Act-On vs Pardot

Marketing automation is a hot topic in the business world lately. It is a cost effective, easy to implement, and highly powerful resource that caters to businesses of all sizes and has become an essential business tool. The technique can increase the quality and number of your sales leads and augment your revenue growth, and do so inexpensively.

One of the most obvious benefits of using marketing automation software is the fact that it takes all the repetitive tasks out of your marketing team’s hands and frees them up to focus and spend time on more useful and rewarding tasks. Marketing automation also excels in making communications more up-to-date and relevant, which makes everything better for your existing as well as prospective customers.

When you use a good marketing automation system, you will have better control of your company’s marketing strategies and processes, as you will be able to monitor how all the different channels work.

As the number of marketing automation service providers in huge, you should choose a package that caters to your specific business needs which can include statistical and graphical displays of data, monitor the progress of marketing campaigns, create a customer base, and more.

Act-On and Pardot are two important marketing automation software platforms you should analyze and learn about before making your selection.

Overview

Act-On

Founded in 2008, Act-On is a marketing automation service that offers businesses a comprehensive set of tools for different important business applications such as social media management, email marketing, reporting and analytics, lead management, and more. The company’s flagship tool is email marketing, with which you can easily segment your customers into lists under different categories, making it easy for your team to focus on specific target markets individually.

The website tracking capability offered by Act-On enables you to track and understand the types and activities of users or customers visiting your site. The streamlined online processes and effective marketing tools, combined with sales and lead information make Act-On an extremely efficient marketing automation solution.

Pardot

Brought to you by Sales force, Pardot is a Business-to-business (B2B) marketing automation solution that enables the sales and marketing departments of organizations to create and effectively manage marketing campaigns from a single centralized system. This platform is inclusive of features required for email marketing, sales alerts, lead management, automated drip marketing, and more. Pardot is popular for its efficient lead scoring capability, and is preferred by many businesses for this reason.

The Ultimate edition of the platform offers several advanced features including custom object integration, custom user roles, dedicated IP address, and more storage space. As it is now owned by Salesforce, Pardot obviously offers seamless integration with Salesforce, with which you can receive alerts, deliver campaigns in real-time, track emails, and perform many other functions.

Benefits

Act-On

• Wide range of features
• Excellent resources
• Comprehensive platform

Pardot

• Easy to customize
• Good customer support
• Good Salesforce integration

Head-to-Head Matchup

Typical Customers	Freelancers Small Businesses Mid-Sized Businesses Large Enterprises	Small Businesses Mid-Sized Businesses
Features Offered	Content Management Event Scheduling Automatic Call Scheduling Lead Scoring Dynamic Content Delivery Tracking URL Customization Referral Offers Campaign Performance Reports Lead Assignment and more	Content Management Event Scheduling Prospect Segmentation Custom Scoring Delivery Tracking Web Form Design Social Post Tracking Custom Reports and more
Integrations	Cisco WebEx Netsuite Salesforce CRM Sage CRM Nimble Google AdWords Citrix GoToWebinar API Access and more	Gmail Citric GoToWebinar Apple Mail Olark Netsuite Sugar CRM Salesforce CRM Outlook GoodData and more

Conclusion

The set of features and tools offered by these platforms are comprehensive. Based on the size of your business, the features your sales and marketing teams need, and taking other important factors into consideration, choose a service that you think will make marketing effortless for your company.