Ion Interactive vs. Movable Ink vs. smartocto

If you want to choose a quick start template and fill in the fields with your content, Ion will be fantastic for you. We've done this with whitepapers and quizzes and it's been great and extremely easy to use. If you have an exact idea of what you want, and a background in web development, you may get frustrated. Ion has some quirks that make it tricky to fully customize - everyone once in a while I really just want to go into the HTML and make some changes, but can't. If you are looking to reuse a piece of content for specific targeting (industry or account-specific), Ion is great. The dynamic substitutions are great and very helpful.

Incentivized

Any business that sends out a lot of email communications, and has accessible data that they can, at the very least, format in CSV sheets can utilize [Moveable Ink] with reasonable success. Depending on how your data is housed or received, the integration within Movable Ink is quite simple. I would recommend looking at the list of partners that Movable Ink integrate with. If your business is utilizing any of them regularly, it would make integration even easier. If you do not do a lot with email or your data is not easily accessible I would not recommend Movable Ink.

Incentivized

Great for setting up MEL measurements for web based media. Great for use in media environments especially where there is no dedicated data analytics staff. Not sure how useful it would be for those sites that are not content focused.

• Quick Starts make it so easy to get started.
• Real-time updates are awesome and save a ton of wasteful process.
• The combination of user friendliness for simple things and the flexibility to do more complex things is great.
• Chat support is excellent and deeper-dive support has been super helpful.
• The ability to use these tools in the cloud or embedded has given us tactic flexibility.

Incentivized

• Personalization--Everyone likes to see their name in lights. Movable Ink allows you to pull in content such as their name, locations that are closest to them, and content they're actually interested in.
• Unique Features--Movable Ink provides a variety of apps that can plugged into emails to make the experience more unique and exciting, such as countdown timers, add to calendar features for events, maps, and social feeds.
• Tracking--Adding snippets of code to emails allow you to track data, such as opens, impressions, and clickthroughs. You can also track how individuals interact with specific pieces of the email.
• User Friendly--Easy to build within apps for those who aren't graphic designers.

Incentivized

• Provides detailed stats on overall blog performance
• Shows which blog topics resonate with readers
• Measures individual blogs against key performance metrics

• Ion University, while stacked with a wealth of information, is difficult to navigate from a troubleshooting perspective. The tutorial videos are all very helpful, but they are also very long. Sometimes I would want to search for how to address a particular issue I was struggling with and it would be a two-minute segment buried in a 45-minute video.
• Again, getting back the self-guidance side of things. I think a lot of the tutorials are set up in a way that makes sense to Ion, but not as much to the end user.
• I think the controls admins use when creating new users could be a bit more straightforward.

Incentivized

• I think they could improve with how to provide strategic guidance to customers on applications and use cases. A lot of recommendations aren't applicable to new business models/scenarios
• Their transition to onsite/landing page use cases was somewhat effective but we ran into some hiccups with applying the technology onsite

Incentivized

• It has a lot of information and data all over the place. It took us some time to get used to it and get people properly onboarded. We have seen some improvement, but UX has more space to improve.

We use it for every landing page and we plan on only doing more dynamic content creation. We dont see that option coming in-house any time ever in the future. ION has a very robust platform for us to work with that really allows us to do more for our customers in regards to having the one-to-one conversation.

Incentivized

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

smartocto is a very user-friendly tool, with a smart & clean interface.

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

I was not the decision maker to choose this over Uberflip, but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training what-so-ever.

Incentivized

Movable Ink is the better product by far. They offer more solutions across multiple channels and their platform is easier to use and better organized.

Incentivized

smartocto is much easier to use and is perfectly setup so that newsrooms can see the information they need in a quick and easy-to-use format.

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

• Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before
• The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects
• It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it

Incentivized

• Email performance has greatly increased overall
• Optimization and testing features allow us to pit directions against one another and determine the best course of action going forward

Incentivized

• It had a positive ROI in terms of support they provide and custom based approach to all our media partners
• Readiness to find solutions to any type of question we might have