ActiveCampaign Review: #1 Reason It’s The Best Marketing Automation

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing and automation tool that was founded in 2003 with the sole mission of helping businesses make meaningful connections with their customers.

The company, which has more than 90,000+ active users is primarily equipped with the tools to help in your email marketing campaigns, managing mailing lists, and nurturing leads.

With the auto-responders, you can automate the response of all the repetitive queries that your clients may have. ActiveCampaign’s basic package goes for about $15. Interestingly, unlike other platforms, ActiveCampaign doesn’t have a free version, but they do offer a 14-day trial of their services. Below are its unique features, pricing, and some tips to help you make the most out of your email marketing campaign.

ActiveCampaign Pricing and Features

ActiveCampaign’s pricing is slightly higher than that of its competitors, but its features and functionality are worth the price. It comes in four packages.

1.     Lite

It is their cheapest plan, but it has some features you’ll only find in medium packages in other email marketing providers. This plan offers;

This plan has more advanced features than most lite plans from other providers. For as little as $15 per month, you can manage up to 500 subscribers. The more subscribers you have, the more you will have to pay;

Subscribers	Pricing per month
500	$15 (Currently at $9 for a limited time)
1000	$29
2500	$49
5000	$89
10,000	$139
25,000	$225
50,000	$229
100,000	$459

However, it lacks some features making it less suitable for large marketing teams. These include;

• You can’t automate your sales in this package, and it also doesn’t offer lead scoring.
•  You can’t schedule a call with the support team; support is available through chats and emails.
• It’s also limited to three users at a time.
• It doesn’t feature the Customer Relationships Management (CRM)

It is a great plan, but only if you have a small list of contacts, or you plan to migrate to other plans soon.

2.     Plus

This plan has more advanced features including;

The pricing for the plus package is as follows;

Subscribers	Pricing per month
500	$70
2500	$125
5000	$169
10,000	$249
25,000	$399
50,000	Request a quote from the providers
100,000	Request a quote from the providers

This plan is ideal for small to medium eCommerce stores. Unlike the lite plan, here you can automate sales, nurture your leads, and even engage your customers through the CRM. It also has all the other features in the lite package.

However, you can’t customize your email domain on this price package. If you use your email campaigns mainly for promotional offers, this might be a problem. Such emails may be flagged as spam by email providers.

3.     Professional

The main feature in this plan is the ability to handle 50 users, which is twice more than the plus plan. Besides that, it has the exact characteristics of the plus package. It is less valuable than the other packages since if you have a team that’s slightly larger than 25 members, say, 35 members, you will end up paying twice the cost for the same features.

Subscribers	Pricing per month
500	$159
2500	$159
5000	$239
10,000	$349
25,000	$599
50,000	Request a quote from the providers
100,000	Request a quote from the providers

4.     Enterprise

For the ultimate functionality, this is the ideal plan. In addition to the fascinating features from the other packages, this plan also includes;

One of the reasons ActiveCampaign is preferred, especially in the Enterprise plan is exemplary customer support.

Unlike the other packages, they provide support through chats as well as phone calls. Since you can import an unlimited number of users, sync dashboards, it helps to have support from people who are well conversant with the ActiveCampaign software during the integration process.

For this plan, they also offer 1-on-1 training for an unlimited period. It’s also one of the most expensive among all other email marketing tools, but as your team grows, as well as your subscriber’s list, you will realize how much of a benefit it will be for your company.

Subscribers	Pricing per month
500	$279
2500	$279
5000	$449
10,000	$499
25,000	Request a quote from the providers
50,000	Request a quote from the providers
100,000	Request a quote from the providers

What Makes Activecampaign A Useful Email Marketing Tool?

As most successful online business owners know, email marketing is one of the most successful marketing strategies in the world of e-commerce and digital marketing.

Unlike other competitor companies, ActiveCampaign is has managed to keep up with user- experience best practices that help you smoothen up your email marketing campaigns. Some of these best practices help you get a neat structure that enable your customers interact better with your content. These include;

• Optimizing content for mobile devices– ActiveCampaign allows you to design workflows, and use templates that are responsive even for mobile platforms.
• Artificial Intelligence – AI may have been intimidating at first, but it’s proving to be very beneficial for marketing. The primary role of AI is in the automation, which is a must-have in today’s marketing. Thankfully, ActiveCampaign has a lot of ways that you can automate your strategies to achieve better results while spending less time. (More on this below.)
• Data-driven marketing – If there’s one thing that’s readily available in this AI era, its data. With data available about customer interests, the pages they visit every day, their interactions with your emails, you have enough data to know what your customer is looking for. This helps improve your ROI (Return on Investment) on email campaigns. Of course, you will have to adhere to data handling regulations based on the regions that you operate.

Below are some of the reasons why Activecampaign is excellent for your Email Marketing Campaign.

Email Automation Made Easy

With ActiveCampaign, automation is at its best. You can set up any type of campaign that you need to automate and automate how it drips to your subscriber list.

