Customer.io vs. iContact Pro Select

This tool is well-suited for companies looking to run email marketing campaigns or send out newsletters regularly to their users/customers. The workflow setup is especially useful for companies who want to send specific emails based on user behavior - i.e. they've not logged in recently, have bought a specific product, haven't opened any emails, etc. This could also be useful for freelancers like me since you can create different workspaces within Customer.io. I have configured it this way to handle email marketing for a few of my clients, and the software keeps everything organized and separate. This might not be the best tool for small businesses, considering the price. It may be better to start out with a cheaper email marketing tool, and then if/when necessary, scale-up with a tool like Customer.io.

Vocus is well-suited for press release posting via Vocus’ PRWeb subsidiary. Vocus is also great for social media such as Facebook promotions e.g: sign-up pages, sweepstakes, and fan offers. However, I did not like that "buying signals” draws on Twitter only. Vocus was well-suited where user rights are organized around “profiles”, which might relate to a company, brand, or product line. This approach made sense for our small business. However, since users are either assigned to a profile or not, there does not appear to be finer divisions of rights for specific features

Incentivized

• Ease of use, a good tool for non programmers, or not so tech savvy people.
• Great support, willing to help a lot, by chat, calls, or screen sharing.
• Fast updates, it's a newer tool, but they are coming with fixes and updates fast.

Incentivized

• Ease and speed of getting out a PR release
• Getting started with creating a new activity is just a few clicks
• The ability to build a campaign and connect different emails, social media posts and PR releases in to one project with overall metrics.

• I may be missing it in the UI, but a place to see the list of emails who qualify for a certain email.
• One easy to view chart of all our automated/lifecycle emails to see what a given user would see over their customer journey. (This is really just a feature request/idea - the product itself is really awesome.)

Incentivized

• For the campaign management feature, provide a campaign diagram to better track campaigns.
• For the reporting and analysis feature, provide a scheduled report delivery option.
• Provide podcasts as another form of technical support.

Incentivized

Vocus works very well for a variety of business sizes. It is also well-suited for both mobile (iOS and Android) and PC platforms. These reports are comprehensive:

• Campaign Performance Reports
• Email Performance Reports
• Landing Page Performance Reports
• Web Analytics

In addition, they also offer great technical support and a lot of resources such as white papers, blog, and tips and hints

Incentivized

It is really difficult to leverage all the neat features without a developer. I actually think the base software could be really great for a small business if the price is right, but there are so many things you *can* do but have to know how to do them or have access to your website and the ability to code.

Incentivized

We used Autopilot in the past. It worked well but the integration wasn't very good, considering they only used cookies. We have a very complex system right now to be able to track every customer, and it was expensive but worth it. Autopilot worked very well when we were starting, but then it didn't track purchases, it wasn't easy to change a customer attribute, and so on (this was a few years ago, probably they have improved a lot). It was more visual and better to create huge workflows. . Mailchimp was the first program we used. It's very basic but good at what it does: sending a newsletter to your small database. It has integrated very well with other services and we haven't used in a lot of time, but certainly was grown a lot so it must be doing things fine. I also tried Active Campaign but it was almost the same as Autopilot.

Incentivized

I've used MailChimp before to generate emails and found Vocus to be a better option because it is an overall suite providing the tools to create customizable emails as well as many other features including press releases, social media etc. Vocus is an all-in-one platform for marketing which makes things more efficient for the user by being able to handle all marketing through one outlet.

Incentivized

• Helped increase our new user engagement with our cloud-based software
• Helped our sales team identify clients who had dropped off and stopped interacting with our software
• Helped our sales and customer service team track which clients were completing their full registration process
• Helped our marketing, sales, and customer service team identify key features and messaging with A/B testing for different campaigns

Incentivized

• Vocus has allowed us to increase and strengthen our customer interaction via social media.
• Vocus has allowed us to generate and track more leads.

Incentivized