Act-On tries its best, you get your money's worth, but it's not truly the best out there.
May 14, 2019
Act-On tries its best, you get your money's worth, but it's not truly the best out there.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Act-On Software
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.
- Positive- quick setup for webinars between 3 different tools, made it easy to do in high volume
- Negative- lots of processes with the designer tools that made email/landing page design take longer than it should have, costing man hours
- Positive- email automation with different types of campaigns we could have flowing at once or could span across multiple audience segments made it so we could consistently create touch points and increase our engagement, thus our ROI over time
I am a relatively new HubSpot user and have only used a few different things on there but so far, the UI/UX is much more pleasant, seems more organized, seems more capable in general. I had heard rave reviews about HubSpot from my former coworkers who were using Act-On with me, and from my current coworkers who have primarily used HubSpot in their careers. I'm still getting into the weeds myself but it does seem more comprehensive, even the internal member tracking/info collecting you can do seems to be more thorough.