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Ion, by Rock Content

Ion, by Rock Content

Overview

What is Ion, by Rock Content?

Ion is an enterprise-grade content experience platform that empowers modern marketers and designers to create no-code interactive content experiences integrated with their CRM or marketing automation tools. Ion helps enterprises to build brand awareness and increase conversions and lead generation…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Ion Interactive is a versatile platform that offers numerous use cases for businesses and marketing departments. Users have found that the …
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An absolute must!

10 out of 10
July 26, 2021
ion interactive may be the most underrated marketing tool in existence. If you run an online business, you owe it to yourself to use this …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 12 features
  • Embedded CTAs (108)
    10.0
    100%
  • Forms / Gated content (107)
    10.0
    100%
  • Content performance analytics (116)
    10.0
    100%
  • Campaign optimization dashboard (107)
    10.0
    100%
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Pricing

View all pricing

Managed Services + SaaS

Custom

Cloud
per year

Entry-level set up fee?

  • $5,500 per customer
    Optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://ion.rockcontent.com/platform/pr…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Features

Content Creation

Features related to the creation of content for marketing purposes.

7.5
Avg 8.1

Content Publishing

Features related to the organization and distribution of marketing content.

8.7
Avg 8.1

Content Reporting & Analytics

Features related to tracking, measuring, and analyzing content creation processes and content performance.

8.5
Avg 7.8
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Product Details

What is Ion, by Rock Content?

Ion is an enterprise-grade content experience platform that empowers modern marketers and designers to create no-code interactive content experiences integrated with their CRM or marketing automation tools. Ion helps enterprises to build brand awareness and increase conversions and lead generation enriching their contact database with declared, high intent data. Ion helps brands launch quizzes, ROI calculators, assessments, interactive infographics, and other interactive formats in just a few hours.

Marketers can start from a blank canvas, use fully-responsive Quick Start templates, or leverage Rock Content's professional services team to plan, create, and launch their own branded content experiences.

Interactive content increases brand awareness by encouraging users to actively engage with the content. Each engagement provides insights into audience behavior by collecting rich, first-party data from interactions and effectively driving users through the buyer journey.

CONTENT FORMATS

• Assessments
• Calculators
• Interactive White Papers
• Landing Pages & Microsites
• Lookbooks & Tours
• Interactive eBooks
• Interactive Infographics
• Solution Finders
• Resource Libraries
• Configurators
• Quizzes
• Fully Responsive Quick Start Templates

Ion, by Rock Content Features

Content Creation Features

  • Supported: Ideation
  • Supported: Content collaboration

Content Publishing Features

  • Supported: Content hub
  • Supported: Forms / Gated content
  • Supported: Embedded CTAs
  • Supported: Content distribution
  • Supported: Content promotion
  • Supported: Content automation

Content Reporting & Analytics Features

  • Supported: Audience profiling and targeting
  • Supported: Closed-loop tracking and reporting
  • Supported: Content performance analytics
  • Supported: Campaign optimization dashboard
  • Supported: Page-level engagement analytics

