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Act-On

Act-On

Overview

What is Act-On?

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.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Intuitive User Interface: Users have found Act-On's user interface to be intuitive and easy to use, allowing them to complete tasks …
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Act-On review

10 out of 10
September 25, 2019
We are using Act-On to reach our customers through email blasting. We also use landing pages and forms to support our website. Currently …
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A great marketing tool

6 out of 10
May 11, 2019
Incentivized
Act-On is used by several departments. We use it for outbound and inbound marketing purposes. We also use it to score leads coming in for …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 26 features
  • WYSIWYG email editor (112)
    8.1
    81%
  • List management (111)
    8.1
    81%
  • Standard reports (112)
    8.1
    81%
  • Email deliverability reporting (112)
    8.1
    81%
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Pricing

View all pricing

Professional

$900

Cloud
per month (starts at 2,500 active contacts)

Enterprise

$2,000

Cloud
per month ( starts at 2,500 active contacts)

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee required
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://www.act-on.com/pricing

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Act-On Software Demo

YouTube

Act On! Software Demo

YouTube

Act-On Software and Touchtown: Personalization and the Buyer’s Journey

YouTube
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Features

Email & Online Marketing

Using software to manage lists, send emails, automate email campaigns, and track results.

7.8
Avg 7.8

Lead Management

The process of tracking and managing prospective customers from lead generation to conversion.

8.1
Avg 7.7

Campaign Management

Users can schedule campaigns and/or events with reminders, announcements, etc.

7.5
Avg 7.6

Social Media Marketing

Using social media networks to help amplify marketing endeavors.

8.1
Avg 7.5

Reporting & Analytics

Users can report on and analyze usage, performance, ROI, and/or other metrics of success.

8.1
Avg 7.5

Platform & Infrastructure

Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.

7.9
Avg 7.6
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Product Details

What is Act-On?

Act-On is an adaptive marketing platform that drives personal and purposeful multi-channel marketing, that aims to spark better inbound and outbound marketing, enable a tighter alignment with sales, and turn user data into substance to act-on.

The vendor states their customers range from start-ups and fast-growing young companies to well-established enterprise institutions; from marketing teams in small and medium-sized businesses, to independent teams in large enterprise corporations. They use Act-On in many different ways to realize their marketing objectives.

Act-On Features

Email & Online Marketing Features

  • Supported: WYSIWYG email editor
  • Supported: Dynamic content
  • Supported: Ability to test dynamic content
  • Supported: Landing pages
  • Supported: A/B testing
  • Supported: Mobile optimization
  • Supported: Email deliverability reporting
  • Supported: List management
  • Supported: Triggered drip sequences

Lead Management Features

  • Supported: Lead nurturing automation
  • Supported: Lead scoring and grading
  • Supported: Data quality management
  • Supported: Automated sales alerts and tasks

Campaign Management Features

  • Supported: Event/webinar marketing

Social Media Marketing Features

  • Supported: Social sharing and campaigns
  • Supported: Social profile integration

Reporting & Analytics Features

  • Supported: Dashboards
  • Supported: Standard reports
  • Supported: Custom reports

Platform & Infrastructure Features

  • Supported: API
  • Supported: Role-based workflow & approvals
  • Supported: Customizability
  • Supported: Integration with Salesforce.com
  • Supported: Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
  • Supported: Integration with SugarCRM

Additional Features

  • Supported: Email Marketing
  • Supported: Lead Scoring
  • Supported: Website Visitor Tracking
  • Supported: Automated Programs (Trigger & Drip Campaigns)
  • Supported: Social Publishing
  • Supported: Reporting & Analytics
  • Supported: SEO
  • Supported: Forms
  • Supported: Events & Webinars

Act-On Screenshots

Screenshot of List Segmentation - Segmentation using behavioral, demographic and/or firmographic dataScreenshot of the Quickstart PageScreenshot of Landing Page Composer - landing pages are designed with a drag and drop function

Act-On Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android
Supported CountriesAvailable Internationally
Supported LanguagesEnglish, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

HubSpot Marketing Hub, Net-Results, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud are common alternatives for Act-On.

Reviewers rate WYSIWYG email editor and Dynamic content and Landing pages highest, with a score of 8.1.

The most common users of Act-On are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).

