Are you looking for the best email marketing automation tool?
Are you wondering if ActiveCampaign is the right tool for your business?
You’ve arrived at the right place. In this blog, I’ll go through every feature of ActiveCampaign and help you decide if it’s the best marketing automation option for your business.
That being said, I recommend reading to the end to learn about its advantages, disadvantages, and what its users think of it.
What exactly is ActiveCampaign?
ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation tool that also includes a customer relationship management system.
You can use the drag-and-drop builder to design automated campaigns that respond to various criteria, compose and update emails based on your prospects’ decisions, and nurture potential leads.
ActiveCampaign promises to be the finest platform for automating the customer experience. With its diverse set of skills, it may assist you in gaining a competitive advantage in terms of client loyalty.
I will give a brief overview of the features (listed below) that this fantastic tool provides to the marketers before we start the detailed analysis of ActiveCampaign.
- Marketing via email
- Automated marketing
- CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management (deals and leads)
- Tracking on-site
- SMS and on-site chat
- Reporting
- Integrations
Having said that, let’s take a closer look at each feature to determine if ActiveCampaign is the perfect automation solution for your sales and marketing team.
ActiveCampaign Review: Features
In this part, I’ll go over all of the features and functions that ActiveCampaign has to offer.
Let’s start with its most important feature: marketing automation.
Marketing Automation
ActiveCampaign is renowned for its high level of marketing automation. Automating is made easy with the visual automation builder. Creating a workflow is as simple as dragging and dropping the elements, and all changes are automatically saved.
Alt text: ActiveCampaign visual automation builder
Based on your preferences, you can add multiple triggers as you can see in the above image. Clicking the ‘+’ icon on the automation flow window gives users the option of adding emails to that flow.
The personalization of email marketing is another element that will give it life. ActiveCampaign’s ability to insert dynamic content and personalization into your email copy achieves this.
ActiveCampaign’s automation capabilities give you more than you could ever imagine. With it, you can build automation so easily with the selection of automation templates already available:
- The follow-up sequence
- Re-sell and Upsell
- Boost referral traffic
- Collaborative teamwork
Plus many more…
Alt text: ActiveCampaign Automation template
Email deliverability
In order to gain success from email marketing campaigns, email deliverability is a major concern. By using ActiveCampaign’s spam-checking functionality, you can easily ensure your emails make it to the inbox of your subscribers.
Make sure your emails are error-free and legitimate by keeping an eye on spam checks.
Our email delivery rate is one of the highest in the industry, ensuring that your emails reach the widest possible audience in their main inbox (not in spam or promotional tabs).
Marketing Via Email
[1] ActiveCampaign offers six types of email campaigns to choose from. The different campaigns that are offered by it are as follows:
- Standard
- Automated
- AutoResponder
- Split Testing
- RSS Triggered
- Date based
Using the flexible drag-and-drop email editor, you can design the perfect email body in a matter of minutes.
In addition, you can hide and reveal specific content blocks on mobile devices for improved navigation and design.
With ActiveCampaign, you can create beautifully designed email templates and place blocks, so you can customize them with a plethora of components. Furthermore, it is possible to adjust font and icon size.
In addition, you can build and reuse templates for future campaigns. Email campaigns can be designed much more efficiently with ActiveCampaign.
CRM and Sales Automation
It includes all the features necessary to build a perfect sales pipeline, as ActiveCampaign’s CRM takes care of them all.
As your sales team is alerted as soon as a new contact is captured, new tasks are created, the deal’s status is updated, and nurture leads are automatically managed.
Automation of the sales funnel and segmentation of results are both available. Furthermore, your sales team can also receive updates when the time is right for them to follow up.
By using this, you can track the performance of team members and assign tasks to them manually or by automating it. All important data is at your fingertips and enables team cohesion.
Lead scoring and win probability is another useful feature provided by ActiveCampaign.
In order to determine whether they will become a long-lasting customer, the win probability uses machine learning to determine the chances of them converting into one.
