ActiveCampaign Review: Marketing Automation for Everyone

Are you looking for a powerful email marketing tool that’s easy to use and affordable?

ActiveCampaign is marketing automation software that can help you grow your business

With ActiveCampaign, you can easily create beautiful email newsletters, landing pages, and forms. You’ll be able to track your results to see how well your campaigns perform. And best of all, ActiveCampaign is affordable, so it’s within reach for any business budget.

In this ActiveCampaign review, we will discuss the benefits, features, pricing, and more on the ActiveCampaign email marketing platform.

Sign up for a free trial of ActiveCampaign today!

What is ActiveCampaign?

Overview

ActiveCampaign is a cloud-based marketing software that offers automation for email marketing, lead scoring, and web analytics. It also has a CRM platform and live chat messaging called Conversations.

ActiveCampaign is a comprehensive email marketing and automation tool. It allows you to create landing pages, track website visitors, and automate email campaigns. It’s a powerful tool that you can use to grow your business.

With ActiveCampaign, you can easily create beautiful email newsletters, automate email sequences, and track the success of your email campaigns. You can also create landing pages and track website visitors. And you can automate essential business tasks like customer follow-up and lead scoring.

Who founded ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign was founded in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom. ActiveCampaign is a private software company with 1,000 employees headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, with offices in Indianapolis, Sydney, Australia, Dublin, Ireland, and Brazil.

Who uses ActiveCampaign?

Over 150,000 businesses in 170 countries have chosen ActiveCampaign as their email marketing software. Some of their clients include AdClients, Paperbell, CodeCamp, Cambiati, Unicorn Capital, Marnell Gaming, and Thinkific.

What are some benefits of using ActiveCampaign?

Regarding marketing automation, ActiveCampaign is one of the best tools out there. It offers a wide range of features and capabilities, making it easy to create marketing campaigns that are both effective and efficient.

ActiveCampaign Products

Email Marketing

ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of features and capabilities for email marketing. Create beautiful email newsletters, automate email sequences, and track the success of your email campaigns. You can also create landing pages and track website visitors. And you can automate essential business tasks like customer follow-up and lead scoring.

With ActiveCampaign, you can easily reach your target audience with powerful email marketing campaigns.

Transactional Emails

ActiveCampaign offers powerful tools for sending transactional emails. With ActiveCampaign, you can easily create beautiful and effective transactional emails without any coding required. These tools are a great way to improve the customer experience and keep your business running smoothly.

Thanks to ActiveCampaign’s powerful email automation features, you can easily create and send transactional emails that will meet your specific needs and requirements. And, with its wide range of integrations, ActiveCampaign easily integrates with various platforms and applications, making it easy to connect with other systems and platforms you may be using.

ActiveCampaign’s Postmark service is a transactional email service that developers and product teams love. It has a flexible API, excellent documentation, and blazingly fast and reliable email delivery. It’s also the most-loved email service for developers and product teams because of its stellar customer support.

With Postmark, you can easily create beautiful and effective transactional emails without any coding required. Transactional emails are a great way to improve the customer experience and keep your business running smoothly.

Marketing Automation

With ActiveCampaign’s powerful automation features, you can easily automate many tasks. Automation features include email sequences, customer follow-up, and lead scoring, and this can save you a lot of time and effort while helping you focus on other areas of your business.

ActiveCampaign also offers a wide range of integrations, making connecting with other systems and platforms easy. Integrations can be beneficial in automating your marketing tasks.

CRM & Sales Automation

In addition to its powerful marketing automation features, ActiveCampaign also provides CRM functionality. CRMs can be very helpful in managing your customer relationships. With ActiveCampaign’s

CRM, you can easily track customer interactions, manage your sales pipeline, and score leads. Sophisticated yet easy to use, ActiveCampaign’s CRM is an excellent tool for small businesses. It can help you stay organized and ensure your customers are always happy.

ActiveCampaign’s marketing automation features are some of the most powerful in the industry. With them, you can easily create sophisticated marketing campaigns that target your customers with scheduled emails.

