ActiveCampaign

Reviews and Expert Opinion

ActiveCampaign

By Mashum Mollah

“ActiveCampaign is a tool that combines several elements of small business marketing into a user-friendly and integrated platform. The tools allow you to create engaging and beautiful emails seamlessly. It also enables users to apply social media marketing, gets information about your contacts, and also apply marketing automation that was unreachable for small businesses previously.”

ActiveCampaign In-Depth Reviews

5.0Based on 1 reviews
  • Features
  • Ease of Use
  • Performance
  • Support
  • Pricing
Pricing Details
  • Lite Plan $9/month
  • Plus Plan $49/month
  • Professional Plan $129/month
  • Enterprise Plan $229/month

Overview

Active Campaign

We have more than 100,000 users globally who trust Active Campaign to help in growing their company. You don’t need a credit card to be able to set up an account for ActiveCampaign. You can also instantly set up your ActiveCampaign account. ActiveCampaign has more than 150 ActiveCampaign integrations and it connects users with the services that they love. Most people also use the friendly, quick, and helpful support that this tool offers. Before we go further, let us first look at what is ActiveCampaign. You will discover that it is one of the most comprehensive ActiveCampaign reviews that you can think about.

One beauty about ActiveCampaign is that it offers everything that you need within one newsletter marketing tool quite well. The reporting gives users insights in virtually all facets like eCommerce, openers, geo-tracking, page visits, and many more. One of the areas that slightly lacks is the newsletter editor because the experience that it offers is not as slick as the other tools in the market. There are a few features in the tool that also require some improvement.

What is ActiveCampaign?

Currently, ActiveCampaign is helping more than 100,000 enterprises in 170 countries to engage with their clients in a meaningful manner. It is a platform that gives businesses of various sizer accessibility to hundreds of inbuilt automation that combine CRM, marketing automation, email marketing, and machine learning for personalization and powerful segmentation across text, chat, messaging, and social.

More than 70% of ActiveCampaign customers use its 300+ integrations that include salesforce, WordPress, Eventbrite, Facebook, Square, and Shopify. The pricing begins of ActiveCampaign begins from 9 dollars per month. The idea that ActiveCampaign is built on is that great customer experience should go beyond the traditional marketing touchpoints such as email.

Delivering a high-touch and personalized experience is easy from the onset. However, as the business continues to grow, adding customer segments, locations, additional teams, and adding channels, etc. It becomes more complex to manage relationships and the personalized relationship does not scale. That is why you could be asked to review a product that you returned, or had incoherent experiences across the success representatives as you try to resolve a support ticket. It tells you why marketing automation, email marketing, support tools and service, and ActiveCampaign CRM may end up wasting time for your organization instead of helping it to grow.

However, the Customer Experience Category of Active Campaign removes the silos between teams, channels, communication, and data sources and helps brands to scale their personal customer relationships via connected experiences that span the lifecycle of the customer. It assists enterprises to automate a personalized experience that feels authentic. It will help your customer relationship to scale regardless of the size of your business.

There are so many things that you can achieve with an ActiveCampaign account. You can use it to automate personalized experiences over customer touchpoints. The other thing is to track the behaviors, preferences, and other custom attributes over the whole lifecycle for more effective outreach and deeper segmentation.  

You can customize your sends based on virtually all types of parameters so that your messages are targeted to the right audience. You will also use data from the whole lifecycle in order to select the best send time, content, and delivery channels for every target group.

With ActiveCampaign, you will be able to create exclusively customized campaigns with very minimal efforts. You will also improve your email strategy in real-time based on the behavior of your customers. The other thing is the ability to replicate a personal experience for all customers even if your business targets are too big. 

How to Use ActiveCampaign?

How to Use ActiveCampaign

One of the most complicated things about ActiveCampaign is knowing the starting point. Most features in this campaign rely upon completing other steps. For instance, there is no way you will create a lead score before you set up a segment. If you have experience in email marketing, this may appear to be an obvious thing. However, it is quite overwhelming if you are a beginner in email marketing. In this section, we will be shedding some light on how to use ActiveCampaign.

Create Campaigns

One of the major flaws in ActiveCampaign is that you have to create a list first before creating an email. Therefore, it forces you to complete the steps as per the order that ActiveCampaign specifies. Therefore, you don’t have the liberty to work in a way that you think best suits your needs. It is one way that weakens the user experience that you get.

After setting up your list, you will choose the kind of email you wish to send. ActiveCampaign also persists in ensuring that you take certain steps before you create an email whether you like it or not. In this case, you should start by uploading a contact list.

After creating an email, ActiveCampaign doesn’t provide you with a plethora of templates. Besides, the few that exist are not as attractive as you may want them to be. The options provided are highly targeted to particular types of actions and campaigns.

The targeted emails comprise discounts, welcome emails, review and feedback, and product recommendations. The drag & drop email is the main feature that stands out on ActiveCampaign. It offers the ability to test your campaign so that you can see how it looks like across various email clients on both desktop and mobile.

It also has a responsive design meaning your email shows up in the optimum format regardless of the devices your clients are using. The other one is a spam check that can fail or pass depending on particular elements like the email domain.