Act-On Customer Size Distribution

Consumers0%
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)29%
Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees)67%
Enterprises (more than 500 employees)4%
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Comparisons

View all alternatives
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Reviews and Ratings

(407)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Intuitive User Interface: Users have found Act-On's user interface to be intuitive and easy to use, allowing them to complete tasks quickly. Several reviewers expressed this sentiment, highlighting the platform's user-friendly design that requires minimal training.

Flexible and Catering to Different Skill Levels: Act-On has been praised for its flexibility and ability to cater to users with different skill levels. Multiple reviewers commented on how the platform can accommodate both simple and complex campaigns, making it accessible for novice users while also providing advanced features for experienced marketers.

Robust List and Contact Management Capabilities: Act-On's robust list and contact management capabilities have been appreciated by users, enabling seamless communication within the platform. Many reviewers mentioned this as a positive aspect of Act-On, emphasizing its effectiveness in managing contacts and facilitating targeted marketing efforts.

Unintuitive and Confusing User Interface: Multiple users have expressed frustration with Act-On's user interface, finding it to be unintuitive, confusing, and difficult to navigate. Some reviewers mentioned difficulties in finding certain features and abilities, resulting in a time-intensive process.

Limited Customization Options: Several users have mentioned limitations in Act-On's customization options. Specifically, the form builder is considered somewhat difficult to use, with limited CSS customization available, requiring manual updates on every single form. Additionally, the landing page creator lacks flexibility in terms of design and layout.

Performance Issues: Users have reported experiencing slow and laggy performance when using Act-On. Edits often fail to save or are lost if left idle for a few minutes. These issues can significantly impact productivity and frustrate users trying to complete their tasks efficiently.

Users highly recommend Act-On for its ease of use and configurability, praising its resources, innovation, and accessibility. They suggest utilizing the available tools and resources provided by Act-On, such as training video courses, help documentation, and customer service. Users also appreciate Act-On's user-friendly interface and easy accessibility to information and tools.

Another common recommendation is to leverage Act-On's capabilities for email marketing. Users advise properly segmenting email lists and testing email blasts before sending. They find Act-On to be an excellent platform for personalization, targeting specific users, analytics, and automation.

Lastly, users recommend taking advantage of Act-On's support and return on investment. They suggest getting a demo, attending training sessions, and trying Act-On for a month or two to fully experience its benefits. Users find Act-On affordable and praise its fast interface for managing customer relations effectively.

In summary, the most common recommendations from users are to make full use of Act-On's resources and tools, leverage its capabilities for email marketing, and take advantage of the support and training provided to maximize the return on investment.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 219)
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Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Act-On is used across our organization as the marketing automation software of choice. Mostly, that means e-mail automation and bulk e-mail, as well as landing page and form creation & hosting. Because it syncs with our CRM (Salesforce), we are able (in theory) to connect customer activities to their record in the CRM, and reach out to specific groups of prospects & clients.
  • Timely and friendly support staff who are generally knowledgable. They are very responsive and helpful.
  • Constantly making additions/revisions to the platform. They roll out updates pretty frequently, though this is somewhat to be expected.
  • The sync with Salesforce is pretty strong, and they have a nice app that works within the CRM to identify web activities the customer has undertaken.
  • Platform performance. Slow, laggy, and don't you dare hit "Refresh" or you'll be pushed back to the home screen. Often, when editing landing pages or emails, edits won't save or will be lost if you leave them idle for more than a few minutes.
  • WYSIWIG editor. It's so bad, I don't know why they even bother. We had been using Act-On templates and modifying them, which was a mistake. They don't preview correctly, and don't provide support for responsive templates. If you select them, you're better off getting web designers to write everything from scratch.
  • Overall solution. I've just been very frustrated across the entire platform. As I write this, I can't even access the system. I have several support tickets in place. It's made my instance of Google Analytics look like a mess because the URL parameters that it generates are unpredictable and unwieldy. Act-On feels clunky, and it looks like it was made for 2004. Clearly a budget buy, and nothing more.
If you want a robust marketing automation platform, look elsewhere. If you want automated email and mass email functionality, look at MailChimp or ConstantContact before you look here.