You can use the premade automation processes known as workflows, or create your own from scratch. The workflow creation process is straightforward since it features a drag-and-drop process and an easy-to-follow navigator guide. There are up to 22 triggers that can trigger a specific workflow based on the activities your clients are taking on your page. Examples of triggers include

• When a customer visits a particular page.
• Events, such as the purchase of a product
• When you or the customer adds a tag.
• When you get a new subscriber to your list

These automations allow you to;

• Unsubscribe and subscribe customers on your list.
• Send an SMS or an email
• Track your goals
• Nurture leads
• Traverse to different parts of an automation.

Convenient User-Interface

ActiveCampaign has a unique user-interface, where you can write an email within the same dashboard as the workflow.

When working with most software, you have to go back and forth between various settings, which makes it hectic.

You can also add SMS (Short messages) in a workflow. You can also integrate automations into each other, making the navigation process more manageable.

• Sharable Automations

If you’re not sure how to create automation from scratch, worry no more, for you can use other peoples’ automations through shared functions.

Also, as much as you would love to create your own, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can always request for those that have been tested and proven to work. In the automations page, you will find the option to share or import. This saves you time and helps you learn how to make better automations in the future.

• It’s scalable

ActiveCampaign grows with your company from its budding stage to its breakthrough. This is why you get scalable pricing plans. At the time of writing this, there’s a lite package that goes for $9 for 500 subscribers. As your subscriber list grows, you can always migrate to the next plan. The plus plan is the best for small and medium businesses since it also accommodates up to 25 users. For an unlimited number of users, custom domain, and all other features, the Enterprise plan would be great.

• Affiliate program

ActiveCampaign has a robust affiliate program that offers up to 30% commissions to affiliates who promote sales for their platform. Whoever that uses your shared workflows will be tagged as your referral and that will get you a 30% commission on their purchase of Active Campaign.

• You can resend your campaign

If your subscriber list has grown since you last sent your campaign, you can resend it again to the new subscribers. Since it allows you to track who opened your emails, you can also resend the campaign to those who didn’t. You can change the subject, or the approach, to ensure you get their attention this time.

• ActiveCampaign allows you to integrate third-party platforms

One of the greatest selling points for marketing tools is their ability to integrate with other software that you use. With ActiveCampaign, you can integrate other platforms such as Google analytics, SendOwl for payment processing, WebinarJam for podcasters, among others. This helps you improve the experience for your customers while making your backend easier to manage.

Activecampaign Cons

To every great sale, there is a downside and this review wouldn’t be complete without highlighting some aspects that need improvement. Here are some for the ActiveCampaign platform;

• It’s quite overwhelming at first – They did their best to make it as versatile as possible, but this leaves you with tones of features to go through. It’ll take you time before you get used to the whole system. However, there are multiple tutorials on nearly everything to do with ActiveCampaign.
• It gets buggy sometimes – ActiveCampaign is becoming very popular nowadays, and as a result, it receives a lot of traffic. They may have improved their systems, but you’ll occasionally experience some downtime.

 Automation Ideas For Your Email Marketing Campaign

• Tagging

ActiveCampaign automation relies on JavaScript, a web programming language. This language is known for recording events, allowing you to record the pages users visit, how long they take, and the activities they did on that page.

This information gives you some insight into the customers’ interests. You can go create tags for your customers and tag them so that the next time you send out promotional emails, your campaigns are shared to segments based on their interests.

Besides tagging, AC also allows you to segment your list based on age, location, and the details they provided during registration.

• Cleanup

After running a successful campaign, your mailing list may grow tremendously. However, after some time, some of your subscribers may fall out with you.

It’s crucial to go through your mailing list, check who’s not opening your emails, and send them a follow-up. If they do not respond, you may have to remove them from your list. However, it’s impossible to remove them, especially if you have a big emailing list.\

Luckily, you can automate the whole process of identifying and removing the dormant subscribers. Doing this ensures you have a manageable list of actual customers.

• Cart abandonment reminder

When a customer visits your site and proceeds to checkout but fails to buy the products, you can set up a follow up email. This email is meant to address any issues that may have prevented them from buying.

• Email Retargeting

Email marketing couldn’t get any better. ActiveCampaign has set out to give you better results even with a smaller mailing list. Email retargeting works similar to ad retargeting whereby it sends out emails based on your customer’s daily search habits.

• Lead Scoring

ActiveCampaign allows you to assign a score to your mailing list based on their interaction with your emails. For instance, you can assign a 5 for those who open an email and 10 for those who click links embedded in the email. This way, you can identify how many people on your list are active subscribers.

This is also a great and easy way to segment your subscribers on the basis of how they interact with your different types of content. 

Conclusion

ActiveCampaign ticks most of the boxes for an excellent email-marketing tool thanks to its vast array of automation options. It allows you to segment your mailing list, auto-respond to common queries, and automate more applications when compared to other tools available in the market today. Since it has many features, it may be hard to master it at first, but the time you invest in learning how to use it effectively will eventually prove to be worth it.