Additional Features

  • Supported: A/B Testing

Ion, by Rock Content Screenshots

Screenshot of ion empowers your other marketing technologies to deliver higher fidelity, data-driven scoring, targeting, segmentation and personalization.Screenshot of The types of interactive experiences the ion platform can create is near-endless. These are the most common types used by our customers: Assessments, Calculators, eBooks, Interactive Infographics, Interactive White Papers, Landing Pages, Lookbooks, Quizzes, Resource Library, Solution Finder.Screenshot of See what our customers are saying about our platform and services!Screenshot of Starting at $2,000 per month, you get an unlimited, scalable interactive content platform with our full feature set. Including: Unlimited experiences, unlimited use of Quick Starts, Unlimited Seats/Users, Unlimited A/B/n Testing, Unlimited Sell-Side Experiences, Unlimited Phone, email & chat support, unlimited analytics... PLUS a FREE custom-branded theme that can be applied to all of your experiences.Screenshot of You have the option to start from a template or entirely from scratch. Our Quick Start template library includes more than 100 fully tested, responsive and flexible interactive experiences you can brand, customize and launch.Screenshot of ion is the only interactive content platform that provides the scalable foundation to grow from one interactive experience to one thousand interactive experiences. With ion, interactive content development complexity, long timelines, high costs and maintenance problems are replaced with freedom and agility.Screenshot of ion provides a full range of services to expand your bandwidth and get you the results you need without blowing your budget, calendar or hours in the day. Our award-winning work takes full advantage of our platform and experience.Screenshot of ion interactive enables digital marketers to generate real business results from their content. Using ion's agile, developer-free platform and services programs, hundreds of leading brands generate, qualify and deeply profile more leads with interactive content. Data-driven experiences like calculators, assessments, report cards, quizzes, interactive infographics, lookbooks, interactive white papers, configurators and more — are all created, launched and tested without development resources.

Ion, by Rock Content Video

Overview of Ion's Interactive Content Marketing Platform

Ion, by Rock Content Competitors

Ion, by Rock Content Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported LanguagesEnglish

Frequently Asked Questions

SnapApp (discontinued), Ceros Studio, and Zoomforth are common alternatives for Ion, by Rock Content.

Reviewers rate Ideation and Content hub and Forms / Gated content highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Ion, by Rock Content are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).

Ion, by Rock Content Customer Size Distribution

Consumers0%
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)0%
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees)40%
Enterprises (more than 500 employees)60%
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(210)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Ion Interactive is a versatile platform that offers numerous use cases for businesses and marketing departments. Users have found that the software simplifies the process of creating landing pages, allowing them to rapidly prototype and deploy pages for multiple domains and marketing campaigns. With Ion Interactive, companies can easily create interactive content such as calculators, quizzes, and informational tours to engage online audiences. The software's reporting and analytics capabilities also enable users to keep all their data in one place, facilitating in-depth analysis and optimization of landing pages. Additionally, Ion Interactive's API connections with ESPs and CRMs allow for seamless integration, while its data collection capabilities provide exhaustive insights for informed decision-making. This robust program has proven particularly useful for small teams that lack the resources to create interactive websites from scratch. Overall, Ion Interactive serves as an efficient solution for creating engaging landing pages, enhancing lead generation efforts, and driving sales conversions.

Versatile Customization: Users have praised Ion Interactive for its versatility in customization and flexibility. Many reviewers mentioned that they appreciate the ability to create forms for landing pages and easily connect to APIs, allowing them to tailor their interactive content according to their specific needs.

Easy-to-Use Interface: Reviewers frequently mention that Ion Interactive is quick and easy to use. They highlight features like creating custom thank you pages for campaigns and showing different content based on parameters as being intuitive and effortless. This user-friendly interface helps streamline the content creation process.

Responsive Customer Support: Ion Interactive's customer support has received positive feedback from users. Several reviewers have mentioned that the support team provided expert assistance whenever they had a question or needed help navigating the system. The availability of additional resources such as a help suite and videos further contribute to an overall positive experience with customer support.

Outdated User Interface: Some users have expressed that Ion's user interface is outdated and does not meet the latest web standards, leading to a less than optimal user experience.

Lack of Undo Button: Multiple users have mentioned that the software lacks an undo button in several areas, making it difficult for them to revert changes or fix mistakes. This has caused frustration and inconvenience when working on projects.

