Constant Contact would have you believe that every business needs e-mail marketing. We think that this misses the main point — first and foremost, every business needs to generate and manage leads. E-mail marketing may or may not make sense for everyone.  At Act-On, our philosophy is that no one tool is enough — each business will end up using the mix of tools that best fits their situation.

Recently, I got a fresh demonstration of how true this is.

I decided to get my 24-year-old roof replaced, and turned to Angie’s List to get bids from a reputable set of roofing contractors. The winning bid was from a company owned by Chilean and Mexican immigrants. As the crew was pounding away on my roof, I chatted up one of the owners, an experienced roofer but not a high-tech marketer by any stretch of imagination.

He was surprisingly sophisticated about his various lead generation channels: print ads, Angie’s List, Service Magic, and more.  He was thinking about how he might be able to use his website to “convert” more of his  proposals. E-mail marketing made no sense to him, but he was thinking of ways to generate referrals from past customers.

When I described the Act-On Marketing Service to him, he *got* it immediately. He sends his bids as e-mail attachments, so he totally saw the value of getting text alerts when the bids are opened. He loved the idea of seeing the connections between his outstanding bids and his website visitors. I did not need to paint the picture — he was pretty much already there.

More than ever, I am convinced that there is a huge under-served market out there for *complete* marketing solutions that are priced right and easy to use.

Now that Twitter has hit the mainstream media (e.g., Oprah Winfrey sent out her first tweet last Friday), we thought we would get in our two bits’ worth.

Twitter has been wildly successful in driving people to our webinars, so much so that we have stopped using Google AdWords (or at least cut waaaaaaay back).

When we tweet about an upcoming webinar, we look for people who have just expressed dissatisfaction about their existing e-marketing vendor or their marketing capabilities. So we are reaching the right people (marketers) at exactly the right time (when they are inclined to look at new solutions). With Google AdWords, we don’t know who they are and we are only vaguely aware of their need/intention. It’s no contest.

When we first started using Twitter, we were a bit concerned that the Twitter user base might be too young (i.e., people without budget authority). In fact, what we found were professionals in their late 20’s and 30’s, savvy creative people that represent our sweet spot. And now, thanks to Oprah, we are bracing for the onslaught of mom-and-pops.

P.S. The Act-On Twitter campaign module is in alpha test. Look for it later this summer.

Here is what we found in the market:

• Companies that built their marketing around marketing data warehouses are finding that their sales and marketing databases have become separate silos. The lack of synergy between sales and marketing regarding leads is so common as to risk cliché.
• Companies are looking for a better alignment between marketing and sales. Sales wants to see all of the actual marketing touches for any specific lead. Marketing needs to get measured on the leads that actually convert.
• Salesforce.com has become the de-facto database of record. We have had any number of CMOs tell us that the marketing data has to be pushed back to Salesforce.

Given this situation, we decided early on to build Act-On around a marketing behavior database, rather than a marketing contact database, which might already exist in Salesforce.com or some other CRM system. (That said, we do have many customers, including our own marketing department, that use Act-On as the central marketing contact database.)

To start using Act-On, you don’t need to go through an elaborate setup phase around your marketing database. You can start by uploading lists (pulled from your CRM system, your old marketing database or even collected at your tradeshow booth) and then using Act-On to interact with your prospects. As you interact, we automatically build the marketing behavior database in the background. If the same person happens to be on 2 separate lists, it’s not a problem. The marketing behavior database automatically collates and consolidates the interaction information.

This makes Act-On an ideal complement to Salesforce.com. We have created Salesforce plugins to be able to move selected Salesforce leads and contacts to Act-On, and to make Act-On marketing histories, lead scores and reports accessible from within Salesforce.

This also explains our pricing model, which is not based on the size of your lists but is instead based on the number of “active contacts”, i.e., the size of the marketing behavior database.

One of the really great things about the Act-On Marketing Service is that we  use it ourselves for our online marketing efforts to promote Act-On.

Every page in our website carries Act-On tags as well as Google Analytics tags. The Act-On tags provide a real-time “heads-up” display of visitors on the site *right now*  for our marketing and sales teams, very different from the Google Analytics report, which is sort of “rear view mirror” view that only our marketing people seem to care about, and that too not every day.

We run a weekly webinar for prospects looking for a live interactive demo. We use Act-On to promote these webinars via e-mail campaigns and Google ads, to send reminders and to follow-up. Along the way, we made significant usability improvements to Act-On to make the management of webinars and other online events intuitive and simple. So much so that a lot of our new customers have chosen Act-On just for its unique webinar management capabilities.