In the next section, I will explain lead scoring in detail since it’s an integral part of marketing automation.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring in ActiveCampaign empowers marketing and sales teams to identify the most likely prospects by assigning points for interactions with contacts.
Lead scoring in ActiveCampaign can be broken down into two types: Deal scoring and Contact scoring.
Using Deal Scores in sales pipelines, it is possible to assign a numerical value to open deals. A deal’s nurture level gives a salesperson an idea of how pressing a deal is, so he or she can prioritize it for follow-up and closure.
This is different from Contact Scores, which are assigned to email contacts such as subscribers and downloaders of resources. In order to determine the most qualified leads, marketers should identify the most engaged contacts.
There are many different factors that can be used to assign points and create specific rules in ActiveCampaign such as page views, purchases, download of resources, opening of emails, and links clicked.
Analytics and Reporting
Campaign performance can be analyzed and optimized with ActiveCampaign’s numerous reporting options.
In addition to campaigns, automated reports, goal reports, deal reports, etc., it offers a wide range of reports.
Your automation is listed under the Report tab, along with the number of people who have interacted with it and how many have completed it.
Additionally, it shows open rates by day and hour. This allows you to adjust the time-frequency of emails according to your goal of achieving maximum ROI.
Furthermore, all your deals can be filtered by a variety of criteria, including status, value, pipeline type, duration, etc.
You can also create custom reports based on trends in automation engagement and forecasted close dates, as well as build a high-level data-driven strategy with the tool.
Advanced Contact Segmentation
Leads, prospects, and customers need a differentiated experience throughout their journey, and segmentation plays a fundamental role in doing so.
When you use segments, you have the opportunity to send the right message to the right group of people at the right time.
By using data that is already in the database, you can create segments out of anything in ActiveCampaign. Following are some examples of how segments can be created using data:
- Contact information: E-mail address, first name, last name, full name, phone number, organization, date and time of subscription, IP address, tag, and total conversion value.
- Custom fields in forms: Whenever you add new custom fields.
- Based on actions & inaction of Contacts: Contacts who have clicked the link, have not clicked the link, have opened, have not opened an email, have shared socially, have forwarded, have not forwarded, have replied to email, have not replied, are in the list, are not on the list, and are subscribed via subscription form.
- Based on geographical locations: The country, the state, the city, and the zip code.
- Based on site & event data: Visiting, not visiting, was referred from, visiting device, total page views, and total site views.
- Based on deal attributes: Has a deal status, has a deal in the stage, has a deal value, has a deal assigned to, has total number of deals, has total number of open deals, has total number of lost deals, has total number of won deals, and has deal title.
- Based on Attributes: Has source, has medium, does not have medium, has campaign, does not have campaign, has term, does not have term, has content, and does not have content.
Furthermore, ActiveCampaign allows you to use logic gates like ‘AND’ and ‘OR’, or multi-dimensional conditions to segment your list more deeply and precisely.
Segment builder is a unique feature of ActiveCampaign given that it is available across all platforms. Within the automation builder, the contact page, and the email campaign page, segments can be created.
By using ActiveCampaign, you can create any segment based on the information you already have. The best part is that there is no limit to the number of segments you can create.
I have included a quick glimpse of the segment builder within the automation builder:
Alt Text: ActiveCampaign segment builder automation
Pricing plans
In ActiveCampaign, you have the option to choose from 4 pricing plans: Lite, Plus, Professional, or Enterprise.
