Overall, it's just been a good experience. I had to learn this software at the same time as a handful of others related to my new responsibilities, and this was definitely the easiest to pick up on.

It didn't take long for me to learn how to use it, even without hands-on guidance. I primarily focus on a monthly campaign being sent to a massive group of clients, and I was able to refer to past ones created by my predecessor as a standard template. Designing is a very simple processes.

I didn't like the reporting at first, but, now that I better understand the information I being provided, it's better.

A few years ago, after consulting and then joining a growing small business, the president and I threw out Microsoft's Business Contact Manager and brought up ZohoCRM integrated with GoogleApps/Mail. The combination was a 'right-size' approach at the time, for many months. But as the customer database grew, the reporting needs and interest in integrating marketing automation intensified, we knew we needed to augment or replace the use of Vertical Response for outbound. Surveying the segment, I found and researched Eloqua, Marketo, and Act-On. As we were staffing limited, time was valuable, complex solutions were of no interest. We went with Act-On and have never looked back. The recent migration from moving from the ZohoCRM platform to Salesforce.com as the needs and demands grew has gone quite smoothly. I have seen the comments related to Salesforce by others and believe that for some who are not going to try to work towards automation, and for whom a solid Ecosystem of solutions from which to draw are not important, ZohoCRM can be an attractive solution. But, if a minimal level of usage sophistication begins to be applied, integration with other systems like Lead Management/Marketing Automation is important (and at this point, it should be for nearly any business with revenues over a few hundred $K a year) the Salesforce/Act-On combination has been killer-good,

Act-On is FAST to get running, whether using alone, or in conjunction with another platform like Salesforce. Answers, insight, follow up automation are all easily obtainable quickly without being sent to a week-long training seminar for $1500.

Act-On is still building out some capabilities that other players like Eloqua have had. But if you're just starting out, you're not likely to need those features for some time as you get your feet under you. A/O is best for small to mid-size firms.

Overall I would give Act-On a low pass. The issues with customer service, slightly overpriced and the lack of proper development plagued my experience. If I could go back, I would have used HubSpot or Marketo. At the moment, we have cancelled our Act-On account after 3-4 years and are using a stack of SaaS solutions tied into our practice management system. This is far more cost efficient, easy to use and with better customer service. My advice would be for businesses considering using Act-On due to the price of the above-mentioned competitors to use a stack approach instead of using this system. Using Vision6/Campaign Monitor/MailChimp in tandem with a better landing page provider (Unbounce, Instapage) linked to a CRM would be far better. Stay away, particulalry due to the service - this is even more important for Australian based consumers.

The system was pretty easy to use. The set-up process for lead nurturing, forms, creating newsletters and other tools were pretty useful.

Customer service, account limits, aesthetics were below average. The customer service was woeful, the original salesperson who on-boarded me and two referral partners promised the world features wise. Lots of nice looking mocks and promises were made yet nothing provided. On the customer service side of things, on two occasions when the unique contacts and email limit was exceeded the entire system shuts-down. All nurturing campaigns cease and there is no ability to send any emails at all. It took two weeks for someone to be able to apply a temporary increase to allow our marketing efforts to continue.

I was looking for an email tool that integrates with MS CRM and this product fits the bill. It allows you to drip campaigns, which is nice (albeit not intuitively). Just make sure you give yourself ample time for their assistance.

In the landscape of marketing automation systems, ACT-ON is not the most powerful solution, but it is not the most expensive. It works quite well for our needs.

I generally don't need a lot of support, but if I can't find a solution on their knowledge base, I have no choice but to call them directly. Ever since ACT-ON closed one of there offices a few months ago, it has been taking me an hour to get through on their support line. I had someone email in June and said they would get back to me very soon. After 6 weeks, I emailed them back and then received a response.

I like that it will track my emails and log them to our CRM (Microsoft Dynamics). I like that I can get a daily email letting me know of known and anonymous visitors to our website.

It's clunky to try and track down a specific email to see if the recipient has interacted with it. This is really a tool that is more valuable to marketing, but has built some features that are being sold as a sales tool. It's a nice to have, but not a need for sales.

The software interface is mostly drag and drop, which is helpful for non developers and non designers alike to create modern, effective emails. With automation and A?B testing, it is great for marketing research and drop or nurture campaigns. Each account is attached to a customer service representative, and they are very helpful and attentive.

The functionality compared to the price is a concern. While it can handle thousands of users, free automation softwares are offering more email design functionality than this software. The user interface isn't the most friendliest, with emails, landing pages, templates and content all divided up into multiple folders. The software boasts that it is custom HTML friendly, but it is very difficult to execute properly. The software also has issues formatting for Outlook.

The most beneficial aspect of Act-On for my team and me is the ease in which you can create attractive templates for emails, landing pages and forms.

I do not have any major dislikes as far as the software platform is concerned. There have at times been minor issues, but support always does a great job quickly rectifying the situation.

We can consistently track visitors and create drip campaigns all from the same platform in a matter of minutes.

Act-On's ability to track customers that visit the website and what pages they subsequently visit afterwards.

It would be nice if Act-On would develop a system to track a visitor using an incognito window or private browser.

Act-On is one of the more affordable marketing automation platforms and has great features.

Act-On gives our marketing teams the ability to send out email drip campaigns and monitor website visitors.

Act-On is a very in-depth software and takes quite a bit of time to understand and become familiar with.

The product just keeps getting better and better.

The Customer Service Team goes above and beyond.

There is an expression, "you don't know what you don't know." Act-On has been a great service for my clients for different reasons, but there is nothing that Act-On hasn't been able to solve for my clients. So nothing comes to mind.