Sales Engagement

ActiveCampaign’s sales engagement automation tool enables businesses to connect with customers at the right time and improve their overall customer experience. The tool allows companies to automate the personal touch at scale, capture more right leads, and optimize 1:1 communication. By using

ActiveCampaign’s sales engagement automation tool, businesses can ensure that their marketing and sales strategies are connected and deliver a truly connected customer experience.

Integrations

ActiveCampaign integrates with a wide range of platforms and applications, making it easy to connect with other systems.

With ActiveCampaign’s wide range of integrations, you can easily connect with other systems and platforms.

Best Features of ActiveCampaign

Email Marketing

Broadcast Emails

Broadcast emails are email campaigns sent to a large group of contacts simultaneously. They are scheduled and usually work best in awareness campaigns, where you’re trying to inform your readers and promote new announcements.

Email broadcasts can take care of big news announcements, a:

• New Business launch or location
• Product or Service
• Promotion or Offer
• A significant piece of corporate news like a news release

In ActiveCampaign, There are 4 types of broadcast emails for B2B (business-to-business) and DTC (direct-to-consumer) companies:

• Newsletters: most common, can be anything from general updates to plans
• Important Updates: Significant updates, news releases, corporate news, etc
• Digests: A collection of media updates
• Sales and promotions: Sales, discounts, and exclusive offers are the best use case for a broadcast email.

Triggered Emails

Triggers are the events that initiate automation. You use them to determine how contacts are added to automation and then proceed through your workflow according to the sequence of events you’ve set up. Triggers can be multiple conditions so that the same automation starts in different ways.

Some of these events that “trigger” automation can include:

• New subscriber to an email list
• Unsubscribes from an email list
• Submits an online form
• Open/read an email
• Clicks a link in an email
• A web page is visited
• Shares, forwards, or replies to an email
• Conversion
• Purchase
• Abandons a Cart
• and many more

You can trigger emails based on a purchase. Or site visits. Or engagement. Automatically send emails when your contacts are most interested.

Targeted Emails

Targeted emails are more effective when your audience narrows and you use various data points to personalize messages.

Examples of common customer data points include:

• Location
• Gender
• Socioeconomic status
• Type of Family
• Buying habits
• Their preferred place of purchase
• What problems are they trying to solve?
• How do they search for solutions?
• And more

Scheduled Emails

Source: AC help Center video

Scheduled emails are emails assigned on a specific date and time. You can use them for one-time email campaigns or recurring campaigns. With ActiveCampaign, you can easily schedule your emails in advance, so you always have the latest information from your contacts. You can also segment your audience into different groups and target them with specific messages.

Automation

ActiveCampaign automation is a tool that allows you to automate specific tasks within your ActiveCampaign account.

Automations can help save time and ensure that your marketing efforts are more streamlined. ActiveCampaign automations can include tasks such as

• Sending emails to specific contacts or groups, like an autoresponder
• Adding or removing contacts from groups
• Updating contact information
• And more

Automation sequences help you handle your business processes effectively.

Autoresponders

Email autoresponders are automated emails sent to contacts based on a specific trigger. There are a variety of different triggers that you can use:

• new subscription to a list,
• event registration,
• purchase,
• website visit,
• engagement.

Autoresponders can welcome new contacts, deliver lead magnets, or start a welcome series. They are a great way to stay in touch with your contacts and keep them engaged with your brand.

Email Designer

ActiveCampaign has taken its email design to new heights with a reliable, user-friendly interface that makes it simpler than ever before to produce high-quality branded emails. Keep your customers engaged and coming back for more by taking advantage of everything this improved easy to navigate Email Designer offers.

The email creation process in ActiveCampaign requires 5 steps provided by the Campaign Builder tool.

One of these steps includes using the Email Designer to follow this process:

• Type: Choose the campaign you want to create.
• List: Choose the group of contacts and a list you would like to receive in this campaign.
• Design: Use the Email Designer to edit the campaign and insert your favourite elements.
• Summary: Check campaign elements.
• Send the email to the list you chose.

