Users of Act-On Software’s marketing automation suite will now be able to tap their data for insights and possible predictive forecasting with the launch of Act-On Data Studio on Tuesday, the Beaverton, Ore.-based software vendor announced.
Act-On provides email marketing tools, plus tracking customers as they move across a company’s online properties via search, social, and landing pages. As a result, it contains all sorts of data about how customers are interacting with different digital touch points. So far that’s been available in some reporting and dashboards within Act-On’s software, but now the vendor is looking to offer a lot more granularity.
“We’re basically building a fancy data export tool,” says Gal Josefsberg, vice-president of product marketing and management at Act-On. Customers are hungry for data, he adds. “It’s never enough. There’s always one more segmentation, one more pivot table that people want to do.”
While Data Studio will offer a visual interface to filter through data, aggregate it, and create custom visualizations, the real purpose of the tool is to hand the data off to more sophisticated business intelligence software. Data can be exported either on demand or automatically on a schedule.
The format the data is rendered in can depend on the user’s needs. It can be as simple as a dump to an Excel spreadsheet, or a custom tie-in to your CRM system. Either way, once its set up, it will be easy to get at the data you need, Josefsberg says.
“We’re not designing this for a programmer, we’re desinging this for a marketer to get access to the system,” he says. “Marketers have become more and more data driven.”
While he is sure to point out that Act-On’s current reporting dashboards are on par with what other marketing automation suites offer (with the slide above), Josefsberg says that Act-On considered whether it should build out a predictive analytics tool to include in its suite. Hearing input from some beta test customers helped make the decision clear.
“The feedback so far is ‘let us use the tools we want to be able to access the data,'” he says. “We don’t believe in forcing you to use tools of our choosing. You should be able to use whatever BI you want, whatever CRM you want.”
Act-On Data studio is generally available starting today. Its included in the Act-On for Enterprise package, and pricing begins at $2,000.