Steep Learning Curve: Several users have found Ion to have a steep learning curve, requiring practice and training to fully understand and utilize its features. This has made it challenging for new users to get up to speed quickly and efficiently.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-21 of 21)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Ion Interactive to create personalized, interactive landing pages for marketing and demand generation. Since adopting ion, we have seen greater engagements and conversions.
  • Creating a more personalized, interactive experience for our prospects and clients
  • Helps make our content a lot more digestible and fun to read
  • Higher engagements and conversions
  • The UI makes it extremely difficult to navigate the platform.
  • No real version control option in place - if you want to make changes but need to keep older versions, I'd suggest users to clone the page and make the changes on the cloned page.
  • ion's training program only takes you so far - to become a better, more comfortable user, you need to go in and create some test pages from scratch.
ion is great for teams big and small, but because there are so many different ways you can personalize a landing page, you need time or possibly outsource design help if you do not have the bandwidth to set it up yourself.
Natalia Ransom | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
ION Interactive was used at a company I worked for about a year ago. It was used to build interactive experiences for a number of different clients. It was utilized by the Creative Marketing department but the experiences were built for company-wide use.
  • Consistent visuals based on style guides and templates.
  • No need to involve developers.
  • Someone without a dev background can develop the interactive experience.
  • Steep learning curve.
  • Limited to what is available through templates.
  • Time consuming to create wire frames and low fidelity prototypes.
I would recommend it if there is a dedicated person on a team who can devote enough time to learn ION and stay focused on it being their primary responsibility. Implementation doesn't require a developer, but a dedicated person would suit best.
Jonathan Hodak | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I have used Ion Interactive LiveBall in 3 different companies, all with slightly different implementations. But in the end, LiveBall excels at rapidly creating landing pages with highly dynamic content and flexibility. It is a very unique platform for creating landing pages that honestly I have yet to see another platform that can be used to create content like you can on LiveBall as quickly or easily. So all of the companies that I have worked with used LiveBall to rapidly prototype and deploy landing pages for multiple domains, multiple marketing campaigns, for reporting and analytics of those campaigns, and to keep it all in one spot.
  • Ion Interactive allows you to rapidly prototype landing pages for multiple domains and keep your marketing campaigns organized.
  • This tool allows for a lot of customization and flexibility. You can create forms for your landing pages. And do you need to connect to an API? Yep it is quick and easy. Do you need to have the submitted forms email to someone in your company? No problem. Do you need to create custom thank you pages for your campaign? It does that too. Do you need your landing page to show different content to different users based on different parameters? Once you get the hang of it, this is a breeze. Do you need to do all of these things together? It does that quickly and easily too.
  • Do you want to code sets of templates that can be re-used with just minor tweaks? This platform can take a very basic base template, and allow you to rapidly edit this template (think child themes), to be customized for each campaign and then be re-used whenever necessary.
  • The learning curve in Ion Interactive is a bit tough for some people. The support team is great and whether you are a developer or a marketer and wanting to use this platform, they will have several one on one sessions with you to get you in and get you moving. However the learning curve is a bit tough since this does work quite differently than most web platforms.
  • If you do not have a developer to create your custom themes and custom frameworks, the graphic user interface is good, but with any non-custom solution, sometimes it can limit things a little bit.
If your company has multiple domains, tons of marketing campaigns, and the desire to have highly customized content, then it is probably a very good choice. Also if your company needs for landing pages to be extremely flexible in how they function and utilize dynamic content, then this tool is definitely a strong candidate.

If you simply want to build a website, this tool really is not for that. This tool is a bit expensive, they market this only to enterprise clients for a reason!
Krista Suchy Lohse, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use ion to support a client's digital media strategy. ion has the most robust tool as compared to the providers I vetted and great customer service that I have not found anywhere else.
  • Customer service support is technically minded and answers questions immediately
  • The Interactive content allows for a unique page experience I did not find with other drag and drop providers
  • Training and support articles are vast and helpful
  • The tool definitely has a learning curve but once you get the hang of it it's very easy to use
  • The custom build fee is one standard fee, it is not based on the level of effort or time put behind the build
  • I was surprised to find out there is a $250 fee for SSL certificate integration, this is high for the effort needed
  • There is no undo button, I tend to save versions of a page when I feel it's in a decent place so I don't lose time in page build
We use ion to support digital media and it suits our needs perfectly. We can dynamically show content to certain groups of people to give a personalized experience. The landing pages can get tedious designing for individual screen sizes but I know the effort makes the landing pages look more professional than if we had gone another route.
April 06, 2018

