E-mail marketing continues to be a cost-effective way for marketers to establish valuable, interactive relationships with their customers. For B2B marketers, it is all about e-mail in the context of larger marketing programs, rather than simple blast e-mails.

The Act-On service provides an integrated platform that combines e-mail with behavioral segmentation (for better audience targeting), easy-to-build forms and landing pages (for creating relevant destination content), website visitor monitoring (for gauging campaign effectiveness) and automation, thereby enabling you to develop and deploy entire marketing campaigns.

Content Creation

If you are familiar with Microsoft Word, you already have the skills to create professional-looking HTML e-mail invitations, announcements, promotions, newsletters and more in just minutes.

Start from a pre-built template, select your favorite corporate stationery, add your content using Act-On's intuitive visual editor, inject trackable links to your forms and landing pages, drop in images from your Act-On Digital Asset Library, and your message is all set to go.

Turbocharge your e-mail messages, forms and landing pages with Act-On's Smart Content blocks, which are pre-designed and pre-built creative elements for common business needs.

Some examples:

• time-and-place calendar (vCal) blocks
• WebEx meeting and event invitations
• embedded mini-surveys
• business card (vCard) blocks
• document links that send SMS alerts when recipients click to download

Launching Campaigns

Act-On e-mail campaigns can get launched explicitly (e.g., a scheduled batch launch to one or more lists or segments) or implicitly (e.g., triggered from a "drip" marketing program or a webinar program, or an auto-response message triggered from a form submission).

Either way, deploy your e-mail campaigns with confidence, secure in the knowledge that the Act-On platform will run a complete set of checks before allowing the launch to proceed.

Act-On checks your message content for personalization errors, for compliance with CAN-SPAM regulations, and to see if it might cause trouble with spam filters. Act-On can even help you proof how your message will look in various e-mail programs.

Before the launch, Act-On automatically suppresses duplicates, opt-outs and previously bounced addresses, relieving you of the burden of having to manage this manually. After the launch, Act-On records bounces and opt-outs, as well as any spam complaints received directly from the big ISP's (such as Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, etc.).

Real-Time Reports

Act-On gives you real-time reports that let you see how your campaigns are performing. See your e-mail open and clickthrough rates, as well as opt-out rates and spam complaints.

In addition, Act-On's integrated reporting lets you see how effective your campaigns are at driving website and landing page visits, form views, etc., right from within the message report.