ion interactive pivots with a platform for marketing apps

SAN FRANCISCO, April 8, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Today at Marketo's Marketing Nation Summit, ion interactive, the leading cloud-based landing page platform, announced its pivot to focus on helping customers create "marketing apps." Marketing apps are the next wave of digital marketing, providing more compelling ways to engage prospects and customers in digital channels with wizards, contests, assessment tools, calculators, configurators, interactive white papers, and more.

Previously, such marketing apps had to be custom built by programmers in IT or contracted through an agency, which was expensive and time consuming. With ion interactive's revised platform, marketers can now quickly design and deploy their own tailored, responsive web marketing apps using a drag-and-drop creative studio — no programming required.

Apps Aren't Just For Mobile Anymore

Apps gained popularity with smartphones, as small software programs that provided consumers with interactive utilities and entertainment. But now, prospects and customers have come to expect more sophisticated, app-like experiences from companies at many other touchpoints on the web — without having to install more software on their phone.

Nowhere is the need for app-like experiences more pressing than in content marketing. Rather than deluging users with static content from white papers, blogs, and articles, ion interactive's customers turn that content into useful and engaging experiences. White papers become participatory learning apps, pricing spreadsheets become interactive calculators, a blog post on best practices becomes a step-by-step self-assessment tool, and a solutions brief becomes an online configurator.

"There is undeniable power in working within a SaaS platform like ion's to develop the app-like experiences our customers are seeking," said Ed Liebowitz, Director of Premium Services, Everyday Health. "From the beginning of our engagement with ion, our philosophy was to constantly push the envelope with the elements we incorporated into our digital funnels.  Not only were we able to build our Jillian Michaels' acquisition funnel as a flexible and stunning graphic-based experience, ion's new approach allows us to quickly scale the framework to the rest of our portfolio and iterate to optimize conversion."

Choose from Pre-Fab Marketing Apps or Build Your Own

The ion interactive marketing app platform is provided as software-as-a-service (SaaS) on the web. With a subscription, marketers receive access to a growing library of pre-fab marketing apps. Marketers can publish them as is by plugging in their own content. Or they can creatively extend and remix them to build their own original apps.

The platform's creative studio lets marketers design stunning responsive web pages and apply rules-based logic, multi-step flows, and animated behaviors to them to craft highly distinctive digital experiences. They can easily modify their apps, create different variations, and A/B test alternatives on their own, without programmers or other technical staff.

This pivot for ion interactive comes after years of pioneering landing pages and microsites in digital campaigns. "We noticed our lead users were increasingly pushing our software to build more advanced kinds of web experiences for their marketing campaigns," said Justin Talerico, ion interactive's co-founder and CEO. "They were innovating new ways of enticing prospects beyond the typical fill-out-form, download-an-asset approach that everyone else was doing. As we saw them double and triple their conversion rates with these new strategies, we realized they were on to something transformative. In response, we've shifted our focus to put such marketing apps within reach of many more marketers."

This new release of the ion interactive marketing app platform will be available to all subscribers this month.

About ion interactive

ion interactive is a marketing apps platform that generates leads and revenue with engaging, highly interactive, digital marketing experiences that can be created and tested without developers. ion interactive is used to differentiate brands, increase engagement and improve conversions in content marketing, social marketing, email marketing and advertising campaigns.

For more information, please visit ioninteractive.com

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SOURCE ion interactive