Active Campaign is a giant in the email marketing space. If you’ve been looking around for a marketing automation option for your business, then you’re in good hands.
In this ActiveCampaign review today, we dive into what makes this tool one of the most popular email marketing options out there.
Overview
ActiveCampaign is a cloud software platform for small-to-mid-sized businesses and is based in Chicago, Illinois. The company offers software for customer experience automation, which combines the email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation, and CRM categories.
Features & Functionality
Email Marketing
This feature is their core function, build great email newsletter campaigns for your audience. You can segment your audience, and send targeted emails to the right viewers and set up an email funnel to nurture your audience for more sales. Their drag and drop email builder also allows you to seamlessly create the email you want without having to code, and their pre built templates allows you to copy elements and change it to your style.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation allows you to have smarter marketing, Set up a welcome series with email automation. Find your most engaged contacts. Pull in information from other platforms. Automate the marketing no one has time for. Set up logical flows to run your users through, based on their user data and have pre-created emails that go to the customer.
This is an extremely useful task if you want to pre qualify leads, before your sales team takes over, so they don’t waste their time.
CRM & Sales Automation
ActiveCampaign has a built-in CRM, so you can keep track of your leads on the same platform. There’s no need to find a separate CRM tool, but they do have the ability to connect to 3rd party CRMs if required.
Furthermore, you can connect with Gmail, Outlook, or any other email provider. Use our Chrome extension to manage contacts from any page and create deals directly from your Gmail account.
Customer Support
This is almost a separate customer support tool on its own. Active Campaign can help you connect conversations happening across marketing channels, nurturing automations, and customer service for a fully personalized and integrated customer experience.
Add-Ons & Integrations
Being one of the industry leaders in the email marketing space, ActiveCampaign users benefit from a large range of integrations with the tool, from e-commerce tools, to CRMs to form integrations.
Notable integrations include
Your Facebook page is one of your most important properties. It allows you to connect with your customers, users, fans, and gives them a platform to engage with you like never before. It’s a highly trafficked channel ripe for acquiring new leads.
Utilizing our Form Builder, you can embed opt-in forms to capture new leads, or distribute marketing materials. Simply create your ActiveCampaign form and then click “Integrate.” Click the Facebook tab and you’ll be walked through the process of adding your form to your page.
WordPress
30% of websites in the world is powered by WordPress, so being able to integrate with the platform will make the transfer of data between the two platforms (contacts, leads & information) a seamless experience.
Zapier
Some people say, if you can integrate with Zapier, you can basically integrate with every software in the world. If you don’t know already, Zapier is an integration tool that helps two platforms talk to each other.
Shopify
Shopify is the largest ecommerce platform right now, and having direct integration with them allows you to easily sync your new leads and contacts with the platform. In addition, you can run smart marketing automation campaigns, unique to each customer, since Active Campaign is able to read your website data.
In addition, here’s the full list of categories ActiveCampaign integrates with:
- Accounting
- Analytics
- CMS
- CRM
- Databases
- Developer Tools
- Documents
- Ecommerce
- Education
- Event Management
- Forms
- Human Resources
- Lead Generation
- Messaging
- Payments
- Project Management
- Sales
- Scheduling
- Social
- Storage
- Support
Ease of Use
As an Active Campaign user myself on many occasions, I highly recommend using the platform as your email marketing tool. It’s easy to use and if you’re willing to put some time into learning the automation side of things, your marketing results is due to skyrocket.
Their email builder is drag and drop, so you don’t need to code anything up. However, that doesn’t always mean you get the sparkling looking emails you admire in your inbox. You will need some graphic design work to create some custom banners and images if you want your emails to be aligned with your brand.
As we discussed earlier, the abundance of integrations means you don’t need to worry about data not syncing between difference tools.
Plans & Pricing
Active Campaign has quite a fluid pricing model, which their pricing adjusts based on both email list size and the features you need.
If you’re just starting out, their Lite plan has everything you need to get your marketing up and running, with automation features included.
Their next plan up, Plus, has more features such as landing page builders, contact scoring to help you track leads.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Easy to use
- Prebuilt email templates available
- Vast amount of integrations
- Integrates with Shopify
Cons
- Pricing escalates fast when you need additional features such as automation or landing pages
Help and Support
As a past user, Active Campaign customer support isn’t bad. They offer chat support and email, but do not operate around the clock, so if you’re in need of help towards the end of the day or late night, don’t exact a response right away.
In their Plus plan, they also offer you a strategy session, which may come in handy. Personal thoughts – if you’re paying that much for their premium plans, I hope you have a strategy in mind, but it’s always good to have a 3rd party to run it by.
As you go up in plans, they offer more custom support and training sessions, which will be handy if you plan on maximising the perks of automation.
Final thoughts
To wrap things up, Active Campaign is one of the most popular marketing tools out there for a reason – it’s great to use. Other than their premium pricing, I struggled to find reasons against recommending this tool, but to be honest, if your business is generating healthy profits, then you should have no qualms with going for the premium plan – which would help you generate even more sales.