However, if you have a few developers and want a skin of a system that you can bend to your will, then Act-On would probably be a good fit (unfortunately that's not me).
Layne Latham | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Act-on is currently used between the Marketing and Sales department as a way to track visitors to the website. Some of the sales team also uses Act-on to track email opens from customers and prospects. Marketing uses Act-on to track the effectiveness of drip campaigns and to host marketing content that the sales team uses in their messaging to prospects.
  • Tracking known sales prospects and their behavior on the website
  • Tracking anonymous visitors to the website and reporting the location and potential company based on their ISP
  • Hosting marketing content
  • Not user-friendly for tracking email opens for a specific user, it takes too much time to locate them within Act-on
  • Primarily built for marketing, the sales tools feel like an afterthought
  • Browser add-on needs to be removed and re-added regularly to ensure functionality
As mentioned before, this tool seems well suited for a marketing department.
The sales tools are marginal at best, and don't come close to the functionality and user friendly sales features of tools like ToutApp and Yesware.
Kyle Moloo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Act-On was being used by marketing to support sales. It was purchased and implemented to facilitate email marketing, landing page design/development, and database organization--amongst other things. Marketing campaigns were to be run and reported on out of Act-On so that we could prove ROI for our marketing efforts. It was integrated with our CRM (Netsuite). 3-5 people at the most would be working inside of the platform, to run between 2-3 marketing campaigns per month.
  • Folder structure for list management and marketing assets/campaigns are easy to use. It was easy to keep things organized.
  • Email testing was accurate and straightforward.
  • Existing templates to build landing page and emails from were responsive out of the box.
  • Building email and landing page templates are difficult, the drag and drop builder is not straightforward, and requires coding knowledge
  • The workflow tool is cumbersome and not as intuitive as I'd expect a best in class marketing software's to be
  • Domain connections and domain management functionality made it difficult to manage multiple company domains and subdomains for pages
Act-On is well suited for your business if you have a lot of contacts and are averse to the pay by the contact model of competing marketing automation software. Act-On charges by emails sent, not by how many contacts are in the database, so it makes it a great place to store everything, even if you aren't engaging with some of those contacts.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Act-On as a go-between for our sales and marketing departments. While it does require an experienced Salesforce Admin on our company's side to access the more advanced option, it's a great tool for lead generation for our sales team.
  • Monitoring lead score
  • Sending notifications to sales people when a new lead comes in
  • The functionality isn't as straight forward as it could be. The naming of some options/settings is not intuitive and doesn't always mean what it sounds like.
Act-On is great for a sales-oriented B2B company. It's not very industry specific beyond that so it may not be a good fit for hospitality, tourism, etc. that requires more specific metrics.
Eric Lehnen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Integration with Salesforce. Each time an email goes out, it is recorded in the Contact Activity History. Additionally, our Sales reps use it for individual emails so they can prioritize people who seem interested based on the customizable lead score that Act-On tracks. However, some of the integration is limited and with specific features such as webinars management.
  • Email marketing. This is their flagship tool and it works quite well. I can track who bounced, opened, clicked emails. These are then calculated in the lead score. It does a good job of scrubbing bounced emails and it flags bounced emails in Salesforce. The steps to create a mass email is methodical so you do not miss anything. You can include different types of content inside emails such as custom HTML, attachments, and buttons. Everything is WYSIWYG and easy to use. There are some obstacles with setting up custom templates but once you have them set up, they are really powerful for branding purposes.
  • Automated programs. They are very simple to set up and show exactly what happens based on certain triggers: behavior (clicked on an email, attended a webinar, received specific email, etc.) and profiles (specific titles, lead score, geography, etc.). You can organize a very complex drip campaign or create niche marketing strategies for people who meet certain criteria. Automated programs are best utilized if you are marketing to a significant amount of people.
  • Webinar management. Our company uses WebEx and Act-On says that they integrate best with them. However, features are so limited for our company's needs, we found it is easy to keep them separate. For instance, we need to identify who attended a webinar in Salesforce. It is not an automated process to push attendance to the Salesforce record. Instead, the integration with Salesforce and Act-On for webinars is simply an interface. It does not push data to Salesforce. This is annoying because it creates more steps for our sales people who need to identify important information and forces them to use Act-On separately from Salesforce.
  • If your company produces a good amount of webinars a year, creating them is very time consuming. There are so many steps required before you can market the webinar. For instance, in our situation, we created custom emails for the following situations: When someone registers for a webinar, When their webinar registration is rejected, When their webinar registration is accepted, Follow up email for those who attend a webinar, Follow up email for those who do not attend, 1 hour reminder email, 1 day reminder email. Each email needs to be added in manually and this process if time consuming if you have to create 100+ webinars a year.
  • Email deliverability. We had problems with email deliverability to certain companies. After talking with our IT department to figure out why Act-On was having a lot of these problems, they said it is because they do not have reliable email marketing practices on the technical side. For example, every so often, I have to send a new IP address range to our IT department to whitelist Act-On emails so any test emails we send to ourselves do not bounce. It says something when you try sending a test email to yourself and it doesn't work.
  • I am not a technical person, but our IT department talked with their support team and concluded that they had technical issues on their side that was causing a lot of our emails to bounce. Act-On tried to address some of the email deliverability problems we had but did not help.
  • Competitor tracking. Act-On has ways of tracking competitor's social media and web traffic. However, it only provides a week time period for Twitter. In general, it doesn't aggregate data so it can be analyzed over different time periods. It does give a fair snap shot of what is going at present time, though.
  • Web traffic monitoring. Stick to Google Analytics for analyzing web traffic. The only good thing about it is you can identify which anonymous/known companies that have visited your website. But sometimes, some businesses do not have a dedicated IP so when Act-On does the automatic reverse IP look up, it does not provide the business, rather the ISP instead. You can only view data a month at a time and cannot select ranges of time Such as 60/90/120 month ranges. It goes strictly by month.
  • Reporting and Analytics. I was very disappointed when trying to run reports on our different marketing campaigns. While they have a dashboard, it is not the same as Salesforce. And because data between Salesforce and Act-On is limited, reports are done separately. When we need to check our email campaigns, the only option to look at them all at once is to download an excel document and manipulate the data from there.
  • Forms. Forms are a little on the basic side. We tried using them for people signing up for events, but the absence of conditional logic forms, where if a contact selects option "A" it will display a separate field/question than someone who selected option "B."
