Act-On Reviews

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.

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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.

Great support and product learning program. The integration with our CRM and overall features/ease-of-use was excellent. It was a pleasure working with their team.

I'd like to have more in-person user group opportunities to discuss best practices.

Thank you so much for the positive feedback! We actually did a user group series this fall (London, Irvine, Chicago) and will do many more in 2020. Hopefully, you can join us in 2020. In the meantime, I would encourage you to leverage Act-On Connect, our customer portal and the vibrant community to share best practices and pose your questions. You can find it here: https://connect.act-on.com/hc/en-us Cheers! Sarah

- Their support team was stellar - Their Salesforce integration is the best I've seen in a Marketing Automation Platform - Their list segmentation system features were fantastic - We were early subscribers to act-on so we had a really cheap rate

I haven't used this software for a couple years, so they may have improved a lot but here were some of my major gripes: - Extremely difficult to track lead sources - Integration with ad platforms wasn't very good - Landing page builder was terrible - Lots of limitations with forms - Email builder was quite painful to use but they made some improvements along the way while I was using them

The Dynamics integration was a crucial part of my decision to adopt this software for my company. Ease of use is comparable to any other robust marketing automation tool. We've seen huge value in this purchase.

Unfortunately the software does not function well on iOS devices.

We love hearing your feedback. Thanks for sharing your review! Great to hear that you're benefitting from the new customer tutorials, tips and tricks. If you haven't already, please check out the Act-On User Community as another great resource for best practices and product suggestions. https://community.act-on.com/home

I like that it will track my emails and log them to our CRM (Microsoft Dynamics). I like that I can get a daily email letting me know of known and anonymous visitors to our website.

It's clunky to try and track down a specific email to see if the recipient has interacted with it. This is really a tool that is more valuable to marketing, but has built some features that are being sold as a sales tool. It's a nice to have, but not a need for sales.

Hi Layne, Thanks for posting your review of Act-On. We value your feedback and really appreciate your candor. If you haven't already, I'd encourage you to check out the Act-On User Community at https://community.act-on.com/home It's a great place to share feedback and product suggestions with the Product team and exchange best practices with fellow users. Thanks!

Act-On is great for most tasks. I can create emails, forms, and drip campaigns with ease. It syncs really easily to Salesforce and I haven't seen a single issue with that yet.

It's not as comprehensive and contemporary as some platforms. The forms aren't dynamic, and the emails are in a modular form instead of an easier drag-and-drop format.

Hi Brian, Thanks for taking the time to share a review on Act-On. We really appreciate your feedback. If you haven't done so already, I'd encourage you to check out the Act-On User Community for great tips, tricks and best practicing sharing. https://community.act-on.com/home Thanks! Sarah

Building mailings is relatively straightforward. There are a decent amount of functions that allow us to customize our mailings in different ways based on content and branding for our various campaigns.

The sorting and filtering functions for sent mailings isn't very robust. The mailing builder is actually really quite finicky sometimes. Adding borders around image blocks causes extra white space around mailings. Also, buttons and other smaller elements render differently in the mailing builder than in Outlook, which is one of the primary email clients people use. Mailings end up looking less polished in Outlook.

Hi Stephanie, Thanks for posting your review. We really appreciate your honest feedback and take it to heart. Best, 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.

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

The automated programs make staying in touch with customers and prospects very easy. You can set up quite complicated programs that incorporate not only emails to the target audience but that also notify internal staff and other functions.

It's not as complete as some other systems. For instance, the website info you can get is not super detailed or useful. As well, connecting with a CRM that isn't already integrated is not a simple task.

This is a very robust email marketing program with marketing automation capabilities. We switched to Act On to be able to take advantage of setting up automated campaigns based on user behavior both in our emails and on our website.

Because the automation capabilities are so robust, this software has a very steep learning curve. It would not have been feasible for us to use this for marketing automation in-house without a full time person just using Act-on. We had to hire a consultant to be able to use this software.

It's functionality and diverse tools makes it the top-of-class when it comes to marketing automation platforms.

In recent months, the customer service has not been as strong as in the past. It seems like it takes more than 48 hours to get questions/concerns of mine answered.

Love hearing that "Act-On is the engine that your marketing success runs on"...that's awesome! The Support Team is working around the clock to help customers. Thanks so much for your patience. Please check out the Act-On User Community for additional resources here: https://community.act-on.com/home Cheers!

Very simple user interface. With a team spread out across the country, there was no problem in teaching everyone how to use this platform. Really like that I can schedule out my email for time zones, that is a great feature.

Sometimes painfully slow to run. Also, help desk would take a long time to respond to a request that would be marked as urgent. While I understand a small company is not biggest fish to fry, it would be nice to have responses within an hour if marked urgent during normal business hours.

Thanks for your feedback, Sara. We've made recent updates that have greatly improved the speed and performance of the platform. The Act-On User Community is another great resource for your questions, tips, tricks, and best practices. You can access it here: https://community.act-on.com/home Cheers!

We like the fact that is it powerfull and we have so much possibility with it

BUT the way to get things done is not very straight foreward. for example, you don't have any customer support - just deal with the manual and the community (this business model is used by sub brand of big brands), the fact that it is not very user friendly (no possibility to edit pictures directly in the landing pages / emails..).

Once you figure it out, it's a very simple tool to use and can be easily accessed.

The form set-up. I think the set-up is complicated & could use some tweaking. I don't like that you have to create a new form (when pulling the data) if you add anything new into the original form.

Thanks for posting your review. I hope you'll check out the Act-On User Community...it's a great resource for best practices, tips, tricks and sharing your product suggestions. https://community.act-on.com/home Cheers!

Ease of use from start to finish- fairly intuitive software so it is easy to train new folks on, too!

the layout has some glitches every once & a while- looks one way in review pane & then totally different in the test send.

Hi Terri, We think YOU rock! Thanks so much for posting a review for Act-On. We value and appreciate your feedback. Cheers! Sarah

The ease of reporting and how well it integrates with Salesforce

the customer service can take a while to resolve an issue

Hi Michael, Thanks so much for posting a review for Act-On. We really appreciate your feedback. We've recently added chat support as an additional channel for help. Initial feedback has been very positive. Check it out... https://university.act-on.com/Your_Account/Act-On_Support/Contacting_Act-On_Support Cheers! Sarah

Act-On is a very good Marketing tool which has been very helpful in my emailing campaigns, creation of forms, polls, landing pages, lead generation, media library hosting, and integration with our CRM.

Sometimes the Customer support can be a bit slow. We have also found the tool stalls at times, though rarely.

Thank you for your feedback. We love hearing from customers.

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The customer support, they are very quick to respond and follow-up.

The ease of use you could be improved. More tutorials on new features.

Hi Kasey! Thanks for your review. I encourage you to check out Act-On's User Community for additional resources and best practice tips. You'll find it here: https://community.act-on.com/home