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
Emma by Marigold
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Emma by Marigold is an email marketing solution. Its key features include mobile-ready design templates, email automation, audience segmentation, and dynamic content. The software includes integration with third-party CRM solutions, ecommerce platforms, and social networks.
$500
per year per user
Pricing
Act-On Software
Emma by Marigold
Editions & Modules
Professional
$900
per month
Enterprise
$2,000+
per month
Basic
$500
per year per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Act-On
Emma by Marigold
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level 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.
Compared to Act-On, Emma is miles above regarding the ease of use and simplification of complex features. Drip campaigns really are a breeze with Emma's intuitive data. You will experience WYSIWYG glitches due to the nature of the program but Emma offers better templates to …
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.
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.
I liked their functionality for creating landing pages and forms. They looked nice, had plenty of options, and were easy to embed in websites.
Creating email campaigns was easy and effective through Act-On. With A/B testing, automated campaigns, and sleek design, it felt very professional.
It connected well with Salesforce, provided we had matching contact criteria. It was fast and easy to sync up.
The automation function within webinars was always efficient and convenient. They synced with GoToWebinar as well as Salesforce to make for a smooth invitation / follow-up / attendee tracking process every time.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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 was decided upon by the Marketing and Operations team. I am part of the Development team and was consulted on the aspects of reporting. However, our Marketing/Operations team were very pleased with the way you could personalize and create your own emails and campaigns without having to place many hours into the details. Our organization is on the smaller side with around 20 people so being able to manage one's time is critical to the success of our organization. Act-On is very easy to teach colleagues and this was one of the reasons it was chosen. Pardot is more complicated on many different levels.
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
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.