Site Tracking

ActiveCampaign’s Site Tracking is a powerful feature that lets you see what products, services, and information your contacts have the most interest. Site Tracking can help you follow up to convert more customers. Site tracking pulls data in, so you can track every step of your customer’s journey and ensure no one falls through the cracks.

Our WordPress plugin sets up site tracking automatically. You can start using site tracking in under 10 minutes—as quickly as installing a WordPress plugin or setting up Google Analytics.

Subject Line Generator

ActiveCampaign’s subject line generator is a great tool to help you create high-quality subject lines for your email campaigns. With this tool, you can easily personalize your messages and ensure they stand out from the competition.

The email subject line tool has 11 subject line templates you can use immediately. If you want to move beyond the template options, you can also customize your Subject Lines.

A/B Testing

ActiveCampaign’s A/B tester is a powerful tool that allows you to test different versions of your email campaigns to see what works best for your audience. This tool will enable you to test other subject lines quickly, content, calls to action, and more to find the perfect combination for your next great email campaign.

Templates

With responsive email templates from ActiveCampaign, you can create beautiful emails that stand out, no matter your design experience. With our library of over 250+ design templates (70+ new and hot off the press), you can customize your email and send beautiful messages in just a few clicks.

Segmentation

As a marketer, it’s essential to be able to segment your email list so you can send more targeted, relevant emails. ActiveCampaign makes it easy to segment your list with our drag-and-drop interface. You can segment by location, demographics, interests, behavior, and more.

You can segment your contacts into highly customized groups by utilizing lists, tags, and custom fields judiciously. Segmentation allows you to send them more personalized and targeted messages.

Geotracking

ActiveCampaign uses a contact’s IP address to determine their location. When a contact engages with your communication or fills out an ActiveCampaign form, we’ll fetch their IP address and display it on the “Location” field under the Contacts overview page.

Conditional Content

Conditional content is a great way to tailor your message within an email. That email can be within more extensive automation as well. The personalization options are plentiful.

You can use conditional content to create dynamic, personalized messages that make ActiveCampaign emails stand out in the inbox. By using ActiveCampaign’s tools, you can easily create customized messages without any coding knowledge. Add the conditions you want to target, and ActiveCampaign will do the rest.

Conditional content is a great way to make your email marketing more effective and engaging. It allows you to send different versions of an email to different segments of your list based on criteria that you set.

ActiveCampaign makes it easy to create dynamic, personalized email content without any coding knowledge. Add the conditions you want to target, and ActiveCampaign will do the rest.

Social Sharing

Email campaigns with social sharing buttons generate more clicks and conversions. Inviting contacts to share your campaign can further boost its success. Try the email campaign social share incentive automation recipe to increase engagement and reach.

For example, when a contact shares your email campaign on social media, they’ll automatically receive an email coupon or other offer.

Rewarding your subscribers to share your email from their social media accounts has many benefits:

• Encourages subscribers to get the word out and increases awareness
• Ability to expand your reach and significantly grow your audience.
• Convert more leads into customers.

Try this email campaign social share incentive automation recipe to increase engagement and reach.

Analytics

ActiveCampaign allows users to view their email campaign results within Google Analytics. This integration will enable you to see all your link clicks, so you can track the impact of your email campaigns and measure your progress. Additionally, you can use digital advertising to complement and amplify your communications.

Transactional Email

Automation

Transactional emails are automated and sent to users in real-time after they take action on a platform, app, or website. These emails are also known as triggered emails. Since an event or trigger must occur for the email sent.

Although the term might make you think otherwise, transactional emails don’t always have to be about money or purchases. Transactional emails can include:

• Purchase confirmations
• Shipping confirmations
• Email verifications
• Account updates
• Password changes
• Social media notifications
• Upcoming events

Send Receipts

A delivery receipt notifies you that ActiveCampaign sent an email to the recipient’s mailbox successfully. A read receipt confirmation lets you know that the message was opened, not read. ActiveCampaign enables you to tell if an email was delivered and opened.

Confirmation Emails

A confirmation email is a type of transactional email that your customer receives after completing an action or meeting a condition. For example, you might receive an email confirmation when placing an online order, subscribing to a newsletter, or registering for a new service.

