Constant Contact vs Act-On

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Our analysts compared Constant Contact vs Act-On based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Marketing Automation Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Act-On Software Tool

Product Basics

Constant Contact is a comprehensive software solution designed for managing marketing automation tasks, making it particularly suitable for small to medium-sized businesses looking to enhance their email marketing efforts. This platform offers a range of important benefits, including the ability to easily create professional-looking emails, track campaign performance, and segment audiences for targeted messaging. Among its popular features are customizable email templates, robust analytics, and integration capabilities with other tools, which collectively help businesses improve their engagement rates and ROI on marketing campaigns. When compared to similar products, users often highlight Constant Contact's user-friendly interface and responsive customer support as key differentiators. Pricing for Constant Contact varies based on the features and scale of use, typically following a monthly subscription model that allows businesses to choose a plan that best fits their needs and budget. This flexibility in pricing, combined with its comprehensive feature set, makes Constant Contact a competitive option in the realm of marketing automation tools.

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Established in 2008, Act-On is a comprehensive platform that offers marketing professionals all the standard features in an automation tool, alongside several other unique features.

Sophisticated email automation, landing page construction, analytics, automated campaigns, useful templates, and social channels are just some of the features that are available to users. This product is ideal for medium to large enterprises, especially those that have dedicated marketing departments.

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$9.99 Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
$1,000 Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
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Product Assistance

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Product Insights

  • Mobile App: Provides native email marketing and email list builder mobile apps for Android and iOS devices. 
  • Live Support: Experts offer help with product questions, marketing strategy and more, accessible via phone or email. 
  • PDF to Email: Convert an uploaded PDF into an email, which can also be edited and sent, ensuring versatility in the market. 
  • Click-Tracking Heat Map: Optimize and streamline workflows, landing pages, websites and emails. Track customer clicks and drill down into the details to enhance strategy. 
  • Mobile Open Rate: Compare metrics to the audience’s desktop open rate and gain greater visibility into the market space. 
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  • Make Sense of Digital Breadcrumbs: Better track and score campaigns with this piece of software. This tool helps marketers attain a high-level overview of their campaigns and enterprises.
  • Inbound Marketing: Act-On provides support for inbound marketing techniques, enabling users to organically and dynamically pull in leads from across channels.
  • Outbound Marketing: Automated campaigns, lead scoring and list management are built into the software to support outbound marketing techniques and conversion tracking.
  • Sales Effectiveness: The software helps to unify sales and marketing teams effectively by providing a sales-funnel overview and campaign attribution, assisting users in scoring their leads.
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  • Drag-and-Drop Editor: Facilitates customizing an email template and designing professional, mobile-responsive emails for every device. 
  • Sign-Up Forms: Supports creating inline sign-up forms that can be embedded into the HTML code on the website or blog to enable collecting sign-ups as people view a specific webpage. Provides sign up-forms and automatic display triggers to maximize list growth. 
  • Surveys and Polls: Facilitates creating custom surveys and polls, and enables viewing individual results from respondents or tracking general data trends from social media or an email survey. 
  • Campaign Report: View email metrics such as sends, opens, clicks and more. Compare campaigns to determine which received the most opens or clicks. 
  • Integrations: Integrates with apps such as Salesforce, Outlook, Mindbody, Shopify, Facebook and more. 
  • A/B Testing: Run an A/B test on two versions of subject lines to maximize email open rates. 
  • Contact Segmentation and Targeted Marketing: Create customized segments based on a contact’s engagement with email campaigns, location and company details, and already-existing lists. Send targeted marketing emails with relevant messages. 
  • Contact Management: Upload contacts from Excel, Outlook, Salesforce and more. 
  • Email Scheduling: Send emails instantly or schedule them to be sent at a future time. Suggests the best time to send emails based on the industry’s open rate. 
  • Landing Pages: Two types are available: 
    • Lead Generation: Collects visitor information and helps set up automated email series to stay connected to new leads. 
    • Shoppable: Enables selling products and supports tracking results such as gross revenue, page visitors, conversion rates and more. 
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  • CRM Integration: Act-On can integrate with SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics, SugarCRM, NetSuite, Infor and Simpleview. Using any of these integrated CRMs, marketers can engage segmented contacts through targeted account activity.
  • Account-Based Marketing Automation: Account profiles provide an overview of accounts and buyer behaviors, giving users a clear picture of aggregate customer behavior.
  • Progressive Profiling: Collect information without making customers fill out a large number of forms. Adaptive forms, which present and collect information incrementally over time, help users gain valuable insights without being intrusive.
  • Targeted Email Automation: With easy-to-use templates, code-free interfaces and a diverse template catalog, users have access to a variety of content to push out through automated email campaigns. Act-On also integrates its analytics platform into its email outreach, letting users track open rates and measure success.
  • Report Sharing: The solution’s analytics platform can generate robust and interactive reports for users to easily share with decisionmakers.
  • Data Studio: This program comes equipped with an analytical engine called Data Studio, which can pull data from a variety of sources such as CSV, Excel, Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure.
  • Social Media Engagement: Build brand awareness with automated social posting and metrics aggregation. Act-On’s content curation engine provides insights into content that can generate higher levels of engagement for a user’s business.
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Product Ranking

