Item: Act-On Software
Rating: 4
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Return on Investment

I can't identify attribution clearly because Act-On has cluttered it up. I'd call that a very negative impact on ROI.
Basic functionality has allowed us to execute automated nurture campaigns and mass emails, which have some positive impact. But we could do that with many other solutions, so it's no differentiator.
The sales team has very little faith in Act-On. We had a lot of deliverability issues early on, which led to the sales people relying more on Gmail or Yesware for their emails to prospects. To Act-On's credit, they held our hand through the troubleshooting and got the deliverability issues ironed out mostly.

Alternatives Considered

I've used MailChimp and Constant Contact (both on lower level versions, not the more robust enterprise versions). I've evaluated Marketo.

The former two are not full service automation, but I would prefer them over Act-On solely for email services. I'd love Marketo, but I wasn't the decision maker when we implemented Act-On. Also, from what I've heard it's a great deal more expensive than Act-On.

Likelihood to Renew

The only reason why it isn't zero – getting a new automation system is costly. Time is the most precious resource, and implementing these types of things is a huge pain.

I will be strongly recommending a new system, particularly as our company grows from a smaller startup to a mid-sized company. While Act-On claims to serve the "Fortune 5,000,000" I think they are probably better suited to budget buyers. With any luck, my company will have some money to invest in a real solution in the not so distant future.

Likelihood to Recommend

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).

At Least the Support is Good...

Overall Satisfaction with Act-On