Act-On’s New Platform Capabilities Give Marketers More Flexibility, Power, Control and Enhanced Usability

Act-on Software provides marketing automation for small and mid-sized businesses. Their latest platform enhancements are designed to empower marketers to customize individual user experiences as well as reports for marketers based on unique business processes. Act-On focused its product innovations on feature sets they found to be most vital to its customers’ needs, i.e., simplifying the user experience through customization capabilities, while making the system more intuitive with personalization and dynamic reporting.  This means that marketers can have more flexibility and while still having control.

When I talk to clients, more and more of them are adopting marketing automation. The new features Act-on is providing are based on customer influence as well as market needs. This is because is Act-On paying close attention to the “whole customer experience” to ensure that Act-on’s clients realize the business success from marketing automation and remain delighted throughout the customer lifecycle.

Act-on’s New Marketing Automation Capabilities Include:

• Funnel Reports - Marketers can better define the stages of their marketing and sales processes and measure the results of their efforts through those stages. Unlike static, traditional reports that provide results for a given period of time, Act-On’s Funnel Reports take continuous snapshots of information in order to measure the overall flow and velocity of leads, track prospects through important conversion points, and compare results across different time periods. These reports can utilize data from multiple sources, including the Act-On Marketing Automation Platform (MAP), CRM systems and other external sources of data.
• Customizable UI & Dashboard - The new dashboard enables users to better manage their marketing assets by organizing them into groups, selecting favorites, and quickly accessing most needed items. They can also configure their dashboards into an instrument panel that gives them an immediate view of their favorite campaigns or performance reports.
• Responsive Design Content Management Editor - Act-On’s new content editor allows marketers to create content that is both responsive and adaptive, rendering properly on any device type. The drag-and-drop editor enables marketers to create attractive campaigns without needing to know HTML or CSS (cascading style sheets).
• New Integration Architecture with Expanded Integrations - A new integration layer provides native integration with all major CRMs, including MS Dynamics, Sugar, NetSuite and SalesForce.com. These high performance integrations give users the flexibility to switch CRM systems without losing any marketing automation functionality.
• Google Chrome plug – Act-On also adds a new Google Chrome plug-in to its growing list of email connectors, enabling users to send email through their corporate email systems like Gmail, Google Apps, and Microsoft Outlook, while using Act-On’s email design templates, personalization and message tracking.

Some Thoughts from Act-on Clients

“We’ve been working with Act-On because it’s the most user-friendly, easiest to implement, and fastest to start up of the marketing automation platforms we’ve used,” said Brandon Larocque, Managing Partner at Access Marketing Company.  “With Act-On Funnel Reports, our agency now has the ability to create a view into the most important output of our marketing automation service — customer movement through the funnel from top to bottom. The new reporting feature unifies marketing performance data from Act-On and our CRM, and allows us to show our clients how marketing is contributing to their bottom line.”

“The Act-On Funnel Reports have opened up a whole new avenue of measurement and analysis,” said John Stalnaker, Marketing Manager at Extensis. “The new reports provide incredible insight into our various marketing channels. We know which channels produce the most leads, opportunities, and revenue — it’s a great alternative to ‘last touch’ campaign tracking that we report through CRM. Because Act-On is our marketing database of record, only Act-On knows all the channels a prospect touches. I can’t get this kind of report out of CRM alone.”

So if you are a small to midsize business, the importance of automating your marketing has never been more important than ever. And what’s great is that marketing automation, which was once only available to larger enterprises is now available to smaller companies. With the ability to scale marketing activities, small companies have the opportunity of a lifetime to grow very quickly, like never before.  And that’s the way I see it.

@drnatalie

 How to work with Dr. Natalie — VP & Principal Analyst | Constellation Research, Inc.