#19

among all
Marketing Automation Software

#50

among all
Marketing Automation Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

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AI-Based Capabilities Campaign Management Compliance And Data Security Dashboard And Reporting Email Campaign Management Lead Generation Lead Management Lead Nurturing Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Social Media Campaign Management Text Campaign Management 21 86 98 99 94 75 100 100 81 100 100 93 0 25 50 75 100
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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 8703 reviews
Great User Sentiment 656 reviews
81%
of users recommend this product

Constant Contact has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 81% when considering 8703 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

84%
of users recommend this product

Act-On has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 84% when considering 656 user reviews from 2 recognized software review sites.

3.9 (4359)
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4.3 (2131)
4.26 (250)
4.3 (1670)
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3.8 (543)
4.15 (406)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Constant Contact and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Lead Management, Platform Capabilities, Social Media Campaign Management and Integrations and Extensibility.

Lead Management Award
Platform Capabilities Award
Social Media Campaign Management Award
Integrations and Extensibility Award

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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Email Campaigns: It’s possible to add tables and buttons, check open and click rates, and schedule, customize and manage emails, according to 90% of reviewers who mention this aspect.
Ease of Use: More than 95% of users who talk about this aspect report it’s easy to navigate.
Templates: Creating and using pre-built templates, including those for different occasions, aid announcements and sales marketing, as 70% of users referencing this aspect observe.
Contact Management: The system helps save and organize contacts in one place, as well as create emails and events to send out to different groups of contacts, according to 90% of reviewers who talk about this feature.
Customer Service: The customer support team is helpful and always available to assist, note 82% of users mentioning it.
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Intuitive Interface: Act-On's user-friendly interface streamlines campaign creation and management, reducing the learning curve for users.
Robust Reporting: Advanced reporting capabilities provide detailed insights into campaign performance, allowing users to track results and optimize future efforts.
Email Marketing Automation: Automated email sequences nurture leads, deliver targeted content, and improve campaign efficiency.
Social Media Integration: Act-On seamlessly integrates with social media platforms, enabling users to manage campaigns and track engagement across multiple channels.
Excellent Customer Support: Act-On provides responsive and knowledgeable customer support, ensuring users receive assistance when needed.
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Lack of Features: The system lacks certain features such as Google Analytics tracking, configuration options, CRM capabilities and automation options, note 90% of reviewers talking about this aspect.
Spam Emails: Most of the emails sent via the platform go to junk folders, according to 83% of users referencing this issue.
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Unintuitive Interface: Act-On's user interface is often criticized for being complex and difficult to navigate, leading to a steep learning curve for new users.
Limited Integrations: Act-On lacks integrations with popular third-party applications, making it challenging to connect with other systems used in the marketing ecosystem.
Costly: Act-On's pricing can be prohibitive for small businesses and startups, with limited flexibility in pricing options.
Lack of Reporting Capabilities: Users have reported that Act-On's reporting features are limited, making it difficult to gain insights into campaign performance.
Poor Customer Support: Some users have experienced delays and unsatisfactory responses from Act-On's customer support team.
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Designed for small businesses, Constant Contact delivers web-based email marketing that’s easy to use. Most users find its robust email marketing and campaign management feature beneficial. It offers lots of templates and strong contact management capabilities. The customer support team is quite helpful as well. However, it lacks some important features such as Google Analytics and automation settings, limiting its usefulness in some key areas. Additionally, reviews indicate most of the emails users send are marked as spam. Overall, it’s a decent software for small businesses that are in need of an efficient, lightweight solution.

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Act-On consistently receives high praise for its intuitive user interface, which allows marketers to quickly create and automate campaigns without extensive training. It is also lauded for its robust reporting capabilities, which provide detailed insights into campaign performance. However, some users have reported occasional bugs and glitches, and its customer support has been criticized for being slow to respond at times. Compared to competitors like HubSpot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Act-On is often seen as a more affordable and user-friendly option, particularly for small and mid-sized businesses. Its focus on ease of use and affordability sets it apart from more complex and expensive solutions. Act-On's intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to create automated workflows, and its pre-built templates help users get started quickly. Overall, Act-On is a solid choice for businesses looking for an affordable and easy-to-use marketing automation solution. Its strengths lie in its user-friendly interface, robust reporting capabilities, and affordability. While it may not have all the bells and whistles of more expensive solutions, it offers a comprehensive suite of features that can meet the needs of most businesses.

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