ION Interactive

Hattie Holm | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our team manages and builds landing pages for our clients. Through ION, we execute A/B tests to gather learnings and optimize the landing page experience for our clients' visitors. We have constructed platform recommendations and competitive reviews, and have utilized ION for more than 5 years.
  • ION's customer support is superb. They always respond promptly and actually jump into the creative to help understand what's going on and recommend solutions. They're extremely knowledgeable in the platform.
  • Desktop and mobile setup are not responsive, so you can't forget to build out both version of pages. This can get frustrating at times, as some content may appear in different places than desktop.
  • There is no undo button, so you better get used to copying your creatives! There have been many times where we accidentally deleted the wrong item on the page and had to rebuild everything from scratch. There are rare instances where the page allows you to undo your most recent action, but there is no pattern with that appearing.
If you have complex landing pages that you want to redesign, manage, test, etc., this is a great platform to use. There are numerous functionalities with this platform - some that you learn from interacting with the support team. No matter what scenario you are going after, the customer service will top any other platform that you are considering.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Our marketing department uses Ion to generate interactive landing pages for email campaigns that we launch. With its robust page-building platform and great customer support team, the possibilities for customization are almost endless! Form building is quick and easy; I love being able to just create whatever we need, as we need it. And the option to tag interactive elements on the page is very helpful in figuring out what content viewers are drawn to, helping us better plan our future landing pages.
  • The Ion Interactive platform enables you to do pretty much anything you set your mind to. The Creative Studio is robust with built-in features that make building and customizing your landing page easy. There's always free resources on the internet that can help you build pages like this, but all of them have paled in comparison when it comes to the ability to customize and ease-of-use.
  • Learning such a robust platform can be hard. However, the support resources offered at Ion Interactive are top-notch. From their built-in Ion-University training courses to the helpful and friendly chat support staff, we've always had access to the expertise to figure out the best ways to accomplish what we set out to do. This is a breath of fresh air after working with some other web-building platforms and marketing automation systems.
  • Communication with Ion has always been really easy. They're quick to respond to questions and concerns, and maintain a level of professional accountability that you don't always find with tech support staff.
  • If there was a way to have an "undo" key when building these interactive experiences, that would be awesome... However, I recognize that isn't how these work.
Ion is great if you're looking for highly customized, interactive content--for landing pages that are ultimately about informing and engaging the customer. And it goes beyond just form-fill landing pages. They offer quizzes, polls, and other interactive templates as well. It's great for beginners because of the strong support staff. And good for experienced content developers as well, just because there's room for so much more once you add in coding and javascript options.

