Act-On vs HubSpot

HubSpot customers benefit from the convenience of an all-in-one platform. What makes HubSpot different from others claiming to be a truly “all-in-one” system is its offering of a wide array of tools, all built to work together seamlessly. Because HubSpot is able to deliver more than surface-level results, we’ve been able to delight over 10,000 customers since 2006.

HubSpot customers using the robust and integrated platform gain the ability to:

• Compare the effectiveness of each marketing channel in producing visitors, leads, and customers. 
  
• View every asset associated with a particular campaign on one dashboard, and see which touch points are driving the most visitors, leads and customers.
• Monitor not only interactions people are having with them Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but identify which of those people are target leads in their database.
• Target leads with personalized content across landing pages, emails, blog and website.

Act-On is an all-in-one solution for beginner marketers. This, coupled with its low-cost month-to-month pricing, makes it a great tool for first-time digital marketers, but often drives them to switch to a more sophisticated platform as they outgrow Act-On’s limited functionality.  The platform has many tools under one roof, but lacks a complete toolset or the level of integration needed by marketers with more than basic needs.

Some areas where Act-On’s platform lacks deep functionality and power include:

• It shows how many leads and conversions have been generated, but  doesn’t provide closed loop analytics without a separate CRM.
• It can sync with Salesforce, but only in batches every 4 hours, delaying the important delivery of hot leads to sales.
• It provides landing page conversion metrics, but no information on which channels drove the most conversions to that page.
• Lead scoring is limited to native Act-On fields, it can’t accommodate fields that you may have customized on a form for your business.
• It provides tools to publish to Twitter, but does not include social media monitoring tools to see interactions with the hottest leads from your database.

HubSpot’s tools support inbound marketing activities for the entire marketing funnel, including the email channel. Because HubSpot and its customers maintain clean databases of contacts who have voluntarily opted-in to receive our emails, we’re able to provide our customers with extremely high email sender scores and deliverability rates. A higher sender score means that emails actually get delivered to prospects instead of bouncing from their inbox or getting marked as spam.

Many Act-On customers have publicly complained about poor e-mail deliverability rates, as well as the Act-On team’s inability to remedy the issues. Act-On customers often resort to buying email lists because Act-On does not enable an effective top-of-the-funnel lead generation strategy. When customers buy lists and send emails to people who have not opted-in their communications, it hurts their sender score and ultimately leads to poor email deliverability rates. Because customers on a marketing automation platform share sender scores, everyone’s deliverability rates can suffer when only one customer from the group employs questionable email tactics. That means that anyone on a platform that encourage spammy email tactics can suffer, no matter how great of an inbound marketer they are.

HubSpot’s Analytics Tools put all of your data in one single location with an easy-to understand interface. HubSpot provides you with micro and macro analytics for each tool in the platform. More than that, it integrates data from all of your tools into actionable reports and dashboards without any manual tracking URL or integrations needed. This gives you a complete and accurate set of data to report on, along with the flexibility to customize reports that track the progress of your marketing efforts against your goals over time. So you can do more than report on your efforts -- you can improve them.

HubSpot customers see many benefits from the platform’s analytics and reporting, including:

• Visitor, lead, and customer generation reports throughout the platform for every tool and channel.
• Engagement analytics for calls-to-action, social media, and even individual website click-events (available in the Enterprise package).
• A Campaigns Dashboard to view the ongoing progress of content associated with a campaign across different channels, to help identify better optimization opportunities.
• An integrated toolset that doesn’t necessitate manual tracking URLs or integrations, which vastly decreases chances for error in analytics.

At the end of the day, marketers are buying software to make their lives easier. And, the people have spoken: HubSpot is #1 in Customer Satisfaction.

For a truly satisfying software choice, the tools they use must be both user-friendly and powerful enough to yield a high ROI. HubSpot has delighted five times as many customers as Act-On thanks to its easy-to-use tools, robust reporting, live and on-demand training, and cream-of-the-crop consulting and support. But don’t just take our word for it...

HubSpot is:

• Ranked #1 by marketers on G2

• Ranked #1 by VentureBeat in the Marketing Automation Index
  

Act-On

• Ranked #5 by marketers on G2
  

• Ranked #7 by VentureBeat in the Marketing Automation Index
  

Sources:

• VentureBeat Marketing Automation Index Report (VentureBeat, 2014)
  
• HubSpot v. Act-On (TrustRadius)
• HubSpot v. Act-On (G2)