Latest Act-On Product Updates and Upcoming Releases

optimate.me teamed up with Act-On for a live "Morning Brew" session: a fast-paced run-through of what's shipped recently, what's coming on the roadmap and how Act-On addresses lifecycle marketing and advanced analytics. We also look inside our own Act-on instance, showcasing a recent outreach campaign built using the latest AI capabilities.

We've cut the 1.5-hour session into five short clips so you can jump straight to what's relevant to you. Below each video you'll find a quick summary of what's covered.

1. What's New at Act-On

Act-On is putting its effort into three things this year: helping you send the right message to the right person, making it easy to connect Act-On to the other systems your business already runs, and giving you clearer answers about who's paying attention and what's actually working. These feature releases and product updates include:

Website chat agent

An AI-powered chat assistant that sits on your website and talks to visitors, answering questions about your products or services in real time. You can run more than one, each drawing on different information, and it all connects back into Act-On.

Why it matters: A visitor who'd otherwise browse and leave can get an answer on the spot, and that conversation is captured. Now an anonymous website visit turns into a named, useful lead instead of a missed one.

A rebuilt way to group your contacts - the headline change

"Segmenting" just means sorting your contacts into groups so you can treat them differently - customers vs. prospects, engaged vs. gone quiet, and so on. Act-On has completely rebuilt this: it's now a clear, visual screen instead of dense formulas, groups update instantly, you can save a grouping and reuse it, and you can build groups off dates far more easily (birthdays, anniversaries, renewal dates). It can also tell the difference between a real person opening your email and an automated security scanner, so your groups are based on genuine human interest.

Why it matters: Getting the group right is the whole game - if the list is wrong, the message is wrong no matter how good it is. Things that used to be fiddly (like a simple birthday email) become quick, and you can be confident you're reaching actual people, not background noise.

A dashboard for your CRM connection

Most businesses run Act-On alongside a customer database (a CRM, such as SugarAI). This new dashboard shows you, at a glance, the information flowing between the two systems, in both directions, flagging anything that failed to transfer, with tools to fix it yourself.

Why it matters: Previously, data could quietly fail to move between your two systems and you'd only find out when something looked wrong. Now you can see it's working, or spot and fix the problem before it costs you.

Better reporting

Act-On has expanded what it can report on - not just emails, but text messages, webinars, and how people move around your website - and it now ties marketing activity to actual sales opportunities and revenue. There's also a plain-language assistant: you type a question ("which industries are most of my contacts in?") and it builds the answer for you, including why it matters, no technical skill required.

Why it matters: It moves you past surface numbers like "how many people opened the email" toward the question leadership actually asks: "did this bring in business?" And you don't need a data analyst to get an answer. One practical note: the deepest reporting (data tied to each individual person, and the sales opportunity data) sits in Act-On's higher plans; the extra channels (text, webinar, website visits) and the question-and-answer assistant are included for everyone.

2. What's Coming at Act-On

From what's shipped to what's next: Kade previews the upcoming releases on Act-On's roadmap.

Already rolling out (Beta now)

• Re-designed Outbound Email UX - a modernized email management interface with redesigned UX and dashboards, updated folder and tag-based organization for messages, more convenient search/filter tools, and improved accuracy via True Open filtering (to screen out bot clicks and opens skewing engagement data). Customers can turn this on directly from their account.

H2 2026 (near-term)

• Segmentation upgrades - more precise audience creation, including segment membership, specific engagement criteria (type, first/last touch, total), and more detailed email/web link criteria for segments.
• Audience Center enhancements - additional audience creation options, including full support for personalization using all platform data, plus general UX upgrades to the Audience Center.

H2 2026 → Q1 2027

• New Contact Details Page - new metrics and data sources on the contact record, including True Open support, new summary metrics, and support for custom data, Insite chat, and subscription data.
• Triggered Messages redesign - improved clarity and metrics, with True Open support, a common reporting UI (aligning reporting across message types), and an activity feed.
• New Scoring Engine - improved activity-based scoring, with more flexible score rules, better score reporting, and improved performance.

3. Lifecycle Marketing

Andy makes the case for treating lifecycle marketing as an ongoing loop rather than a one-off campaign, then walks through where most programs quietly break down.

The lifecycle journey

The customer journey runs Awareness → Consideration → Purchase → Retention → Advocacy. Most teams pour effort into Awareness while Consideration and Purchase are under-invested, Retention is under-focused, and Advocacy is almost always ignored entirely.

The 3 gaps - why lifecycle programs stall

• The Handoff Problem - marketing passes a lead and considers its job done; sales follows up once; nobody owns the middle.
• Content Stops at Acquisition - plenty of content for prospects, but nothing for a customer on day 31 or day 90. Most orgs have a cliff, not a journey.
• Automation on Autopilot - a drip sequence set up years ago is still running and nobody remembers why. That's a "ghost program," and customers can feel it.

Live demo in Act-On

• The Contact Report, showing a full engagement summary (email, website, search, social, webinars, forms) plus scoring models, including an AI Predictive Score for likelihood to convert and a dedicated Onboarding Score.
• The Automated Programs builder, walking through two real journeys: a "New Member Acquisition Program" and a "Sales Engagement Cycle" with branching logic based on whether an opportunity was created - straight to a sales follow-up task, or back into marketing nurture.
• Analytics and reporting, including Website Visits (traffic source, top referring sites, UTM tracking) and Email Performance with True Open Impact - showing how filtering out bot and security-scanner opens can swing open-rate numbers dramatically, giving far more trustworthy data.

4. Contact Insights & Attribution

Sticking with Andy: this segment covered Act-On's newer advanced analytics capabilities, specifically contact-level insights and attribution.

The Contacts, Engagement & Attribution report

• Demographics - contact volume by lead score bucket, and by job title/seniority (manager, specialist, VP, etc.), so you can see who's actually in your database.
• Engagement - engagement count broken down by channel and type (clicked, downloaded, opened, session, submitted), plus a "Top 20 assets by total engagement" view to spot your best- and worst-performing content.
• Attribution - the core of the segment. A filter bar lets you slice by channel, campaign, opportunity create/close date, opportunity stage, contact score, industry, lead source, and region. The key control is the Attribution Window (Days) - e.g., set to 90, it counts any marketing engagement in the 90 days before an opportunity's creation (or close) as "influence." From there:
  • Marketing Influence on Open/Won Opportunities - a snapshot of pipeline and closed-won deals touched by marketing.
  • Marketing Influenced Deals by Channel and Opportunity Stage - shows which channels (Website, Email, Form, Media) are showing up at which stage of the deal.
  • Top 20 Assets Influencing Opportunities - the specific pages/content most associated with influenced pipeline.

The Analysis Agent (AI assistant) live demo

Andy asked the AI assistant a question - "what are the top 5 industries for my contacts" - directly into the assistant.

It built the query itself, returning a chart (Corporate Services/Business Services, Parts Manufacturing, Insurance, Business/Consulting Services), and then wrote out Key Insights and a Recommendation - in this case flagging that most contacts have no industry assigned and recommended the data be enriched for better segmentation and targeting.

5. The optimate.me Act-On Workflow

We don't just implement Act-On for customers - we run our own marketing on it.

In this segment, Steven walks through a live campaign workflow including a segmented list from SugarAI, an HTML Coded (within Claude) three-email sequence, a contact form embedded in a branded landing page and the marketing automations allowing the small team to scale their outreach to a large audience.