If you are marketing on volume, it would be a fair fit, depending on other marketing needs too. In comparison to other marketing automation companies, they do roughly the same thing, but the depth is the biggest difference. Be aware of some of the limitations of the product - You get what you pay for. The big one is email deliverability. If you can suffice with some of their outbound emails bouncing, it would be a good product. But if you are trying to integrate with a webinar platform to gather more information, be careful because we ran into a lot of customers and prospects complaining that they did not get their registration email to enter a webinar.
Nini Diana | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Act-On was used (when I was using it) as a tool for communicating to prospects and customers about ongoing webinars and conferences offered by the company. It was used across the organization and integrated with SFDC. It made it possible to create lists in SFDC and use them to target the appropriate audience for the message.
  • It was easy to use the SFDC integration
  • The templates and sending mechanisms were easy for non-HTML users
  • It had a reasonably good reporting interface
  • The way it "filed" templates was a little difficult as it was long lists
  • It didn't have a ton of flexibility in design
  • It is not top of the line in terms of automation
Act-On is best for small B2B communication. I really don't think it's appropriate for large-scale B2B communications, though it does have the SFDC integration. In terms of really enhanced features, though, it's a smaller player. However, its relatively simple interface works well for small companies and is easy to manage in-house.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Act-On is used by several departments. We use it for outbound and inbound marketing purposes. We also use it to score leads coming in for sales development. Act-Oon is also used to keep track of leads visiting our site. We can easily assign leads to the respective individual based on the lead activity we see. It's a great marketing tool that adds value to our daily business activities.
  • Score leads
  • Showing lead activity
  • Sending emails
  • It's not too visually appealing to use.
  • I wish it had more sales functionality.
Act-On is a great marketing tool. I would recommend Act-On to marketing professionals, but not so much sales. I like a lot of the marketing functions, I just wish they were more compatible with a sales outreach workflow.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My company used Act-On to collect customer/prospect/partner data, view trends based on industries and titles, send marketing email campaigns to different levels of our engagement "funnel", design and send both internal and external newsletter emails, set up resource pages for our website and special events, and use forms to gate resources or facilitate sign-ups for events.
  • 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.
  • 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.
There are so many ways it could improve with just smoother functionality and UI/UX, mostly in the ways I said it needed improvement that are quite major. But overall I think it has the right ideas and tries to offer a lot of options for marketing tasks and a solid system for working with a marketing funnel.
Christian Banach | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organization uses Act-On to deploy email marketing campaigns to generate leads for advertising agencies and marketing services companies. It provides us with the capability to set up automated email programs and send thousands of emails to our clients' prospects.
  • Manage multiple clients and segment the client accounts
  • Activate multi-step automated email campaigns
  • Track recipient engagement such as opens, clicks, and website visits
  • Set-up requirements and steps are complicated
  • Customer service could have been better
Act-On is well suited for activating complex automated email programs but requires a significant investment of time to learn the platform. Act-On is not well-suited for basic email campaigns since the set-up process and capabilities are complex.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We recently rolled out Act-On as our new marketing automation platform with our marketing department as the primary users. Our organization uses Act-On for sending out marketing content; to capture and manage lead scores and organize marketing campaigns.
  • Act-On is very strong in behavior based messaging, drip and nurture campaigns.
  • Easy to use email design through WYSIWYG designer.
  • Act-On handles volume of data quite well
  • Act-On's system navigation and overall UI could be improved as this is not intuitive at all. Often times, even after having used the system for some time it can be hard to find certain features or abilities of the platform. This turns out to be time intensive and could be better.
  • Act-On is not at all set up to handle multiple teams working in 1 instance of the platform. Initially during the roll out of our platform we didn't know about this and we have 6 different teams working in the same instance which causes a lot of data management issues since the system's search capabilities are limited.
  • Act-On's out-of-the-box connections to CRM system's is not ideal and could better. Our organization is using MS Dynamics 365 and there have been some issues in the set up, maintenance and continuous use of the Act-On connector
  • Because of the way Act-On seems to be designed for a centralized structure rather than decentralized marketing teams, the reporting through their data studio creates a big gap. Act-On reports well per initiative, however aggregating data can only be through a 3rd party BI tool s.a. Tableau, MS Power BI, Qlik, etc.
If you have a centralized marketing structure and a robust CRM platform to do all the things Act-On cannot, Act-On is a great tool for all your email and webinar outreach. Although the design capabilities are limited with the WYSIWYG and therefore the emails don't look pretty, the tool is every easy to use and allows you to reach a large audience in any way you want to segment that audience.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our sales and marketing departments use ACT as our main hub for contacts. It is a database that holds all our leads and clients with detailed information and the ability to tag for segmenting and note so other team members know what is going on. It is a simple way to look up and sort contacts.
  • Sort by select fields
  • Edit templates to view clients info
  • Ease to see other users notes
  • Slow
  • Outdated
  • Hard to sort with multiple topics
Well suited: helps us see what other team members have made notes. Ability to each have our own layout to mold to our specific needs. Less appropriate: It becomes harder to sort when people enter multiple answers for multiple fields. Can't group by multiple fields at once, which I would like for our team.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Act-On has been used by our marketing team to help us manage our email marketing, automation, and lead scoring efforts to improve the efficiency of our marketing campaigns. The software allows us to set up campaigns to segment our prospective customers, current customers, and closed-lost deals to help us build, retain, and try to reengage our database.
  • Easy to use. The UX is simple and you can easily navigate the program.
  • Marketing automation.
  • Customer service/help has been amazing with all of our questions.
  • Our server went out several times when we were in the renewal period.
  • Lead scoring constantly broke.
  • It's not as robust as other competitors.
I like Act-On and I think it's a good program for someone that is starting out in email marketing or has some experience with it. I feel like this is the intermediate solution for email marketing. It's great for setting up simple email marketing/automation campaigns with basic reporting needs. If you want super customizable or really advanced list features, you'll want to look at a different tool.
Dave Moll | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As an agency, we use Act-On to manage all our clients' marketing automation efforts. And that covers a lot of ground: web and social tracking, form submissions, content downloads, list management, lead scoring, landing pages reporting and, of course, email programs. The Act-On ecosystem is solid and each of the pieces complements each other well enough to create a marketing automation whole if that makes sense. So your emails "know" who visited what landing page and your forms "know" if this person has downloaded other content. This connected system allows you to build complex marketing campaigns, all within the Act-On system.

