Act-On Software

Pros

As a user of both HubSpot and Act-On I cannot really give very many positive comments about this product.

Cons

This product is difficult to work with when compared to HubSpot. It looks as if they attempted to retrofit a desktop package to a web-based interface. You have to take too many steps to accomplish a goal.

Pros

I’m a part of a sales and marketing team, and we highly appreciate this software. It helps us count everyone, who visits our web page, including sign-in customers and anonymous visitors. Now we can easily set up automated programs, which makes our workflow simpler and smoother. Lastly, the customer support is terrific! They helped us on numerous occasions, by providing useful and clear information on any topic we needed.

Cons

Like any product, this one isn't perfect. For instance, you need to get familiar with this app before you decide to use it. Otherwise, it is easy to make mistakes and set up wrong algorithms. You also need to monitor this app regularly, because sometimes settings will automatically change without proper notification.

Great piece of marketing and survey software. Very powerful and can have multiple uses in almost any organization.

Pros

Act-On's back end really customizable and you're able to make your emails look exactly how you want. The landing pages you make are able to capture documents (like jpgs or PDFs) so participants can upload files making it really easy to download all the attachments along with their responses at once.

I also appreciated the ability to schedule survey reminders to participants in advance and to cross check that with live results. This means that you could schedule a reminder to go out at 8AM tomorrow, but if someone completed the survey at 7:59AM, they wouldn't receive the reminder. Great feature.

Cons

It's very admin and training heavy. The software is not intuitive and you need to setup the pieces of the survey/email first (I.e landing pages, contact list, etc) before you start working on the actual survey or email.

Pros

The ability to be able to set up automated email campaigns. When comparing Hubspot and Act-on, Act-on had stronger outbound marketing functionality which is exactly what we were looking for. The toll is pretty easy to use once you get trained up and the on boarding process was very smooth.

Cons

Unfortunently there was no integration with our Sage CRM so in ways we were automating but then just creating more manual work on our part because of the lack of integration.

Pros

Act-On is a fairly straightforward MAP and is a strong competitor to some of the bigger names in marketing automation. The platforms has some strong segmentation abilities and offers a lot of integrations with other tools.

Cons

Great platform, but may be best for smaller to mid-sized companies depending on your use case. Nevertheless, lots of great features to take your marketing programs to the next level.

Pros

You can do quite a lot with Act-on, although it does not have as much functionality as Marketo it is more affordable.

Cons

The interface is not very intuitive or free-flowing. Integration with Salesforce.com could be better

- sending multiple emails on behalf of our clients
- great experience so far
- very user friendly

Pros

accessibility is very easy
it does just what we need for our clients

Cons

no "garbage bin". If any emails are deleted on accident, there is no way to recover them.

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.

Their sales department is good at selling this product, the reality is that it's not very good.

Pros

We started using this as an alternative to similar features in SalesForce. It does have a ton of features and integrates with many other systems.

Cons

We've had nothing but trouble with this since the beginning. Even after two years we still have random issues (services disconnecting) which can take hours to repair. The bulk emails we send from Act-On consistently end up in spam folders and customer support gives us the run around about how to fix it, usually we end up spending hours just to prove to them that this is actually happening.

The worst. Beware - do NOT fall for this "automation" system. Go with something that actually supports the workflow of marketers in 2018.

Pros

Absolutely nothing. I came from using Pardot at my previous company and then was stuck with this poor excuse for an automation system for two years. Luckily we're in the process of switching back to Pardot at the moment.

Cons

Pricing Model Not Built to Scale: They think that the "pay for contacts" pricing model is a pro, but it is not! For any marketer with a growing database this is a pure nightmare given that they are basically unresponsive when you need to add more contacts. We are actually currently in a situation where we can't get ANYONE to respond to help us add more contacts, which means that I cannot execute on a very large campaign that we were set to launch yesterday.

Customer Service: As mentioned above, good luck getting anybody to actually call you back or fix your issues. If you have any level of sophistication in your marketing programs and automation, it's just a matter of when you're going to run into issues with Act-On, and half the time, they don't even know why the system doesn't work. I just got a call back a few days ago about a support ticket I submitted in JULY (it's October 18 right now).

Product: Act-On does not have a contacts database. So if you need to look up a contact and see every list that they are on, every automation program they are in, or to manage their subscriptions or lists, you cannot. That's right - there is no way to globally search for a contact in Act-On. This is absurd. There is no way that you can call yourself an automation system in 2018 and not have this most basic of capabilities.

We can easily email and manage our marketing campaigns to a large email database.

Pros

The ease of use and drag and drop features in the email templates.

Cons

The automatic role-based email address suppression.

Pros

You can create landing pages, forms and personalized marketing processes, etc.

Cons

Usability is very bad, and support is not very helpful when things are malfunctioning.

Pros

I like how easy it is to use this software. They have made things very simple from uploading lists to creating a drip campaign, to the actual design of the email.

Cons

The only thing that I can think of would be to have a couple more templates. But the selection they have is good.

I think Act-On is a great tool for marketing. I've been using it for the past year and a half and finally feel confident with it. It does take time to understand everything, but customer service and the free webinars have been a huge help.

Pros

Once you figure it out, it's a very simple tool to use and can be easily accessed.

Cons

The form set-up. I think the set-up is complicated & could use some tweaking. I don't like that you have to create a new form (when pulling the data) if you add anything new into the original form.

Pros

It's pretty basic.

Cons

Not a very simple UI. Also lacks editing features.

Everyone I have spoken to from account manger, tech support and engineers for trouble shooting any problem that we have have been really helpful. They have always figured out a way to fix the problem especially with our really complex list that we have.

Pros

Act-On is easy to use especially if you know a bit of html knowledge. When designing you can even go into the code and alter it a bit if you know any html. The designs come out nice and clean and you can always work around any issues that comes up.

Cons

When designing emails and your using tables and have the image set to the max pixel you have to alter the code for it to display on mobile devices.

Help marketing users to create professional emails to our clients

Pros

Ease of use and create professional works for the company.

Cons

Ability for the API Integrations with other software.

Overall we have a good experience with Act-On.

Pros

Once I learned the ends and out, it is really easy to use. Although I just recently took over using the software from a former employee.

Cons

There are probably lots I still need to learn. But, I have not seen where an image could be edited once uploaded.

Pros

easy to use user interface, very good friendly support staff

Cons

nothing, the best I have used to date, have a hard time finding something to criticize, but support did lag a few times

Act-On is the engine that my marketing success runs on.

Pros

It's functionality and diverse tools makes it the top-of-class when it comes to marketing automation platforms.

Cons

In recent months, the customer service has not been as strong as in the past. It seems like it takes more than 48 hours to get questions/concerns of mine answered.