Marg Act-On

The software itself was pretty good. We would have loved to continue using the software and take full advantage of what it has to offer.

Aggressive, high-pressure sales calls and smoke and mirror games about getting discounted prices. Ultimately though, Act-On offered us a discount, but did not disclose what future upgrade costs would be. We made our needs of what the client count would have to be clear before we signed up, but they convinced us to sign up in a lower tier to meet our budget and close the deal. But then after 3-4 months of set-up and training, we finally went to use the software in practice and needed to upgrade # of clients to actually utilize the system, and then were met with the reality of the situation. They had no intent of accommodating our original needs at the budget we discussed and tried to double our cost to get to the original needs we discussed. Even though they admitted that they were vague and unclear in the agreement on the upgrade details, they refused to accommodate our needs/budget or to let us out of our contract and instead chose to simply state that we were still bound to pay for the software until the end of the term, even though they know we won't even be able to utilize the service. Pretty poor service and they are only thinking in the short-term about making a few bucks instead of working with us to save the account.

Be careful to get your growth plan and rates for future growth identified in your initial contract. Don't sign up unless you know what rates they will charge you in the future if you need to upgrade client #s.

E-mail marketing automation.

Nothing. Act-On provides nothing that other companies don't and for less money.

Promise the moon and are always trying to upsell. Avoid Act-On like the plague--we've tried so many programs like this and truly thought they would be different, but they're not. Waste of money. Use a cheaper system that provides the same analytics. The worst part is that they convinced us that one of their third party partners would be able to design an email program that would deliver leads, but that was a joke! We ended up having to create the content ourselves. So we spent more money for nothing. Many less expensive programs out there that provide the same service.

Save your money and go with a less expensive system--Act-On provides nothing that the others don't at less cost.

No benefits at all. We thought they'd be able to help us with email blasts and the like, but in six months we've gotten no leads.

I liked the hands on approach and they don't just forget about you.

They are only after money and care about nothing but signing on people even if they know it isn't a right fit. Lots of promises and tell you it can do more than it does.

Requires a full time associate to utilize the software.

Harass you about owing money and contracts which were fulfilled and payed up in full. Loses track of payments billing and accounting will say you owe money when you have all receipts an invoices for the contract.

If you are a medium enterprise or corporation I highly suggest avoiding act-on unless you want to pay someone 30K a year to babysit an email marketing acquisition effort.

Email marketing and future lead acquiring.

Honestly not much. Almost every interaction we had with them was pretty poor. I suppose the fact that it's less expensive than Marketo is a bonus.

The user interface - difficult and complicated, poorly designed. The performance - very slow to load. The support - they stonewalled us when we asked them to address some issues.

In more details, we used Act-On for about a year, and saw a variety of problems. Here are some of them:

Downtime and unavailability. My customers/visitors repeatedly and publicly complained about not getting downloads they signed up for. After clicking through a form and filling out their information, instead of downloading an ebook they'd get a 404 not found error on Act-On's servers. Act-On denied that this could possibly happen and refused to even investigate it seriously. I found it unconscionable that they would blame us or just close support tickets without even trying to do something simple like look at server logs. Meanwhile I was getting a black eye on social media, and it's a lose lose situation because if you say "I'm trying to fix this problem but my vendor's systems are broken" you look even worse, so I ended up just emailing a bunch of PDFs to people personally who were trying to download but could not. This was not an isolated incident, it happened over the space of months and months.

Integration with SalesForce. Instead of really integrating with SalesForce, they keep a "walled garden" around the data and link to a page within Act-On. So in SalesForce, when you're looking at activity history for example and you see an email or something, you click into it and it's just a link to a page within Act-On. This means we're going to lose all of our historical data if we leave Act-On.

Performance of the product. We hosted our own website and embedded their JavaScript tracking snippets and forms. This was a nightmare. We repeatedly measured the performance impact that this had on our website's page load time for visitors and proved that the performance of loading their JavaScript was abysmal. It was causing issues such as Google Webmaster flagging our pages as slow (and as you know, this causes a hit to Page Rank, impacts SEO, and impacts the cost and visibility of Adwords and related ads.

Security of the product. My engineers were horrified at the quality of the Act-On code. They warned me repeatedly that by embedding Act-On's snippets and forms into our pages, we were exposing our customers and visitors to genuinely insecure code. IN addition, the quality of their externally visible code was so low it gave us no confidence that their backend systems are secure or high quality.

Integration headaches. Everything was a spaghetti mess of broken HTML and styling. It was enough to make your eyes bleed trying to work with it.

Customer success. They basically abandoned and ignored us after we onboarded. Certainly did not follow their own best practices of customer success in the ebooks they constantly produced and marketed to me.

In summary, I think Act-On is a cheap knock-off of Marketo whose business model is "churn and burn." It's a sales-first product and company that doesn't deliver on promises and doesn't care.

Use HubSpot instead.

The usual marketing automation things - email campaigns, forms and registration for downloads, lead scoring, etc.

The ability to replace previously uploaded files without changing the link.

Initial experience was ok. Email editor is very limited and building your own custom email templates is unnecessarily difficult. Using the system for over a year and finding out something simple we wanted to do was there the whole time, but we weren't trained at all. Time came for discussing renewing the contract and we asked for specific numbers and answers were vague but assured the price change was minimal. Asked is $X,X00/month was the increase, told yes. Come to find out, we were moved from our annual contract to a 3-year extension with an increase of nearly 5x/month. Through all of this, Progressive Profiling (a feature that was a large selling feature for us and integrated throughout all of the forms on our site broke due to something they did on the backend. We contacted support, we told it was a small issue would be fixed. This continued on for several months until we were told they don't know how to fix it and it was broken. What started as a serviceable relationship has quickly spiraled into a nightmare.

Avoid like the plague. Their concern for the customer is minimal. Their goal is to bleed as much money out of you for as long as they can before you leave.

Marketing automation with emails and resource delivery as well as integration with Salesforce.