Act-On provides marketing automation software to more than 4,000 companies around the world, and aims to provide customers with a system of record for their marketing activities and enable accurate and rapid insights into their marketing data. . However, the vendor himself is also working on his architecture to ensure that customers get the information they want, when they need it. was becoming more difficult.
That’s why Act-On embarked on a project to become a “data-driven organization,” bringing all of our data into one place and making it easier to glean value from it. Syed Ahmed, Senior Vice President of Engineering, AI and Operations at Act-On, explains:
The company is 16 years old and the systems they have developed have evolved over time. And that led to the creation of different silos. We wanted to break down the silos and bring everything together in one place so people can extract the value of their data.
That was the first step we took, creating a data lake and a data warehouse. We chose Snowflake because the data lake stores an unlimited amount of data, while the data warehouse stores approximately two and a half years of data.
Ahmed said this setup made the data accessible to both internal and external parties. But in particular, this new infrastructure meant that Act-On could pursue its goal of becoming a “GPS” for navigating its customers’ emails and the performance of their campaigns.
The transition to Snowflook occurred in 2022 and took approximately 5 months to complete and set up Act-On. At this point, with all the data in one place, the vendor could consider its next task. It’s about democratizing data analytics for customers, with the aim of enabling them to derive more value from their data by introducing more features. platform. His customers often exported data from his Act-On to their own analysis tools and spreadsheets, making it a challenge to gain insight. Instead, Act-On was keen to integrate and extend its analytics platform to buyers.
Duessa Hoscher, principal product manager at Act-On, said the company wanted to collaborate with leading analytics providers to provide customers with the “best of” product. She therefore went through an extensive process of considering vendors and conducting proofs of concept with many suppliers. She explains:
We were actually evaluating based on different criteria. Among them are: How powerful and easy to use. How data management works with Snowflake. What flexibility do you have within the tool and how can you model your data? Ability to visualize. We’ll also show you how easy it is to customize the display of the data your customers are looking for.
We were looking at localization and per-user customization, and of course the technology behind role and account embedding, security, and management.
Question
After extensive research, Act-On selected ThoughtSpot Sage as their vendor. Hosher says:
What really struck me about ThoughtSpot was its approach to searching data using natural language, making it very user-friendly.
Because many of our users aren’t really analytics experts. They’re primarily just trying to get the data into a spreadsheet and analyze it. We were able to give them a friendly opening that said, “Let’s ask questions about your data and see the answers,” and the innovation and AI support there was much more advanced than what we were seeing in other services. I felt that there was. product.
As noted in diginomica in recent months, ThoughtSpot is integrating its own natural language processing engine with those made available by generative AI model providers such as OpenAI, allowing a wide variety of users to use it for analysis. I am making it accessible. ThoughtSpot’s main proposition is that it wants to be known as the “Google of numbers” in that users can gain insights just by asking questions about their data.
Act-On was able to release its first prototype beta within 30 days. The biggest hurdle was setting up user authentication and setting up accounts so we could have different environments for development, staging, and production. It is segregated so that one account cannot access another account’s data. Ahmed says:
Our thought process was: How can we make it really easy for marketers to get insights? Our idea was to democratize analysis. Traditionally, analysis and reporting have been the domain of business analysts.
But we chose ThoughtSpot because of all the features that come with natural language search and AI. Marketers are technically savvy, but they’re not data analysts, so it was really important to us that there was something that marketers could easily access and understand the data.
Customer reaction
Since launch, Act-On Advanced Analytics users are spending twice as much time on pages since implementing ThoughtSpot. The vendor has also seen a 60% increase in customer report usage compared to older reports.
Regarding how customers are responding to the platform, Hosher said:
Overall, they are happy with it. Previously, our reporting was pretty static, so we didn’t have much of an opportunity to dig deeper.
What we can offer them now is the ability to actually see trends and spikes. You might be looking to see if your email open or click rates have spiked or gone down in the last week. And they can ask: “Why?”
It’s great to be able to dig into that data and have the flexibility to compare a large number of measurements. Instead of just the 3 or 4 measures previously presented, customers can now analyze and explore 25 measures.
Similarly, a key benefit for users is the availability of analytics and data within Act-On’s applications. Previously, marketers creating extensive reports had to use Act-On’s export tools to get data out to other systems, such as spreadsheets or another BI tool. Now, they can gain insight into where their marketing automation tools reside within Act-On. Hosher adds:
It used to be very troublesome. That’s why we’ve worked with many customers to show them how to migrate their homegrown reporting systems and create the same types of charts and tables within their analytics tools. And you can put it there automatically every day without much effort in manipulating or moving the data.
At Act-On, we see our users asking a variety of questions about their data. For example, “Which sales template is most commonly used?” or “Which sales reps are sending emails?” or “Which messages are driving opt-out rates?” Hosher says.
We receive a lot of different questions like this. There’s some additional data that we’d like to continue to bring in, and we’ve got some data to round it out further.
But for core use cases, people are really excited about understanding what’s driving success or figuring out why things aren’t successful.
The great thing is that once you ask a question, you can also run SpotIQ analysis on it. This will give you 25 other factors you never thought to ask that may be highly correlated to performance. of a specific message.
future possibilities
Act-On runs a model it calls a “parent-child relationship.” Many of the companies we work with are agencies or umbrella organizations that market many other retailers and brands. Therefore, Act-On may have customers with five different marketing channels. So the long-term goal is to enable these organizations to link data across these channels for more in-depth analysis. Hosher says:
This is a big request from our customers to extend analytics across these instances so they can see how different departments and branches are preparing for each other. So we definitely want to expand that in the future.
Next, Act-On is looking at ways to go beyond behavior-based data to better understand contact-based data. Hosher adds:
Currently, most of the data in ThoughtSpot is actually behavioral. So, “This particular email got this many clicks, and they clicked on these links.”
But customers really want us to aggregate all of that and look across contacts and segments. Be able to say, “Tell me about the people who clicked on these emails.” For example, were they primarily her CFO or primarily purchasing managers? Or what industry?
By working with our segmentation engine and better integrating with analytics, customers can go beyond just “What was my opinion of this email?” to truly micro-target people who are resonating with that email. You can.
