OutboundEngine vs. Swift Digital

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.

Incentivized

it's well suited to a business that relies on constant email marketing and to keep in contact with leads or customers. This is the heartbeat of business and suits us. We can segment qualified leads, data scores, track campaigns and effectively save time to work on other customer campaigns. If you are a smaller business that only sends one email a month, it's not for you. This software is very sophisticated and can be technical in the beginning.

• 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.

• drag-and-drop campaign builder
• email templates
• lead scoring
• Analytics

• 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.

Incentivized

• More email flexibility would be good.
• Simplify the modules-there is a lot, and it can be overwhelming.

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.

Incentivized

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 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.

Incentivized

We looked into Swift based upon a recommendation. We have previously used ActiveCampaign but found it very clunky for what we wanted to use it for. We also looked into Pardot, but was on the other end of the spectrum, it had far too many features, complexities and required an implementation specialist at our expense of $15K. Swift was just the right fit for us, and we like knowing that our data is kept in Australia

• 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

Incentivized

• Better lead quality
• Has allowed us to close clients quicker.
• Higher ROI
• Access to much more targeted customer data
• Getting used to the software took more time thn anticipated