Item: Act-On Software
Rating: 7
Author: Bob Balm

Overall Satisfaction with Act-On

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Return on Investment

I cannot really comment on this as we implement this for our clients and I do not have access to reports myself.

Alternatives Considered

Eloqua and HubSpot

I didn't specifically select Act-On over the competitors I listed, since I implement these packages for our clients. As I described in other questions though, the difference is clear: Act-On is a great tool for organisations just getting started with marketing automation, who do not want to get overwhelmed with possibilities. The downside of this is that it lacks the finesse these competitors have in their feature packages, once you do want to invest more into these possibilities. It is however what I suspect keeps the price of it relatively low, so business wise, it's a good compromise.

Other Software Used

Oracle Eloqua

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Act-On Feature Ratings

Comments

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Compact package to get your feet wet with marketing automation