The ACT! E-marketing account requires a paid subscription. If you have already set up an account you’ll need to add your credentials to ACT!. If you do not already have an account you can create a 60 day free trial account by going to: http://swiftpage.com/partners/partneractinternational.asp?Partner=TechBenders. At the end of the 60 day period you can opt to continue the service or discontinue its usage.
You’ll need three important pieces of information in order to start using your ACT! E-marketing account:
- Your ACT! E-marketing account name
- Your ACT! E-marketing user name
- Your ACT! E-marketing password
You’ll now be able to work with the ACT! E-marketing functionality for 60 days. This is a great opportunity to master ACT! E-marketing and set up some of your templates before actually paying for the service. At the end of the 60 day period you’ll be prompted to both upgrade and start paying for your account or you will no longer be able to take advantage of the E-marketing capabilities. You can upgrade your account at any time by returning to the Services Account tab and clicking the Purchase/Upgrade Services button.
You’ll receive a Welcome email message that you’ll need to respond to prior to sending out your first email blast.
By default, ACT! adds a Marketing Results tab to the Contact Detail view. This tab is designed to allow you to view the results of your various campaigns directly from within ACT!. If you decide that you don’t want to use ACT! E-marketing, or don’t want to take advantage of the Marketing Results tab, you can remove it from your layout. However, the tab must be removed from ACT!’s E-marketing Account area:
- Click the Write menu and point to Sage E-marketing for ACT! and select E-mail Marketing.
- Click the Account button. The E-marketing tab of the Sage Connected Services Account Management dialog window appears like the one you see in the following figure:
- Remove the checkmark from the Display Marketing Results Tab field.
- Click Submit to save your changes.
As you learned earlier, ACT! E-marketing includes many additional benefits in addition to the ability to just send email. You might be wondering why, if the ACT!’s email functionality works so well, you would need to use an additional service.
If your email blast follows either of these parameters then you’ll want to use ACT! E-marketing rather than just ACT! email if:
- The email needs to be sent to over 50 people
- You wish to include graphics in the body of your email
- Youd like to be able to track the open rates and clicks that your message garnered
- You want to make sure that you are completely anti-spam compliant
There are several processes that come into play when you send ACT! email using a template. Each email address is merged with the template so that each recipient receives their own message. ACT! also creates a history record for each of the recipients. All this takes time and can severely hamper your computer’s resources.
In addition, most ACT! users integrate with Outlook, which means that any graphics in the body of your message must also appear as an email attachment.
ACT! E-marketing supplies you with a great solution for both of these problems.