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 (starts at 2,500 active contacts)
SendPulse
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
SendPulse is an integrated messaging platform providing user communication that includes emails, SMS, web push, SMTP, and user management.. This solution includes 15,000 free emails with up to 2,500 subscribers per month.
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Pricing
Act-On Software
SendPulse
Editions & Modules
Professional
$900
per month (starts at 2,500 active contacts)
Enterprise
$2,000
per month ( starts at 2,500 active contacts)
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Act-On
SendPulse
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
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 package starts at 2,500 active contacts, 6 marketing users, 100 sales users and 30,000 API calls per day. Annual contract required.
Pricing starts from $9 a month and depends on the number of messages sent.
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.
SendPulse is great if you want to connect with your list on a more personal basis, and making sure that your email reaches your subscriber when it is best for him/her. You can also use the SMS function (though I haven't used it yet). Let's say you have clients and want to send a message to them automatically on their birthday, SendPulse allows you to do that. It allows you to add in specific fields that are relevant to you, in order to customise your messaging as much as you want and need.
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.
I like its Drag and Drop function to design e-mailers but it lacks in some functionalities. Foe example when I write two different contents in a same box I need a line to show separation between my contents in the same box but this feature is unavailable in SendPulse.
They should include more fonts. Every product or service needs different kind of fonts to make a right impact on customers. With limited option of fonts it restricts user's creativity.
It is good to have templates to give users some idea for designing campaigns but here SendPluse has nothing much to offer. They have very limited number of templates.
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
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.
I find that overall SendPulse is very intuitive to use and the support is there to help you out in case you don't find how to do what you wish to do. The drag and drop functionalities make it easy to create the newsletters you want. Every field is explained and small tutorials are included to show you how to create a new template, newsletter, etc. which makes it very easy to use.
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
Every time I contacted the support team with a question or a problem, they were very fast in replying and helping me out solve it. Usually latest within 10 minutes I would receive a first answer, and the problem would get solved on the same day.
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 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.
For SendPulse's price point, I consider their competition to be the likes of Mailchimp, ConstantContact, etc. While SendPulse rates roughly average across the board in all areas, for businesses looking for the cheapest option (which comes with a lack of features/quality), ConstantContact beats them. For quality/features/value, I'd say Mailchimp is the best option for small businesses.
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.
