Exponenciel have developed an addon for ACT! that uses the Mailchimp API to integrate the world’s favourite Contact Manager with the fastest growing Email Service Provider platform. With 12,000 sends per month to up to 2,000 Contacts (and a host of strong features) offered for free, Mailchimp was already a rival to Swiftpage. However, this new integration could threaten the Denver company’s domination of the ACT! user base where email marketing technology is concerned. Mailchimp boasts a number of features that are thus-far excluded from Swiftpage including Google Analytics integration, multi part messaging (with text alternatives to html) and multiple email client render testing.
Swiftpage won’t give up this fight too easily though; they’ve recently introduced social media integration, eroding a significant competitive advantage that the other main players have offered for some time. The integration between Swiftpage and ACT! remains superior to that of Mailchimp in our view, populating the marketing service tab with more detailed information regarding individual Contacts’ responses, and also supporting integration of Drip Marketing Campaigns with ACT! Smart Tasks to enable automated workflows.
The choice of Email Services Provider extends beyond Swiftpage and Mailchimp for the ACT! user; there is also a Constant Contact plugin which – although rudimentary when compared with the two alternative offerings – is able to effectively manage uploading ACT! Contact data to a Constant Contact account. This option may not have the bi-directional features of the other two, but could be enough to maintain customer loyalty from existing Constant Contact users migrating to the ACT! platform for CRM.
Ultimately, the winner in this battle is the ACT! user organisation; for some time now the ‘ESP’s have sought to differentiate themselves by adding more value to the free or ‘low cost’ editions of their software; ACT! users have not always enjoyed the benefits of this competitive positioning, limited only to the Swiftpage solution. The Exponenciel addon suggests that perhaps the market is more open now though… interesting times ahead then!
Does it work with act 2012 or just 2011, I can only see 2011 info on their website. Which one has your post been written and tested on?
We downloaded the ACT! 2011 plugin and installed it with ACT! 2012. It appeared to function perfectly well.