In some cases, our marketing efforts “Aha!” moments have driven Act-On in exciting new directions. For instance, our marketing interns started using Twitter (manually) to promote our weekly webinars. Pretty soon, we noticed that Twitter was driving a lot more people to our webinar landing page than Google Adwords. This in turn caused our product development team to sit up and take notice. So sometime in the near future, Act-On will be rolling out a brand new Twitter campaign module based on our internal experiences.

Bottom line: having to eat our own dog food has (a) made us healthier and (b) improved the quality of the dog food. A lot.

This is not a hardware question. It is Microsoft Windows vs OS X (OS X kicks butt) and Microsoft Windows vs Linux (Linux kicks butt).

The issue that prompted this discussion is what kind of machines our developers ought to have to be most productive.

Bob is our die hard Mac user. Anecdotally, his Mac (almost 3 years old, Core Duo) seems to run circles around newer Windows machines with Core 2 Duo, when it comes to compiling our source code, running AWK and GREP, etc. But then again, all Mac users have that fanatic gleam in their eyes so we tended to discount this.

Then, I decided to replace my 3 year old Sony TZ laptop (Intel Centrino, 1G RAM) with a new souped up Sony TZ with 2G RAM and Core 2 Duo CPU, running Vista Business. The old one, about to be donated to charity, was re-imaged to run Ubuntu Linux. When we did a head-to-head test between these 2 machines (the test was a ground up recompile of all our source code), the old machine was 4x faster than the new one!

Arrgh!

The smart guys up in Redmond appear to be the perfect antidote to Intel & Moore’s Law.

The beta test cluster in the cloud has been a huge success.

We recently discovered Amazon EBS. Wow! We were about to plunk down a huge hunk of cash on an Equalogic setup in our datacenter. EBS is causing us to re-think this.

Basically, EBS gives us a SAN in the cloud. We are now hot-sync-ing our encrypted database up to an EC2 instance with an attached EBS, so there is now a hot standby in the sky. Now if we do fail over to the standby, some things (e.g., our mail servers) will still operate from our data center so that all our ISP relationships stay the same.

I am pinching myself. A setup like this cost me over $1M in my last startup (I was the co-founder of Responsys).

We have not thought much about localizing the Act-On service.

Imagine our shock/surprise when 2 of our customers (Secure Computing and BroadVision) informed us that they had started running campaigns in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese and who knows what else, and that they were happy that everything had worked out so well.

We have always been careful with our Java and Javascript usage, but still! It all just worked!!!

We have been looking at Amazon EC2, and we like it. A lot.

The economics are simple and compelling for us. A single rack with 20 amps of power at our datacenter costs us about $1,000/month. With Amazon, for $1,000, I can get a nice database server class machine (about $300/month), a Pound load balancer machine ($75/month) and about 6 or 7 web server class machines ($75/month each). That’s about how much hardware a single rack at our datacenter can take before we start running out of power.

Our architecture allows for a hybrid configuration with some servers in the cloud and others (e.g., our mail servers and our database machines) in our datacenter. We are planning to try Amazon EC2 out for a few months by moving our QA test cluster out of our datacenter and up into the cloud.

Stay tuned. I will post an update in a few months.

Wow!  Talk about product placement! And we had no idea this was even coming!

I opened the paper this morning and was flabbergasted to find a *huge* screenshot of Act-On in the Marketplace section of the Wall Street Journal (September 24 2008 print edition, Marketplace section  page B3, the article is entitled Cisco Sets Sights on $34 Billion Market).

Click here to check it out!

We might be a bit biased, but we have long felt that Act-On was one of the most compelling Connect partner offerings.  That Cisco chose to feature us in this article totally validates our point of view.

We have built a platform that can serve enterprise customers as well as SMB customers. The reason is that we are going after the Fortune 5,000,000 rather than just the Fortune 500. 

Google search has altered the balance of power between big companies and small ones, since the all-knowing Google Page Rank algorithm makes no distinctions based on company size.

So now the little guys are looking for tools that let them compete better with the big boys. They need the same sorts of powerful tools, but in a cheaper and simpler to use package.Not just e-mail marketing — they are looking to turn their websites into efficient marketing engines.  Everything needs to work well together right out of the box, since they don’t have the time or the energy to cobble things together.

That’s our sweet spot.

That said, we have a bunch of bigger companies as customers, who genuinely appreciate the ease of use and the integrated tools approach. They are thrilled to be able to involve their sales people and even their channel partners in their marketing efforts. And they love the fact that they can get the contracts through finance quickly since they can cancel anytime.

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