A Great Email Marketing Tool

I took the opportunity to check into a fairly young player in the email marketing space, Act-On Software. Act-On is the Cisco-funded brainchild of former leaders from Responsys and WebEx, and the application itself represents a well-thought out marriage of email marketing, webinar management, and multi-step campaign development.

Described as an email marketing tool for the masses, the user interface is clean and easy to use, requiring zero HTML coding to produce email templates. Pages are generated with intuitive drag and drop elements such as text, images, mail merge fields, and interactive elements.

The interactive elements proved most intriguing for me, allowing for the creation of questions, with answers in variable formats: radio buttons, picklists, multi-select picklists, etc. A single question may be used to elicit a simple response from your recipient, such as a picklist with 5 available times for a follow up call. A survey can easily be created with multiple questions that appear in the body of the email for rapid engagement with your audience. I would anticipate higher response rates by taking the “click-through” stage out of the equation with this feature.

The software is deployed with four core integrations out of the box. They are WebEx, Outlook, Salesforce.com, and Google Analytics and each appears to be a tight integration that enables the end user to live in Act-On as much as possible.

The WebEx integration allows a WebEx account holder (not licensed through Act-On) to manage webinars completely within Act-On. Creating, scheduling and executing marketing campaigns to drive registration occurs all within the platform. The template editor is used to design the invitations, the registration form, and even feeds the ongoing campaign data back to Salesforce.com if you use their marketing automation tools – specifically the Campaign object.

The end user forges the API connection between Act-On and Salesforce.com, and may link a webinar and emails to a Campaign. WebEx statuses such as “Invited,” “Registered” and “Attended” are then mapped to standard or custom Campaign Member Statuses – generally terms like “Sent” “Responded” etc. The data may be pushed to Salesforce to allow for deeper reporting against Leads and Contacts and overall Campaign effectiveness, as well as inform your Sales team with more accurate intelligence on the activity of their prospects.

Act-On appears to come packed with all the other standard goodies, like auto-logging of activities in Salesforce.com, lead scoring and nurturing, and full reporting against survey data and response rates.

With a “per active profile” pricing structure as opposed to a monthly email limit, and attractive pricing at about $500/month for 5 users, Act-On is worth a look; a feature-rich multi-step marketing tool that aims to demystify intelligent lead generation for the masses.

Learn more at www.actonsoftware.com

Act on also offers a free 30 day trial if you want to just check it out.

Tagged as: Act-On, Email Marketing, Marketing tools