All these elements help in making sure that you are delivering emails that give customers the best visual and technical experience. You will also get more clicks and opens by landing in their inboxes and not the spam folders. The challenge with ActiveCampaign is that it only allows you to schedule your email for a specific time and does not allow users to optimize the scheduling at the off-peak time for opening emails or according to the time zone.

Segmentation

Most email marketing solutions just allow users to add a single condition to be able to create a segment. However, ActiveCampaign is a bit different as it allows users to add very specific and multiple conditions. For example, you could create a segment for the individuals who have visited your website from the subscription date, live in Georgia, social media channels, and pages viewed on your website.

The ability to segment in such a granular manner also implies that you can utilize dynamic content in personalizing different email elements as par that particular segment. When it comes to tracking the performance of your email, you may dive deeper into the things that resonate with certain segments of clients and get more insights about why certain elements work.

ActiveCampaign also has unrivaled segmentation capabilities that it offers to the users. The ability to create these granular segments implies that you can create the type of super-relevant and highly-targeted campaigns that boost ROI and drive customer engagement.

The ability to track performance according to different segments implies that you can enhance the content type that you deliver to your subscriber and also meet your objectives. You can use it to improve your brand awareness through higher click and open rates or generate high revenue through increased conversions. ActiveCampaign allows users to customize info that they collect from the client signup forms. It is a good way to create more relevant and tailored campaigns.

Contact Management

When collecting as much data as you can on your customers, you will be able to get better insights about who they are, what they like, and how they behave. ActiveCampaign allows users to add as many custom fields as they like to their landing pages and signup forms. Therefore, you will be able to collect the most relevant data on how your business operates.

You may also select what type of every new field is (text, dropdown, etc.) and this enhances the user experience as you enter their details. ActiveCampaign is ideal for both B2C and B2B marketers. You will also manage the details of the businesses that you sell to that may comprise additional info like the turnover and size of your company and multiple contact points.

Creating Automations

Instead of setting up automated email workflows by hand, this platform gives users inbuilt automation templates. The templates are adapted to various kinds of campaigns and user behavior like repeat product views, cross-selling and upselling, user engagement, and cart abandonment. ActiveCampaign groups the triggers which kick off the automated workflow to assist you to quickly move through the process.

You will be able to choose how frequently you can run the automation and if you would like to segment clients that fall under this automation remit. It helps to make sure that all clients receive the most relevant messages possible across all the channels. This makes a lot of sense for the stage in the purchase cycle. There is so much that you can learn from this ActiveCampaign review especially when it comes to how to use the tool.

Features (4.6/5)

1. Site Tracking

Site tracking is used to connect your marketing efforts to the behavior of your contacts which allows you to respond to the things you are doing on your website and also adapt the marketing interests you have to theirs. The feature enables ActiveCampaign to ‘observe’ what contacts are doing on your site.  The whole page view history is attached to the contact record to help you know what they have done or have not done on your website.

This is highly useful data and it is also actionable. You can use the view information on this page in segmenting your contacts like creating a list of contacts that view your pricing info. It can also help you to alter your marketing e.g. by sending out a demo product invitation whenever a contact views the product page.

2. Conditional Content

Conditional content allows you to dynamically alter your content based on your contacts. For example, in emails that are based on how contacts are tagged or the web pages that they have viewed on your website. If you send out emails that notify contacts about a sale, you can use this feature to display certain products that they have viewed in the past.

3. Event Tracking

Event tracking allows users to communicate particular actions that your contacts have undertaken to ActiveCampaign and then use that info in creating highly personalized marketing.  You can use event tracking in notifying ActiveCampaign whenever a user logs in your website, when they make transactions, and then triggers a follow-up campaign.

4. Easy to Use API

According to ActiveCampaign, the company receives so many compliments because of having an API that is easy to use. It is a crucial feature because while most popular services have inbuilt integrations, ActiveCampaign can completely and easily integrate with the app’s ecosystem that you are already using and can extend the capabilities as you wish in the future. 

5. Intuitive Automation Builder

Most people who use the various marketing automation tools complain that they are difficult or confusing and hence they don’t use most of the features that they have paid for. The automation builder of ActiveCampaign is a drag and drop flowchart tool that is highly intuitive to use to help you create powerful automation easily and quickly with the least training. It is a platform that gets out of the way in facilitating the work that they are trying to accomplish.

6. Email Split Testing

With the advanced split testing feature of ActiveCampaign, you will be able to test various email body content, subject lines, and sender information to help you identify the things that work best for your audience. You can define the number of contacts that should get every version of the testing before sending the winning version to the other contacts.

7. Sales CRM

The automation tool of ActiveCampaign extends into ActiveCampaign CRM meaning there is a seamless transition from marketing to sales. You can leverage these marketing automation tools in the marketing process so that you can use it in automating several tasks in the sales process.

8. Advanced Lead Scoring

ActiveCampaign gives users the ability to create unlimited lead scores and unlimited rules so that you have the control and flexibility of prioritizing your leads following any criteria that are crucial to your company. You can use these lead scores to start automation to help you distribute a lead automatically to the sales team whenever they reach a threshold score.