Payment Reminders

A payment reminder is an email sent to customers with past-due invoices reminding them of their outstanding payments.

There are several benefits to email automation when it comes to payment reminders, including:

• Increase CLV (customer lifetime value)
• Reduce the amount of time between purchases to increase efficiency
• Get your customers excited about buying from you today
• Create a sense of urgency
• Email your customers an incentive

Marketing Automation

Welcome Emails

Set up an automation that sends a welcome email when someone new joins your list. Welcome emails have high open rates, so this is a great way to improve your business quickly and easily.

Contact Score

A contact score is a lead score that you can create in your ActiveCampaign account. It helps you to evaluate and prioritize the quality of your leads. There is no maximum limit on how high the score value can be.

Contact scoring is a numerical value that ActiveCampaign gives to your contacts. A single score is one or more rules that add or remove points from a contact. For example:

• a rule that assigns 25 points to a contact that opens an email
• a rule that assigns 25 points to a contact that clicks on a link in an email
• a rule that assigns 50 points to a contact that forwards an email to another person
• a rule that removes 50 points when a user unsubscribes
• etc

These points are then added together for a relevant & accurate point assignment.

Automatic Reminders

Automation Templates

ActiveCampaign makes it simple to get started with hundreds of pre-built automation workflows that are already available. You can explore the ones in the app or marketplace or build and share your creations.

Even if you don’t use the template automations precisely as they are, it can be helpful to see what they are and how they work.

eCommerce Automations

ActiveCampaign lets you leverage automations in your eCommerce business.

Here are a few areas where you can automate and get results:

• Abandoned cart email automations to recover revenue
• Use email automations to highlight your store’s products
• Upsell campaigns to get customers to purchase higher-valued items
• Cross-sell campaigns to get customers to buy similar items purchased before
• Use discounts and special promotions to incentivize your customers.

Cart Abandonment Revenue Calculator

Without a doubt, abandoned shopping carts cost eCommerce businesses dearly every day. Using this abandoned cart calculator, you can see how many potential sales are lost – and what Adding an abandoned cart email could mean for your business bottom line.

ActiveCampaign has a free Lost revenue from cart abandonment calculator.

Strategy Templates

ActiveCampaign can get you started with their free marketing strategy templates. There are a few toolkits that you can download for free:

• Marketing Strategy Template
• Email Automation Starter Kit
• Podcast Marketing
• Sales Process Template
• Communication Plan Template
• Product Sheet Template
• Holiday Marketing ToolKit

There are many more available on ActiveCampaign’s Free Marketing Tools page.

CRM & Sales Automation

Contact Creation

Site tracking is an invaluable sales tool – it lets you know when a potential customer has been visiting your website and considering making a purchase. They may still need to go ahead with the sale because they want to think about it, or they may need clarification on specific points.

If your sales team could reach out proactively to help clear up any confusion, this could lead to more closed deals.

If a lead visits an essential page on your website, such as the pricing or product page, this will activate Salesforce automation.

The contact information for that person is added to Salesforce so that sales can follow up, and a message is sent to your team’s Slack channel notifying team members of the potential sale.

Personal 1:1 Emails

The “Send a 1:1 email” action is critical for sales engagement automation. It allows you to improve customer experiences, connect personal sales messaging to marketing strategies, and automate touch at scale.

The “Send a 1:1 email” automation action lets you send outbound emails with your connected email account. There is a send limit of 500 emails per day for every email account connected.

Appointment Follow-Up

The appointment follow-up is an automation recipe provided by the ActiveCampaign marketplace.

The way this automation works is before your appointment, make sure you have all information from the contact. If any fields were left blank when booking, shoot over a follow-up email to request what’s missing.

Lead Generation & Nurturing

ActiveCampaign’s lead generation and nurturing capabilities make generating leads easy and nurturing them into customers.

With ActiveCampaign, you can create beautiful landing pages, forms, and pop-ups that help you collect lead information.

You can also automate important tasks like lead scoring and follow-up. And you can segment your leads based on their behaviour and interactions so that you can send them the most relevant information.

Sales Automation

ActiveCampaign’s sales automation features help you close more deals and increase sales.