That said, we use for all of the above. Mileage varies from client to client, but we certainly use every part of Act-On. We will build our client landing pages in Act-On, we house our email templates in Act-On, we upload marketing content to Act-On -- I'm in it all the time! In fact, I have it open in one of my browser tabs as I am writing this review.

Overall, it is a solid marketing automation platform. Act-On manages lists, segments, email programs, and sync's with SalesForce very well, but in some areas like landing page design and reporting it falls short.
  • List Management. Act-On has some powerful segmentation tools that complement the automated programs very well. Act-On lets you really slice and dice your lists however you see fit. Connected to Salesforce, Act-On becomes super-charged.
  • Automated Programs. You can then take your targeted segments and create robust automated programs that can be tailored into specific tracks for your targeted audience.
  • Webinar Programs. If you use GotoWebinar or WebEx, managing the webinar is a breeze. Act-On will handle the invitations, registrations, reminders and post-event follow-up for you. It works really well.
  • Landing Page Design. The drag and drop builder is OK. But it feels very limited for someone who has a good knowledge of HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. Inevitably, there will be something that you simply can't do in Act-On that you could do in a standard web design environment.
  • No Server Side Scripts. There isn't any way to retrieve data in your lists and add it to a landing page. Basically, you can't use any data stored in an Act-On list and add it to a landing page.
  • It's limited. There is simply some data you can't pull from Act-On and into a 3rd Party Reporting app.
Act-On is great for companies who have multiple people managing marketing and sales programs. Each person will get their own log in and access to certain (or all) areas of the software. Alerts can be created when prospects reach certain stages of programs which means marketers don't need to constantly monitor lead scores or anything like that. Also, designers can log in and create landing pages, copywriters can login in and upload content and managers can login and build programs. There's no stepping on each other's work either. Team management is very good. Act-On is also great if you have multiple customer profiles. Act-On allows you to create programs designed to capture many leads across your customer profile.

