Act-On Reviews

A Solid Marketing Automation Platform

Comments: We are a media publisher that used Act-On primarily for sending out marketing emails — about 20+ a month, supporting a white paper site, and hosting 2 webinars a month. Act-On made it super easy to set up and market webinars from the initial thought, through sending a copy of the webinar to attendees when done and every step along the way. I've used about 4 different marketing automation platforms and I can tell you that Act-On was by far the easiest to send email campaigns in, from initial email creation to sending.

Pros:

I liked that over the past four years I have worked with the product I have seen it grow leaps and bounds. They have a team that is dedicated to making smart improvements with the product.

Cons:

Like all products this isn't perfect. I had the most problems with our sales rep kept changing. Also, once in a blue moon a feature would change without proper notification.

ACT-ON customer service is fading fast

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Over-promising and under-delivering are key traits of Act-On

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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

Cons:

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.

This is really a marketing tool that has build some features for salespeople

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Act-On's strengths are it's customizability and robust features.

Comments: 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.

A good beginner tool for email automation, but overall is falling behind other, inexpensive software

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Some great features but a lot of big flaws (haven't used it for 2 years)

Comments: It did some things really well, but other things really poorly. I'm not sure how much they've improved these past couple years, but I would only use them again if I were to lock in a heavily discounted rate and needed an instant bi-lateral sync between Salesforce and my automation platform.

Pros:

- Their support team was stellar - Their Salesforce integration is the best I've seen in a Marketing Automation Platform - Their list segmentation system features were fantastic - We were early subscribers to act-on so we had a really cheap rate

Cons:

I haven't used this software for a couple years, so they may have improved a lot but here were some of my major gripes: - Extremely difficult to track lead sources - Integration with ad platforms wasn't very good - Landing page builder was terrible - Lots of limitations with forms - Email builder was quite painful to use but they made some improvements along the way while I was using them

Blagh!

Comments: 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.

Act-On Review

Comments: I was pretty satisfied with the quality and number of potential leads.

Pros:

I sued Act-On to find new leads and create a database for potential customers.

Cons:

It needs daily updates that can take a long time before you can actually use it.

Good alternative for Pardot, but not as comprehensive

Pros:

Act-On is great for most tasks. I can create emails, forms, and drip campaigns with ease. It syncs really easily to Salesforce and I haven't seen a single issue with that yet.

Cons:

It's not as comprehensive and contemporary as some platforms. The forms aren't dynamic, and the emails are in a modular form instead of an easier drag-and-drop format.

A strategic tool to build successful marketing campaigns

Comments: 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

Comments: 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.

Very Solid Product for Very Little Money

Comments: 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.

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Very Effective

Comments: My experience has been great! We don't have an overly complicated marketing plan and this does everything that we need it to do.

Pros:

This software works very well for our company. A lot of people I've chatted with feel it's out of date but for us, it's perfect. It's easy to write and send an email campaign, and even easier to track the results! I also appreciate how easy it is to use with Dynamics CRM and upload .csv files.

Cons:

There really isn't anything I don't like about this software. I haven't had a negative experience and it hasn't disappointed me in any way.

Comments: Our company is an insurance brokerage firm specializing in employee benefits (health, dental, life, pensions) for midsize companies in Brazil. Our sales process is based on inside sales cold calling clients to schedule face-to-face visits with our sales consultants. We already have a great telemarketing platform, and we wanted to extract more value from the interactions we have with our prospects, especially when it's not yet time to schedule a face-to-face visit. Before Act-On, we only scheduled a follow-up call after a given time, determined by the inside sales agent according to client response. We found Act-On as an affordable and flexible solution to our marketing automation needs. We particularly liked their "no commitment" sales approach, with month to month billing, no contracts, no upfront setup fees. Implementation was easy, we were able to figure out how to do it ourselves. Business support is very weak, though. Interactions are very superficial, and the sales rep (who, thankfully, continued to be accessible to answer our questions) is more knowledgeable about the software and real marketing applications than the designated Customer Success Managers (who we don't feel are very invested in our success). Its functionality is basic but complete. The content manager (for Landing Pages, for example) is quite basic, but once you figure out how to use it, it does what you need done. Lead scoring works fine, as do Automated Programs. It could have better designed templates for emails and landing pages; the ones provided are dreadful. There is a major shortcoming, though, and I think it's a fatal one: e-mail deliverability. For some reason, most of the email I send through Act-On doesn't make it to my clients' inboxes. I have trying to address this issue with Act-On's deliverability team, but it seems to be something they have resigned to convince their customers to live with. Our clients are in Brazil, so they tried to convince me that this is a problem specific to Brazilian ISPs. I believed this, until I made a test a couple weeks ago. I sent test messages to all ISPs I could create an account on: UOL, Locaweb (Brazilian), GMail, Google Apps, Outlook.com, iCloud, and Yahoo. It turned out that all messages sent to Brazilian ISPs actually made it to their inboxes. The problem was with Google hosted email accounts (100% of the messages I sent went to junk/spam; they didn't even make it to the new Promotions tab), Outlook and Yahoo. So, even if you are in the U.S., look out for poor deliverability.