If you're only looking for flat, basic landing pages, Ion Interactive will work, but it's a costly platform if you're just going to under-utilize it.
Linet Menachery | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Ion Interactive to develop our landing pages.
  • Great for A/B and multivariate testing
  • Excellent customer support
  • Great for developing interactive content
  • There is a learning curve for new developers when using the system for the first time
Customer support is incredibly helpful and reliable.
Tim Gonzalez-Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use ion interactive to extend our media optimization strategies, ensuring our clients' investments are working from pre-click to conversion confirmation. ion interactive allows us to work smart: nimble, fluid, and forward-thinking. We've launched thousands of landing experiences and helped increased client revenues by the millions. Some prospects have issues with the proxy set up, others aren't always willing to add more tags to their sites, but none of them ever complained once we've got things going.
  • Lookup tables and server-scriptlets let us create hundreds of dynamic local pages from a single template. This allows us to optimize performance in one place and positively affect all of the locales.
  • ion interactive has worked overtime to keep the technology fresh and have managed to sustain a quality user experience throughout all the evolution. Being able to offer out of the box experiences that are flashy, light-weight and totally customizable helps our speed to market positioning and makes our overall creative approach that much more efficient.
  • The lack of a decent mobile interface has been an issue. Sometimes we have client issues or data worries that can't be solved from a hand-held.
  • There have been some extra cool features in the platform that, as power users, we've uncovered in a variety of ways. We aren't creative-less WYSIWYG users and it can be a burden to dig and dig for something that isn't openly documented when trying advanced integrations or the like.
We've never been able to integrate ion interactive in a capacity to really affect the lower ends of the funnel. In many cases, we'd prefer to start optimizing e-commerce experiences at the end of the funnel and follow the money back up to the top. We use different partners for that type of work, leaving ion interactive for top of the funnel, high-level optimizations.
Jessica Hill | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have begun using ION Interactive to create digital experiences including calculators, quizes, and informational tours for our online audience. Prior to ION this type of content was created through the use of Flash and other animation/web design software that required a large time commitment from staff and was not easily changed on the fly to comply with market or regulatory changes. ION has greatly streamlined this process allowing us to create richer and more relevant content while keeping pace with industry changes.
  • ION's templates have provided us with great jumping off points for our content. We can easily look at the examples and see how our existing content, both digital and print, can be created or enhanced through the presentation offered by ION.
  • ION's customer support has been stellar. The support team has helped us learn the system faster and create pieces that would have been difficult if not for their assistance and prompt responses.
  • During the on-boarding process ION's staff created a custom theme and color pallet incorporating our branding that we can easily apply to any of the templates already in the system again reducing the time required for us to begin utilizing the tool and creating valuable content.
  • Some of the functionality we would like to see in ION's system is only available in a rudimentary form or requires more indepth and customized coding efforts. Specifically the ability to perform complex equations and calculations which incorporate many data points behind the scenes while keeping the visitor facing interface as simple as possible.
  • It would be nice to have the training and online support materials available as online articles with step-by-step instructions and visual examples in addition to video tutorials which can be difficult to watch while actively working on a project.
  • Providing quick reference sheets for the built in micro-themes would be quite valuable.
ion interactive (ION) is well suited to creating content that needs to be timely and easily edited to respond to market changes keeping in mind the fact that it will be hosted through ION's systems. However, if content is core to your business and planned to be used for long term marketing I would recommend it be created using tools that allow you to host it within a company's own systems and not through a third party.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Ion interactive is being used by my department to create interactive content for corporate blogs. It addresses the need for an easy to use interactive content creator. This includes making content such as quizzes and interactive infographics. We're currently using this exclusively for our department. It also has potential to be used for tracking and optimizing user journey. This is something I'm very interested in.
  • Ion has a very enthusiastic and helpful support staff. This is helpful because there is nothing worse than losing time on a project because you had to wait for tech support to answer a question.
  • Ion has a vast library of videos and textual guides for using it's many content creation platforms. Again, learning the software is made easy if you want to go at your own pace with the library of guides.
  • Ion offers a robust array of options for creating content. This includes e-books, infographics, animated infographics and quizzes.
  • There is always room to improve the learning curve of the product. There could be more video tutorials and detailed guides.
  • Some of the interfacing is a little confusing at times. It's a little difficult to go from an Adobe program like Indesign to Ion.
  • I'd prefer it if we could keep the content that we produce after we cancel the subscription.
Ion interactive is great for monitoring customer interaction and user journey experience across a content marketing campaign. It offers a robust amount of features, comparable to Adobe Marketing Cloud. It also boasts some simple web design options to help make minor optimizations to web pages. I'm still on the fence about how it's design capabilities compare to Adobe products. There's still a learning curve to Ion's CAD programs. I'm on the fence about whether it's worth learning CAD programs or investing time in something that isn't Adobe.
October 24, 2016

iOn review

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
ion interactive is being used as a branding tool for our online interactive content within the marketing department. The main issue we come across which ion interactive helps to solve is branding and consistency.
  • Fantastic support staff when facing difficulties learning how to use ion for the first time.
  • Very intuitive and relatively easy system to use for beginners through to more experienced users.
  • Very easy to embed onto company website. And great help from the beginning in keeping within brand.
  • Step by step written guides on how to use easy quick starts.
  • More accessibility to support staff - however I am based in UK which makes it harder.
Where I have struggled with certain aspects, when possible, the training staff have been extremely helpful and supportive all the way.
September 22, 2016

