This week Swiftpage will be announcing the sunsetting of their Act! eMarketing service effective December 31st, 2020. “AEM”, as it’s known, was the successor to their flagship Swiftpage eMarketing service, but quickly became redundant with the acquisition of Inbox Guru, which later came to be known as Act! marketing Automation.
Swiftpage has made no secret of the fact that Act! Marketing Automation is the future of the Act! product, and the backbone of their new Act! Growth Suite offerings. Keeping another email solution in the stable of products no longer made sense, especially when AMA could be stripped down to offer the same limited eMarketing service as AEM, but with a single product code base and providing the customers better publishing & delivery tools.
An example of this was seen last fall with the launch of Act! Growth Suite Starter. With this new SaaS CRM offering, Swiftpage removed AEM from Act365, and replaced it with a “lite” version of AMA, and rebranded it as Growth Suite Starter.
Current AEM subscribers will notice on their 2020 renewal bill that their service is prorated to the end of the year. The thinking behind this billing decision was many AEM subscribers may need time to manually migrate their templates over to AMA, and would rather do so at their schedule, not Swiftpage’s. These subscribers will have the option to either contact Swiftpage and schedule the cancellation of the AEM service when they’re ready to complete their migration, or go “cold turkey”, and forcibly migrate over at their renewal date and cancel AEM when it comes due.
The point is Swiftpage is leaving this choice to subscribers, which we applaud.
Standalone subscribers to AEM, or those using it in conjunction with off-plan versions of Act! or Act! Pro, have almost a year to plan their migration. Swiftpage is offering a number of attractive “Winback” promotions to lure legacy Act! users back into the Act! Growth Suite fold, which includes AMA bundled at no extra charge. AMA is not simply a superior editor and email delivery tool, but a significantly more intelligent workflow tool to automate engagement with customers based on their responses to your emarketing.
PC Mag describe Marketing Automation this way…
Think of marketing automation as the smarter and more powerful older sibling of email marketing. Marketing automation lets marketers plan extended customer interactions without requiring manual intervention.”
If you’d like to schedule a demonstration of Act! Marketing Automation, you can book a class HERE.