Act-On Software vs. Oracle Marketing

If you have MS Dynamics CRM, this is the automation platform for you and your operations. Act-On Software easily syncs with dynamics, and we've never had a problem with this since we set ours up years ago. If you use a different CRM, I'd check to see if other options might make more sense. Having that ability for the systems to seamlessly talk is critical.

Incentivized

A duration of one and a half years is enough for us to
recognize the capabilities of a tool and in my opinion, this one is just a
great tool to manage marketing campaigns of even massive-sized firms. Its
marketing automation tool and its way of managing campaign and the way it
executes digital initiatives is enough to get an inkling of its abilities.
Less favorable for the people who want to have something at
a cheap price and are more dependent on the reports as its reports have nothing
much in detail.

Incentivized

• The templates are easy to use and set up campaigns.
• It's simple to use, and the email editor features a drag-and-drop interface.
• It's easy to set up a drip campaign or a series of scheduled emails.
• It has the flexibility of having a variety of scheduling options and the use of user experience automation.

Incentivized

• We can look for the behavior of our clients on our website and mobile application using the analytics it provides.
• It is highly customizable.
• It presents data in a form that is easily understandable and reports are highly beneficial for us.
• Analytics in the form of graphs.

Incentivized

• Building email and landing page templates are difficult, the drag and drop builder is not straightforward, and requires coding knowledge
• The workflow tool is cumbersome and not as intuitive as I'd expect a best in class marketing software's to be
• Domain connections and domain management functionality made it difficult to manage multiple company domains and subdomains for pages

Incentivized

• User Interface - The UI is a bit outdated and clunky, but gets the job done with some getting used to.
• Training - There isn't much out there for training, unless you are willing to pay Oracle or a 3rd party.
• Support - There is no dedicated support and you have to use their portal. It sometimes take awhile to get things looked at or fixed, but they eventually get to it.

Incentivized

It's my single biggest asset in my current role. With limited resources, its enabled Anachron to punch well above our weight marketing wise and although we're still at the beginning of our journey I know the system can scale with us

We have been able to automate so many marketing processes with Eloqua over the past 5 years that the only direction would be to adopt the latest and greatest features Eloqua adds. The alternative would be to go back to the marketing stone-age and start over again. And we would rather move forward with increased automation and efficiency.

It's good, but not quite brilliant. Some parts of the interface are still a bit outdated. The product has been evolving very fast, though, and I believe in a few months it will be up there with the best of them, interface wise as well.

Incentivized

Personally, I find it quite easy to use. But for those members of our team who have little or no testing experience, it's been a bit more difficult. There's also training required for development teams in order to have your campaigns coded and set up in the most efficient way. Our developers have been able to do basic and intermediate tests with no difficulty, and they find the interface itself quite intuitive... it's just the extremely complex tests that require a bit more understanding.

I have always found them quick to respond to my query by web inquiry. In those instances when I call, I have always reached help quickly. They are conscientious and skilled in discussing my concern and finding a solution to my problem. Other tech organizations should use Act-On as a model for top-notch customer service.

No one has experienced any problems with availablity.

Sometimes the server loading speed is a little slow but most often runs fine and if it doesn't their tech support is quick to respond

There are occasional complaints about slowness to refresh a screen or build a report. However, this is as much a factor of network access speeds as the system itself, since often the complaints occur when someone is accessing on a wireless network.

Since we start using Act-on for ourselves and our clients, we have been supported very well. Often we need to integrate with legacy systems and we find the support team on our side during the whole endeavor. Always asking if they can help us further, always willing to do a better job. The support of Act-On is one of the main differentiators

I would actually rate day to day support a 1. We often knew more than the person on the phone.

I would however rate escalation support a 7. When we went to “red status”, support was very good. We were assigned a technical resource who performed a full audit. Unfortunately the integration to Salesforce.com still failed

Dan D. was great. He took the time to understand how I needed the program to run, and was very flexible to our special CRM setup.

They offer very basic classes which are required for master certification.

After having been through it, I would not consider anyone with a master certification any more qualified, unlike Salesforce.com certification which is a more difficult thing to acquire. For example, one of the classes towards certification was around social media. I would have expected examples of how to incorporate into campaigns in the product, with a demo and hands-on test. Instead, it was a powerpoint slideshow that went on way too long and covered really basic stuff like “what is Facebook, what is Twitter”

The system is very user friendly, I think we were up and running within a day or so of having the product. It took very few online training for me to learn a large chunk of the functionality of this system.

Ok, so, this sounds like it could be horrible because it was all remote, but we loved it... the Adobe training environment was easy to use, and the trainers were engaging. It was simple to switch back and forth between the meeting and the hands-on exercises in their training instances. We took the fundamentals training early in our implementation-- before the consultants came onsite-- and I know this made a big difference in our implementation, because we were able to ask informed questions throughout

What impressed me most is that Act-On showed full committment in making our implementation successful, even when it required additional support from their team. This gave me a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings. Most other software software vendors are not anywhere close to being this responsive and effective

I give it a 10 because the only issue we had was a result of not following the guidance we were given. Maxymiser provided a customized implementation guide for each site where we were adding the code. On our site implementations when we followed that guide to the letter, it was extremely fast and easy and has worked very well.

We chose Act-On for its ability to support our customers within a single account. The Marketing Network is a huge benefit to our business and the offerings we provide to our customers. In previously working with Hubpsot and Salesforce, we found the support to be lacking - often being referred to a forum or landing page rather than getting hands-on guided help from a knowledgeable person on their team. We LOVE Act-On and the team that they have servicing our account!

Incentivized

It was quite complex to generate segments with Adobe
analytics and I wasn’t personally satisfied with the overall performance of
Adobe Analytics and wasn’t enough flexible in any way. So we decided to switch
to something else better than Adobe Analytics and is available in the market at
a cheap rate and we ended up doing our research for the most suitable tool at
Oracle Infinity and we don’t regret our decision.

Incentivized

Before I feel like I need more features, the Act-On customer service reps are contacting me telling about new features as part of my account.

Eloqua is definitely good for larger companies that have 100,000+ contacts and complex marketing workflows and data. Personalization is fairly robust with Eloqua for larger campaigns with smart content and features. Scaling across channels is also seamless - as the platform has great options for non-email channels like SMS, Direct Mail, Chat, etc.

Incentivized

• Positive- quick setup for webinars between 3 different tools, made it easy to do in high volume
• Negative- lots of processes with the designer tools that made email/landing page design take longer than it should have, costing man hours
• Positive- email automation with different types of campaigns we could have flowing at once or could span across multiple audience segments made it so we could consistently create touch points and increase our engagement, thus our ROI over time

Incentivized

• Eloqua has had a very positive impact on our ROI and ability to build very complex programs. We have been nomitnated for the past 4 years as a Markie finalist and have won a Markie ourselves.
• Eloqua has a great pulse on the marketing trends and future developments to help keep it's software competitive.

Incentivized