ActiveCampaign Review (2022) – A True King Of Automation?
- Lucas H.
- May 9, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: Jun 28, 2022
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Overal rating - 4.6/5 |
Usability - 4.5/5 |
Pricing - 4/5 |
Reporting - 4.5/5 |
Support - 4.5/5 |
Newsletter Creation - 5/5 |
Subscriber Management - 5/5 |
Technical Factors - 4.8/5 |
ActiveCampaign Summary
In this ActiveCampaign review, we will see why this email marketing provider is a reliable marketing automation platform that is quite a hidden gem for businesses looking for the best in automation and CRM systems on the market. Also, ActiveCampaign is popular because of its platforms’ ability to offer various plans for personal use, small teams of numerous digital businesses, eCommerce, and B2B companies of any size.
Furthermore, ActiveCampaign allows businesses to create different marketing campaigns and sales funnels to analyze and monitor how your clients or potential customers react to your content and information.
ActiveCampaign’s simple interface invites companies to participate in various functions such as setting up e-mail sequences, tracking if your clients have visited your website, or analyzing how many customers are clicking on the links in your e-mails. We’ll go in-depth into what makes ActiveCampaign a unique platform and how it stacks against other e-mail marketing and automatization systems.
Jump to:
Most Important Features Of ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign offers over 90 features that can be integrated into your business. The platform’s flexibility and customization options make it easy to match these features with your company’s objectives. Certain features of ActiveCampaign continuously stand out from the rest, including their Campaigns, Automations, Deal Flows, and Customer Messages.
Campaigns
Creating a campaign is one of the highlight features of using ActivaCampaign. You or your business can use campaigns for various functions to close sales, send e-mails, acquire more leads and even analyze how your customers interact with your marketing efforts.
For example, you can let your customers know about a huge sale you’re about to have by sending all your contacts an e-mail campaign; in other words, you can use it to send regular newsletters. You can then track what those customers do when they receive your e-mail. If they open your e-mail or click on a link, customers can be added and sent through an entirely different automation or e-mail campaign based on their actions.
Automation
Automation allows you to create processes that work for your business, even when you’re not. Once set up, the automation process can save you a ton of time because it will automatically allow your customers to hear from your company and drive them closer to purchasing or using your products and services.
Your company can customize the automation process to fit the specific objectives and goals of your marketing outreach. You can choose to automate different actions based on what your customers do when they click your e-mails when they visit a specific page of your website or repeat a behavior over time. All this information is delivered to you through the ActiveCampaign online reporting and analytics system.
ActiveCampaign’s automation process can take a while to set up because you must create the automation and set specific rules. However, once you have that process set up, it will work dividends for your business. If you don’t have ideas, ActiveCampaign offers multiple pre-made “recipes” or automations that you can adapt for your own business.
Deal Flows
Deal flows help you monitor and track your contacts through their entire life cycle, including the ability to track how customers respond to your outreach methods. Your deals can be moved through different stages of your sales cycle, which creates a visual representation of your progress with a deal. You can track important information and create tasks within your deal to keep information organized and accurate.
You can even build automations around your deals, which will help automatically move your contacts from one stage to the next. Your contacts can be automatically enlisted to a specific e-mail campaign based on what stage of the sales cycle they are in. For example, if you just won over a contact, they might be automatically added to an e-mail campaign that educates your client on their newly purchased services or products.
Customer Messages
Being able to stay ahead of your competitors by offering top-notch customer service will always be the key to engaging and keeping customers.
ActiveCampaign allows you to send targeted messages to any of your website visitors. You can automate common customer questions, encourage a customer to sign up for a free consultation, or subscribe to an e-mail list.
Screenshots Of ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign Pricing
The pricing for ActiveCampaign is based on your number of contacts (customer). You can start with plans ranging from 500 contacts to 100,000 contacts, depending on your organization’s needs. You have the option to either purchase a monthly or yearly plan that you can cancel at any time. The four plans offered include Lite, Plus, Professional, and Enterprise.
Lite Plan
This is the most basic plan that ActiveCampaign offers and by far the most inexpensive. For a minimum of 500 contacts, you can get the lite plan for only $9 if you pay for the yearly plan. The lite plan only allows three users on the application, which may be perfect if you run a small business. Some of the Lite plan’s top features include marketing automation, unlimited e-mail sending, e-mail marketing, newsletters, segmentation, campaign and automation reporting, and over 300 integrations.