Good marketing automation, with some catches

Comments: Overall, Dynamics CRM is the biggest problem; however, if Act-On is going to support its integration with the platform, it has to better understand it. Besides that, I like the tool. It has a lot of bells and whistles and is competitively priced against similar marketing automation programs.

Pros:

Once you learn it, you realize how nice of a tool it is. Email campaigns, lead scoring, assessing total voice of customer -- it's all there.

Cons:

Unless you get the white glove setup service, it's tough to really figure out what you're doing at first. I would not recommend for Dynamics CRM (it's missing features that other CRMs have). The Outlook email template plugin is nice when it works, but more often than not, there are problems. I do wish they help you better understand what data fields are required in both Act-On as well as the CRM, and how to add/edit what is being integrated.

Act-On helps me stay organized and save time.

Comments: 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.

Best Marketing Automation Tool ever!

Comments: Coming from no experience at all, to being able to automate programs and have all the detailed information and reporting on them is a huge step for me. I've been using other Marketing Automation platforms also, but they are just to complicated.
Act-On is very user-friendly and easy to use, learn and understand, and also has very detailed step-by-step guides to every feature they offer, besides the courses you can go over at their University.
Customer support is always there to help and very effective.

Pros:

That you can do everything in one place, you don't need to code anything, (it is useful if you want to improve features or personalize a little bit more, but really not necessary) all modules are easy to use. You have Social Media, Automation, Reporting, Scoring, detailed contact information, connectors, etc.

Cons:

I think that lists could be updated a bit, like being able to sort by any of the columns. I don't like that they don't have a connector for Instagram and only to webinar options.

Happy Journey from ZohoCRM/Act-On to Salesforce/Act-On

Comments: 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,

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Great but with a learning curve

Comments: It’s been a great tool but because we couldn’t utilize all the features internally, we had to hire a consultant.

Pros:

This is a very robust email marketing program with marketing automation capabilities. We switched to Act On to be able to take advantage of setting up automated campaigns based on user behavior both in our emails and on our website.

Cons:

Because the automation capabilities are so robust, this software has a very steep learning curve. It would not have been feasible for us to use this for marketing automation in-house without a full time person just using Act-on. We had to hire a consultant to be able to use this software.

Would Recommend For Basic Marketing Needs

Comments: Act-On has supplied us with a platform to create quality looking emails and marketing materials with ease.

Pros:

Act-On is an extremely easy to use software. It is mapped out in a user friendly fashion to where you feel you are utilizing as much as possible from the program.

Cons:

We have encountered a few deliverability issues with sending our email campaigns and I've felt that at times Act-Ons customer service has not always been the most responsible or understanding. They provide help but not necessarily in correlation with the severity of the matter.

Review from T. Currie

Comments: I send out a lot of emails using Act-On. I also love the reports as we have to generate a lot of them to send to our clients.

Pros:

User friendly, quick and convenient! I use it everyday and I enjoy how easy it is to use and also train others to use.

Cons:

The customer service when you have a question/issue hasn't been the greatest.

Easy to Use Marketing Automation Platform

Comments: We've built all of our landing pages in Act-On, and every marketing emails is sent through the software.

Pros:

Very easy to learn and use the platform. The drag-and-drop Landing Page and Email composers can your team productive with Act-On in no time.

Cons:

The interface is a inconsistent (some modules have been updated more than others), and there are a few missing nice-to-have options (like the ability to add anchors to CTA buttons - this can be done but by manually adding a button with HTML).

A good, but slightly old vendor

Pros:

This software is good, offer great functionality and its fairly priced.

Cons:

The UI/UX is old, it seems like legacy software.