Likelihood to Recommend For current Wordpress users Spokal is outstanding and highly recommended. For clients who don't already have a Wordpress blog it's a bit tricky as I need to first sell the benefits of using Wordpress in order to get them on board, but in all honestly I would recommend Wordpress anyway, it just slows the process down having to design and install Wordpress before we can get started.
Read full review It's a great platform if you're looking for something to run contests that provide leads and drive user engagement, but if they also incorporated social media management and scheduling, Wishpond would be a 10 by far. It's definitely worth looking into specifically for running contests throughout the year, for a wide variety of companies and industries.
Read full review Pros Content calendar - the ability to visually see blog posts in draft and scheduled to publish over the coming weeks and months was a key benefit. Tracking this in spreadsheets is too hard. we can even post blogs as topic idea, pre draft, draft and final and schedule in advance so we can visualise the messages we want to communicate. Creation of tweets and Linkedin posts is done for you automatically. Simply drag the blog post to the time slot, day, week or month. This is a lot quicker than Hootsuite Additional tweets can be composed and also dragged to the calendar, plus the feedly link allows curation of tweet content. This just scales up our creation and curation process. Easy simple overview dashboard - showing key website stats, new visitors, new twitter followers. New blog posts. Social enagement per blog post, linkedin shares etc. simple lead scoring based on pages visited etc. Simple realtime SEO analysis on the blog post builder twitter builder. very simple autopilot of increasing your twitter following using key words (it easy has a simple key word tool) to find relevant people to 'like' and hence follow Dynamic, responsive team. I have asked a few questions about futures and always received a prompt helpful reply. Chris and his team are clearly commited to developing a great product. Once linked to your wordpress site I really like the fact I can log into a dashboard on the web and on my ipad and manage my content delivery and monitor visititors and interaction. I use and know hubspot and the biggest issue for me is the learning curve. Anyone can learn and use Spokal. It provides and integrates a number of tools I currently use today at a far lower cost. It does need to integrate into a third party email provider but frankly the integration is simple. A lot of effort has gone into the design for non techies Read full review Very small learning curve, thanks to wonderful real-time tutorials and help, and drag-and-drop editors. Easy to navigate - there are only 3 main sections of the site (content, lists, and emails). Excellent customer service. I've always gotten prompt answers to any questions I've had. Read full review Cons I personally would love to see more direct integrations into CRM and more powerful Marketing Automation tools, but the current Zapier integration is a general approach and works in most cases very well. Read full review They added keywords to campaigns we'd specifically said not to. They should tweak campaigns with a 0.06 ROAS. They should provide the services that are promised. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Spokal delivers everything I need to serve my clients in one place. It's so easy to use and their customer service is always available and responsive, there's no need for me to look elsewhere.
Read full review Usability Spokal takes away some of the complexity and noise that Wordpress has. Offering a separate login and dashboard to allow a user to create blog posts, check on backlinks, see ranking keywords, social engagement and tracks visitors/ contacts. Spokal provides a lot of functionality that would typically require the purchase of several products e.g. Hootsuite, SEO Moz, SEO pressor, Hubspot. What I really like is the content calendar. I simply drag and drop of my blog posts into my calendar to post to twitter, linkedin and facebook. This is an easy way to repost evergreen content and build my following on twitter. The twitter builder is constantly looking for relevant profiles and conversations based on my defined criteria. The tool automatically likes the twitter user which drives traffic to my sight and actually helps me find followers and potential influencers. This product is ideal for people new to internet marketing or small business owners who don't want to be overwhelmed by the effort to learn, manage and run several tools or wordpress plugins. I have been with Spokal since the start and I continue to be impressed by the support and raft of new functionality being added.
Read full review Support Rating They worked with Bluehost to make sure our blog connected properly. This was done without anyone from Strategic Revolution asking for this help.
Read full review There is no support at Wishpond. I contacted my project manager's manager over a week ago without a reply. When I responded to the automated 'How is your experience' email saying how awful it was there was no follow-up. When I had trouble and had to escalate things it resulted in some new procedures being put in place that changed nothing and they never checked in to see if things were fixed.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I haven't really tried other products at this point. I would say I tried to cobble together a bunch of options to make the right inbound marketing "tool suite". Nothing quite worked well enough. Again, Spokal serves as a very cost-effective option. Particularly relative to Hubspot.
Read full review We choose Wishpond as our first option since we were a startup e-commerce.
Klaviyo was a little bit expensive for us and Wishpond really suits pretty well in our budget. Besides, if you don't have so many clients, at a first glance, there are a lot of features that would not be taken advantage of. That is why Wishpond was a better option when we started.
Read full review Return on Investment It's still early for us, but we can definitively say that we've cut our content creation / curation time down by about 40% while INCREASING the volume of quality relevant content that our audience expects. Read full review Negative google ROI. A few conversions in September on paid social then none - negative ROI. Between ad spend and Wishpond fees every month is negative ROI. Can’t wait until I can get out of this contract. Emails don’t perform as well as my own for open rates or clicks. Read full review ScreenShots Wishpond Propel IQ Screenshots