A strategic tool to build successful marketing campaigns

Having a marketing automation tool such as Act-on is a really benefit to run successful marketing campaign. When we started using Act-On, we realized we were not as organized as we thought we were; It kind of "forced" us (in a positive way) to rethink our campaigns, how we built them and what we expected from them. We were able for the first time to really segment and target our audience. We saw a significant increase in our opening and click rates, we could trigger more interest by sending relevant content to our audience, and this led us to more qualified and interested leads. This tool allowed us to track our audience and create reports on our tasks and projects such as events, webinars, digital campaign (including google adwords, social media posts, emails, website, landing pages). It is a must-have in our marketing tech-stack. We would advise to really define your needs and do some benchmark; Act-On is a great tool to build segmentation, automated programs, nurturing programs and it can be integrated with many other tools, to create a great and efficient tech stack. It definitely is a tool worth having, but it requires to know where you want to go and what you want to achieve. It took us a few months before understanding and mastering most of what you can do within the platform, and we’re still learning. So be persistent and don’t be afraid to “play with” and test the tool, it’s totally worth it.

Pros

Act-On’s automation platform is intuitive, I like the way the menu is built, it’s been made in a logical order so that when you move from one section to another, you go down the logical path to build automation.
The support team is great, they’re efficient and patient ! There are many ways to find answers and tips; the Act-On community, the Act-On university, the online training courses, the webinars, everything is made for us to easily learn and efficiently use the platform.

Cons

Sometimes it takes us quite some times to do some simple tasks, for example when editing a step in an automated program, we have to wait a few seconds for the system to record what we edited and allow us to move to the next step. When there are many steps, it can become frustrating. Another example is when editing an image using Act-On editor, it can time many minutes before we can see the changes on the image where it’s being used (in emails, landing page, etc). These delays can be a bit frustrating when you are working on a template and you can’t finish it because some of the assets are still being processed by the system.
The marketing calendar is a bit confusing sometimes, I see messages that have not been sent marked as sent, and we can only have a month view unless we export the details.

One of the Best Marketing Automation Programs I've Ever Used

My sales and marketing team had so many benefits from this software. The marketing and data analysts had high-level, quality reports that were as detailed or as broad as they wanted. The sales team had live information about their hottest leads and could rely on the lead-generation process to do things automatically. They didn't have to worry about information not being part of the CRM from Marketing because the integration made that seamless. Truly a great program and I didn't even have enough characters to talk about all of the other features too!

Pros

I liked everything about this software! It was truly an all-in-one deal. First of all, it integrated with our CRM (we used SugarCRM). The features related to this integration were: lead generation from our web forms, lead generation from our email campaigns, lead generation based on user action. It also pulled information in from our CRM, so any lead lists we created in our CRM (manually or automatically based on file status, etc) could be pulled into ActOn for campaigns.

Next, it integrated with our website - it also has the ability to design your own website within ActOn that allows for even more neat features. It tracked users across emails & webpages and the reports allowed us to drill down to specific geographical areas of activity, key words used, which pages they were on and for how long, etc. It also gave a numerical value (that you can custom set) to each action and at a certain point could put that contact into a sales cycle or send an alert to the sales team to reach out to them.
Lastly, the automated marketing feature was THE BEST. You have the ability to design a multi-faceted campaign that could run for a set amount of time, or indefinitely. What I found to be the cherry on top was that you could set actions for contacts who didn't do certain things (didn't click, didn't open, etc) and then repeat steps or put them into different tracks.
As huge as this program seems, it was also incredibly easy to navigate. Saved our teams a lot of time and energy.

Cons

The most challenging features were the design elements. It was very template based and it took some CSS or HTML skills to make them less-standard. This was true for everything - emails, web pages, landing pages, etc.

Invaluable Marketing Asset

Pros

Act-On is a robust, yet easy-to-use solution that combines multiple marketing applications into one. It has been a workhorse for us. While it can serve more than a dozen vital functions, including social media management and ABM, I most appreciate its integration with our CRM system (Microsoft Dynamics 365) and how it can be used to automate nurture programs, score leads based on behavior/engagement, and monitor web site visitor activity. I’m also very impressed by members of the tech support team who are very patient and have bailed us out of an after hours pinch more than once.

Cons

Keeping up with the constant evolution of Act-On is a full-time job. I often feel like we’re 5 steps behind in understanding newly released features and everything it can do. Of course, that’s a good problem. My only true critique is that the organization seems to have gone through some growing pains and lost its personal touch along the way. When I first selected and implemented Act-On at my previous company 4 years ago, I felt like our sales rep and implementation team were truly invested in our success. I was so impressed by the product and Act-On’s customer success team that I implemented it again at my next company and recommended it to several peers. However, faces began to change quickly, and we had 3 different reps in the same year. Our new contacts were less interested in our success and more interested in what we could do for them. One became obsessed with recruiting our company as a reseller. Things have settled down, but I don’t feel like they value our business as much as they once did.

