ActiveCampaign Review & Complete Pricing [No fluff]

This ActiveCampaign Review will look at how email marketing is still a tremendous way to reach your audience on a daily basis. If you want to follow my review and look at ActiveCampaign pricing at the same time, click here now.

From its humble beginnings in Chicago, in 2003, first as a consulting firm and then an on-premise software provider, ActiveCampaign has come a long way. Today, it stands as a full-blown software company offering marketing and sales automation, email marketing, and comprehensive CRM solutions to more than 90,000 small and midsize businesses.

Though it is widely known for its email marketing tools, AcitveCampaign has a lot to offer. But, before we dig deep and evaluate its various features, let’s briefly review AcitveCampaign and its pricing for the sake of those who are new to the world of digital marketing.

What Is ActiveCampaign?

Contrary to the common perception, ActiveCampaign is not just an email marketing tool. It also offers comprehensive cloud-based marketing and sales automation solutions as well as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

Targeting small and midsize businesses, the software helps the growing organization improve its efficiency and performance by simplifying and automating a variety of tasks that need to be performed on a regular basis. These include, but not limited to, building contact lists, creating professional but personalized emails, managing marketing campaigns, tracking consumer behavior, and measuring their own performance.

In addition to all these powerful features, ActiveCampaign also offers customer support via a comprehensive knowledge base, live chat, and phone support. Enterprise customers get even better customer support in the form of one-on-one consultations and free design services. 

While there are many other software that offers a similar set of tools and features, what really makes ActiveCampaign stand out from the rest is how effectively this cloud-based platform ties all its features and functionalities together.

Another factor that makes ActiveCampaign rise above the rest is the price tag it comes with. The platform offers comprehensive business solutions at less than a quarter of the price of most other similar platforms. It is this balance of functionality and affordability that makes ActiveCampaign a great choice for a majority of small to midsize businesses.

ActiveCampaign Features – An Overview

As mentioned above, ActiveCampaign offers a comprehensive and powerful toolkit for growing businesses. But, in order to make the big decision of moving to new automation and CRM software, you need to know what exactly you’ll get from it.

AcitveCampaign offers over 20 different tools, which can be classified into five categories. To save your time and help you make an informed decision, here I am listing all the features of ActiveCampaign.

Email Marketing

The email marketing tool of ActiveCampaign offers:

• Subscription forms
• Dynamic content – enables you to send personalized content.
• Email segmentation
• Autoresponders
• Free email templates
• Drag and drop email designer
• Split testing

Marketing Automation

Automation is inarguably the best feature of ActiveCampaign. It lets you perform the following tasks in an effective manner:

• Site tracking
• Event tracking
• Attribution
• Goal tracking
• Automation map – showing how all automated processes work together to maintain a workflow.
• Social media monitoring along with reaction automations
• A/B testing

Sales Automation and CRM

This ActiveCampaign feature comes with:

• Gmail extension for Chrome
• Salesforce app
• Contact and lead scoring tool
• Mobile app
• Tracking feature to find contacts based on their location, gender, and age

Messaging

Not many people know that ActiveCampaign also comes with a messaging tool. It lets you perform the following tasks:

• Sending personalized marketing SMS
• Creating personalized site messages
• Create custom ads for different audience groups on Facebook
• Set up live chat conversations by creating customized auto-replies, custom branding, and triggered automations.

Machine Learning

To help you further streamline and enhance the effects of your marketing efforts, ActiveCampaign lets you do the following:

• Predictive content – ensuring each client receives a message personalized according to where they are in the buyer’s journey.
• Predictive sending – sending emails at times when your recipients are more likely to engage with them.
• Calculate win probability for every deal.

Since ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of automation, management, and tracking tools, reviewing all of them will take up a lot of space. Therefore, I am only going to discuss its best and not-so-good features, so you can decide whether ActiveCampaign is worth trying for your business or not.

The Best ActiveCampaign Features

Let’s evaluate if the software can really help you improve relationships with your customers and lives up to its bold claims by taking a look at its best features:

Automation

In addition to being the best among its own features, the automation builder of ActiveCampaign is also among the most flexible tools available out there.                  

The software features a visual workflow builder, which supports an array of triggers to initiate automations. These range from the most basic ones, like using a tag or joining a list, to advanced ones, such as when your subscribers are at a certain place in their journey or visit a specific webpage.

