Swiftpage Previews Act! Cloud
Swiftpage, a provider of integrated marketing and CRM solutions, today revealed the first details of Act! Cloud, its newmarketing, sales, and interaction management platform. The solution will be offered exclusively as subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS), with general availability in North America scheduled for the second quarter of 2014. Availability in other regions is planned for later in the year.
Core functionality planned for inclusion in the base subscription of Act! Cloud will include the following:
- Comprehensive contact import — Users can consolidate their contacts from an increasing number of leading online services, including their iCloud and Gmail accounts.
- Time management — An integrated system ensures users can prioritize, track, and take action on what is most important to them, with one place to keep all customer related activities.
- Detailed interaction history — Every interaction, whether online, by phone, or in person, can be tracked and referenced within a contact’s information page.
- Fast group creation — Users can add and remove contacts from groups, search for specific criteria, and create a group from the results.
- Pre-built email templates — Professional-grade email marketing campaigns can be built and executed using fully editable, built-in starter templates designed for a wide range of uses.
- Smart email distribution — Once an email distribution occurs to a created group, users can track opens, click-throughs, and other relevant usage information to measure campaign effectiveness.
- Intelligent follow-up management — Powered by the new Act! recommendation architecture, Act! Cloud helps users know the best person for follow up.
Act! Cloud will introduce the new cloud-based Act! recommendation architecture, an underlying layer of analysis technologies that run invisibly to the user. This architecture will power an increasing number of features in Act! Cloud over time, with each feature area designed to give clear, proactive recommendations.
The first of these capabilities, included as standard functionality in the first release of Act! Cloud, will be the Act! call-list feature, which automatically recommends the best person for the user to follow up with next after initial marketing outreach.
Once a user begins an email-based marketing campaign, the architecture immediately begins tracking and capturing information on which recipients opened their emails, who clicked on the included links, and how many times they clicked. Based on this information, Act! Cloud automatically re-orders the user’s call list, moving the recipients who opened and clicked most to the top of the list, and therefore showing them as the first to be contacted.
"Small businesses have many SaaS options to choose from right now, but peel back the layers and the reality is that most services focus almost entirely on mass-distribution of emails," said John Oechsle, president and CEO of Swiftpage, in a statement "We view sending email as just one piece of the puzzle. That's why we've designed Act! Cloud to give small businesses a true end-to-end solution for growing and transforming their business, from lead generation, to follow-up, to loyalty building, all for a lower subscription rate than most other SaaS options offer. For users who want more than just email blasts, Act! Cloud will be the clear choice.”
“Every entrepreneur or small business owner I've met has three things in common: First, they are doing what they love. Second, they wish they had more time to do it. Third, they wish they could do more marketing to grow their business," said Dan Ogdon, senior vice president of customer experience at Swiftpage, in a statement. "These three priorities are what the Act! recommendation architecture is all about. When you take the guesswork out of what to do next, everything goes quicker, so users can accomplish their marketing goals sooner, and have more time for whatever is most important to them. When we can give users a few hours or more back in their day by making the entire marketing process easier, and their business is growing, that’s when we know we are delivering real value."
Sage just updated its Act! line in September. This marks the second major upgrade to the technology since Swiftpage acquired it from Sage a year ago.