Make ION Your Best Friend

Bill Johnson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our company has used ION across multiple business units. Thanks to the testing capabilities it provides, we have been able to build and refine our landing pages so that they incorporate the most effective design for generating conversions. We did not have that kind of agility when we were relying on our in-house web team, due to limited bandwidth. ION solved that problem for us.
  • ION's interface is very intuitive. Non-technical users can use it with ease to build webpages.
  • The ION platform is great for both A/B and multivariate testing, as it has the ability to split traffic from one url between multiple creatives.
  • The ION platform has a number of built-in widgets for almost any need.
  • Newer users are often daunted by the fact that a change to a page goes live as soon as it is made. If there were a "save" function, that would improve the product.
  • Platform navigation could be a little more intuitive.
  • Setting up a traffic source can be confusing to newer users.
The ION platform is probably best suited for simple product pages, and in environments where a lot of A/B testing is conducted. This is probably not a platform for a team of experienced web developers in environments where web pages require a lot of complex coding.
Eric Gradberg | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We actually are still figuring out how to implement ion interactive in our marketing channels. The program is robust (even if a little more complex than advertised), but the potential is there. There is a steep learning curve to this program but ion interactive offers plenty of recorded and live training.
  • Lots of options. Plenty of room for the creative marketer to find creative uses for the program.
  • Plenty of support.
  • The availability of templates is both a blessing to getting up and running quickly and a curse as it could stifle out-of-the-box thinking.
  • Training staff tends to go through features a mile a minute leaving new users in the dust.
  • Far more complex of a system than was advertised in the sale.
Customer interactive scenarios are well suited for ion interactive. I am not sold on its B2B potential.
Matthew Lloyd | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We're looking to use Ion across marketing and content to expand our interactive content and allow us to do the work on our own without needing a developer and the time and money that comes from that. We wanted an easy to use platform that could be used quickly to build out quizzes, interactive guides and several other pieces of content.
  • Love the idea and possibilities with the themes
  • Easy to place pixels for remarketing
  • Great professional looking feel
  • The learning curve
  • Initial builds look like they'll take a while, but get easier once done
  • Lots of little things to remember
If you're looking to create interactive content and have your marketing or content team be the ones to do this, it's a great product for you. Also the easy sync with Marketo and Salesforce are great. If you've got a full set of devs that can build these out for you quickly, it may not be for you.
Aneliya Georgieva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use ION interactive across the whole organization - from landing pages and micro sites to embedding a short form on our public site. We use it to create landing pages with registration for events as well.
  • I love the support from our account manager. He responds quickly and is extremely helpful. It is extremely rare for a SAAS company to have the same account manager for 4 years.
  • ION is great for interactive content creation. You do not need to be a designer to create elaborate and beautiful experiences.
  • I love the speed to market. That's why we chose ION over our internal IT. I can create and launch new landing pages on the fly, run A/B, MVT tests without having to submit any project requests to IT and wait for approval and estimate of hours and cost involved.
  • I love the fact that they constantly innovate and improve. Learning is a big factor for me and they stay on top with current trends and tricks of the trade. They do a great job with their webinars and tutorials.
  • One feature I wish to see is a change log. It is good to be able to know who made what change and at what time when you have multiple users in the platform.
  • There is a learning curve to it. Don't expect to know everything in the first week of use. You have to learn through practice.
  • One feature they lack is being able to have short forms where people can upload pictures. You can have forms collect customer data, but no images.
ION is great for organizations that need a speedy and creative delivery of landing pages and micro sites. If you are thinking of using ION to build your website, then it really is not designed to serve that purpose.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Before ION we developed interactive content by hand, this took time and money. ION has assisted us in decreasing development time for interactive content, effectively increasing our ROI on projects that include interactive content. This tool is primarily used by our Creative and Technology Departments. As an agency, ION is great for multi-client/multi-project scenarios. With the use of themes and micro-themes, we are able to quickly create a thoroughly engaging content piece that stays on-brand quickly, and efficiently.
  • Staying on-brand with ION Themes.
  • Quick, efficient builds with very modular styles.
  • Great UI, easy to use and really takes the coding out of developing.
  • Mobile. There is a lot of showing/hiding entire sections to make things work right on mobile.
  • Sometimes inserting a new element can be tricky. It'd be nice if we could drag a new element from the palette directly into the "List" view.
  • Undo only allows you to go back a single change. A real undo would be nice, possibly with CTRL/CMD+Z as a keyboard shortcut.
  • Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, those would be an incredible addition.
ion interactive (ION) is great in almost every scenario. I actually do not see a use case for not using ION when creating interactive content.
January 29, 2016