Plus Plan
The Plus plan is a step up from lite and costs $49 on a yearly plan with a minimum of 500 contacts. You’re able to add up to 25 users to your platform with the Plus plan. You’ll receive all the Lite plan benefits plus Facebook custom audiences, contact scoring, landing pages, SMS marketing, conditional content, advanced performance reporting, and custom branded forms. The amount of customization in this package dramatically increases, allowing you to custom-tailor your messages and reach your customer base.
Professional Plan
The professional plan will cost you $129 on a yearly plan with a minimum of 500 contacts. You’ll be able to add up to 50 users to your platform. You’ll receive all the benefits of the Lite and Plus plan with your package. The Professional package includes predictive sending, predictive content, website personalization, split automation, conversion reporting, and site messages. The level of analytics and customer tracking sets the professional package apart from the two other basic packages.
Enterprise Plan
This is the most expensive of the four packages, costing $229 on a yearly plan with a minimum of 500 contacts. However, it’s also the plan with the most features. You’ll be able to add unlimited users to your platform and receive all the benefits of the Lite, Plus, and Professional package. You’ll also receive a custom mail server, custom domain, free design services, unlimited e-mail design testing, social data enrichment, custom reporting, and one-on-one training and workshops to increase your marketing reach.
Choosing the perfect plan depends on the number of features you need for your business and the number of contacts you work with. For example, if you have over 10,000 contacts, Lite starts at $125. If you have 25,000, Lite starts at $205. The prices dramatically change, so it’s essential to pick the appropriate plan that works with your budget and business goals. If you’re interested in trying out the platform, you can start for free with their 14-day trial, with no fees charged for set up or installation.
Marketing Features That You Get With Each Plan
List Of Sales Features
What Service Features Are Included
And Finally Platform & Support Features Available
Pros
✅ Easy Interface
This interface is easy to use, regardless of your level of familiarity with this type of program. Creating campaigns, deals, and e-mail automation is simple. You can do that with drag and drop abilities and tons of tutorials to walk you through the process.
✅ Automations
You can create hundreds of automations within your business to fast-track your success and rid yourself of mundane tasks. If you’re unable to find any ideas, ActiveCampaign has many resources to help you get started.
✅ Integrations
Through their partnership with Zapier, ActiveCampaign allows you to integrate over 2,000 tools to their platform, from social media to e-mail platforms.
✅ AI Technology
Active Campaigns technology can predict your ability to land a lead based on e-mails, offer predictive content, and predictive sending.
Cons
－CRM Functionality
It’s fantastic that the CRM ability is built into ActiveCampaign’s platform. The only downside is it’s not as advanced as other programs like Base, Pipeline, or Salesforce, which specialize in CRM.
－Price
The basic plan for $9 might seem very inexpensive for your business. However, there are not many capabilities included, and you’re limited to three users.
To get real use from ActiveCampaign’s platform, you’ll need to invest in a plus or professional plan. Additionally, if you have many contacts, your price can quickly jump up to $500 a month.
But considering what you get for that price and the ability to send unlimited e-mails, use all advanced features – it is not that expensive. If you'd need a cheaper alternative, you can read about one of them in the review we did.
－Templates
The stock templates you can use for your newsletters, landing pages etc. are very similar. You’ll need to spend time and create your own with ActiveCampaign builder (as with most other email service providers).
If you want them to look even more unique than their standard templates and adequately represent your brand. You can also custom code your templates with HTML editor.
Complete Rating Details
We did this ActiveCampaign review by looking at twenty different, most important metrics. We chose them because they are the most important criteria to help you see if this tool is best for you and will satisfy your needs.
