Act-On Features

Act-On’s automation platform is intuitive, I like the way the menu is built, it’s been made in a logical order so that when you move from one section to another, you go down the logical path to build automation. The support team is great, they’re efficient and patient ! There are many ways to find answers and tips; the Act-On community, the Act-On university, the online training courses, the webinars, everything is made for us to easily learn and efficiently use the platform.

Sometimes it takes us quite some times to do some simple tasks, for example when editing a step in an automated program, we have to wait a few seconds for the system to record what we edited and allow us to move to the next step. When there are many steps, it can become frustrating. Another example is when editing an image using Act-On editor, it can time many minutes before we can see the changes...

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Thank you for posting your review. It's always great to get customer feedback on what's appreciated and what could be improved upon. Thanks again!

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I liked everything about this software! It was truly an all-in-one deal. First of all, it integrated with our CRM (we used SugarCRM). The features related to this integration were: lead generation from our web forms, lead generation from our email campaigns, lead generation based on user action. It also pulled information in from our CRM, so any lead lists we created in our CRM (manually or automatically...

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The most challenging features were the design elements. It was very template based and it took some CSS or HTML skills to make them less-standard. This was true for everything - emails, web pages, landing pages, etc.

Thanks so much for your enthusiastic review of Act-On! We really appreciate it and are glad to hear about your excellent experience with our solution. Happy Marketing! Sarah

We just started using Act-On a few months ago. We had debated marketing automation companies to go with for years. Overall, Act-On was able to go toe-to-toe in most regards with the other vendors we were considering, at least. The deciding factor was the pricing model, which is a bit unusual. They only charge you for "active" contacts, which are contacts you are actually reaching out to. You can import...

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You'll get out of Act-On what you put into it. The support and university is there to guide you in that process, but it's ultimately up to you. That's how it is with any platform that doesn't offer in-house services, but with a marketing automation suite, you will really get more out of it if you have knowledgeable staff that have experience implementing and using these platforms. It can be daunting if it's your first time using a marketing automation suite. While Act-On is working on some new things, I don't know that they are putting as much effort behind investing into the product as some of the leading companies in the space. Also, some of the tools are a little rudimentary, and the UI could certainly use some modernizing. It feels too much like Windows XP at times.

Act-On gives me the ability to get extremely specific with my target prospects and customers. It's easy to build new segments and immediately see the size of those groups. It's very useful for data mining and determining where to focus your marketing efforts. For example, in just a couple of minutes (assuming you've done the work to collect the information from customers and store them properly in...

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The UI in some areas of the platform could use some design enhancements for aesthetics and for consistency throughout.

So great to hear that you're a fan of Act-On. Sounds like you're using it exactly as intended and seeing great results. That's fantastic! Thanks for sharing your review.

The software interface is mostly drag and drop, which is helpful for non developers and non designers alike to create modern, effective emails. With automation and A?B testing, it is great for marketing research and drop or nurture campaigns. Each account is attached to a customer service representative, and they are very helpful and attentive.

The functionality compared to the price is a concern. While it can handle thousands of users, free automation softwares are offering more email design functionality than this software. The user interface isn't the most friendliest, with emails, landing pages, templates and content all divided up into multiple folders. The software boasts that it is custom HTML friendly, but it is very difficult to execute properly. The software also has issues formatting for Outlook.

Hi Paige, Thanks for taking the time to write a review. We appreciate your candor and value your feedback. Sarah

I think you will find ActOn easy to use. I can quickly develop an email and define a target list and send as easily to 10 people or 100,000 people. I also like the reporting and graphs associated with a campaign. I also find the Form editor very valuable b/c I can quickly create a business need survey in a matter of minutes for my internal customers. The responses are easy to analyze b/c they are in spreadsheet form.

ActOn recently rolled out a new forms editor and they did not bring over the reporting URL feature from the Classic Form editor...this would make it easier for my internal customers to pull data vs having me pull the data for them.

Hi Rick, Thanks so much for posting your review! We appreciate your candor and will share your feedback with the product team. They continually work to improve Act-On for customers like you. All the best, Sarah

Once you learn it, you realize how nice of a tool it is. Email campaigns, lead scoring, assessing total voice of customer -- it's all there.

Unless you get the white glove setup service, it's tough to really figure out what you're doing at first. I would not recommend for Dynamics CRM (it's missing features that other CRMs have). The Outlook email template plugin is nice when it works, but more often than not, there are problems. I do wish they help you better understand what data fields are required in both Act-On as well as the CRM, and how to add/edit what is being integrated.