ion interactive review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We (the SEM part of our company's Marketing Department) were looking for a web page creation tool that would allow us to bypass developers in order for us to be able to make the pages ourselves without waiting for developers to have the time to dedicate to helping us. Ion interactive was able to provide us with a comprehensive "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) option that made our page creation efforts much more nimble and effective.
  • We really liked the drag and drop capabilities.
  • We also liked having access to the HTML coding so we could manually make more specific changes to the look and feel of our pages.
  • We also liked being able to use the custom templates feature.
  • We would have liked for it to be a little easier to duplicate pages.
  • We also wish ion interactive would have given us a larger number of tracking capabilities to choose from.
As a newer member of the SEM part of our Marketing Department, ion interactive was a very easy tool to learn quickly, thus decreasing my overall learning curve. Without any prior knowledge or experience in web development or landing page creation, I was able to confidently come in and start making changes and updates with little assistance.
Brina Kaiser | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use ion interactive to speed up delivery of creative assets by enabling a much wider array of personnel to create, edit and publish landing pages (primarily). Most users are in our marketing org, with a few on our people team (e.g. internal comm). The primary problem solved for is limited creative team resources. With ion interactive our creatives can focus on creating templates and layouts that look great and that other users can edit as they make (frequent) changes based on their own initiatives and stakeholder input.
  • I have confidence that creative assets produced using ion interactive look beautiful because I can preview them on every size device (desktop, tablet, smart phone, etc.).
  • Editing is incredibly quick - an intuitive double click on a text box, image, headline or other item instantly opens it up so I can edit or replace the content.
  • My live content is protected from accidental, post-launch changes. Once it's live and attached to a published URL (traffic source), no one can edit it without purposely unpublishing the page.
  • The learning curve is steep. With such a robust platform there are understandably lots of features, but discovering them is not intuitive. Simply figuring out how to add a new button CTA or image to a page was exceedingly difficult. I dream of a simpler true drag and drop interface.
  • We have a standard set of tracking scripts we want to run on each page. Having to individually select each one slows down the publishing process.
  • Getting instruction on how to add a particular element is not easy. If my in-org expert isn't in the office on a particular day I'm probably stuck until he gets back because self help resources are difficult to find, navigate and consume. I'm a researcher who really digs for info so I can do it myself, but even with that internal drive it's been challenging to boost my expertise.
Ion Interactive is perfect for maximizing your asset output and quickly seeing analytics on any published asset. If you're in a fast paced environment that leverages lots of hands to produce rapid results with a high level of trust, it's incredibly valuable. If you have a much more regimented marketing org with creative production locked down, it's more difficult for me to see this speeding up production for a few employees who are already experts.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My department uses the ion interactive platform to design and build landing pages for a client organization. The landing pages are created in conjunction with direct marketing campaigns to drive customer sales, and are seen by people all over the country.
  • ion interactive has a clean and organized interface. The ability to create and organize multiple campaigns is also very important due to the high volume of ion interactive landing pages my department produces.
  • The tools for creating ion interactive landing pages (and microsites) are very powerful. There is a bit of a learning curve involved when starting to use the platform, but once you know the basics it's easy to create interactive and advanced pages.
  • ion interactive includes the ability to create urls for multiple traffic sources, so clients can know where the customers are being driven to the landing pages from.
  • Variables can be set up while creating a landing page, but as of now there is no way to connect to an external database or data extension.
  • Some of the steps when setting up and creating pages are confusing and have too many steps. There is no quick navigating around ion interactive. The interface on some pages, such as when setting up multiple traffic sources, could be greatly improved.
  • The system can be very slow, or even completely unresponsive at times.
