Act-On is an adaptive marketing platform designed to drive personal and purposeful multi-channel marketing. Its foci are inbound and outbound marketing, for enabling a tighter alignment with sales and turning data into actionable insights.
$900
per month
Adobe Advertising Cloud
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
AdobeAdvertising Cloud (formerly Adobe Media Optimizer) is an ad management product and is part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud. It delivers a rules-based bidding solution that improves the performance of search engine marketing campaigns and is integrated with Adobe Analytics.
N/A
VerticalResponse
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
VerticalResponse is an email campaign management software and services platform from Deluxe. In addition to providing email marketing tools, VerticalResponse offers fully managed email marketing services from campaign launch and management to reporting and analysis.
$9
per month
Pricing
Act-On Software
Adobe Advertising Cloud
VerticalResponse
Editions & Modules
Professional
$900
per month
Enterprise
$2,000+
per month
No answers on this topic
Basic
$11.00
per month
Pro
$16.00
per month
Pro Plus
$196.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Act-On
Adobe Advertising Cloud
VerticalResponse
Free Trial
No
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
The Professional package starts at 2,500 active contacts, 3 marketing users, 50 sales users and 30,000 API calls per day.
The Enterprise allows for much more customization, the package starts at 2,500 active contacts, 6 marketing users, 100 sales users and 30,000 API calls per day.
Annual contract required for all packages.
We often have quick turnaround time requests, and Act-On's new composer is great because it is easy to make an email look great in desktop or mobile views. This has been a huge time-saver for us! We have benefited from using Act-On for many years and are accustomed to where everything is and how to use it. For the new accounts we train, we will sometimes hear that the organization of where things are could be improved.
I think it is good to keep in mind the type of business application you have in mind when selecting Media Optimizer for your company. For us, as an agency, it makes sense for us to utilize the reporting and paid search optimizing portions for our clients as we manage over 300+ clients PPC campaigns. With this tool it is possible to set up campaigns easily and as long as the parameters are set correctly within the portfolio, there is a great opportunity for the tool to do its job and use the simulation/modeling process to run and grow a paid search campaign with ease of human interaction.
For businesses requiring advanced email marketing features like sophisticated automation, in-depth analytics, and extensive customization, VerticalResponse might fall short due to its limited featuresVerticalResponse is ideal for small businesses or freelancers who need a simple, straightforward email marketing tool. Its ease of use and basic features make it suitable for those without extensive technical expertise in email marketing
I love the ease of list builder because we often times have a lot of data to import. It would be simply impossible without this tool, considering the amount of customer data we have for any one given email.
We really enjoy the ease of use of the HTML wizard as well. It helps even a novice be able to make a beautiful and attention grabbing email.
The dashboard is functional and easy to find when you need with a quick search.
The designer tools, especially for emails, were often difficult to use. The formatting of the text would be all over the place and change / refuse to change at random. Moving boxes around was shifty and sometimes nearly impossible. It just wasn't customizeable enough. No "undo" functionality either.
The only way to collect information expansively over time (there's a term Act-On uses for it, I can't recall) where it adds questions to the form each time a user fills it out, is if the person were to fill out the same form multiple times. I know this does happen for some websites/resources, but as a company that wanted to collect new information each time someone filled out any form, regardless of the resource or the URL, that was simply not an option, and that doesn't really make a lot of sense. I know it's not really possible to track someone but if they filled out the first part of the form and then it added new questions to answer, and then they submitted and got through the gating, that would actually be helpful.
There was no "trash can" of sorts in case you deleted something by mistake. This could be so stress-inducing if it was a major project. My coworker did this once, contacted Act-On, they couldn't even recover it.
As with most Adobe products, it can be a little tedious to use and requires a bit of extra training and "googling" around to make sure you are getting things right. It has improved over time within the entire Adobe suite, and I anticipate that this will be true of this as well.
Adobe training and learning platforms can include a lot of technical terminology and jargon that makes it difficult for a novice to understand without feeling like they need a whole new education.
The type face is small. Not sure if this is to avoid overwhelming the reader, but I could see this being an issue with vision-impaired people or people who don't see small print well.