Each plan is outlined below:
| Lite | $9/ Month Billed Yearly | The price is determined by the number of contacts. Features • 500 people to Contact • Marketing Automation • Email Marketing • Unlimited Email Sending • Drag & Drop Email Builder • 125+ Email Templates • Send Newsletters • Subscription Forms • Segmentation • Site and Event Tracking • Campaign and Automation Reporting • Import leads • Sales Emails • Lead Capture Forms • Segmented Outreach • Customer Newsletter • Customer Analytics • Up to 3 users • Import Contacts • Chat and Email Support • Mobile CRM & Marketing Access • Integrate to Over 850 CXA Partners • 500+ Automation Recipes • Unlimited inactive Contacts • APIs, Webhooks, and Developer Tools |
| Plus | $49/Month Billed Yearly | The price is determined by the number of contacts Features • 500 people to Contact • Everything from Lite plan, plus • Landing Pages • 50+ Landing Page Templates • Facebook Custom Audiences • Contact Scoring • SMS Marketing • Automations Map • Conditional Content • Advanced Performance Reporting • Custom Branded Forms and Landing Pages • CRM with Sales Automation • Lead Scoring • Sync Inbox with CRM • Mobile CRM App • SMS Prospect Nurturing • Task Reporting • Sales CRM Sync • SMS Service Follow up • Deal Assignment • Customer Success Pipelines • Account Management • Customer Health Scoring |
| Professional | $129/Month Billed Yearly | The price is determined by the number of contacts Features • 500 people to Contact • Everything from Plus plan, plus • Website Personalization • Predictive Sending • Predictive Content • Marketing Attribution • Split Automations • Attribution Reporting • Site Messages • Win Probability • Conversion Reporting • Split Automations • Split Automations • Personalized Product Experiences • Conversion Reporting • In-App Messaging • Up to 50 Users • 1:1 Onboarding Support • Three 1:1 Trainings Per Month |
| Enterprise | $229/Month Billed Yearly | The price is determined by the number of contacts Features • 500 people to Contact • Includes Everything from Professional plan, plus • Custom Reporting • Custom Mail server Domain • Custom Domain • Free Design Services • Unlimited Email Design Testing • Social Data Enrichment • Custom Reporting • Contact Enrichment • Custom Reporting • Contact Enrichment |
Pros and cons of ActiveCampaign
As a whole, ActiveCampaign is a superb piece of software with only a few small flaws. With its easy-to-use user interface, it is one of the best tools for building automation campaigns.
PROS
- User-friendly – ActiveCampaign was the first platform to offer visual marketing automation. If you join ActiveCampaign, one of the things you’ll notice immediately is how intuitive and well-designed it is. Unlike most marketing automation tools, this one requires no training to understand.
- Affordable – ActiveCampaign offers marketing automation pricing that is very affordable for small businesses who do not want to pay thousands of dollars per year. With no upfront costs, their pricing begins at just $9/month.
- ZAPIER INTEGRATION – With their Zapier integration, ActiveCampaign is connected to over 2,000 tools. You can integrate ActiveCampaign with many tools; however certain integrations are only accessible if you subscribe to Zapier.
- Automation split testing – With this feature, you can compare multiple emails rather than only single emails (which is what most marketing automation tools allow you to do).
- Machine learning – ActiveCampaign provides ML-driven features, including predictive sending, predictive content, and predictive win probabilities, that help you automate even more of your marketing and sales process.
CONS
- CRM – ActiveCampaign’s marketing automation system is especially powerful due to its built-in CRM system. However, this CRM is not as good as standalone platforms like PipeDrive or Salesforce – though we consider activities automation in ActiveCampaign a reasonable trade-off.
- Reporting – ActiveCampaign’s reports are quite comprehensive and can provide insights on sales/goals conversions, but they are often cluttered and complex to navigate.
Conclusion
The key to ActiveCampaign is that it offers almost everything you need within a newsletter marketing tool, and it does so very well. Insights into almost every aspect of reporting are available, such as page visits, geo-tracking, openers, e-commerce, and more. A bit lacking is the newsletter editor, which does not provide an experience as slick as other programs. There are also a few niggling features (such as revision history) that could be improved.
Friendly, helpful, and quick is what you can expect from the support. Messages are sent via email and chat, and have a very personal touch. In a high percentage of cases, the knowledge base returns relevant results when searched. In addition to one-on-one training and webinars, their ‘Plus’ plan gives you access to helpful information.
One of the best choices you could make if you want a comprehensive newsletter marketing tool is ActiveCampaign. In comparison to their automation, other tools’ versions pale in comparison. The effort requires some time and a bit of money, but the rewards will be worth it for your business.
If you want to learn more about ActiveCampaign while reading this blog, you can sign up for a 14-day trial by clicking the link below.