Act-On would be overkill for the small B2C client. A small business that uses email to manage newsletters and product announcements will find Act-On to be much, much more than they need. Act-On can certainly do these things but so can MailChimp at a much lower price point. There would be many features in Act-On that this client simply would never use.

If your company uses a custom CRM, Act-On won't be the best fit. I imagine you would need to hire a developer (or commit an in-house developer) to a large project of integrating your CRM with Act-On. Otherwise, you'll be importing and exporting list data on a regular basis.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Act-On in our marketing department. We primarily use it for email marketing, customer retention, and webinars.
  • Good integration with Webex for webinars. We're able to schedule webinar events, schedule invitation emails + reminder emails, and launch and conduct webinars all through the program. It's very easy to set up, manage, and use.
  • Users can set up solid email marketing campaigns with workflows, identify hot/warm leads, and push to Salesforce with the integration.
  • Customer support is responsive and easy to work with, and their Act-On Academy is a comprehensive resource for learning about the platform.
  • The automated email programs could be more intuitive to set up and manage.
  • I find their landing page templates lackluster. We've opted not to use them because we couldn't get them to look the way we wanted them to.
  • We had some trouble with list cleanliness and getting stuck in spam folders, with our opens decreasing and bounce rates increasing. Even after hiring Act-On to consult and help us clean up our lists, the same problems persisted.
If you have a mid-size to large marketing team who will take the time to figure out how to use all of the features and integrate everything carefully with other tools like Salesforce and Webex, etc. then Act-On could be right for you. It's been a good tool for us for integrated email nurture campaigns, customer retention campaigns, and events. I do not know how strong a tool it is for inbound marketing campaigns -- at least, we haven't had much success here.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
Act-On is being used by my organization and by my clients. It allows us to quickly create and manage integrated marketing campaigns. But more importantly, with Act-On we gain powerful insights that enhance lead generation efforts and increase conversions.
  • Email campaigns and landing pages.
  • List management.
  • Marketing automation - based upon behavioral triggers.
  • Analytics and insights.
  • Responsive design - optimized for mobile devices.
  • Social media scheduling and publishing across multiple channels.
  • User interface.
  • Set-up and implementation.
The pricing models and the month-to-month payment feature, instead of a long term commitment required by competitors.
Michelle Homar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The marketing department is utilizing Act-On as a tool for new member onboarding. We are able to load new members into a 16 week automated drip campaign we built within Act-On. The support and the reporting is very intuitive and robust.
  • Knowledge Base
  • Support
  • Knowledgeable and accountable staff
  • Act-On has numerous capabilities...I haven't found anything I don't like.
We purchased Act-On for a specific purpose. We were unable to find a better competitor with all of the capabilities for building an automated drip campaign for our new members.
July 11, 2014