I started out using Marketo years ago and while I was a power user and loved the depth of features, others in the company found it to be complex and most could use it for only the basics. I moved on to Pardot and I really liked it, and I even attended their user conference three years ago in Atlanta - which unfortunately, was when they pass along the news to customer that they have been acquired and would end up Salesforce's portfolio. Pardot was moved into their Sales Cloud (and ExactTarget went to the Marketing Cloud), and the result has been, other than some UI improvements, almost no innovation at all... and a major rise in costs, where it's extra for phone support, they charge for Salesforce Engage, they charge for Wave Analytics, etc. etc. Meanwhile, Act-On has been the steady player in the market that has continued to advance - and you see that in Forrester's Q4 2014 Wave report where Act-On moved to the upper, Leader quadrant ahead of Pardot and HubSpot (though, I'd say that HubSpot has always been more "Movement-First" versus "Product-First" where they invest more in their marketing then their marketing features, particularly with their focus on their CRM now). Act-On received a large round of investment money, brought in loads of new talent on the executive team and down, and continue to push out new features faster than others on the market. They were first to launch Account-based Marketing, their Social tools are very advanced (Forrester scored them higher than HubSpot for example), built Data Studio that allows us to push to our BI easily (Tableau), they overhauled all of their composers (email, landing page and forms), added dynamic content & personalization features, and added a unique way to create Program Templates that is awesome and now have a growing library of templates you can grab and use that build out all the nurture program steps for you automatically (including sales alerts, CRM campaign updates, basic or advanced if/then scenarios, etc.). I've always thought that price should not be a big driving factor for which tool to use. But, their Active Contacts model allows you to pay for what you use, versus the size of your database - and where Marketo and Pardot are adding more modules, Act-On includes everything in their Enterprise edition. And their Support is also fantastic. Don't be fooled. This is an advanced tool that medium and large companies are using.

Sincerely easier to use than others on the market, great overall feature set, love the dynamic content options, program templates were a game changer, account-based marketing provides visibility into how programs are doing at the Account-level that we haven't had.

The UI is slowly being overhauled but I'd like to see this go faster. Their out-of-box reports aren't great, but I haven't run across a marketing automation platform who has great reporting (I do like Marketo's Opportunity Analyzer report) and we use Data Studio to simply pull data out the way we want it to populate our reports in excel or Tableau

We needed a platform to help us segment and reach customers across many varied products lines, and this has helped. Adding in customer service analytics and social media mindshare, and we are pleased with what Act-On provides.

Ease of use is first and foremost. To create, segment and automate emails of value that will reach our varied customer base is key for us. The social media aspect of Act-On is also a valued feature that not only allows us to plan when our content is shared but what content hits at the right time. We don't use the scoring as much as most companies probably do, but our dive into behavioral analytics through Act-On is yielding great results as well.

Main dislike: More personalization for our sales force to view how their customers are responding. Dashboard is fine, for sure, but we'd love a better way for them to witness the contacts happening.

Our company has tried different Marketing vendors, and not every experience has been a pleasant one. This is why I can say with confidence that Act-On is the best Marketing Software that we have found. Not only do they deliver a great product, but the customer experience has been stellar from Day One. You can really feel they care about their customers and I especially love the fact that I am not treated like just a client number. It's always great to find a vendor that takes such great care of their clients. Our Product Management and Marketing Teams are definitely #TeamActOn! One of the things that Act-On does better is their Salesforce integration which works both ways, meaning that no matter where the lead information originates, it will synchronize correctly as it should, which was not the case with other software we tried. Act-On's out-of-the-box Webinar integration with GoToMeeting and WebEx simply works and there's no need to purchase or subscribe to additional "Apps" as was the case with other Marketing platforms. We really appreciate their service--it has helped our Marketing Team be more efficient and take our Marketing campaigns to the next level. Did I mention that our Sales Team loves seeing who's visiting our website? They even have their own Act-On Tab in Salesforce with leads in their territory based on Act-On's lead scoring. I feel that Act-On provides the best value from the marketing software that I've personally vetted. They recognize that sometimes you don't market to the same individuals all the time, which is why their pricing model is based on the number of active contacts you e-mail each month. Unlike other vendors, you are not locked into a 12-month or greater commitment contract. The contract is on a monthly basis and you can cancel at anytime--they truly earn our business on an ongoing basis. If I had to change anything, I would probably request for greater reporting capabilities when it comes to integrating our Google AdWords campaign, but it looks like they plan on rolling out some improvements in that area soon. Overall, Act-On is a great service and we plan on being a customer for many years to come.

Our target markets have become much more complicated as we've grown, and ActOn allows us to segment our campaigns to send the right message to the right audience - by geography, vertical, etc.

Syncing with SFDC is awesome. Easy to use - novices can pick it up quickly. Reporting is quite good and easy to understand. Love the continuous product improvements that are made.

WYSIWYG can drive you crazy, especially with formatting and fonts and hyperlinks, making it tedious to get the look you want. Lately it has been very slow to load, especially photos/graphics.

I like that I can build drip campaigns or send one-time emails. I also like using the send over time feature. I like the variety of options in how to customize email content.

The tool is clunky-not very user friendly. It takes too many clicks to get to the screen you want, whether it's changing a step in an automated program or checking email opens on a report. The reporting is very limited and makes my reporting process very manual because it doesn't provide what I need. Whenever I call customer service, there is at least a half an hour wait to get through. If I leave a voicemail, they do not call back. They email instead and provide very limited answers in the responses, so it takes multiple emails back and forth to get the information I need. The whole email process takes several days until my issue is resolved.