ActiveCampaign Review: Combined Email Marketing + Automation Machine

This In-depth ActiveCampaign Review will take you completely through ActiveCampaign and see how much it outperforms the user expectations and competitor’s offerings. This tool is a perfect solution for businesses and websites that wants to automate their marketing efforts with emails. Included with CRM, It is a productive email marketing solution with exceptional automation capabilities and email marketing features which makes ActiveCampaign stand out among competitors.

ActiveCampaign Review: Introduction

Less work and more results have been the vision of ActiveCampaign and they are doing well with it. ActiveCampaign is a Chicago based Email marketing automation tool that was founded in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom. Revenue of ActiveCampaign in 2018 shows how well they are performing with $60 million in revenue along with raising its customer base to 90,000+.

This leading Email Marketing tool offers everything you need for sending emails and newsletters along with advance automation flows which makes ActiveCampaign different from the whole industry. Being a feature-rich email marketing tool, ActiveCampaign is affordable too with plans starting from $9 per month for basic plans and $49 per month with CRM and other pro features.

The reason behind the success of ActiveCampaign has been its strong automation feature which has made email marketing easy on autopilot. It allows automation on myriad conditions, contacts, emailing lists, and CRM system known as “Deals”. Along with email features, they also offer a website feature using which you can send targeted messages right away to your website visitors.

Well, in this ActiveCampaign Review, I’ll be showing you how useful ActiveCampaign can be for you and how much it fulfills the user’s expectations. So, let’s move to the review without taking more of your time.

Pros & Cons of ActiveCampaign

Many people don’t like to read a lot and want to know in short about the tool. So, this section is especially for those, if you are not willing to read a lot then you can find your goods and bads of ActiveCampaign here. Yes! this ActiveCampaign review is going to be long and detailed which means the more you read, the more you get to know about ActiveCampaign, Anyways, here is the quick Pros and Cons of ActiveCampaign based on our experience during this ActiveCampaign Review.

Why I fell in Love with ActiveCampaign?

To see how it performs, I just pushed every feature and option at its fullest. So, as I’ve been through the tool, I’ve got some strong points which will make you understand how your business can profit from ActiveCampaign. One thing I would like to tell you is that if you are not looking for automation, its better to opt for other email marketing tools like GetResponse, MailChimp, etc.

When I started planning automation for my email campaigns, I had a thought in mind that I need to do some sort of coding or technical configuration to create automation. But with ActiveCampaign, creating automation was as easy as moving a cursor. ActiveCampaign offers you a visual workflow builder which is very easy to use. Along with workflow builder, you have automation control features like start and stop, data update, behavioral branches, connecting it with CRM, and more. Event and site tracking are given with “If” and “Then” conditions which can be used to perform automation based on the recipient’s response.

Traditional email marketing worked with autoresponders which are a series of scheduled emails sent to the subscribers on the list. But, automation in ActiveCampaign is totally changing the way we sent auto emails to the users.

Contact management structure in ActiveCampaign is the most powerful contact management structure I’ve ever experienced. With the usage of tags and lists, it becomes pretty easy to manage contacts. One thing which is really considerable about ActiveCampaign is that this is reasonably priced.

Email Marketing with Multiple Campaign Types

Email is the best and cost-effective way of being in front of your audience. At the same time, it is pretty simple to create informative and beautiful campaigns and send them right away. Let’s check out the email marketing features offered by ActiveCampaign. Well, It is pretty normal like other email marketing tools, so if you are expecting something extraordinary from ActiveCampaign in email marketing then sorry, you won’t find anything extraordinary like that. Because, as I said and most of the other ActivewCampaign Reviews on the internet say, ActiveCampaign is more about automation. So, with email marketing, it has a lot to offer for your business at the same price.

You are being offered a variety of email campaigns that you can use depending on the sense of your business and goal you are looking to achieve. Let’s take a look at available email campaign types:

Email Broadcasts: Broadcasts are the simplest form of email marketing campaigns we usually send to our subscribers. As clear by the name, this type of campaign is good for announcing something or sending an update to the subscribers.

Trigger Based Emails: Businesses like eCommerce, SaaS, Service providers can benefit from trigger-based emails. For Example, someone visited a page of your website or bought something, an email will be automatically sent to the user based on the triggers you configured.

Targeted Emails: Based on different factors, you can list and segment subscribers in different segments, groups, and lists. This helps in sending the right email to the right person which directly impacts on improved results from campaigns.

Email Autoresponders: Autoresponders have been in the email marketing industry for a long time now. What it does is send an automatic email to the subscribers when they signup or you can set up a series of emails that’ll be sent automatically as configured.

Email Funnels: Here comes an interesting thing. Funnels are the best method to convert leads into paying customers. You can set up email funnels in ActiveCampaign and send automatic emails to subscribers using the email automation.

Scheduled Emails: There are some specific days when you need to send an email to users. So, you can configure and schedule emails for those such days like holidays, festivals, events, etc. using the schedule emails feature and make your work easier.

Templates & Campaign Designer

Well, I agree with the fact that ActiveCampaign has got fewer templates available as compared to other email marketing tools. But, there is an interesting thing that the quality of these templates is better than other email marketing tools in the market. All the templates look unique and one can easily get a template matching to his/her purpose.

