Act-On's Newest Features Focus on Personalization and Security

Adaptive Forms give marketers the technology to turn static surveys and forms into a choose-your-own-adventure-style format. Instead of showing the same set of questions to viewers regardless of their answers, Adaptive Forms use ML backed by a user’s navigation experience to adjust and adapt fields for each specific viewer. With the tech, marketers can show, hide, or introduce a new set of questions to prospects based on how they respond to previous questions and based off the way prospects arrived at the form. Adaptive Forms also feature responsive design, which enables the forms to optimize for mobile, desktop, or tablet devices.

“We built an entirely new rules engine under the hood that will be able to better personalize the form as somebody is completing it,” said Mertz. “If somebody goes to a page on a company’s website that’s focused on financial services, if they see a customer quote and click to see a case study, a brief form will pop up asking for their name, email, and company. Because the platform is built to know that they came from the financial services page, it maybe has another question show up that maybe wouldn’t have shown up [for prospects coming from other pages].”

The adaptive forms could surface financial services-specific questions such as, “Are you interested in our financial services [return-on-investment] ROI report?” The forms bring in on-site behaviors that lead to the form, according to Mertz, as well as behaviors that take place while answering the form’s questions. However, he said the company would like to someday be able to bring in customer relationship management (CRM) and historical interaction data to further personalize and contextualize the form experience.

Transactional Sending turns operational emails into personalized communications that are able to supersede a customer’s opt-out preferences. Act-On uses financial communications as an example of the kind of email that Transactional Sending helps to facilitate. These types of emails include shareholder reports and financial statements in addition to vital brand communications, such as system updates and purchase confirmations. With traditional email marketing tools, these kinds of messages get blocked by the user’s opt-out preferences. With Transactional Sending, the messages include individualization and operational data, both of which help to ensure almost 100-percent deliverability, according to Act-On.

Here’s how it works: In partnership with the Amazon Web Service (AWS) Simple Email Service (SES), Act-On can push emails through to customers by using only an email address. Unlike email marketing and marketing automation tools, SES isn’t beholden to customer opt-in preferences. As a result, SES messages have near 100-percent deliverability.

“Many of our customers leverage us to drive a number of marketing campaigns and execute inbound and outbound strategies,” said Mertz. “It turns out that there’s a number of communications that are individualized that need to go out on a regular basis that aren’t marketing messages. For instance, a password update or an order confirmation.”

By working with Amazon, Act-On has figured out a workaround for operational messages. The emails sent through this module must be operational in nature and not run any marketing content. Act-On has hard requirements in place to enforce these measures. For example, if a client’s customer complaint rate rises above 0.1 percent or if email bounce rates rise above 0.5 percent, then the module will be turned off.

As you might be aware, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will have a dramatic impact on your data collection and marketing practices starting May 25, 2018, especially if you have a large European customer base. If you’ve never heard of GDPR, then this in-depth primer will tell you all you need to know. In essence, the regulation requires brands to be transparent with consumers about how personally identifiable data is stored, transferred, and used for business purposes. Companies that fail to comply will be required to forfeit 4 percent of their annual revenue.

Act-On is helping its customers to be compliant by introducing a Local Sending module that supports the EU’s updated processes and protocols. All data created by these customers will be stored and sent from Act-On’s AWS-powered servers, which are based in Ireland. The company said it is continuing to build additional functionality into its tool to help ensure marketers using its system remain GDPR-compliant.

“The theme of driving more and more personalization has to take into account new regulations that are going to impact every company midsize and greater,” said Mertz. “What this new module offers is that…via the SES mail stack we facilitate the sending of emails from Ireland. [In] most of the organizations today, the actual send is jumping back and forth from a server in North America. It never gets to the North American data center but it’s being facilitated via North America.” With Local Sending, the email message never even touches a North American server; instead, the message originates and is sent from an Amazon server in Ireland to Europe-based recipients.