Hi Matt, Thanks so much for posting a review of Act-On. I would encourage you to check out Act-On's customer portal, Act-On Connect. It's full of great resources for customers and includes a customer community for sharing best practices. https://connect.act-on.com/hc/en-us Cheers, Sarah

The company's main advantage (whether they market it or not, but they definitely use it during a sale) is they allow for companies to BUY lists and bring in cold contacts. Almost every other provider prohibits this. Well, that's why for good companies, your marketing performance and emails drop wayyy down. And worse, their support imagines nothing is wrong, and everything is going OK. They will also negotiate your price far lower than others, to lock you into an annual contract.

- Email delivery is terrible - Their support tried to help, but makes false promises on waiting - Locked into a major contract, which even with their lack of performance, is tough to leave - Their UI is really, really bad - Barely any templates for things like landing pages, emails, etc. - General data between modules is not easy to gather, collect or use for additional sales.

This software works very well for our company. A lot of people I've chatted with feel it's out of date but for us, it's perfect. It's easy to write and send an email campaign, and even easier to track the results! I also appreciate how easy it is to use with Dynamics CRM and upload .csv files.

There really isn't anything I don't like about this software. I haven't had a negative experience and it hasn't disappointed me in any way.

Hi Kerry, Thanks so much for posting your review. We love customer feedback and are so happy you're an Act-On enthusiast! Cheers, Sarah

Absolutely nothing. I came from using Pardot at my previous company and then was stuck with this poor excuse for an automation system for two years. Luckily we're in the process of switching back to Pardot at the moment.

Pricing Model Not Built to Scale: They think that the "pay for contacts" pricing model is a pro, but it is not! For any marketer with a growing database this is a pure nightmare given that they are basically unresponsive when you need to add more contacts. We are actually currently in a situation where we can't get ANYONE to respond to help us add more contacts, which means that I cannot execute on...

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Act-On is a robust, yet easy-to-use solution that combines multiple marketing applications into one. It has been a workhorse for us. While it can serve more than a dozen vital functions, including social media management and ABM, I most appreciate its integration with our CRM system (Microsoft Dynamics 365) and how it can be used to automate nurture programs, score leads based on behavior/engagement, and monitor web site visitor activity. I’m also very impressed by members of the tech support team who are very patient and have bailed us out of an after hours pinch more than once.

Keeping up with the constant evolution of Act-On is a full-time job. I often feel like we’re 5 steps behind in understanding newly released features and everything it can do. Of course, that’s a good problem. My only true critique is that the organization seems to have gone through some growing pains and lost its personal touch along the way. When I first selected and implemented Act-On at my previous...

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Sincerely easier to use than others on the market, great overall feature set, love the dynamic content options, program templates were a game changer, account-based marketing provides visibility into how programs are doing at the Account-level that we haven't had.

The UI is slowly being overhauled but I'd like to see this go faster. Their out-of-box reports aren't great, but I haven't run across a marketing automation platform who has great reporting (I do like Marketo's Opportunity Analyzer report) and we use Data Studio to simply pull data out the way we want it to populate our reports in excel or Tableau

Act-On offers automated program templates, all of which are completely customizable to meet our needs in driving leads in our marketing plan. The ease of use which is visually appealing with drag-and-drop, list segmenting, lead scoring options and integrations all work for our organization on both the user level and administrator level.

Pricing as this tool is at the higher end of some marketing resources. Also, the inability to schedule integrating segment runs at the earliest of four hours has caused issues with some of our marketing aspects.

Hi Ashley, Thank you for posting a review! We appreciate your feedback. Cheers, Sarah

The system was pretty easy to use. The set-up process for lead nurturing, forms, creating newsletters and other tools were pretty useful.

Customer service, account limits, aesthetics were below average. The customer service was woeful, the original salesperson who on-boarded me and two referral partners promised the world features wise. Lots of nice looking mocks and promises were made yet nothing provided. On the customer service side of things, on two occasions when the unique contacts and email limit was exceeded the entire system shuts-down. All nurturing campaigns cease and there is no ability to send any emails at all. It took two weeks for someone to be able to apply a temporary increase to allow our marketing efforts to continue.

We like to use Act-On to have a bigger impact on our clients, the personalization is very good, it empowers our sales force, it keeps the marketing automated which allows us to maintain a good interaction with our clients, good detailed reports. It allows us to segment our clients to design specific marketing strategies.

Our expectations with Act-On have been exceeded as we have increased our sales and customer acquisition, we have achieved good ROI with this software, the implementation was easy and it has great technical support.