As far as the editor is concerned, The layout and placement of options look organized and easy to navigate. On top of the editor, you can see a bar from where you can change colors and typography settings. On the right side, you have all the features and widgets in the “Insert” tab which you can use to design the campaign. They have given all the essential features like Text Block, Image, Button, Video, Line Break, Spacer, RSS Feed, Social Links, and custom HTML block. Using all these features, one can design a nice campaign for subscribers.

Before sending the campaign, you can setup some useful tracking features as shown in the image below:

Contacts Management: Segments, Groups, Custom Fields, and Lists

Since you start collecting user’s data for email marketing, it is important to tag them into the right fields based on their interest, their behavior, and who they are. Well, tagging them using the custom fields is quite easy in ActiveCampaign. You can set a specific type of user in one group and custom fields making it easier to send them your next email campaign.

For contacts management, ActiveCamapign uses list format and you are allowed to create as many lists as you want. One subscriber can be added to multiple lists which helps in better segmentation of subscribers and targeted email sending.

For example, you can create 2 segments of the audience based on their actions. One segment of the audience that has bought a product and one segment which didn’t buy the product yet. So, with the help of this segmentation, you can send appropriate campaigns to the right user.

Bulk edit feature is given for easy segmentation, tags, lists, and groups. With just a click, you can select subscribers and tag them in different lists and other tags.

One thing I would like to mention is that when you look at the contacts management tab for the first time, you may find it a bit difficult to understand. There are plenty of options available that may look overwhelming to you. Explore each option once and you’ll be good with it.

Some more Email Marketing features we found during ActiveCampaign Review which makes it stand out:

Susbcription Forms for Growing List Size

Subscription forms let you collect subscribers’ information from your website directly to the list. ActiveCampaign also offers you the functionality to tag those subscribers in different lists and groups based on the interest and web pages. Once you collect subscriber information, you can set up automated emails to give them the first impression that you care about them joining your subscriber base. There are very few email marketing tools that offer various types of subscription forms as ActiveCampaign does. Generally, an HTML form is offered which can be used at any place. ActiveCampaign offers you Inline Form, Floating Box, Modal Pop-up and Floating Bar form types which help increase engagement and conversion.

Automate Marketing Operations with Marketing Automation

With their best focus on marketing automation, ActiveCampaign is one of the most innovative and easy to use automation tool out in the market. It is so easy to understand and work with that I was able to build my first automation perfectly at the first attempt without any training or help.

ActiveCampaign uses visual workflow builders like Drip and GetResponse but the efficiency of ActiveCamapaign’s workflow builder is much better and I loved working with it.

Combined with intelligent site tracking and tagging, Automation workflows can really work like a magic charm for your business automation. Recently ActiveCampaign has started offering recipes which are simply pre-made automation workflows which you can directly use for your business purpose.

Nurturing Leads with Automation Sequences

During the ActiveCampaign Review, I decided to create a practical automation sequence and see how it works. So, there was 2 phase of it. The first one was of short-term nurturing and then long-term nurturing. What we did in short term lead nurturing is that we educated people about the service and send them a series of automated emails based on their behavior over the emails. Short term sequence worked for 2 weeks in which we took a response about what number of people are interested in knowing about the information we are serving them. After analyzing the short-term sequence, we moved to a long-term sequence which was a mix of indirect selling and education which worked well in terms of converting leads into customers.

Site Tracking, No More Losing!

Site tracking is an important feature which everyone should implement on their websites. It helps to understand what your users are looking for. This tracking feature tracks the user’s activity on the page and if the user gets distracted from the page then you get the option to follow-up to the visitor and see what he was looking for on the website.

Event tracking works similarly, for example, if someone gets distracted from the video on your website, you can follow up and ask them what exactly they were looking for.

ActiveCampaign Review: Sales & CRM

CRM is extremely important if you are generating leads for your business. It helps you to manage the process and efficiently work on leads along with making sure that none of the leads get missed from the business. As ActiveCampaign is an AIO tool for small businesses, it doesn’t stop on email marketing. They have offered CRM solution which helps in better working and utilization of leads and business prospects. CRM given in ActiveCampaign performs integrated with email marketing. ActiveCampaign’s CRM can work like a contact management and followup system which is quite easy to use. Working with a team collaboratively will be a good idea using ActiveCampaign’s CRM tool. You can track all your leads, actions taken on them, follow-ups, and other contact management things.

Conclusion of this ActiveCampaign Review

I’ve reviewed 5 email marketing tools so far including GetResponse, ConvertKit, Aweber, and more, I’ll place ActiveCampaign on top of all those. Talking about automation, Drip is the only one that can be counted truly close to ActiveCampaign. As I stated previously, if you only need an email marketing tool, ActiveCampaign is not the only available option. Why I am saying it because ActiveCampaign isn’t an extraordinary Email Marketing tool. But, if you are looking to automate your email marketing operations for your business then ActiveCampaign is the one you should go with. It will be the most consistent and innovative tool in the marketing automation segment.

This is what I told you about ActiveCampaign based on my experience with it. I highly recommend you to try out ActiveCampaign using this 14 Days Free Trial (No Credit Card Needed).

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Shashank Kulshrestha

Hi, I’m the writer at Shashankk.io and founder Big5 Network along with many other internet ventures. I write helpful tutorials and article on this blog that helps readers in learning about Internet Marketing and Strategies to scale businesses digitally.