This allows you to automate a wide range of processes, such as sending emails and creating custom fields. The only downside of ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is that you cannot automate the process of adding subscribers to a custom list if you are on the basic pricing plan.

While the automation workflow editor of ActiveCampaign is not as good as that of ConvertKit, its drag-and-drop feature and guided workflow creation make it quite easy-to-use.

You can also build endless types of automations with ActiveCampaign by integrating other features, like intelligent tagging and site tracking.

While all these characteristics are amazing, what really sets ActiveCampaign apart from all other similar platforms is the automations marketplace. This unique feature allows users to share or sell their automations.

To sum up, ActiveCampaign’s automation builder is definitely among the best-performing ones, if not the best in the market.

Segmentation and List Management

ActiveCampaign allows you to segment your contact list in a variety of ways, getting as specific as you want using a myriad of tags. This, in turn, helps you connect and engage with your audience in a much better way and build strong relationships with them by sending personalized content.

Sales CRM

The automation tools of ActiveCampaign also extend into the area of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which means the platform offers an easy and smooth transition from marketing to sales. In other words, it allows you to use the same tools used in marketing automation to automate several tasks in the sales process.

Integrations

With over 150 integrations, ActiveCampaign is one of the most heavily supported platforms in terms of third-party applications. It works with almost every app. The software offers a library of documents providing the details about each integration works that make this process easier.

Site Tracking

This feature of ActiveCampaign allows businesses to connect their marketing measures with the behavior of their contacts, which then enables them to adjust their marketing tactics and messages according to what their customers are doing on their websites.

In addition to displaying their current activity, the site tracking feature also shows a detailed activity history of every user. This information can be used to send targeted marketing messages as well as to segment your contacts on the basis of similarities in their interests and/or actions.

Conditional Content

This is another great feature of ActiveCampaign that helps you to engage your audience in much better ways by sending personalized emails. It allows you to personalize specific sections or entire emails according to your contacts’ previous activities on your website or how they are segmented or tagged.

Split Testing

Out of all marketing and sales automation platforms, ActiveCampaign has the best A/B testing tool. It is not only efficient but also comprehensive. With ActiveCampaign, you can A/B test literally everything from entire automations to specific elements, like email copies, images, subject lines, and CTAs.

Due to its wonderful A/B testing tool, ActiveCampaign helps you continuously improve your marketing and sales practices.

Scalability

From startups with just the need to set up email marketing campaigns to larger and growing businesses with an array of marketing tools and CRM, ActiveCampaign caters to different sizes of businesses.

It Lets You Resend Campaigns

With this cool feature of ActiveCampaign, you can resend your successful campaigns to new contacts or people who did not open your email the first time. This saves you from the hassle of creating new campaigns to target new customers every few months. The platforms ensure that the emails are only sent to the contact that subscribed after the original broadcast and the ones who did not open your email earlier. The subscribers who have already viewed and interacted with your campaign will not receive it again.

The Not-So-Good Things about ActiveCampaign

Since now that we have discussed the best features of ActiveCampaign, let’s take a look at the features that could be better and hence, need to be improved:

Affiliate Marketing

Simply put, it’s not as easy to carry out affiliate marketing with ActiveCampaign. The platform has a quite strict policy regarding emails that are overly promotional and contain direct links for affiliate products. If you are using ActiveCampaign to promote affiliate products, you need to do it indirectly.(something that I recommend anyways)

Email Templates

ActiveCampaign is far behind other tools when it comes to the number of email templates – it only has 30 templates. Also, the designs of available templates are pretty average.

While you can find a few decent and modern template designs or start from scratch, these features don’t come at par with other tools of ActiveCampaign.

Higher Learning Curve

Since AcitveCampaign comes with plenty of features, many users have to go through a learning curve to get the hang of it.

While this may be a problem, the fact that the software offers a comprehensive knowledge base makes up for it to some extent.

ActiveCampaign Pricing Plans

Let’s do the real talk, now!

ActiveCampaign offers four different pricing plans for different sizes of organizations. The packages are primarily based on the number of contacts a business has. ActiveCampaign also offers a 14-day free trial for all packages and free migration from one to another.

Checkout AcitveCampaign’s website to see what each package includes and for a comparison of all packages to figure which one is best for your business.

The Final Word

ActiveCampaign is inarguably a comprehensive software for small-to-midsize businesses and there are several factors that make it a great tool and worth giving a try, at least.

These include a wide range of features it offers, great customer support, and competitive pricing.

Click here to check it out.

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