With ActiveCampaign, you can automate tasks like lead scoring, follow-up, and proposals.

You can also create custom forms to collect data from your customers. And you can segment your leads and contacts so you can send them the most relevant information.

Sales Engagement

Personal 1:1 Email Automation

Sales engagement automation takes advantage of rich customer data to send automated messages that are unique and timely.

Some of these unique data points available in automation are the following:

• Sender Email
• Customer Email
• Subject
• Message

Sales engagement allows salespeople to focus on when providing a human touch will be most effective in closing a sale.

Customer View

Using the ActiveCampaign email marketing platform, you can send the right message every time and unify data from multiple touchpoints. This allows for automation that intelligently reacts to customer behaviour.

Lead Scoring

By delivering dynamic messages that understand where customers are in their buyer’s journey, you can alert sales when leads are ready to purchase and convert.

Pipeline Automation

Automate your pipeline to create efficient and individualized experiences that rapidly advance deals through the process. You can shorten your sales cycle and close more business deals with streamlined sales tasks.

Win Probability

By understanding the win probability percentage for each deal, you have a strategy and data points on how to close a deal in the most efficient way possible.

Landing Pages

ActiveCampaign offers customizable landing pages that are easy to use and help you get started quickly. You can also build your list, send emails on the same platform, measure your success, and know what works.

Turn page traffic into new contacts, and email each contact the content they want to see.

You can quickly understand how your landing pages perform with a newly improved dashboard and tracked metrics.

ActiveCampaign’s landing pages are a great way to increase site traffic, generate leads for your business, and boost sales.

Site Tracking

ActiveCampaign’s website tracking capabilities make tracking your website visitors and their behaviour easy. With ActiveCampaign, you can see what pages your visitors are viewing, what links they are clicking, and what forms they are filling out. You can also segment your website visitors to send them the most relevant information.

SMS Marketing

ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of features for managing your customer relationships.

ActiveCampaign also offers SMS marketing, which can be a great way to reach your target audience on the go. With SMS marketing, you can easily send text messages to your customers, which can be a great way to stay in touch with them.

Coupon Management

ActiveCampaign’s coupon management tool makes creating and managing coupons for your business easy. This tool can easily track coupon usage, expiration dates, and more. Coupon management can help ensure that your customers take advantage of the best deals and offers.

Pricing

Marketing + CRM Plans

ActiveCampaign offers four pricing plans for their Marketing + CRM Product:

• Lite Plan, with Marketing Automation, Unlimited email sending, Drag and drop builder, Segmentation, Subscription forms, email and automation reporting, site and event tracking, and some more features from the Sales Suite
• Plus Plan, everything in Lite plan plus landing pages, contact scoring, SMS marketing, advanced performance reporting, custom branded forms and landing pages, eCommerce store integrations and abandoned cart automation, and some more features from the Sales Suite
• Professional Plan, everything in Plus plan plus website personalization, predictive content, predictive sending, marketing attribution, split automations, conversion reporting, and site messages, and some more features from the Sales Suite.
• Enterprise Plan, everything in Pro plan plus custom objects, custom reporting, custom mail server domain, free design services, unlimited email design testing, social data enrichment, and some more features from the Sales Suite

The Lite plan starts at USD $9/month for 500 contacts, the Plus plan starts at USD $49/month for 500 contacts, and the Professional plan starts at USD $149/mo for 500 users.

They also have a free trial available before buying.

Transactional Email Plan

The new Postmark App for ActiveCampaign makes it easier to trigger transactional emails from within ActiveCampaign so that you can embed them into your workflows. Postmark is a powerful marketing automation solution for sending transactional emails.

The Transactional email plan is tiered based on the number of emails per month:

• 10,000 emails per month starts at USD $10/mo +$1.25 per 1,000 additional emails
• 50,000 emails per month starts at USD $50/mo +$1.00 per 1,000 additional emails
• 125,000 emails per month starts at USD $100/mo +$0.85 per 1,000 additional emails

Pricing is available up to 5,000,000 emails per month. Beyond that, if you need a more extensive plan, you can contact ActiveCampaign to discuss their higher volume plans.

