This review was last updated May 20, 2013 by RichBohn

This CRM Review examines Act-On Software.

In-Depth CRM Review

Act-On Software

Act-On Software, Inc.
8405 Nimbus Avenue
Suite E
Beaverton, Oregon 97008-7185

Telephone: (503) 530-1555
Toll Free: (877) 530-1555
Fax: (503) 536-6737
Email: [email protected]
Web: http://www.act-on.com/

CRM Category: Marketing Support – Cloud
Sub-Category: Marketing Automation/Email Marketing/Lead Management/Social CRM/Visitor Tracking
Seats: Small Business

About the Company:

Our Mission

To delight Fortune 5,000,000 marketers with a cloud-based integrated marketing solution that enables them to market online more effectively than ever before. Act-On makes it easy for marketing teams to do sophisticated, multi-channel marketing, via a simple yet highly intuitive suite of integrated capabilities.

Our Story

Act-On was created to empower businesses to effectively market online at a fraction of the effort and cost incurred by more complicated systems. Act-On introduced a solution that was far more powerful yet easy enough and intuitive enough that a marketer could use it without help from the IT department.

Act-On Software is the world’s fastest growing marketing automation company; its cloud-based marketing automation platform is the foundation of successful marketing campaigns everywhere – from small, simple and direct, to complex globally implemented programs. Act-On’s technology features an Instant-On™ database for accelerated campaign implementation; an easy, highly intuitive user interface; and a comprehensive, feature-rich solution set. This includes a best-in-class email engine with one-click integration to leading web conferencing and CRM solutions; tools for website visitor tracking, lead scoring, lead nurturing and social media prospecting; design tools for web forms, landing pages and emails; and more.

Our customers tell us that Act-On enables them to keep their focus on their campaign objectives rather than on the underlying technology. Act-On’s integrated marketing platform can be implemented in a matter of hours rather than days and weeks. Contrary to general industry practices, all contracts regardless of size are month-to-month, with prices starting at $500.

Test-drive Act-On yourself and see why well-established companies like Motorola and Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, and rising stars like On24, count themselves among our 1500+ happy customers.

Founded in 2008, Act-On is headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, with offices in Roseville and Menlo Park, California, and Bangalore, India. It is backed by venture capital firms Norwest Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners and Voyager Capital. In addition, the company has received an investment from Stanford University.

About the Product:

Plan and execute all your online marketing campaigns with Act-On’s simple, powerful, cloud-based integrated platform

Organize your online marketing efforts
Generate high quality leads
Turn those leads into sales
Integrate marketing into your sales and support systems
Measure results so you know what works

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a set of technologies that help the marketer manage the customer experience across online channels. The better the customer’s experience, the more likely they are to buy, remain loyal, and become an ardent advocate.

Meet customers where they are: online

Buyers research websites, reach out in social media, open targeted email, listen in on chats, click interesting ads, attend virtual events, and watch videos, all for the sake of gaining intelligence about challenges and making decisions about solutions. It’s become the marketer’s job to discover the best digital channels in which to find their buyers, optimize those channels, and coordinate them so that the buyer’s experience is consistent, positive, and engaging, no matter the channel.
What the marketer needs now is an integrated multi-channel platform that makes all the many facets of online marketing manageable and optimizable, and tracks and aggregates ongoing cross-channel customer engagement. What’s needed is marketing automation.

Email Marketing

Optimizing your email marketing messages and campaigns is one of the most effective things you can do to supercharge your lead generation campaigns and generate higher-quality leads. Act-On provides everything you need to easily and quickly create, test, deploy, and measure your email campaigns.

Create and launch high quality email marketing campaigns with a simple drag and drop interface. No need to know HTML.
Optimize your email using list segmentation, lead scoring and dynamic content to ensure relevant messages go to the right people.
Integrate forms and landing pages with email campaigns to ensure high conversion rates.
Track and measure performance results, including opens, clickthroughs, bounces, and other data.

Generate Leads with Website Visitor Tracking

Get the most from your investment in your website with website visitor tracking. See who visits your site and what they’re looking for. Go beyond page views and unique visitor statistics provided by traditional website analysis tools to get real marketing and sales intelligence to boost your sales.

Who’s visiting your website?

Determine the companies visiting your site before they even fill out a form. Use the Anonymous visitors feature to target likely prospects at those companies

What brought them to your site?

