Act-On Erfahrungen

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

An unexpected benefit has been in the customer support department. Proactive email drips for recent purchasers helps that team provide great service consistently through scheduled email programs with tips and tutorials.

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.

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.

No benefits when looking back, lots of time, and money lost.

We've worked with Act-on for more than three years and have appreciated what it accomplishes for us. Customer service has always been responsive, as well. If you can't necessarily affort one of the major players in the market, Act-on is a great alternative.

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

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

Overall great experience with the platform. The ease makes the biggest difference.

Let met take an example. You want to create a decent marketing automation campaign. For this, you need to create landing pages but first, landing pages templates. oh, I want forms in it so lets create some forms templates to create a form for this landing page template. You do your landing page etc.. and you need to change something in the form. You must go to forms, edit the form to modify it in the templates..... Why not on the go actions ? this would make so much less clicks and back and forth actions... The preview mode for the landing pages is not very a preview mode because you can't really preview all things (like hoovering colors changing on a button, actions on buttons etc) so what is the point ? Maybe I don't really understand your way of thinking but the tool seems to be made by programmers who are not really into User Experience and User Friendly stuffs.
This is maybe a bit too critical but this is my honest review of a intense user.

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.

as our Marketing automation platform we use ActOn daily for lead gen email campaign send, as well as client communications.

ACT-ON is a very powerful marketing automation tool that we decided upon after much research. It allows a great deal of work in segmentation, customer behavior analysis, etc. However, at $600/mo plus the $450 a month for the Salesforce CRM that we used with it, it was too much expense and, as a very small company, we were not able to take advantage of the features. Support is TREMENDOUS with this company and that goes a long way. We're dropping Act-On for now but if we grow to the size of a company that can afford a full-time marketing person and who can devote the time necessary to utilize all the great tools, we would definitely look at them again.

When it came to a marketing automation solution, our organization took the Goldilocks approach:

First, we tried Pardot and found that it really didn't deliver what we were looking for. Their lack of lead attribution functionality just didn't work for us. We wanted to be able to connect the dots on sales and marketing touches but ultimately know which touch landed us the business. The process that Pardot defined for us meant that we had to add several steps to our own process. It was not what we expected out of an automated program.

Second, we tried Marketo and found that it was overwhelmingly complicated. Again, not what we expected out of an automated system. Not only was it complicated to set up campaigns, but it was also complicated to get some assistance if we ran into a problem. We'd have to put in a ticket, call to follow up, wait for someone to get back to us and then wait for them to hear back from overseas trainers and developers to get back to them so they could circle back around to us. Several times, we were told that we needed to pay for some additional add-on or additional training.

Finally, we moved to Act-On and they have been "just right." Our implementation was a breeze, and the software does exactly what we want it to do - and then some. As with any new software, we had questions and user issues, etc. but the Act-On crew was always there with answers - sometimes within minutes of us contacting them! The software is great, but what makes Act-On different is their team. It's comforting to know that we have advocates there that really want us to succeed.