Likelihood to Recommend Act-On simplifies the creation of landing pages, web forms, email campaigns, and other types of marketing automation. Designing a customer journey using the workflow builder (a nurturing flow) is possible. It is used in various ways and in a variety of contexts. Tactical's knowledgeable support team helped us unlock Act-On's potential for complex integrations and marketing campaigns. In some areas, it would be beneficial to improve functionality.
Read full review Using Emma for weekly templated email use with minimal changes is awesome. If you want you can create a master and make minor graphic edits quickly and easily from your smartphone. Any edit is possible as long as the artwork is on the online server. Only time I hit a bump in the road is when I was asked to change the style sheet and did not know that the pricing plan I was on did not include this feature. Client had to wait to send new format until Emma performed the requested changes.
Read full review Pros Establishes a simple but very decisive way of how to perform specialized marketing work. It includes the monitoring of advertising networks or account management on digital platforms and social networks. The support is solid; it takes all the suggestions and doubts I have regarding the software. Read full review Enterprise-level email marketing with multi-level account structure allowing for multiple users at different levels to send campaigns Easy-to-use WYSIWYG email template editors to create dynamic emails with enhanced personalization through merge-fields A large API index that connects to many different platforms and the ability to work with Emma support to create new connections to new platforms as needed Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Their customer service leaves something to be desired. We ran into an issue with one of our campaigns, and we decided to reach out to support, but they didn't get back with us until 3 hours later! Time is money!! We don't like that their photo editing capabilities are limited, you can only choose small, medium or large photos with no way to resize to exact dimensions. Makes emails a bit of a pain The upgraded premium tools are buggy and leave something to be desired as well – it's a shame. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Emma has been a great tool for our marketing. It's easy to use and I've had no issues in the almost two years we've been with them. It's really been a great way for us to stay connected with customers that takes no time to setup and send
Read full review Usability It's good, but not quite brilliant. Some parts of the interface are still a bit outdated. The product has been evolving very fast, though, and I believe in a few months it will be up there with the best of them, interface wise as well.
Read full review While every WYSIWYG software will experience glitches, Emma handles them well. Keep in mind they rarely happen, but they do, it can be of annoyance. Regardless, Emma allows my organization to create seamless email campaigns using fresh data. Emma makes coming up with strategic decisions very easy. The list segmentation that Emma feature allows us to easily manage a large list without issues. Overall, Emma is extremely usable with nearly no learning curve!
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Performance Great for the most part. Sometimes there are little lags, but that's likely because I'm requesting to see a lot of data at one time.
Read full review Support Rating 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
Read full review I hate that to get support I have to submit a question to a public forum and wait for a response. I just want the ability for a quick live chat to answer my simple help questions quickly or at the very least submit a ticket via email and get a status update.
Read full review In-Person Training Dan D. was great. He took the time to understand how I needed the program to run, and was very flexible to our special CRM setup.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review At the time we made the decision to move to Emma, my organization was using both
MailChimp and
Constant Contact . Emma's drag-and-drop template editor surpassed both, and even editing the pre-made template HTML in Emma was easier. List management was much smoother than the clunky
Constant Contact and
MailChimp lists we had. From a design perspective, we chose Emma for its ease of use in creating templates and modifying existing ones, as well as the ability to push out branded templates and brand assets through its master admin/subaccount capabilities. Emma's analytics and reporting were much less frustrating to navigate and understand, such that, rather than spending all of our time trying to make sense of the metrics from a campaign (which we were definitely doing), we were attracted to being able to report easily and then move on to determining how to make real improvements
Read full review Scalability Before I feel like I need more features, the Act-On customer service reps are contacting me telling about new features as part of my account.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review Stores using the platform have seen good deliverability stats. Open rates and click-through rates are high with the templates that Emma creates. We still face the challenge of getting more users on the platform. User satisfaction is high for our users who are regularly using the platform. Read full review ScreenShots Emma by Marigold Screenshots