With the way my client organization is structured, ion interactive is a very important and essential tool. There are certainly ways that ion interactive could be better utilized in marketing campaigns, but it will always be necessary.
Nancy Martineau | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our marketing department uses ion interactive exclusively for all of our landing pages that are used by our email lead generation tool. Our website is not responsive so ion's pages are great and the easy interface allows us to create nicely designed mobile landing pages.
  • Interface is very intuitive and easy to understand both designers and non-designers alike can use.
  • Great customer service any time we have a question it is immediately answered and we just keep learning more about the platform.
  • Interesting and informative trainings/webinars that keep you abreast of new initiatives.
  • The analytics leave something to be desired, I would like to see more in depth tracking and connection to Google Analytics.
  • The interface is great perhaps more tutorials for advanced users.
ion interactive is well suited for interactive white papers and infographics - this feature is fantastic. I do not think this should be used as a full on website but more of a microsite - not that you portrayed yourselves that way.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using ion interactive to provide our prospects and existing customers with a better user experience, and to convey our visual and verbal brand identity in a better, more up-to-date fashion. I have created ion experiences for many divisions at our company, as we have six different sales departments that are each unique and have different brand messaging parameters. In addition, I have created a number of institutional landing pages, new business presentations, email landing pages, and online customer surveys. While each of these ion experiences has a specialized target audience, they work together to build our brand. Prior to using ion interactive, we had to design custom CSS pages on our website and use several third-party resources to create the multitude of web-based marketing initiatives that we needed. Now, we are able to create everything that we want with one platform: ion Interactive. This streamlines my workflow and keeps everything consistent in terms of look and feel.
  • Excellent technology for custom-branded landing pages. Our ion representative and creative contact set up our account so that one click is all that is needed to add our company’s branding colors, logo, fonts, etc. All of this populates instantly on the ion experiences I build.
  • Ahead of the curve designs and functionality. The ion interactive templates and functionality are leading edge and at the forefront of today’s design standards. One thing I have noticed during my first year of using ion Interactive is how they consistently add new themes and updates. This is great because browsers, pixel settings, and mobile device viewing modes are often changing.
  • Responsive designs that work! The ion Interactive templates have a really cool option when it comes to setting them up. I am able to customize the on-screen content for desktop computers, tablets and mobile phones. This is a huge benefit because we want less text on our mobile ion Interactive pages.
  • The ion Interactive platform is so comprehensive and involved, it can be difficult to master at the start. It took me a few weeks to fully grasp the easy and intermediate templates, and I am still learning the advanced templates. However, once you finish an ion Interactive template, you will see that is well worth the time and effort (to learn).
  • We use a leading email automation application and incorporated it into our ion campaigns, but it was hard to set up at first. Maybe they will simplify this process in the future.
  • When I am working on the more involved ion Interactive experiences, I sometimes need to contact David, who is always willing to help and promptly assists me via email with great feedback and assistance. If ion continues to grow and acquire new clients, maybe they can add a live online chat function for paid customers only.
I think ion Interactive is naturally well suited for companies of all sizes that need to take their online marketing efforts to the next level. It will require an employee with some knowledge of website design and form integration to ensure that each ion Interactive experience is set up properly. However, you can also contract with ion Interactive to have them build any template or experience for your company. We haven’t gone this route because I have the time to create them myself. In my humble opinion, ion Interactive would not be a good fit for a company that is not forward thinking, or that will not use the platform on a consistent basis. In addition, it would not benefit a company that has an outdated website, as the leading-edge and high tech look and feel of ion Interactive might confuse website users.
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