ActiveDEMAND vs CallRail

When choosing a marketing automation system, it is important to think of what exactly you want it to do. I think no matter what you are hoping to get out of a marketing automation platform, you can achieve it with ActiveDEMAND. It can be used for simple/basic marketing email sending and campaign execution or it can be used to develop a microsite, create sales and marketing kiosks, run multi-step campaigns, host protected assets or whatever you want to do with it. You can easily choose (or ignore) the modules and features to be as creative as you choose to be.

This is great software for differentiating where phone traffic is coming from. Whether it's paid/organic search, you can see exactly where the calls are coming in from. I'd love to see them add text/SMS features in the future, but it does what it claims. I'd also like to see more CRM integrations, but not sure that other users share the same sentiment

• Customer Service - this company EXCELS at customer service, always answering our questions and being helpful.
• Innovative Ideas - they stay on top of the trends in marketing, offer ways for us to incorporate these items into our efforts.
• Friendly staff - the staff at ActiveDEMAND are great to work with and are responsive to our needs.

• Tracking phone calls first & foremost! Being able to have a running tally of the phone calls made and listening to the recorded calls throughout the month and providing that information back to our clients is vital!
• Their UI is exceptionally easy to use & navigate. This is important when we have many clients running at the same time and we are able to always determine what report is for which client.
• The ease of setting up a brand new client & their tracking phone number is fantastic! Saves a lot of time when it walks you through everything you need to know & do step by step.

• Reporting - Though the reporting is extensive and very very good... I sometimes miss a simplified view of email opens/clicks/link clicks etc.
• Don't get me wrong, you can get to this data in ActiveDEMAND relatively easily, the default views through the campaign dashboard are just quite detailed (which some people would probably prefer) and I just don't think that we need that level of reporting on first glance. That being said, I do love the option to drill down and uncover the complex detailed data when i do want it (ActiveDEMAND is very good at this).
• One element of reporting that I would also like would be an event registrant report showing all registered people (this part exists) and their responses on the registration form they completed to register for the event. (These things would be dietary restrictions, industry, customized responses to other event related questions).
• I also wish the reports autorefreshed more frequently.
• ICS Files - Right now there are work arounds for loading an ICS file (Calendar meeting invite file) that can be accessed in campaign assets. I just wish this was more native to the tool.
• Archive Filing - Now, first of all, it is so amazing that ActiveDEMAND even has an archiving feature... I LOVE this. One small downside, however, is that the archiving cannot be organized using a folder structure or anything. I would like to be able to group my live events together, then group my webinars together etc.

• The integration with Hubspot is not as seemless as I would have liked. We had an issue where a person who was already in Hubspot called in, and their contact information was not matched to the caller ID correctly which created some duplicate entries. A little bit of a bummer, but from what I understand they may have fixed this. We had to stop using them for a little while because our outsourced sales team was more confused by adding CallRail, so we'll be re-implementing this once our new sales team is fully trained. Hopefully the record miss-match issue gets fixed.

The platform is easy to use and we really don't have any complaints with using it so far. The information is invaluable for clients that rely on phone calls to drive more business. Not much negative to say about it at this point. We're actually really happy with it so far and the cost is manageable.

CallRail support normally gets back to us pretty quickly when we submit a ticket and they have a good knowledge base for common questions. I've heard mixed reviews from other local marketing agencies that use this tool, but overall in my experience, support has been knowledgeable and quick working through our problems.

Vertical Response wasn't a full marketing platform at the time when we used it, but it was clunky and the tech support wasn't easy to use. I like the one-on-one response we get from ActiveDemand and really being on a first name basis with the folks there

Callrail has a very seamless and easy to use Dynamic Number Swap function. In other call tracking that we looked into the integration was either not as easy to use or required much more work to implement. Setting up CallRail has been so easy even our entry-level employees need very little training to master the platform.

• Simplified email marketing and event management
• Better tracking of leads
• Better intelligence about which initiatives are working well and where future opportunities lie
• Less reliant on IT department/third party to execute our online marketing

• CallRail has helped us follow up on quality leads, something we couldn't do effectively prior to using this product.
• The reporting feature has helped us to generate reports that have helped us plan and increase conversion rates.
• It helps us plan our budget effectively because we can easily see which campaigns are effective and should be targeted.