With Act-On's Activity History, I am able to view a Timeline that helps to keep me organized so I know what I may still need to send and so that I have a good idea about whether or not my prospects are getting communications that they should. Sometimes, with email blasts emails may not get through an organization's spam filter, but using the Activity History and Timeline in Act-On and testing by sending things through Act-On Anywhere in Outlook help to determine who need to receive emails alternate ways.

Often times, maintenance and issues are not brought to our attention prior to us having issues with the software not working or causing issues with our campaigns. Having warnings in advance of when maintenance is being done or of possible known issues so that we can watch for them and be prepared would help a great deal.

Hi Robin, Thanks for taking the time to post a review. We really appreciate it. If you haven't already, I would encourage you to join the Act-On user Community. It's a great place to connect with fellow marketers, submit product enhancement and feature suggestions, as well as share best practices. https://community.act-on.com/ideation-home Happy marketing!

We chose Act-on as our marketing automation software because of its native integration with Salesforce, our CRM at the time. We made the move from Marketo, and Act-on has a much easier user interface. There were so many things we could track and do. We had great customer service, including weekly calls with a customer experience rep.

Like most marketing automation software, the key to success is learning all of the ins and outs of the system, then create a strategy surrounding it. If you don't have someone on your team willing to take advantage of all of the features, the price might outweigh the benefit. Our customer experience rep could have helped more in overall strategy and campaign building, but they were incredibly busy, too busy to go in depth on those items. The team ended up moving to a simpler and cheaper product because they weren't taking advantage of everything Act-on had to offer.

Hi Kelsey, Thanks so much for posting your review. We're seeing a huge uptick in Credit Union customers as they're realizing what a game-changer marketing automation can be in their efforts to compete against big banks. We hope you'll reconsider Act-On in the future when your team is ready to take its marketing to the next level. We've got awesome boot camp trainings that can get users up to speed quickly. Good luck! Sarah

There is a huge uniqueness in the services I get from Act-On compared to my switch softwares. I have experience a fast way to reach out to our leads through SMS and emails. It is quite effective and saves time too. We have been able to collect important data concerning our marketing efforts. It is generally easy to launch and user friendly.

I can't get enough of this. Act-On is easy to use and quite customizable. I have only experienced advantageous services so far.

Ease of use is first and foremost. To create, segment and automate emails of value that will reach our varied customer base is key for us. The social media aspect of Act-On is also a valued feature that not only allows us to plan when our content is shared but what content hits at the right time. We don't use the scoring as much as most companies probably do, but our dive into behavioral analytics through Act-On is yielding great results as well.

Main dislike: More personalization for our sales force to view how their customers are responding. Dashboard is fine, for sure, but we'd love a better way for them to witness the contacts happening.

Thanks for the great feedback. If you haven't already, check out the Act-On User Community for best practice sharing. You'll also find a recent on-demand webinar there about Act-On and Sales Enablement. https://community.act-on.com/home Cheers! Sarah

That you can do everything in one place, you don't need to code anything, (it is useful if you want to improve features or personalize a little bit more, but really not necessary) all modules are easy to use. You have Social Media, Automation, Reporting, Scoring, detailed contact information, connectors, etc.

I think that lists could be updated a bit, like being able to sort by any of the columns. I don't like that they don't have a connector for Instagram and only to webinar options.

Hi Diana, Thanks so much for your positive review! We love your feedback and are so glad you're an Act-On enthusiast. Cheers! Sarah

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Syncing with SFDC is awesome. Easy to use - novices can pick it up quickly. Reporting is quite good and easy to understand. Love the continuous product improvements that are made.

WYSIWYG can drive you crazy, especially with formatting and fonts and hyperlinks, making it tedious to get the look you want. Lately it has been very slow to load, especially photos/graphics.

Thanks for posting your review. I agree that it's easy to pick up and hit the ground running especially if you take advantage of the University, the User Community and the awesome Boot Camp trainings. Learn more on the Community here: https://community.act-on.com/home

I like that I can build drip campaigns or send one-time emails. I also like using the send over time feature. I like the variety of options in how to customize email content.

The tool is clunky-not very user friendly. It takes too many clicks to get to the screen you want, whether it's changing a step in an automated program or checking email opens on a report. The reporting is very limited and makes my reporting process very manual because it doesn't provide what I need. Whenever I call customer service, there is at least a half an hour wait to get through. If I leave a voicemail, they do not call back. They email instead and provide very limited answers in the responses, so it takes multiple emails back and forth to get the information I need. The whole email process takes several days until my issue is resolved.

Hi Amber, Thanks for your honest feedback. We appreciate it and take it to heart. I'm sorry you've had some frustrating experiences. I will be sure to let your Account Manager know so that we can address your concerns. Thanks, Sarah