I remember the day we delved into the world of email marketing as if it was yesterday. We fully understood and appreciated the benefits of having our own mail list to reach our customers directly. Unfortunately, the search for an excellent email marketing tool was not as easy as we thought.
Most of our friends in online marketing kept talking about the automation features in ActiveCampaign, so we had to check that out. The vast amount of ActiveCampaign Reviews and other email marketing tools online were a bit overwhelming, to say the least, but we dug on.
In this ActiveCampaign review, we simplify the fantastic features you will find in this autoresponder and give you a head start, so you know what you are getting into.
What is ActiveCampaign?
ActiveCampaign is a powerful email marketing tool built with next-level automation capabilities to enhance email personalization. The tool is also a sales management and CRM solution, but its foundation is on email marketing. That said, the vast features of this tool also make it quite complicated, especially for beginners.
Recommended if:
- You require serious marketing automation.
ActiveCampaign has the most powerful automation capabilities at its price range. It allows you to set up anything you can imagine-from sales follow-ups, triggered campaigns to automated segmentation.
- You need multi-level marketing.
ActiveCampaign has more personalized features like SMS chats and social media integration if you need more than emails to reach your contacts.
- You need to integrate sales and marketing.
The high-level tiers of ActiveCampaign come with in-built CRM to seamlessly link your email marketing data with your sales team so they can make better decisions.
Not recommended if:
- You need a beginner-friendly tool
Are you new to the world of email marketing? ActiveCampaign is not the best tool to start with. It has a high learning curve and takes a lot of ActiveCampaign training to understand it.
- You are on a budget
ActiveCampaign may be categorized as an affordable autoresponder, but it’s not if you are a small business looking for simple automation or basic campaign features. There are more budget-friendly options with a more relaxed learning curve, including ConvertKit, Mailchimp, and MailerLite.
ActiveCampaign Review
The dashboard on this tool looks pretty straightforward. When you log in, you will see on your left;
- Contacts
- Campaigns
- Automation
- Conversations
- Lists
- Forms
- Reports
For this ActiveCampaign review, let’s go through some of my favorite ActiveCampaign features – the ones that left my jaw hanging, in relation to the benefits they provide.
System and Segmentation
Active Campaign uses both lists and tags to manage subscribers. The best approach is to make as few lists as possible (two or three are sufficient) and use tags to do the rest. The good thing with ActiveCampaign is that you can use as many segments as you want to personalize the email marketing even more.
For instance, you can have one segment for people who live in Georgia, subscribed in August, and have viewed a particular page on your site.
You should use automation workflows to make the segmentation easier. For example, you can set up triggers and conditions which determine which tags the subscriber lands on.
Automation
Out-of-this-world automation capabilities are what ActiveCampaign is all about. It’s the primary reason why anyone would leave all those easy to use tools like ConvertKit and MailChimp to deal with the complications of ActiveCampaign.
The only thing limiting you from doing more is your imagination. ActiveCampaign makes automation easier because the platform already has built-in automation templates, meaning you don’t have to do them manually. The models are designed to meet different user behavior such as;
- User engagement
- Opening emails
- Repeat product views
- Cart abandonment
Contact Management
Sometimes personalization is all about knowing who your subscribers are. One very unique thing about ActiveCampaign is that it allows you to collect as much information about your subscribers as possible. You can add any custom fields on your landing page or signup forms to obtain more info about your prospects. This means you will better serve the businesses you are targeting because you know their turnover, size, points of contact, and what makes them tick.
ActiveCampaign Integrations
When it comes to integration with other apps, ActiveCampaign is leading the rest with a list surpassing 150 apps. Most things on ActiveCampaign may be hard to understand but not integrations. When you click on any of the apps on this document,
You are shown how ActiveCampaign integrations work.
Check out this example with Facebook;
These integration capabilities come in handy because you can do a lot of things with other apps and then use ActiveCampaign for its automation features. For instance, since you can’t make a landing page directly on ActiveCampaign, you need landing page builder software like Leadpages or Clickfunnels to do so.
