ActiveDEMAND is an integrated marketing automation platform that is designed to bring together online marketing tools into a single application. This platform focuses on helping both novice and expert marketers set up, manage and execute campaigns with a focus on measuring business results such as conversions and leads.
$3
Per Phone Number/mth
Exotel
Score 7.2 out of 10
N/A
Exotel is a call tracking solution with real-time notifications and analytics, multi-level IVR, and call recording capabilities.
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.
Exotel is well suited for: - Small and mid-sized Internet based businesses where it is necessary for them to have a very strong customer support team working round the clock and in different shifts. - Company making large number of calls and sending mass SMS's. They can do that on a single cloud based platform. Exotel might not be a good fit if: -it is not a call intensive business that you want to cater to. Though the setup cost is very low but it follows economies of scale i.e. more the number of calls, less will be per call cost.
Affordable Solution: First and foremost the platform is very much affordable for a small start-up starting their business and want to connect with their leads and serve their clients economically.
Easy to Use: Anyone can start using the platform from the Day 1. No extensive training required for it. Just integrate your phone number with the platform and solve customer problems at godspeed!
IVR Set-up- Want to have different services on a single number for your Services. Set-up IVR and make your life easy.
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.
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
Exotel was selected by us because of the following reasons: -Low set-up and maintenance cost as compared to its peers. -Prompt customer service: You want to upgrade your plan or facing any issues around the platform, Exotel team is just a call away. -Call recording Quality was also better than the peers.
