Excellent
ActiveCampaign offers a lot of marketing features, which results in a cluttered interface, though that’s balanced by its high quality online support.
WHAT WE LIKE
- Many third-party integrations and auto-responder options.
- Excellent online support.
COULD BE BETTER
- Time-consuming to get started
- Limited email scheduling
SCORE
- Ease of Use 9.1/10
- Support 9.1/10
- Pricing 9.0/10
- Features 9.2/10
What is ActiveCampaign?
ActiveCampaign combines various aspects of small business marketing into an integrated and user-friendly platform. With this tool, you can seamlessly create beautiful and engaging emails, use social media marketing, find out more information about your contacts, and apply marketing automation technology that previously is unreachable for small businesses. Over 130,000 users worldwide trust ActiveCampaign to help grow their company.
You do not a credit card to set it up. You can set up ActiveCampaign instantly. With over 850 apps and integrations, the tool connects you with the services you love.
People all over the world also love the tool’s quick, friendly, and helpful support.
Is ActiveCampaign right for your business?
ActiveCampaign is a great option for experienced marketers who are already familiar with email marketing software and are looking for an advanced solution that lets them create complex campaigns. It’s also suitable for both B2B and B2C marketers, as you can manage both personal contacts and business accounts.
While ActiveCampaign has almost every email marketing feature you can think of, its complexity makes it unsuitable for inexperienced marketers or people who want to create simple campaigns using a basic solution.
Overview of Activecampaign Features
- Marketing automation
- Smart auto responders
- Over 850 built-in apps and integrations
- Drag and drop email designer
- Track your contacts onsite and in your apps
- Campaign, contact, as well as list reporting
- Track where your contacts live or travel
- Add live ecommerce data and even videos to your emails
- SMS marketing
- Free phone, live chat, as well as email support
- Send newsletters
- CRM & Sales automation
- We find contacts based on age, gender, and location
- Advanced segmentation and targeting
- 500+ pre-built automations
- Dynamic (as well as conditional) email content
- Social media monitoring as well as reaction automations
- Free email templates
- Build custom forms for your landing pages
- Free one-on-one training
- Landing pages
Overview of ActiveCampaign Benefits
ActiveCampaign is the Customer Experience Automation (CXA) platform that helps businesses of all sizes acquire, retain, and ultimately engage their customers. From getting new contacts to keeping tabs on your company’s post-sale processes, the tool provides immense value to its users at any stage of your company’s business lifecycle.
Although the tool boasts a good set of email and messaging features, this web-based platform does much more than just any traditional email service provider. It goes beyond competitors by tying its email and messaging features to a user-friendly and robust marketing automation platform, along with built-in CRM and sales automation functionalities. ActiveCampaign enables businesses to create special marketing workflows as well as automated follow-up sequences, while at the same time tracking behavior across multiple marketing channels.
ActiveCampaign offers over 850+ apps and integrations. The apps and services range from accounting, CMS applications, and analytics, all the way to services that are focused on sales, support, as well as lead generation.
Site Tracking – Site Tracking connects your marketing to a contact’s behavior allowing you to respond to what they are doing on your website and adapt your marketing to their interests. This feature allows ActiveCampaign to “see” what a contact is doing on your website. Their entire page view history is attached to their contact record so you know what they have and haven’t done on your website. This data is useful in itself but it is also actionable. You can use this page view information to segment your contacts (for instance to create a list of contacts who have viewed your pricing information) and alter your marketing (for instance, by sending out an invitation for a demo of a product when a contact views its product page).
Conditional Content – With Conditional Content you are able to dynamically alter content on a per contact basis. For instance, you could display entirely different images or blocks of text in an email based on how a contact is tagged or what web pages they have viewed on your website. If you are sending out an email notifying your contacts of a sale, you could use this feature to display the specific products that they have viewed in the past.
Event Tracking – With Event Tracking you are able to communicate specific actions your contacts have taken to ActiveCampaign and then use that information to create highly personalized marketing. You could use Event Tracking to notify ActiveCampaign when a user logs into your website, or when they make a transaction, and then trigger a follow up campaign.
Easy-to-use API – ActiveCampaign says it gets many compliments on how easy to use its API is. This is important because, while built-in integrations exist for many popular services, this means ActiveCampaign can easily and completely integrate with the ecosystem of apps you are already using and you can extend its capabilities as needed in the future.
Intuitive automation builder – A common complaint for marketing automation users is that the tools are confusing or difficult so they often don’t end up using many features they are paying for. ActiveCampaigns’s automation builder is a drag-and-drop flowchart tool that is intuitive to use so you can create powerful automations quickly and easily with minimal training. The platform gets out of the way and facilitates the work you are trying to accomplish.
Email split testing – ActiveCampaign’s advanced split testing feature allows you to test different sender information, subject lines, and email body content so you can identify what works best with your audience. You can define how many contacts should get each version of the test and then send the winning version to the rest of your contacts.
