Outgrow vs. Ion, by Rock Content

Well suited: When you want (potential) customers to quickly determine if your product or service is right for them. I noticed that we could make a very honest calculation tool that shows how quickly our car sharing service is beneficial to customers. These types of calculations are difficult to convey in text. Less appropriate: The length of your calculation has to be in line with what the engagement people have with your product or service. We want to determine if a shared car is interesting, so we don't want 10+ questions. But if you're selling a house you can include more questions.

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

• Outgrow provides a comprehensive knowledge base, which allows you to quickly become adept at using their platform.
• They don't make any assumptions. When your quiz or calculator is ready to go live, they offer you an in-depth checklist of ideas to promote it.
• They ensure that you have a high degree of creativity.

• 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

• Some of the formulas, if you want to do more complicated quizzes, need their help. You can do simple quizzes easily. I wanted/needed something much more complicated. They did help me out for an additional fee - but it was reasonable.
• I would love to see more examples of how/why so I can emulate them. Or even a "duplicate" another quiz and use my own words.

Incentivized

• 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

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

The software works fast and has an intelligent design

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

Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.

Support is very responsive and is quick to respond to questions and problems. Outgrow sometimes changes their pricing and plan structures and add/remove options without properly relaying the info to customers. They could do a better job with communications and being upfront with the pricing plans people sign up for.

Incentivized

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

The previous tools we used had no ability to make numerical calculators and limited logic jump features within surveys (if someone answers question one a particular way, skip question two, etc.) and more limited ability to direct people toward different outcomes based on how they answered questions in the surveys. Many of them didn’t have native integrations with Marketo either. These were critical features that we needed so we decided to switch to outgrow.

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

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

• Outgrow has helped me sell more life insurance through the use of interactive calculators.
• Outgrow has helped me attract more referral partners thus helping my agency grow.
• Outgrow saved my agency money because I was able to cancel subscriptions to other services which offered fewer features.

• 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