Highly recommended for email automation.
March 12, 2013
Highly recommended for email automation.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction
- Email automation. This is so easy to use. We've been using for about a year now and it's very intuitive and easy to set up campaigns. Segmentation requires a little learning bit of a learning curve, but it's not hard. I was walked through how to do it by an Act-On trainer.
- Visitor tracking. This tells us who visited the website. Not just the person's name, but also the fact that they visited this page and read this content, and are interested in this product, etc. We relay this data to the sales team so they can they follow-up. We also use Google Analytics, which is useful, but does not provide us with this level of granularity.
- Integration with salesforce is seamless. This works very well indeed.
- The HTML editor is a little wonky - we have to mess with it quite a bit as content doesn't always look the way we want it to. IT has a WSYWIG editor which is fine for most things, but if we want to write custom HTML for more complex templates, it doesn't work well. The tool does let you write in HTML, but it doesn't always work very well.
- Not sure actual numbers, but it saves me hours of time. If I had to manage email campaigns manually, it would involve building the content in Word and then managing multiple mail merges and importing spreadsheets for sends. This is extremely time consuming and Act-On takes all the drudgery out of this process.
Product Usage
2 - Both are marketing, but I'm the main user.
- The primary need is email campaign automation.
- Our use case is relatively simple. We host events and then send out email blasts to contact lists which are imported from Salesforce.
- We build a large number of different email campaigns based on things like geographical location, whether or not they have opened a previous email, whether they have clicked on a specific piece of content etc. Our campaigns are highly segmented and there is some quite complex "if/then" logic behind the campaigns.
- We have used the product to build landing pages a few times, but with mixed results.
Evaluation and Selection
Constant Contact
Pardot
Marketo
Constant Contact
We went with Act-On since it offered best price/performance.
We actually liked Pardot the best, because it allowed for more customization, but it was double the price which was out of the question. The basic functionality was very similar, and it was not worth paying so much extra. Marketo was out of our price range. ConstantContact is a simple bulk email tool and didnt do what we needed in terms of segmentation and email marketing sophistication.
Another key advantage of Act-On is that integration with SFDC was straightforward.
Marketo
Constant Contact
We went with Act-On since it offered best price/performance.
We actually liked Pardot the best, because it allowed for more customization, but it was double the price which was out of the question. The basic functionality was very similar, and it was not worth paying so much extra. Marketo was out of our price range. ConstantContact is a simple bulk email tool and didnt do what we needed in terms of segmentation and email marketing sophistication.
Another key advantage of Act-On is that integration with SFDC was straightforward.
Implementation
Training
- Self-taught
Absolutely, everything is very intuitive.
However, it would be great if they offered monthly webinars to help us understand more advanced features. I feel that the product is capable of more than we actually use it for.
However, it would be great if they offered monthly webinars to help us understand more advanced features. I feel that the product is capable of more than we actually use it for.
Support
No - The regular support is fantastic so there is no need.
Usability
Reliability
Integration
- Salesforce
We use this to manage our lists of contacts and then import them into Act-On for the actual email automation process. All of which was extremely easy to do.