Agree with recent Forrester Wave Report

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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

Powerful and user friendly marketing automation suite with excellent customer support

We've been able to bring our marketing data into one place and create a more unified platform from which to send out our marketing campaigns.

Pros

We just started using Act-On a few months ago. We had debated marketing automation companies to go with for years. Overall, Act-On was able to go toe-to-toe in most regards with the other vendors we were considering, at least. The deciding factor was the pricing model, which is a bit unusual. They only charge you for "active" contacts, which are contacts you are actually reaching out to. You can import other contacts for reporting, data synchronization, or potential marketing purposes down the line if you wish, and you won't be charged for them. The support team at Act-On is great. During our evaluation, I received an email from the CEO himself, asking what he could do to help us choose. Throughout implementation, we had several calls and I was always provided what we needed quickly. Act-On does so many things, it would be impossible to cover here, but I like their email and landing page creator. I found it to be very intuitive. The user interface is showing some age, but it's very straightforward and there's not a lot of guessing about how to use it. Act-On is list based, which is the "old" methodology in the industry right now, but if you're a fan of that strategy, you'll feel right at home. Workflow creation is very easy. Data Studio (an add-on) also allows you to create custom reporting, and baked in integrations and an automated FTP connection allow you to get your data talking to each other automatically. The university has great educational information available too.

Cons

You'll get out of Act-On what you put into it. The support and university is there to guide you in that process, but it's ultimately up to you. That's how it is with any platform that doesn't offer in-house services, but with a marketing automation suite, you will really get more out of it if you have knowledgeable staff that have experience implementing and using these platforms. It can be daunting if it's your first time using a marketing automation suite. While Act-On is working on some new things, I don't know that they are putting as much effort behind investing into the product as some of the leading companies in the space. Also, some of the tools are a little rudimentary, and the UI could certainly use some modernizing. It feels too much like Windows XP at times.

Excellent Segmentation and Automation Tools

Act-On is instrumental for meeting our company's revenue goals with email marketing campaigns.

Pros

Act-On gives me the ability to get extremely specific with my target prospects and customers. It's easy to build new segments and immediately see the size of those groups. It's very useful for data mining and determining where to focus your marketing efforts. For example, in just a couple of minutes (assuming you've done the work to collect the information from customers and store them properly in custom lists) you can create a segment of prospects who have downloaded or purchased x product from your website, meet criteria x,y,z for their attributes, have opened or clicked messages in a specific timeframe, and have visited a specific page of your website. You have the ability to get as granular as you want. You can then build automated programs that send targeted and timely messages depending on where these prospects are in your funnel and use conditional logic to define any future interactions.

Cons

The UI in some areas of the platform could use some design enhancements for aesthetics and for consistency throughout.

ActOn -- act on it!

ActOn allows me to get important professional messaging out to my target audience in a timely basis. I am impressed with their can-do customer support team. They always help me figure out a solution to building content. The software wear offers so much in terms of content marketing, form building and automated drip campaign functionality. The email content reporting and tracking is also very good.

Pros

I think you will find ActOn easy to use. I can quickly develop an email and define a target list and send as easily to 10 people or 100,000 people. I also like the reporting and graphs associated with a campaign. I also find the Form editor very valuable b/c I can quickly create a business need survey in a matter of minutes for my internal customers. The responses are easy to analyze b/c they are in spreadsheet form.

Cons

ActOn recently rolled out a new forms editor and they did not bring over the reporting URL feature from the Classic Form editor...this would make it easier for my internal customers to pull data vs having me pull the data for them.

Act-On helps me stay organized and save time.

When Act-On is working smoothly, I am able to keep in contact with my prospects, to know what they are looking at and what interests them as well as to determine how I need to send communications to them. The insight that Act-On provides into the life of the leads is very helpful by allowing me to stay organized and save time.

Pros

With Act-On's Activity History, I am able to view a Timeline that helps to keep me organized so I know what I may still need to send and so that I have a good idea about whether or not my prospects are getting communications that they should. Sometimes, with email blasts emails may not get through an organization's spam filter, but using the Activity History and Timeline in Act-On and testing by sending things through Act-On Anywhere in Outlook help to determine who need to receive emails alternate ways.

Cons

Often times, maintenance and issues are not brought to our attention prior to us having issues with the software not working or causing issues with our campaigns. Having warnings in advance of when maintenance is being done or of possible known issues so that we can watch for them and be prepared would help a great deal.

If you take advantage of all of its features, you will succeed.

Pros

We chose Act-on as our marketing automation software because of its native integration with Salesforce, our CRM at the time.

We made the move from Marketo, and Act-on has a much easier user interface. There were so many things we could track and do.

We had great customer service, including weekly calls with a customer experience rep.

Cons

Like most marketing automation software, the key to success is learning all of the ins and outs of the system, then create a strategy surrounding it.

If you don't have someone on your team willing to take advantage of all of the features, the price might outweigh the benefit.

Our customer experience rep could have helped more in overall strategy and campaign building, but they were incredibly busy, too busy to go in depth on those items.

The team ended up moving to a simpler and cheaper product because they weren't taking advantage of everything Act-on had to offer.