Sometimes I find it takes multiple clicks to make one simple change. I wish there was a search field at the top of the screen that allowed me to jump directly to a client's entry to update it there.
It's my single biggest asset in my current role. With limited resources, its enabled Anachron to punch well above our weight marketing wise and although we're still at the beginning of our journey I know the system can scale with us
As of this writing, we have just discontinued our use of Adobe Media Optimizer. Other vendors gave us a better rate, a better contract option, and the product is just better than what we had with Adobe at the time. We may revisit Adobe again at the future, but it seems like they have a lot of work to do to catch up with the leader in the space
Product is easy for both technical and non-technical people to use. A cost effective solution for sending out large number of messages. We can manage unsubscribes by individual accounts, so we can have multiple multiple accounts combined to maximize our buying power on credits. Effective API for sending/receiving data makes tool a valuable asset.
It's a great tool for our business, and we get a fantastic ROI on it every year based on wins for customer service and automation responses. It's save projects, repaired salesperson/customer relationships and generated new sales and interest yearly. We really wouldn't hesitate to recommend this platform at all.
It definitely takes some instruction to get to be able to use the system. One would struggle trying to get it to work without any previous experience with it. If you are famailiar with the interface it is actually quite fast and easy to maneuver around.
I truly love this product. We are moving to an all-in-one system next year and my greatest fear in doing so is how much I will miss this platform. Although we are excited for things ahead, I will always keep Vertical Response in my back pocket incase I don't love the new platform as much
I have always found them quick to respond to my query by web inquiry. In those instances when I call, I have always reached help quickly. They are conscientious and skilled in discussing my concern and finding a solution to my problem. Other tech organizations should use Act-On as a model for top-notch customer service.
Since we start using Act-on for ourselves and our clients, we have been supported very well. Often we need to integrate with legacy systems and we find the support team on our side during the whole endeavor. Always asking if they can help us further, always willing to do a better job. The support of Act-On is one of the main differentiators
They are super knowledgable and help in almost all situations, however sometimes I feel they put you on hold to find the answers themselves as they literally have said. "Can you hold a few minutes while I research that answer for you?" Most of the time they come back with a solution, other times they manually escalate it to someone else.
At Vertical Response the help desk associates are courteous, knowledgeable and helpful. You can tell they enjoy what they do. And clearly, they are well trained because most times, the first point of contact is able to resolve any issue you may have. There have been very few times where an associate has needed to get back to me or escalate me to a supervisor
Act-On had a lot of resources, and their staff was great at answering any questions I had to make sure we got started on the right foot. Looking back, I would have preferred some additional training sessions since we didn't have any previous experience with Marketing Automation and best practices.
Basic functions and online help...we used what was needed, at the time, and will continue to explore other online trainings as our functional needs expand
What impressed me most is that Act-On showed full committment in making our implementation successful, even when it required additional support from their team. This gave me a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings. Most other software software vendors are not anywhere close to being this responsive and effective
Act-On is easier to use than Marketo, but not as visually appealing and user-friendly as HubSpot. It's much better than Pardot, as Pardot feel clunky every step of the way. SharpSpring is comparable because of its price point but surpasses Act-On in its tools and intuitive interface. We selected Act-On because of the pricing model and thought all things would be close to parity with other options. It depends on the team you have. If you have developers and a marketing team that knows some html/css, you can get by with Act-On.
It was a step up from Marin in terms of UI. Very similar functionality to Marin. Compared to Kenshoo Search and Google Marketing Platform it was probably not as advanced but offered the benefit of integrating with other products in the Adobe stack like Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Campaign.
In addition to using Vertical Response personally I also manage email marketing for clients that already use Mailchimp, Robly and Constant Contact. While most of these platforms all offer similar features I choose Vertical Response first if the client does not have a platform in place. Typically I am also teaching the client how to use this tool and the Vertical Response visual interface is very easy for me to teach a client how to navigate and create their own campaigns.
With the Automated Series, we were able to put in place campaigns that generated revenue that took no time to continue running once set up. This was a positive feature allowing employees to work on another project while the campaign ran on their own.