Pros and Cons of ActiveCampaign

Advantages

The advantages of using ActiveCampaign include the following:

• Ease of use: ActiveCampaign’s user interface is intuitive and easy to use.
• Affordable: ActiveCampaign’s pricing plans are very reasonable, starting at just $9/month.
• Landing pages: ActiveCampaign offers customizable landing pages that can help you increase your website ActiveCampaign
• Automation Tools: Lots of automation recipes to help generate leads and sales.
• SMS marketing: ActiveCampaign offers SMS marketing, which can be a great way to reach your target audience on the go.
• Coupon management: ActiveCampaign’s tool makes creating and managing coupons for your business easy.

Disadvantages

The disadvantages of using ActiveCampaign include the following:

• ActiveCampaign’s reporting can sometimes be difficult to navigate, and the platform can be fairly crowded. Additionally,
• ActiveCampaign’s CRM system is less robust than standalone platforms like Salesforce or PipeDrive.
• Limited Drip: An improvement in their drip functionality is welcome. Currently, the email campaign can only send one message to all contacts on a selected list at a specific time.

Conclusion

In summary, ActiveCampaign is a comprehensive email marketing tool with many features to help you manage customer relationships. Their pricing plans are affordable and they offer a free trial before buying. Additionally, their website tracking capabilities make tracking your website visitors and their behaviour easy. SMS marketing is also available, which can be a great way to reach your target audience on the go.

ActiveCampaign offers an excellent platform for managing your customer relationships. The platform is easy to use and provides many features, including SMS marketing, landing pages, and coupon management.

However, the reporting could be more user-friendly, and the CRM system could be more robust. Overall, ActiveCampaign is a great email marketing platform.

FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions

What are other ActiveCampaign alternatives?

This ActiveCampaign review has shown that this is a compelling email marketing platform, but other options are available, including Constant Contact, AWeber, and others. All these platforms are similar in what they do, but ActiveCampaign has one of the largest automation libraries compared to its peers.

For a review of other ActiveCampaign alternatives, jump over to our 7 Best Mass Email Marketing Platforms in 2022 article.

What is the ActiveCampaign email builder?

The ActiveCampaign email builder is a powerful yet easy-to-use email marketing tool. With the email builder, you can easily create beautiful email newsletters and automated email sequences and track the success of your email campaigns.

What is ActiveCampaign automation?

ActiveCampaign automation is a powerful tool for automating your email marketing. With automation, you can easily send personalized emails, follow up with customers, and track the success of your email campaigns.

How much does ActiveCampaign cost?

ActiveCampaign offers four pricing plans: Lite, Plus, Professional, and Enterprise. The Lite plan starts at $9/month for 500 contacts, the Plus plan starts at $49/month for 500 contacts, the Professional plan starts at $149/mo for 500 users, and the Enterprise plan starts at $249/mo for 5000 users.

What is ActiveCampaign’s free trial?

ActiveCampaign offers a free trial, so you can try it before you buy. The free trial gives you full access to all of ActiveCampaign’s features for 14 days. After the free trial, you can choose the plan that best fits your needs.

What is ActiveCampaign’s email deliverability?

ActiveCampaign’s email deliverability is excellent. To get the exact figure, we recommend you visit an independent 3rd party website that reviews email deliverability.

What are ActiveCampaign’s features?

ActiveCampaign has many features, but some of our most popular include automation, email marketing, landing pages, forms, and a CRM.

What is an automation in ActiveCampaign?

Automation is a powerful tool that allows you to automate your email marketing. With automation, you can easily send personalized emails, follow up with customers, and track the success of your email campaigns.

What is ActiveCampaign’s automation builder?

The ActiveCampaign automation builder is a powerful tool that allows you to create and manage your email marketing campaigns easily. With the automation builder, you can easily send personalized emails, follow up with customers, and track the success of your email campaigns.

How do I get started with ActiveCampaign?

Getting started with ActiveCampaign is easy! Sign up for a free trial, and you’ll fully access their features for 14 days. After the free trial, you can choose the plan that best fits your needs.