are looking for.

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

Rarely has a company shown this much support during implementation. This almost got to the point where it was too much hand holding. Sometimes, social teams just want the keys to the car so they can drive it themselves instead of waiting on someone to drive along with them...

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

Salesforce has much better reporting capabilities inside the system, where Dataverse has to be utilized for building sources for Business Intelligence reporting. This is not as real-time as Salesforce, but the ability to configure and integrate the system into the Azure stack is much greater and well worth the inconvenience.

Incentivized

Three major areas separate Percolate from the competition in my POV:

• They view themselves as truly, an all-in-one SaaS model. Other large, enterprise platforms, like Sprinklr, have the old a la carte approach to their platforms. Everything is extra. Every new addition or component comes at a cost and does not automatically update your license. Percolate has a different approach. If it is an update and it is good for the platform, you should get it. Therefore, they update the tool OFTEN and always evolving the functionality.
• Which leads to my next point, Percolate wants to build the best-in-class social content management tool, period. Therefore, they are not chasing ways to upcharge you with new functions and modules. They focus on their core product and make it better and better.
• Lastly, the pricing is simple and easy to understand. The cost is the cost.. no hidden details. Good luck getting that transparency with platforms like Sprinklr or Radian6.

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

• 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

• We've only been using it for 8 months so I cannot comment on the cost aspect
• From a marketing and data perspective - it is invaluable.

Incentivized

• Percolate has made it much easier to communicate between teams and has provided a return on investment in that area in particular.
• Percolate also helps save time because you are able to schedule social media posts across channels easily.
• It has also been an easy way to work with remote team members, which is very helpful.

Incentivized