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 Integration with Microsoft Access - We use Access for a lot of different Queries, such as for our bar back to know the specifics of each bar. Caterease allows Access to pull data directly so all we have to do is run the report instead of entering all the information manually. Same with diagramming, having software like Placez that pulls from Caterease allows for such things as table and chair counts to be pulled directly from Caterease instead of having to place each individual table.
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 Quick updates to contracts/files Great integrations available Report generation 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 It’s a great program, but it’s missing some aspects that would be incredibly useful. It has the ability to store venues and locations that you’ve used in the past, but it doesn’t allow you to associate a tax rate with the saved venue. As our company handles events all throughout Southern California and tax rates are constantly changing, it would be nice to be able to assign certain tax rates to certain zip codes and venues. It can be a little finicky sometimes with its equipment conflict algorithm. There will be events In the system that have been marked as cancelled, yet it will insist that an event I am working on has an equipment conflict with it (even though that event is not going through). It will not let you save out of your event and, sometimes, will end up deleting all your changes and progress, which is incredibly frustrating. I wish there was a way to export PDFs of your proposals without re-saving your entire proposal. Sometimes, clients will ask for two versions of the same proposal with just slight changes, and it’s annoying to have to go in and completely re-do and save the proposal and have to adjust it back to the original. It would be nice if there was a way to see a history of all of the changes that had been made in a proposal, that would be great. Because we often have many hands on each event we do, having a comprehensive list of all the changes made to each proposal and the date and times, and users who made these changes would be an incredible asset. 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 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 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 have not had to use the support in my over 3 years of using Caterease. This is why I gave it a 9 rating because even though I haven't had to interact with support, the fact that I haven't had to use support speaks volumes to how good the software is and how it is user friendly.
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 I haven’t used too many other events programs in the past – at a former company, we used the back end of our website in order to create events, but Caterease is a lot more user-friendly. Our website wasn’t particularly fancy – it didn’t allow us to conflict check or see if there was another event at the same time. It was used for the sole purpose of posting the information to our system – not for creating full proposals. Caterease is much more effective for what we need to use it for in this context.
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 Has made our team more efficient and be able to have a central place to store all info so everyone can access it. Manually printing BEOs has proven to be incredibly inefficient as they get updated quickly and often times just causes confusion and mistakes. It's nice to be able to generate contracts fairly quickly for clients Read full review ScreenShots