Act-On Software Does List-Based Demand Generation

If you look at the Web site of Act-On Software, you’ll see a typical set of demand generation features: email marketing, demand generation (equated with landing pages and forms), lead nurturing, Website visitor tracking, channel (partner) marketing, and lead scoring. Oddly, it does not highlight Act-On’s most distinctive advantage, which is tight integration with Webex for Webinar presentations. Less oddly, it also doesn’t explain that – unlike every other demand generation I recall seeing – Act-On has no marketing database. (Or, as CEO Raghu Raghavan comments below, it doesn't require one.)

I’ll come back to the database later. In most ways, working with Act-On is like working with other products: users build emails, landing pages and Web forms; track activities through page tags and cookies; do scoring and segmentation with activity history and lead attributes; and pass qualified leads to Salesforce.com. The specific features to do this are reasonably powerful: for example, emails and Web pages can be built from scratch, based on templates or imported, while the templates themselves can be built from components stored in a central library. The components can include prebuilt surveys, which can be embedded in an email or linked to a separate Web form. This is more than many other products offer.

The system also offers above-average flexibility in its delivery arrangements: clients can send the email either from their own servers or through Act-On, and can display Act-On-host forms within external Web pages as iframes.

Act-On also does a good job of capturing activity history and form entries. The activity data is stored in together so that all activities for a given lead (identified by an email address or, if anonymous, a cookie ID) can be used for scoring and segmentation. Data posted to Web forms can also be stored in a central file. Scoring rules are pretty simple, but can both reference lead attributes and activities, and are updated in real time as new data arrives. Users can also use scores, attributes or activities to define lists that are updated in real time.

So far so good, and now we can talk about Webinars. Users can define a Webinar within Act-On, entering name, time, date, duration, password, and teleconference number, and then push this to their Webex account. They can also create a registration page and form, auto-response message, invitation emails, reminders and follow-up emails. The system will feed the registrations into Webex and pull back attendee lists, gathering all the related data within Act-On for reporting. This is a significant improvement over the usual situation, where data is scattered between the different systems.

But remember that channel marketing listed on the home page? It’s pretty limited. Dealers and similar channel partners can be assigned Act-On accounts with access to the library of marketing materials, including documents and email templates. They can also import lists and execute email campaigns. The parent company can’t use the partners’ lists (always a sensitive issue) but does have access to responders. At present, email templates are either fully locked-down (no changes allowed) or totally open. Act-On plans to refine this so the parent can allow partners to change some portions of the template and not others. Even with these changes, the channel management features in Act-On don’t compare with Marketbright or Treehouse International. (For more information, see my blog post on Marketbright and my post on Treehouse International.)

Lead nurturing is also very limited at present: there is no automated or event-trigged email execution, and no multi-step campaign structures. The company is set to add these in two weeks, however. That first release won’t support other automated processes, including list imports or sending data to a sales automation system. The company does expect to add those over time. But at the moment, Act-On is very much an exception among demand generation products in not offering automated data synchronization with Salesforce.com.

This brings us back to the database. Act-On doesn’t maintain a marketing database in the conventional sense: a single, continuously updated list of customers that is linked to attributes, survey responses, activities and campaign history. Instead, it maintains separate lists that can either be imported or built within the system. The system has standard connectors to import from Salesforce.com (it can pull members of a specific campaign, all contacts or all leads), Microsoft Outlook, and Webex. It can also take data from Excel, comma-separated text files and its own Web forms.

The system does let users create internal lists by segmenting or merging existing lists. This gives back some of the capabilities lost with the database. When lists are merged, users can decide whether to allow duplicates (based on email address), to merge duplicates (adding fields to the parent list to avoid losing data), or only to add records with new email addresses. Clients who wanted something like a conventional marketing database could use these features to merge everything into one big list. But you'd have to do it manually, at least until the new automation features are added.

The main practical difference between working with lists and with a database is that segmentation, scoring, personalization and reports can only work with one list at a time (plus the activity history, which is automatically linked to all lists via email address). This means lists must be physically merged before their attributes can be used in combination. To me this sounds like a lot of extra work; Act-On argues it gives users great flexibility because they don't have to worrry about a data model. I think it ultimately comes down to whether you'll be using the system like a traditional email engine, sending campaigns to independent lists, or for on-going interactions, where a single, continuously maintained database makes more sense.

Whether you’d be comfortable with Act-On’s list-based approach depends on how you would use the system. Pricing is less likely to be an obstacle. The company charges for “active” contacts (defined as having an interaction or receiving a message), starting at $499 per month for 5,000 active contacts and reach $1,499 per month for 25,000. It’s hard to compare this with other vendors since most charge based on database size or communication volume. But it seems competitive with small business-oriented demand generation systems and lower those products aimed at larger firms. There are no set-up fees, clients can have month-to-month contracts, and you can start with a 30 day free trial. So this is a pretty easy system to buy.

Act-On also offers a sales automation system that could be an alternative to Salesforce.com. Pricing on this starts at $14.95 per month for three users and 1,000 contacts.

Act-On released its beta version in June 2008 and started selling last October. The company is now up to about 25 clients. Most are small or mid-sized, but they also include Cisco, which invested in Act-On in 2008.