OutboundEngine vs. Viralheat (Discontinued)

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

Viralheat is great for those who have to report back with hard numbers or proof backing a specific campaign or initiative. If this is important to you, make sure you ask to see examples for the monitoring and reporting features. Also, the amount of monitoring you do will impact your quote, so have that information in mind.

• 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.

• Simplicity: The software is very easy to use and took very little time to start optimizing my social media campaigns.
• Set up time: I was up and running in no time. With social media you cannot wait days or weeks to get started. By having a quick start up process, it allowed me to get started ASAP.
• Reporting: The foundation of all business decisions has been a very tedious process in the past. By using Viralheat, I save time on reporting and have better reports to give more actionable insights.
• Data: Not only is the reporting awesome, there are many more insights you can get by using the large amount of demographic data that is in the software.

• Logging into Outbound Engine on my phone is difficult because I can't save the login name and password. Being able to save it would be very helpful.
• Posting my new listings on social media would help if that's possible.
• Being informed of what you're posting on social media and when would also be helpful.

Incentivized

• Some trouble that we ran into with Viralheat was with the daylight savings time change. All the posts that we previously scheduled out before the daylight savings ended up coming out late an hour. I thought Viralheat should have fixed this on their end and should have reached out to their clients about the time change and to tell us if we needed to change anything on our end.
• I also want to see Pinterest and Instagram soon on Viralheat. I know this component is not entirely up to Viralheat, but seeing that Pinterest and Instagram are a big part of the social media game, I think scheduling out posts for both these platforms would benefit alot of community managers.

Incentivized

AS my business is beginning to change and with volatility in the market, I have to rely seriously on a budget. That and nearing retirement consideration has me more likely to opt out in the near future.

Incentivized

There are no other tools out there that offer an equivalent level of functionality for the cost. We continue to monitor the space to see if we can find a tool that includes paid digital marketing analytics, but all tools that include this functionality are 3-5x the cost. Viralheat continues to be the best value.

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 found it really easy to use and I use it on a daily basis and can easily find my way around. It has the usability of a consumer application for an Enterprise product that does very complex things in a very elegant manner.

I don't recall having any issues needing to contact OutboundEngine. I believe maybe I once emailed about an issue and got a quick response. I also believe I may have messaged through the app and gotten a response. To my knowledge, there has been nothing like app errors or outages.

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.

The customer success team clearly cares about how well we do. They are quick to get back to us and they always offer to jump on a screen share so we can understand and learn new features.

We were up and running within an hour.

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 selected Viralheat for a number of reasons but the biggest factors were because it had the lowest TCO (total cost of ownership) for the features available and the fact that we only had to purchase one tool. During the selection process we demoed with a handful of other SMM tools but realized that we would need to purchase two or more subscriptions if we wanted to get what Viralheat was offering in one.

• Outbound Engine keeps me top of mind by automatically sending articles to my database and posting to my facebook.
• I spend zero time researching and writing articles.
• I spend zero time taking great pictures.
• I spend zero time dealing with mailing lists.

Incentivized

• Viralheat has helped me understand how real-life users react to things I build and/or test.
• I’ve gotten a better understanding of my space and the relevant news surrounding it. This helps me build a better product.
• It saves me a lot of time. I’m able to quickly monitor what’s important to me.