What is ActiveCampaign?
ActiveCampaign’s category-defining Customer Experience Automation Platform (CXA) helps over 180,000 businesses in 170 countries meaningfully engage with their customers. The platform gives businesses of all sizes access to 750+ pre-built automations that combine transactional email and email marketing, marketing automation and CRM for powerful segmentation and personalization across social, email, messaging, chat and text. Over 75% of ActiveCampaign’s customers use its 850+ integrations including Microsoft, Shopify, Square, Facebook, and Salesforce. Pricing starts at just $9/month.
ActiveCampaign was built on the idea that an excellent customer experience must go beyond the traditional marketing touchpoints, like email. Delivering a personalized, high-touch experience is easy in the very beginning, but as a business grows— adding channels, additional teams, locations, customer segments, etc.— the complexity of managing relationships is too much, and that personalized connection doesn’t scale (this is why we’ve all received sales emails for products we already own, been asked to review a product we returned, or had disjointed experiences across success reps while trying to resolve a support ticket, etc.) This is why email marketing, marketing automation, service and support tools, and CRMs end up wasting time for organizations instead of supporting their growth.
With ActiveCampaign, and the customer experience automation (CXA) category, we are removing the silos between data sources, communication channels, and teams, and helping businesses scale their 1-1 personal customer relationships through connected experiences that span the customer lifecycle. This enables businesses to automate a truly personalized experience that feels authentic, so their customer relationships can scale, no matter how large that business grows.
What are some of the things you can do with ActiveCampaign?
-Automate personalized experiences across all your customer touchpoints
-Track buyer preferences, behavior, and many custom attributes across the entire customer lifecycle for deeper segmentation and more effective outreach
-Customize sends based on almost any parameter, so your messages are always targeted for the right audience
-Use data from the entire customer lifecycle to choose the best content, send time, and delivery channel for each customer
-Create entirely customized campaigns with minimal effort, then improve your send strategy in real time based on customer behaviors
-Replicate the 1-1 personal experience for every customer, no matter how big your business gets
ActiveCampaign helps any business connect and engage with their contacts through powerful, easy-to-use email marketing and contact management. Build newsletters, send triggered campaigns, and create personalized messages targeted to each contact’s interests so they get exactly what they want, when they want it. The campaign builder and full template library lets you design beautiful emails with just a few clicks, getting the right emails to the right people. Pricing starts at just $9/month.
ActiveCampaign Review Summary
- ActiveCampaign is a complete email marketing tool with advanced automation capabilities
- The entry-level plan starts at $15 per month (for up to 500 subscribers, paid monthly), and includes automation workflows
- If you want to access pro features such as the in-built CRM, lead scoring, landing pages and SMS sending, the Plus plan starts at $70 per month
- It might be too powerful for those only wanting to send simple newsletters
One of their key features is marketing automation. Aside from autoresponders, which can be based on myriad conditions, you can automate list and contact management, as well as deals, if you decide to use their CRM software. This ‘Deals’ system (sales pipeline) also allows you to add notes to contacts, set up appointments, send direct messages to them, and much more.
The ‘Conversations’ feature is another one to note. You can use it to send targeted messages straight to your website visitors in order to optimize the overall customer experience and create a kind of sales funnel to help you convert more visitors.
Having all your information and activity in one place means that you can quickly get a holistic view of how your sales and marketing efforts are performing. Not having to use a number of providers for your various digital marketing efforts will also potentially save you money.
What do you like best about ActiveCampaign?
The ease of use. Intuitiveness. And if you can’t logically figure it out, there are TONS of articles, resources, references, etc. with fantastic screenshots and resources to help you easily navigate the system.
ActiveCampaign is easy to use. My emails get through. Particularly to the folks who still use yahoo and aol. With my previous email provider, deliverability to those email addresses was a problem. I have not had a problem with ActiveCampaign. The software has way more features than I currently use. I probably need a tutorial. They also have good customer service, as I’ve needed help when it was time to upgrade my account.
I love the amount of automations (& that there are many already built that you can just plug in & customize). I also love how our sales and marketing teams can now both work within one platform so there is better visbility across the organization.
AC is a really powerful tool that is only limited by two factors: time and patience.
Time not only to investigate all options (campaigns, automations, forms), but also to think of a strategy and, most importantly, to implement it (for instance, it’s easy to say: send an email with good content, such as a case study, to download; but then you have to make this damn case study, which takes a lot of time).
Patience because the best strategies are not direct but imply the need to nurture users.
ActiveCampaign offers a lot of automation tools; that seems to be their main focus. If you’re really trying to build up a business, and get leads, they have a lot of tools for that.
Creating automations on ActiveCampaign is intuitive and simple – basically, it does everything I would expect it to do and I find how to do that pretty easily. I was new to automations, and mine aren’t super-complex, but for a relative beginner, it’s perfect.
What do you dislike about ActiveCampaign?
Because there are so many features, you don’t know what you don’t know. There are probably 10 different ways to get to the same endpoint and while I appreciate the flexibility, I want to know the fastest, easiest, most simplified way to build out my email list without having tons of automations, sublists, tags, etc. It just feels . . . messy sometimes.
They don’t notify when you hit the email threshhold for your tier. For example, I crossed the 1,000 email subscriber mark and all my automations shut down and I couldn’t send an email out. The only reason I knew this had happened is because I logged in and discovered I couldn’t send email. If for whatever I hadn’t logged in, who knows when I would’ve learned of the problem.
The email design builder was a bit of an adjustment for me and sometimes my emails don’t look exactly how I’d like them to, but every platform has its pros and cons and most custom email design would require skills beyond of what we have on our team. I’ve also noticed there are sometimes the platform crashes or has issues, which impacts my work. Typically those issues are resolved within an hour or two, so not a huge deal.
Although they have recently renewed the platform’s look & feel, it still looks a bit outdated, at least compared to what one is used to see around.
In general, the user experience could improve and also it can be very time consuming to work on an automation, because, each time I have to make a single change to an email, it takes ages to click, load, display, save, etc.
I think that the flow across different windows should be faster.
Their search lacks basic functions, such as searching for only active customers. Also, creating segments is not intuitive and is actually an onerous process. Their customer service is not the best, and if you are at all interested in doing HTML emails (rather than drag and drop), they don’t have anybody who can help you. The platform is often slow as well, especially if you have a bigger list.
What problems is ActiveCampaign solving and how is that benefiting you?
Emailing my list information from deatils on my podcasts, to webinar alerts, to sales emails, to lead magnets, etc. I love the ease of integration and if there isn’t an integration Zapier will figure it out and integrate that way. I like that I can create an automation and forget about it, I know it’s working, I know it’s moving forward, and I don’t have to stress about it. It’s like my own assistant.
ActiveCampaign is helping me stay in daily contact with my growing email subscriber base. I am able to send a quick campaign. The automation I use was built for me. So, I don’t know how to build that and will probably need to hire someone to build one for the future. But I like its ease of use and only wish I was more tech savvy with it so I can could take advantage of all the bells and whistles it offers.
Features
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Activity Dashboard
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Campaign Analytics
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Campaign Planning
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Contact Database
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Pros
Cons
Though we recommend ActiveCampaign, its prices are something to take into consideration. Despite the most affordable plan starting at $15, prices quickly rise as you collect more subscribers. ActiveCampaign’s pricing is on the higher end of the email marketing spectrum. You can compare it to other email marketing programs here.