Act-On

The platform is very simple to understand and use. You don't need much training before you can get up and running building e-mails, landing pages, and programs for marketing automation. There is a lot of room for customization as well. Also, the price is a bit lower than some other marketing automation software.

There are some issues within the landing page builder - sometimes it is hard to get the object placement right if you do not know the HTML coding on the back end. The system also can run a bit slow at times.

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.

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.

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.

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