Act-On

A few years ago, after consulting and then joining a growing small business, the president and I threw out Microsoft's Business Contact Manager and brought up ZohoCRM integrated with GoogleApps/Mail. The combination was a 'right-size' approach at the time, for many months. But as the customer database grew, the reporting needs and interest in integrating marketing automation intensified, we knew we needed to augment or replace the use of Vertical Response for outbound. Surveying the segment, I found and researched Eloqua, Marketo, and Act-On. As we were staffing limited, time was valuable, complex solutions were of no interest. We went with Act-On and have never looked back.
The recent migration from moving from the ZohoCRM platform to Salesforce.com as the needs and demands grew has gone quite smoothly. I have seen the comments related to Salesforce by others and believe that for some who are not going to try to work towards automation, and for whom a solid Ecosystem of solutions from which to draw are not important, ZohoCRM can be an attractive solution.
But, if a minimal level of usage sophistication begins to be applied, integration with other systems like Lead Management/Marketing Automation is important (and at this point, it should be for nearly any business with revenues over a few hundred $K a year) the Salesforce/Act-On combination has been killer-good,

Having a marketing automation tool such as Act-on is a really benefit to run successful marketing campaign. When we started using Act-On, we realized we were not as organized as we thought we were; It kind of "forced" us (in a positive way) to rethink our campaigns, how we built them and what we expected from them. We were able for the first time to really segment and target our audience. We saw a significant increase in our opening and click rates, we could trigger more interest by sending relevant content to our audience, and this led us to more qualified and interested leads.

This tool allowed us to track our audience and create reports on our tasks and projects such as events, webinars, digital campaign (including google adwords, social media posts, emails, website, landing pages). It is a must-have in our marketing tech-stack.
We would advise to really define your needs and do some benchmark; Act-On is a great tool to build segmentation, automated programs, nurturing programs and it can be integrated with many other tools, to create a great and efficient tech stack. It definitely is a tool worth having, but it requires to know where you want to go and what you want to achieve.
It took us a few months before understanding and mastering most of what you can do within the platform, and we’re still learning. So be persistent and don’t be afraid to “play with” and test the tool, it’s totally worth it.

Our company is an insurance brokerage firm specializing in employee benefits (health, dental, life, pensions) for midsize companies in Brazil. Our sales process is based on inside sales cold calling clients to schedule face-to-face visits with our sales consultants. We already have a great telemarketing platform, and we wanted to extract more value from the interactions we have with our prospects, especially when it's not yet time to schedule a face-to-face visit. Before Act-On, we only scheduled a follow-up call after a given time, determined by the inside sales agent according to client response.

We found Act-On as an affordable and flexible solution to our marketing automation needs. We particularly liked their "no commitment" sales approach, with month to month billing, no contracts, no upfront setup fees.

Implementation was easy, we were able to figure out how to do it ourselves. Business support is very weak, though. Interactions are very superficial, and the sales rep (who, thankfully, continued to be accessible to answer our questions) is more knowledgeable about the software and real marketing applications than the designated Customer Success Managers (who we don't feel are very invested in our success).

Its functionality is basic but complete. The content manager (for Landing Pages, for example) is quite basic, but once you figure out how to use it, it does what you need done. Lead scoring works fine, as do Automated Programs. It could have better designed templates for emails and landing pages; the ones provided are dreadful.

There is a major shortcoming, though, and I think it's a fatal one: e-mail deliverability. For some reason, most of the email I send through Act-On doesn't make it to my clients' inboxes. I have trying to address this issue with Act-On's deliverability team, but it seems to be something they have resigned to convince their customers to live with. Our clients are in Brazil, so they tried to convince me that this is a problem specific to Brazilian ISPs. I believed this, until I made a test a couple weeks ago. I sent test messages to all ISPs I could create an account on: UOL, Locaweb (Brazilian), GMail, Google Apps, Outlook.com, iCloud, and Yahoo. It turned out that all messages sent to Brazilian ISPs actually made it to their inboxes. The problem was with Google hosted email accounts (100% of the messages I sent went to junk/spam; they didn't even make it to the new Promotions tab), Outlook and Yahoo. So, even if you are in the U.S., look out for poor deliverability.

My sales and marketing team had so many benefits from this software. The marketing and data analysts had high-level, quality reports that were as detailed or as broad as they wanted. The sales team had live information about their hottest leads and could rely on the lead-generation process to do things automatically. They didn't have to worry about information not being part of the CRM from Marketing because the integration made that seamless. Truly a great program and I didn't even have enough characters to talk about all of the other features too!

We've been able to bring our marketing data into one place and create a more unified platform from which to send out our marketing campaigns.