Just what we needed

Leah Dockter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used as our CRM and we use it for mass marketing emails. It is as well linked to our Sage BusinessWorks accounting software.
  • I specifically like the ability to put our customers in groups and specific markets.
  • Attaching files is as well highly convenient for our purpose.
  • Task list and calendars are quite helpful as well
  • Tracking history of emails and letters sent is very helpful.
  • Linking to other Sage products is as well highly convenient.
  • When changing contact data, it will prompt to "continue working with this record". After clicking yes, you have to redo your look-up. So if a company changes their name and I have 5 contacts within that company, I have to look up each one to make the changes.
Any major "service" industries including construction would benefit from this software.
June 19, 2015

Act-on Review

Maggie Kenney | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Currently only the marketing team is accessing the information provided by Act-On. We send reports to other teams such as sales depending on what information we think would be valuable to them. It is very helpful to see the specific names and organizations of our users and helps the sales team see what our prospects and clients are really interested in. This is also helpful for marketing so we can validate our work and see what's successful and not so successful.
  • We really like the responsive email designs so our clients can easily see our communication on their mobile devices
  • We like seeing all the activity one specific user has done in the history of their interaction with our website
  • On the interface, when you see boxes of information displayed, its hard to see everything when there is a vertical AND horizontal scroll within the page. If everything could be displayed on the page itself without any scroll (except for the regular scroll on the existing page) that would be ideal for when I have to make screenshots of information to send in emails.
  • The interface menus are confusing. The homepage with the vertical menu plus the horizonal menus on the upper navigation is a little repetitive and sometimes counter productive. Sometimes I can't remember where i found specific information and it takes me a while to get back to it because there are so many menu options. I think things should be grouped differently and a bit simpler.
  • SEO features, you should be able to audit for more than one keyword at a time so you dont have to run the same reports several times for one page
It was really helpful for us to have a conference call with my whole team who will be using Act-On because each of us use it in a different way so all the possible questions were covered during the few demos we had about the product.
Kimberly Kitchen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use, and facilitate the use of, Act-On for a professional service provider. Their sales team uses Salesforce to track leads, prospects and accounts in the sales funnel while the marketing team send out emails to generate interest and increase awareness on various topics. The two sides were not connecting. By using Act-On, and it's integration with Salesforce, we are now able to connect the dots. We know what prospects are nurturing themselves through the sales process by signing up for webinars and downloading content from the website. We can also see when a lead comes in through the website, what their specific path was - how many emails have they opened, what campaign were they originated in, what content did they spend the most time on, etc...
  • Integration with Salesforce database
  • Email reports
  • Ease of creating webforms and embedding on site
  • Timeline reporting shows user engagement at most macro or micro level
  • Although integration with SalesForce is critical, there are certain things we can't do, like pull a SalesForce report based on email activity
  • Adjusting scoring is very tricky. We had a registration form being filled out at a trade show and Act-On attributed all the submissions to the 1st person who filled out the form. Trying to fix it was nearly impossible.
  • Reports take forever to download and aren't as intuitive as most other analytics.
If your sales team uses Salesforce, I imagine Act-On will be the best option because of the ease of integration. I would say it isn't well-suited for someone who doesn't know their way around html code for emails. I've used other email marketing tools that are easier drag-and-drop templates but Act-On is more robust and you'll need to dive into the html to get your fonts and spacing just right.
Anderson Crosby | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have integrated Act-On into SugarCRM and are doing a better job of organizing, scoring and managing our leads. We are also utilizing the email programs to help with our customer communications.
  • Act-On has a full suite of services and tools to effectively and efficiently manage your marketing activities. It is a great resource for small and mid sized companies that do not need and/or can not afford big expensive enterprise systems.
  • The email template library is thin. They should have more templates for the most frequent communications already loaded in the library. No need to recreate the wheel - show me what is proven to work and let me customize as needed to support my business and communication objectives.
  • While they have a lot of great capabilities, overall they do a poor job of providing recommendations and benchmark solutions. Everything can be customized to your needs but sometimes you just want solid solutions and proven programs for reference.
I believe Act-On is well suited for small to mid size companies that need a solid integrated marketing automation solution that is relatively easy to manage, has solid functionality and is affordable.
November 19, 2015

Great Customer Service!