Ease of Use (4.5/5)

ActiveCampaign Automation

As an advanced solution, ActiveCampaign has a long list of features. Unlike other software, if you are new to the use of email marketing tools, this tool has a huge learning curve. ActiveCampaign does not have an introduction tool that provides an overview of the main features of the tool.

ActiveCampaign is the type of tool where you have to get training to be sure that you know how to apply these features and the process of creating a campaign. It isn’t one of those email marketing solutions where you can get started on your own. Unless you have used a similar tool before or are highly experienced in marketing, you will need a lot of learning.

It is an ideal solution for big companies with the resources and time to train the users.  You should be willing to invest a lot of time in learning how to use ActiveCampaign. If not, you will never be in a position to harness fully the multitude of useful features that it presents.

Performance (4.7/5)

ActiveCampaign is not just like any other email marketing solution in the market. The high tier plans of this platform include lead management, CRM, and sales management functionalities. In this ActiveCampaign review, we will be focusing on the email marketing function.

ActiveCampaign comes out as an all-in-one user-friendly marketing tool for all types of businesses in the world. The platform provides a broad range of suite tools that are specially designed to help small to medium-size businesses to acquire, retain, and also engage their clients. From keeping tabs to getting new contacts on the post-sale process of your company, ActiveCampaign offers immense value to the users at all the stages in the business lifecycle of your business.

This tool boasts of having the best messaging and email features. However, it does not offer so much beyond what a traditional email marketing service offers. It goes beyond the competition by tying the messaging and email features to a robust and user-friendly marketing automation tool, alongside the inbuilt sales automation and CRM functionalities. ActiveCampaign allows brands to create special email marketing workflows and also automated follow-up sequences. At the same time, it tracks the behavior of multiple marketing channels. 

ActiveCampaign integrations are also a great feature for the users. The solution integrates with more than 150 services and apps.  The services and apps range from analytics, CMS applications, accounting, and other services that focus on lead generation, support, and sales.

Support (4.6/5)

ActiveCampaign possesses a sticky button for help at the bottom section of the screen. The implication is that you can access these support options at any time. When you click this button, it will take you to the knowledge center. You will not be forced to navigate away from the thing that you are doing because you can search the help center and get access to the info that you need straight from the pop-up window. The feature is highly useful if you require help on small tasks or a refresher that does not call for a long explanation. To get in touch with ActiveCampaign, just click on the ‘Contact US’ tab in the help menu and then fill out the form.

The support of ActiveCampaign is the way it is advertised; fast, helpful, and friendly. Both the chat and email support are great as they bring a personal feel to the communications. It is easy to search their knowledge base and returns the right results most of the time. With the ‘Plus’ plan from the company, you will access helpful webinars and one-on-one training which are great additions.

Pricing (4.8/5)

ActiveCampaign gives users a 14-day free trial and grants them access to most of the features. It means that you can work out the features that you need and the ones that you don’t require. This will give you a better idea of the ActiveCampaign pricing plan that will work best for your business.

ActiveCampaign basically has four pricing plans and the price of each of them depends on the number of contacts that are in your email list. If all that you need is the email marketing functionality, the Lite (most basic plan) that comes at $15 per month will meet your needs perfectly. However, if you need marketing automation and CRM capabilities, you should use the higher-tier plans.

There is also the Plus plan that grants users lead management and CRM capabilities that allow you to manage pipeline stages and contacts better. According to the brand, this plan gives you the ability to adapt to emails accordingly. The last one is the professional plan that allows you to carry out A/B testing of automated workflows and also optimizing the end times according to the past customer behavior.

Pricing Details
ActiveCampaign Plan Users Free Email Templates Split Automations Price View Details
Lite Plan Up to 3 Users  Yes No $9/mo Click here
Plus Plan Up to 25 Users  Yes No $49/mo Click here
Professional Plan Up to 50 Users  Yes Yes $129/mo Click here
Enterprise Plan Unlimited Users Yes Yes $229/mo Click here

User Reviews

Partha

ActivChampion
(5/5)

The best thing I can say about ActivChampion is that if someone has less money, they can also start email marketing with $ 9 a month only.
October 12, 2020
Write a review

Bottom line

If you are looking for the best all-in-one newsletter marketing tool, ActiveCampaign will not let you down. The real deal of the brand is automation and it makes it stand out from the other ActiveCampaign alternatives. However, prepare to invest some time or even invest more money but your business will truly grow.

However, if you just want a simple way of blasting out newsletters, ActiveCampaign alternatives like MailerLite or GetResponse will serve you better. It is good to use this tool when it is a perfect solution for you if you wish to get the most from it.

Mashum Mollah

Mashum Mollah has been there in the blogging industry for over a decade. He has always believed that blogging holds the most potential in the digital marketing industry. With years of research, he has created some of his best blogging practices, which have helped him establish himself in the industry as a Blogging Engineer. Now he is on a mission to help others and spread the concept of Blogging Engineer.