Sales CRM – ActiveCampaign’s automation tools extend into CRM so there is a seamless transition from marketing into sales. The same marketing automation tools that can be leveraged during the marketing process can also be used to automate many tasks during the sales process.
Advanced lead scoring – ActiveCampaign gives you the ability to create unlimited lead scores with unlimited rules so you have the flexibility and control to prioritize your leads along any criteria that is important to your company. These lead scores can be used to begin automations so you could automatically distribute a lead to your sales team when they reach a threshold score.
Technical details
| Deployment | Devices | Support |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Hosted | Windows Linux Android iPhone/iPad Mac Web-based Windows Mobile |
Live Support Training Phone |
| Customer Types | Pricing Model |
|---|---|
| Small Business Medium Business Large Enterprises Freelancers |
Monthly payment Annual Subscription |
| Language Support |
|---|
| English, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Italian, Dutch, Portugese, Polish |
Activecampaign Pricing Overview
| Free Trial | Lite | Plus | Professional | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| √ | $15 | $70 | $159 | $279 |
Pricing information for Pipedrive is supplied by the software provider or retrieved from publicly accessible pricing materials. Final cost negotiations to purchase Pipedrive must be conducted with the seller.
ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day free trial, which gives access to most of the features, so you can work out which ones you need and which you don’t, and get a better idea of which price plan works best for your business.
ActiveCampaign has four pricing plans, with the price of each depending on how many contacts you have in your email list. If you only need email marketing functionality, then the most basic plan (Lite) which comes in at $15 a month as part of a monthly subscription will meet your needs. But if you want CRM and marketing automation capabilities then you need to fork out for a higher-tier plan.
With the Plus plan, you get CRM and lead management capabilities that let you better manage contacts and pipeline stages, as well as the ability to adapt emails according to your brand. With the Professional Plan, you can A/B test automated workflows and optimize send times according to past customer behavior.
(The software’s pricing page highlights its most popular pricing tier. Source: ActiveCampaign.)
Overall, the strong roster of features makes it good value for money, but only if you are going to use lots of those capabilities to create complex campaigns. If you don’t need all of the features then there are other more affordable options — the problem with ActiveCampaign’s pricing model is that, as there is no free version, it ends up being more expensive than a lot of other email marketing software for basic users.
ActiveCampaign’s ease of use
ActiveCampaign is an advanced solution with a huge number of features. If you have never used email marketing software before then this solution presents a huge learning curve, especially as — unlike other similar software — it doesn’t include an intro tour that gives an overview of the main features.
ActiveCampaign is the kind of solution where you need to get training to make sure you know how to use the features and what you need to do to create campaigns. It’s not the kind of software where you can dive in and get started on your own, unless you’ve used similar software before, or you are a very experienced marketer.
This software is suitable for bigger companies with the time and resources to train up their users. You need to be willing to put the time in to learn how to use ActiveCampaign, otherwise, you will never be able to fully harness its multitude of useful features.
Getting started
One of the more complicated aspects of ActiveCampaign is knowing where to start. Many features are dependent on the completion of other steps. For example, you can’t create a lead score until you’ve set up a segment. If you’re an experienced email marketer, this might seem obvious, but it’s overwhelming for someone new.
Using features
There are occasions – normally for ActiveCampaign’s more advanced features – where you can get help understanding what a particular feature does, either by following a link to a help center article or through a quick, in-app description. However, a lot of ActiveCampaign’s functionality relies on the user having prior knowledge or access to thorough training and a training manual.
ActiveCampaign overcomplicates processes, instead of making it as simple and quick as possible to use. It seems as if everything has to be complex and time-consuming. Take creating a list. You can’t just quickly add a list name and start managing it; instead, ActiveCampaign makes you enter a URL for the list, as well as a description.
You also can’t create the list unless you fill in all the fields (below), even if they aren’t relevant to your use case. It is this lack of flexibility that makes ActiveCampaign a difficult-to-use solution.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does ActiveCampaign cost?
ActiveCampaign’s most basic price plan starts at $15. There are four pricing plans and the cost depends on the number of contacts you have.
How long is ActiveCampaign free for?
You can use ActiveCampaign’s free trial for 14 days. As there is no free plan, after the 14 days you must upgrade to a paid plan.
What is ActiveCampaign used for?
ActiveCampaign is a B2C and B2B email marketing, sales management and CRM solution designed to help you nurture your contacts through the pipeline using a variety of marketing channels.
Does ActiveCampaign have landing pages?
No, you cannot build a landing page directly from within ActiveCampaign, unlike other solutions such as GetResponse or Mailchimp, which allow you to design and create landing pages. If you are using ActiveCampaign and want to build a landing page, you need a third-party integration, such as Leadpages, ClickFunnels, or OptimizePress.
Check out ActiveCampaign’s excellent segmentation capabilities, but be prepared to work to get it up and running!
