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Tracking and analytics spot-on.
March 12, 2013

Tracking and analytics spot-on.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction

  • The tracking and analytics capabilities are spot-on and it is very useful for large marketing lists and for interfacing with Salesforce. (We don't actually use Saleforce however - we use a custom CRM system). Act-On helped a lot in building a simple integration to our custom CRM.
  • Tracking is particularly helpful for our ad-word campaigns. Act-On allows us to capture information even if someone doesn't enter specific data. Analytics provides us better data than we would get from Google.
  • The product does not emphasize all of the functionality clearly enough at times. we struggle in the beginning in not knowing exactly what the product could do which hampered our initial campaigns. Training is too rushed and does not cover all the details you need to know. You really need to spend a week to 10 days using the system to really understand all the functionality before going live.
  • For example, we struggled with email templates. Their training module on this (forms) was very light. After that, they added a lot more functionality and variation and templates. Although we were not aware of it, one month in, they had added many more templates which I was not aware of and which would have given us some of the template flexibility I needed. Also, we didn't even realize that it was possible to design our own templates by writing HTML directly.
  • It has helped with warm leads by increasing them by almost 30%.
  • Warm leads are those for which we know not just name and phone number. We also know company location, training library they are interested in, detailed contact info /position.
  • Before implementing Act-On, we would know only very basic data such as the country in which a website visitor is located. Because of analytics, we knew a lot more.
  • SInce we knew so much more about our leads, it was much easier to talk to them and set up demos. I knew what they had been looking at on our website, which products they are interested in, whether they are the likely decision maker, etc.
While we are happy with the product, we feel that we are not getting full value from it for internal reasons. We are simply not organized properly to take full advantage of the system capabilities. For this reason, we are considering pausing and taking a break for a few months to re-organize and get more value from the product.

We really need to scale our operations get more people in the company using the software to reap full benefit.
For a company using salesforce and dealing with a large contact base that has at least 2 or 3 people they can dedicate to the system, this product will be highly effective.

Product Usage

3 - Marketing and design.
1 - One technical resource.
  • It is used to create and track email campaigns. We also use it to target website and ad visitors and for lead scoring.
  • Prospects are identified either from our CRM system or from purchased lists. Another smaller bucket of prospects are from our ad-word campaigns and website visitor id. For leads identified through web analytics, we generally make a direct call and follow-p with an email.
  • We use Act-On to build landing pages for specific campaigns (which are really just extra pages on our website). Our campaigns are highly segmented. For example, we target specific vertical industries like oil and gas / manufacturing / distribution a d use different email templates and landing pages for each (both Act-On templates and ones we have designed ourselves). We also have different campaigns depending on prospect behavior.
  • Their training module on email templates (forms) was very light. After that, they added a lot more functionality and variation and templates...a month in, they had templates that I wasn't aware of.

Evaluation and Selection

Mail Chimp
Along with Act-On, we looked at Marketo, and Eloqua. We picked Act-on due to pricing and also because it was a better fit for the size of our business.

Were a small company, and Marketo and Eloqua are designed for larger projects . we are not trying to reach very large numbers of people; Out challenge is to identify prospects and push them through the funnel faster. For us, it's all about lead scoring. Giving demos to unqualified prospect is costly. Act-On has the right funcionality to solve this problem at a reasonable price.

We really didn't give anything up by going with a more SMB-oriented system. The problem was, surprisingly the opposite of that. Act-on turned out to be capable of more that we at first realized. We found out product capabilities only after we had started using the software, which was in itself problematic.

Implementation

Difficult to get started. At the begining we had an issue with forms and how they explain iframe in some of our data. This took an extra day.
  • Implemented in-house

Training

  • Online training
The training generally provided good information, but was not detailed enough. It seemed that we went through it all too quickly so that we could begin using the software and getting value from it. This did not work out very well, since gaps in our knowledge of what the product could do hurt us later on.

Support

Tech support was competent, but there were availability issues. I felt that sometimes it was difficult to talk to our account rep. The only weay to talk directly to her was by setting up a dedicated meeting a couple of days in advance. Sometimes we needed to talk urgently with someone familiar with our particular implementation, and it was hard to do that. This created timing problems: I would set an appointment with our rep, but in the meantime, something else would come up and it would be too late to solve the initial problem.

We did have access to standard tech support - they were pretty good, but didnt know our specific implementation or use case so we had to repeat ourselves.

Usability

Usability is pretty good, except that there are capabilities which are not obvious at first. The product really requires comprehensive training to fully understand all the capabilities up-front.

Reliability

No real issues here.
No real issues here.

Integration

  • Yes.
Our custom CRM system. We're working on this as a company (making it easier to integrate with a range of third-party systems). eventually, we hope to be able to build a complete integration.

Vendor Relationship

During the sales process the vendor was very easy to deal with, post sales has been good but not as good as before.

It was much easier to get hold of our initial contact. The dedicated account rep we were assigned later was much harder to reach.
We negotiated a month-to-month agreement at a good rate. I would advise buyers to focus more on training and implementation, because I felt we lost some time trying to figure out all the functions of the system when we went live.