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Category: Act! Tips
Written by Ken Quigley
January 13 2020

Understanding the differences between the three Growth Suite Tiers

Since Act! Marketing Automation was released last November, there has been a lot of discussion about the comparative benefits of the different tiers of AMA (later rebranded as Growth Suite). So much so, that many prospective subscribers had trouble understanding where the benefits of one tier ended and the next began.
 
While Keystroke has put together a fairly exhaustive comparison chart on our website HERE (with detailed explanations of the feature nested within each row), it's still difficult to understand the real world cases for selecting one tier or the other. To that end, we've laid out the following explanation for understanding the broad feature difference between the four tiers below. 

Starter Tier
  • SaaS only CRM (formerly Act365)
  • 10K monthly sends
  • Digital Support
This tier is primarily for basic CRM users looking for emarketing. The designer built into the Starter tier is the same as the higher tiers, and is a significant upgrade over Act! eMarketing or Swiftpage eMarketing of the past. It includes 170 templates, email tracking & metrics, but does not include workflow automation or drip marketing with Starter, and it should be intended for simple outbound campaigns only.

Professional Tier

  • Act! CRM (with US based hosting)
  • 25K monthly sends
  • Technical Support

The Professional tier is perfect for design, delivery, forms and reports. If you're coming from another emarketing platform like Swiftpage emarketing (SPEM) or Act! emarketing (AEM), and want to continue the same type of emailing with better design & delivery tools, the "Select" tier is an easy choice.

Professional is perfect for those designing business newsletters, and sending up to 10,000 emails per month with normal delivery or with some additional delivery workflow after the newsletter. What this means is you can trigger additional emails to be sent based on how the recipients respond to the first one. For instance, you can trigger a follow-up email if they open the newsletter, or resend the first one (with slight modifications) if they don't. It's a new level of emarketing interaction.

Professional users can also build simple landing pages to capture basic data with webforms. 

Premier Tier
  • Act! CRM (with US based hosting)
  • 50K monthly sends
  • Premier Technical Support
And while Professional can manage "outbound" delivery workflow, it's important to understand that only Complete & Advanced support "inbound workflow" into Act!. What does "inbound workflow" mean? Well the Select Tier CANNOT process the responses from a campaign to create tasks inside of Act! like adding new or existing contacts to campaigns, or alerting sales staff of click-through responses, or even creating follow-up activities or opportunities based on how a recipient reacts to a campaign.

So the simplest way to understand the difference between Professional and Premier is the former supports "outbound delivery workflow", and the latter support that AND "inbound response-driven" workflow. If you review the comparison chart, you'll notice that most of the differences between the first and second tier follow this theme.

It should be noted that Premier also has another 40,000 sends per month (total of 50,000), and more robust Webforms & landing pages that support many more types of data fields, like check boxes for example, that allow users to present a more meaningful survey to their audience than Select supports.
Ultimate Tier
  • Act! CRM (with US based hosting)
  • 100K monthly sends
  • Ulltimate Technical Support
The case for Ultimate is even simpler. Those that need advanced features like a/b testing or multi-stage lead profiling already know what they are, and understand the benefit of them. These are sophisticated marketing tools, and if a user is qualified to use them, they likely know their value well enough to justify the extra cost. The only other reason a user would justify the extra cost of the Advanced tier is based on the increased send limit, namely the extra 50k included with the top tier of AMA for a total monthly send of 10,000 emails. In these cases, the math will speak for itself.
 
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