Tracking and Reporting
Any email marketer worth their salt understands the importance of timely reports and tracking. When you launch a campaign, you need to know how it’s performing and make any needed improvements. ActiveCampaign provides detailed reports so you can see how many people opened your emails, number of clicks, and contacts who acted.
With such comprehensive reporting and tracking, you can quickly resend the email to people who didn’t open it the first time. You will also identify campaigns that are working better than others and take the necessary steps.
Conversations
The last feature that blew me away was conversations. Yes, it means exactly what you think. You can incorporate a live chat widget on your site and then integrate it with your email automation. If you thought personalized emails are good enough, ActiveCampaign disagrees. You should also have one on one chats with your prospects and make them feel special.
ActiveCampaign Pros and Cons
Let’s cover the Pros and Cons of the platform in this ActiveCampaign review!
Pros
- Fantastic email deliverability
There have been several deliverability tests conducted across the most popular email marketing tools by different people. While the results of each test differ, this table shows the average deliverability rate.
As you can see from these figures, ActiveCampaign is doing really well compared to other tools. Ensuring that your emails land on your contact’s primary tab makes it more probable that they will see it and open it.
- Reliable support
I am sure I have stated several times that ActiveCampaign is not for newbies in email marketing. However, the tool has a vast knowledge base that includes how-to articles, webinars, and video tutorials which you can find here.
Of course, you can reach out to their customer support directly via email for a more personalized answer. Their live chat and phone contacts are also very reliable, especially during working hours.
Nowadays, Facebook groups provide the best and fastest solutions. Luckily for you, these two ActiveCampaign dedicated Facebook groups will give you all the support you need whatever time of day.
- Numerous email templates
The one thing growing businesses complain about ConvertKit is that it has limited email templates, and you cannot customize them unless you know how to code. ActiveCampaign provides you with an excellent array of beautiful templates to choose from, and you can customize them to look better.
- Activecampaign CRM
Now, you may argue that a small business doesn’t require customer relationship marketing, especially since Activecampaign CRM comes at a hefty cost. However, functional CRM can really help to build relationships with your customers and streamline the marketing and sales processes to avoid wasting leads. The inbuilt CRM, combined with top-notch automation features on Activecampaign, can catapult your marketing efforts to greater heights.
Cons
Everything great also has a downside. As an experienced marketer, you may not find ActiveCampaign to be hard at all. It’s actually very intuitive and straightforward once you get the hang of it. However, this autoresponder can be quite a drag – literally. Slowness is something that many people have complained about, and we believe ActiveCampaign is looking into ways of improving the platform and make loading faster.
ActiveCampaign Pricing
There are 4 ActiveCampaign plans; Lite, Plus, Professional, and Enterprise. The lite plan starts from $9 per month if you have less than 500 subscribers and increases as you get more subscribers. Most businesses choose the lite plan because it has everything you need for email marketing, including automation, subscription forms, integration, and user support.
However, if you need more features like CRM with sales automation, you can upgrade to Plus or Professional plans. Plus plan starts at $49 for 500 subscribers and goes up as your mail list continues to grow.
| LITE | PLUS | PROFESSIONAL | ENTERPRISE |
| $9/month | $49/month | $129/month | $229/month |
Final Verdict: ActiveCampaign Review 2020
Absolutely. Imagine going to bed knowing that your business is running automatically without any effort on your part. With the triggers and conditions you have set, customers and site visitors are being taken care of, thanks to automation features.
There are other emailing tools like SoftInfusion or ConstantContact, and that can give you better automation, but they are expensive and hard to comprehend.
Can I recommend it to beginners on a budget? Maybe not, but it’s a close second.
We hope that this ActiveCampaign review has shed some light on the good and the bad you expect to see on this tool. As always, try the 14-day free trial and experience ActiveCampaign for yourself before making any judgment.
