Act-On

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.

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 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.

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.