Criteria | Rating | Comments |
|---|---|---|
Usability | 4/5 | ActiveCampaign has a user-friendly dashboard with resources to walk you through set-up and common issues. However, the dashboard does feel a little crowded and can be overwhelming for beginners. |
Pricing | 3.5/5 | ActiveCampaign is fantastic for the basics, such as sending newsletters, tracking e-mails, and simple analytics. However, you’ll need to pay much more if you want to use their full capabilities and integrate with premium apps. |
Reporting | 5/5 | ActiveCampaign allows reporting on everything: Campaign reports (opens, clicks, page visits, geo-tracking); Powerful automation, contact, conversion, attribution, deal reports. It is essential to mention that there are also Ecommerce reports on specific plans for Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. |
Customer Service | 4.5/5 | Customer service is fantastic with ActiveCampaign. The platform offers many resources on its website, including articles, FAQs, and video tutorials to walk you through the basics. You can even call or e-mail them to help with any issue you might be facing. If you have the premium or enterprise plan, you’ll be offered one-on-one training to walk you through the application. Support is available by e-mail and live chat Mon – Fri, 8 AM – 4 PM, CST, although there are other providers who offer 24/7 support. |
Newsletter Creation
Editor | 4/5 | The editor is relatively fast and has a highly useful feature of saving custom ‘blocks’. This is great because it is possible to reuse them later in other e-mails, saving a lot of time. But there isn’t a lot of pre-made blocks, which could speed the design process in the first place (compared to some other platforms). To preview your newsletter, you have to take extra steps, and getting to undo changes can get tricky as the interface for it isn’t perfect. |
Campaigns | 5/5 | It has all the standard features as single campaigns, RSS, follow-up e-mails, scheduled newsletters, autoresponders, A/B testing, etc. |
Automation | 5/5 | ActiveCampaign’s e-mail automation is a very powerful tool that allows flexibility and tracking. You can easily set up abandoned cart emails for your e-commerce store. The platform tracks your e-mail campaign results. It can funnel customers into specific e-mail flows. Furthermore, it can automatically follow up on contacts that lack engagement or perform a specific action. The possibilities with ActiveCampaign automations are endless. |
Templates | 4.5/5 | ActiveCampaign has more than 100 templates for your inspiration. You can preview them in another window and choose the one that suits you the best. The only drawback is that some other providers offer more template options and slightly more different features (content blocks) in the editor. |
Subscriber Management
Lists & Contacts | 4.5/5 | Managing lists and contacts are quite easy as you can automate it. You can organize people into lists via various automations. Not all platforms can do this so smoothly. On the other hand, some filtering option could be more user friendly. You can learn more here. |
Segmentation & Personalization | 5/5 | Here in ActiveCampaign, they have these ‘Tags’. They let you tag any contact by any criteria and then use it to send customized e-mails with different, conditional content. You can use tags to swap out sections of text or images so that each contact sees precisely what they are interested in. |
Subscription Forms | 5/5 | Form creation is easy to use. You can additionally create your own fields to segment your leads further. Next to the inline forms, you can also create floating bars, boxes, and modals. Double opt-in is available. |
Landing Pages | 4.5/5 | These landing pages are hosted on a custom domain or subdomain. There is a friendly editor that lets you create them quickly. You can also choose from easily customizable templates. (Not available on lite plan). |
More Technical Factors
Integrations | 4.5/5 | ActiveCampaign can integrate with over 2,000 platforms like Google, Facebook, WordPress, PayPal, and so much more. This ability allows you to customize your platform to fit your business needs and goals. It is also very helpful in setting up more complex automations. The downside is that a lot of the most popular apps are premium, and you have to have a plus plan for them. |
Authentication | 5/5 | |
Deliverability | 5/5 | We saw good deliverability results as our e-mails landed in the inbox of the most popular providers like Gmail, Yahoo etc. (You have to take into account best practices and a variety of other factors to see good delivery results). |
Dedicated IP | 4/5 | It is available only for enterprise customers, so that means it will cost more (compared to some other providers), but this is an advanced feature that isn’t free elsewhere too. |
Spam Testing | 5/5 | The spam testing option is a ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ metric that you get before you send out your campaign. You get points for each thing that is increasing your spam score, so you get pretty good instructions what you need to change in order to lover it. Also, don’t forget you have to be familiar with things that impact spam score in the first place. |
Bounce Management | 5/5 | Soft bounces are automatically counted as hard bounces after three times, which then puts them in an exclusion list. Standard management practice. |
Storage | 5/5 | Unlimited. |
Team Access | 5/5 | ActiveCampaign doesn’t have specific levels, but the system is pretty adjustable. You can select exact access options with tick-boxes and give access to particular groups that you create. |
OVERALL RATING | 4.6/5 | This application’s functionality and flexibility allow customers to rejuvenate their automation process and focus on closing leads and customer retention. While the price can be a deal-breaker for some users, it may be necessary to overlook this for the application’s multiple other benefits. So if you are looking for a top-notch email marketing tool for your business, or if you’re a digital marketer working for a larger company, this is an excellent choice. |
Conclusion
ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation application that’s very powerful. Also, at the very beginning, it might look like it’s not that simple. But give it a few days and you will see it’s quite easy to use. Just like with a lot of things – you just need to get used to it.
With its reliable, easy interface, various analytics, and application integrations, ActiveCampaign is a tool that businesses should invest time to explore. To see if ActiveCampaign is right for your personal use or your company, try out their free 14-day trial to get started.
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