Ryan Range | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Act-On for our mass outreach needs. It's wonderful for getting our message out!
  • Great Customer Service!
  • Fast, timely!
  • Knowledgeable!
  • Could be a bit more user friendly.
  • Some aspects are hard to follow.
Getting the message out makes it the perfect tool for what we are trying to accomplish.
Laura Peterson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Act-On is used by all of the marketing personnel across the organization.
  • Customer Service
  • Act-On University
  • Statistics
  • Reports are bulky
  • Color choice in editing would be helpful if Pantone choices were available,
Well suited for industry leaders with an experienced sales and marketing team
David Tate | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Act-On is currently being used by the marketing team, however, input is sought from the business development team when thinking about content, automated workflows etc. We have two marketing users, and may look to increase the sales users next year. It addresses the problems of being able to manage multiple leads through a nurture process with minimum resources through the use of automated programmes.
  • Website prospecting - allows you to see both named users (once set up) and anonymous users, but very useful as an analytics tool.
  • Automated programmes - the ability to put leads into a workflow that nurtures them to a point where they become sales ready.
  • Forms - the ability to capture data whilst at conferences and then turn that into usable Salesforce data.
  • Reporting - the reporting on automated programmes is slightly clunky, and it would be good to easily see user stats on emails sent this way.
  • The ability to quickly send an outbound email based on a template from an automated programme would be good.
I believe to use Act-On to its full capability, you need to have a strong funnel of leads, and also a lot of content lined up ready to go, as well as a strong content plan; always looking 3-6 months ahead. Without these things you won't get the full benefit of the service.
Barrie Vredeveld | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Act-on mostly to create digital newsletters, landing pages and forms for our customers. "We" is in this case a department of two: myself and a colleague. Sometimes customers create their own stuff in Act-on, with our account.
  • It's easy to send emails to a list of contacts, multiple lists or just parts of a list.
  • The rough layout of emails and landing pages is set up in a few minutes.
  • The designing parts are very extensive.
  • Support is great; quick, detailed answers to questions (including screenshots or video calls).
  • Act-on is a program with lots of features; so many that it takes a while before you find out what everything exactly does and when it's the best thing to use.
  • It would be great if complete rows in a template could be copied, and not just the blocks inside. That way I don't have to set backgroundcolors and padding everytime.
  • Forwarding email should be easier; I know personalizations fields become empty when forwarded to a person who's not in the database (maybe there should be a solution for that too, "if empty, display ..." or something - everything but the codes), but I've never seen an email where I had to click special buttons to forward instead of the "normal" forward.
It's a great program if you email a lot, or to a lot of persons. By the reports of Act-on you get a very detailed image of what your clients do and what they like. It's good to know some html (terms as well as code) if you want to work with Act-on, but if you don't it's not a huge problem. If you want to personalize your mail there are a lot of options with photos, senders and other self created fields.
Bob Balm | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We implement Act-on for our clients as one of our primary marketing automation tools. We provide campaign support or even create them from scratch, set up CRM integration, and help clients implement ideas into the system. The business problems it addresses are mostly a lack of lead nurturing. Act-On makes it possible for clients to get insight into their prospects' digital body language, and to act on said body language to produce results. Tools like the website prospector have already allowed many of our clients (ourselves included as we use it too) to pick up on opportunities that would otherwise have been missed.
  • It has a low learning curve compared to other more complex systems.
  • The website prospector gives you quick insight into the value of your website visits.
  • Compact and easy to use interface.
  • There are a couple of quality of life features / interface options that are missing or counterintuitive, although this is part of what makes the platform more accessible to SME users. If they could add these without affecting pricing too much, Act-On would be even better.
I'd definitely look at the scale and flexibility of a client's project before recommending Act-On. A large organisation with a robust inbound marketing strategy will probably still find success in Act-On, but might benefit more from quality of life features found on bigger competitors. A smaller organisation, or one that is new to marketing automation will benefit from Act-On's more compact feature set and ease of setup. In my mind, I often name it the MailChimp of marketing automation.
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