Understand which campaigns brought visitors to your site so you can optimize your marketing efforts and focus on higher performing campaigns
Gain intelligence on what each of your prospects is looking for, and share this information with sales

Lead Management

Develop your prospects by engaging, nurturing, and qualifying leads. Then you can provide the right offer at the right time, for the right product or service, and increase your sales. Every aspect of the Act-On platform contributes to lead generation and management. Act-On lets you employ powerful lead management techniques – without the steep learning curve that hobbles most marketers using other systems.

Start marketing campaigns to your existing lists by simply importing them using Act-On’s list management tools
Nurture your leads to bring them along the buyer’s journey
Use a lead scoring system to identify and prioritize sales-ready leads based on points scored for demographic/firmographic data and behavioral touch points including email, website, events and social media
Refine your communication with prospects as you learn more about them using segmentation and dynamic content
Communicate regularly with prospects using automated drip marketing campaigns and trigger marketing campaigns based on interests and actions
Increase sales revenue and reduce cost of sale by passing qualified leads to sales

Make the Most of Social Media

Act-On’s social media tools help you align your social media strategies and tactics with your other channels, so that your messaging is amplified and your branding is consistently reinforced in all the places a prospect may find you.
Make all your campaigns social, and drive traffic to your website

Act-On’s intuitive creative tools let you add all your social sharing buttons to emails and landing pages with one click, so that all your channels are connected. Broadcast your landing pages to your social media outlets. Then – check the Website Visitor Tracking tool to see how many visits Twitter drives to your website.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Marketing Automation

When marketing automation technology and customer relationship management technology are integrated, real-time, actionable intelligence is the result.

Using Act-On integrated with CRM, salespeople can:

See marketing touch points and scores and know exactly why a lead has been qualified and assigned to them
Prioritize the hottest prospects
Use shared real-time intelligence about a prospect’s interests and activities to inform conversations targeted to demonstrated wants and needs

Act-On Integrates Seamlessly with your CRM

Microsoft Corporation, developer of Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Salesforce.com, developer of Salesforce Sales Cloud

SugarCRM Inc., developer of SugarCRM

Swiftpage, developer of SalesLogix

Measure results in real-time; get insights into campaign performance

Accurately measuring and analyzing campaign performance is a fundamental part of good marketing. It lets you calibrate how you are doing, optimize your campaigns based on what’s working and what isn’t and improve future efforts after analyzing previous results.

Act-On’s tracks and measures all key activities in the system enabling you to quickly view results in real-time and access data for more in-depth analysis.

Who’s coming to your site and how did they get there? See who’s visiting your site, the company they’re with and who referred them to your site.
How are your campaigns performing? From email opens and click-through to landing page visits, form submissions and webinar attendance, get a clear picture of the performance of each campaign
Test and optimize your campaigns with A/B testing. Determine the best converting campaigns even before you go live by running A/B tests to segments of target list across a broad range of parameters
Benchmark your online presence against your competitors. Compare your web traffic, social media activity and your presence on YouTube to that of your competition. Use the results to set goals for improvement
Measure your return on investment (ROI) to see the results you are getting from the money spent in marketing.

Make your webinars and online events far more effective than they are today

As a 21st century marketer, you should be doing online webinars and events to generate leads, nurture existing leads and interact with current customers. But the planning and execution of such events is time consuming and therefore the results are often sub-optimal.

Act-On’s webinar and online event management functionality dramatically reduces the time you spend on organizing your webinar while increasing the quality of your results.

Act-On integrates with both WebEx and GoToWebinar to provide you with a seamless experience of planning, delivering, and following up on a webinar or online event
Plan your webinar or online event campaign from start to finish using Act-On to ensure your communication with prospects is both effective and timely
Engage prospective attendees before the event by creating a curriculum of steady communication and giving them a professional registration experience to maximize registrations
Follow-up with registrants (attendees and non attendees) after the event. Use Act-On to segment your audience based on their attendance and level of participation and send them the appropriate message to continue to interact with them

Price:

For complete pricing details, please see:

http://www.act-on.com/pricing/

For a proper demo of this CRM solution:

For a proper demo of this CRM solution, please see:

http://cdn1.actonsoftware.com/video/demo1105/start.html

Rich’s Video Highlights of this CRM solution:

Rich’s View of Act-On Software:

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