Do you consider using ActiveCampaing for your email marketing but not sure if it’s right for your business? In this review, we’ll go through the features ActiveCampaign has to offer, its pros&cons, so you can decide if it’s the right choice for you.
Choosing a perfect email autoresponder for your business can be challenging. It’s absolutely worth taking some time and look over different variants in the beginning as moving to another email software later isn’t fun at all.
It’s quite easy to export your contacts and import them to a new autoresponder. However, the re-creation of all your email sequences in the new software consumes much time.
We tried our share of autoresponders until we found ActiveCampaign. And we can honestly say that it’s our #1 choice since then.
Let’s dive in and take a closer look at ActiveCampaign, and why we love it so much!
What is ActiveCampaign?
ActiveCampaign is a powerful and one of the most popular email marketing solutions.
It’s not just a regular email autoresponder. ActiveCampaign gives you email marketing, automation, and CRM tools, SMS, and much more in one solution.
This all leads to better and more personalized customer experience and better results from your email marketing efforts.
Who is it for?
ActiveCampaign works great for almost any business in any niche.
Its powerful automation and CRM features can meet the requirements of established businesses. While the budget-friendly price makes the software affordable even for small companies.
Disregarding the size of your business and your email list, ActiveCampaign will be a perfect fit for you if you’re looking for serious marketing automation (we’ll go through it in more detail further in the review).
ActiveCampaign lets you create complex automated email sequences, campaigns, lists’ segmentation, and much more.
Not only can you send emails with ActiveCampaign! You can use SMS or “Conversations” to website visitors to stay in touch with your leads/customers, as well as manage Facebook ad follow-ups.
On top of that, ActiveCampaign offers a native CRM system. It’s connected with your email marketing data and allows you to easily manage sales deals and follow-ups in one place.
The only case you should NOT use ActiveCampaign is if your core business is affiliate marketing. Some affiliate marketers tend to spam their subscribers with affiliate offers or link to questionable pages. And that’s something ActiveCampaign wants to avoid!
It doesn’t mean that you can’t include affiliate links to your emails at all. However, if you do it regularly, it’s probably better to choose another email autoresponder that is more tolerant of it.
ActiveCampaign Features Review
Let’s go through the most prominent features that, in our opinion, make ActiveCampaign the #1 email marketing solution.
Automations
Marketing automations are ActiveCampaign’s most powerful feature that lets the tool stand out among the competition.
It allows you to automate follow-up campaigns, add conditions, segment the list, send customized emails, and so much more.
Despite a lot of features the automations provide, they’re extremely intuitive and user-friendly.
It’s an example of a simple automation you can easily create in ActiveCampaign. Although it may seem overwhelming at the first glance, it’s quite straightforward if you follow the flow from the start of the automation.
And the flowchart-like view ActiveCampaign uses for the automations, gives you a great overview of the whole automation process.
If you believe that ActiveCampaign is the right email marketing tool for you and can’t wait to test all the features yourself, get your free 14-day trial right now.
Campaigns
Campaigns are the second most popular feature of ActiveCampaign. Here’re a few campaign’s usecases:
- send a regular, one-time email
- create a sequence of email actions and conditions
- set up an automated campaign that will be sent after a contact subscribes to your list
- split test multiple emails
- send emails whenever your RSS feed is updated or based on contacts’ birthdays, anniversaries, and more.
ActiveCampaign provides 20+ modern-looking and responsive templates to choose from. Additionally, you can create a campaign from scratch or use your custom templates.
The email editor itself is quite intuitive – you can style your email like in any text editor and drag-n-drop additional elements from the toolbar on the right side.
Forms
On top of the usual features you’d expect from an email marketing tool, ActiveCampaign also has a built-in form builder.
The builder allows you to create and customize all of your forms and add them to your page in a floating bar, floating box, or even in a popup.
It can be a nice way to save some money if at the moment you’re using a dedicated tool to create forms.
Reports
Another feature we love in ActiveCampaign is the informative reports.
You can view separate reports for your campaigns, automations, contacts, and chat conversations. When you want to dive deeper, you can review detailed reports ActiveCampaign provides on the open rate, click-through rate, revenue, etc. for each campaign or automation.
ActiveCampaign Pricing
As with many other email marketing tools, ActiveCampaign’s pricing is based on the number of contacts you have on your list. Also, if you choose the yearly billing, you can save a nice amount on the subscription.
You can go straight to the ActiveCampaign pricing page to see how much each plan will cost for you based on the size of your email list.
All plans start with a free 14-day trial so you can test the software and decide if it’s the right choice for you before paying for it.
At the moment, ActiveCampaign is offering four pricing plans:
Lite
The Lite plan will be perfect for somebody who’s just starting with email marketing and doesn’t need advanced features.
It’s priced at $15/mo ($9/mo if paid yearly) for up to 1,000 contacts and includes all the basics you need to start.
Plus
The Plus plan includes all the features from the Lite plan and additional things like CRM, landing pages, SMS marketing, and more.
The price of the Plus plan is $70/mo ($49/mo if paid yearly) for 1,000 contacts.
Professional
The Professional plan includes everything from the Plus plan and such awesome additions as predictive sending and content with machine learning, onboarding and strategy consultations, 1-on-1 trainings, etc.
The subscription fee for the Professional plan is $159/mo ($129/mo if you pay yearly) for 1,000 contacts.
Enterprise
In addition to the features of the Professional plan, the Enterprise tier offers custom domain, mail server domain, custom reporting, free design services, phone support, and some other features.
The price of the Enterprise plan starts at $279/mo ($229/mo if you pay yearly) for up to 1,000 contacts.
ActiveCampaign Pros&Cons
- powerful but easy-to-use email marketing automation
- intuitive drag-n-drop email editor
- detailed reporting
- native CRM
- additional features like SMS, landing pages, Facebook audience management, etc.
- high deliverability in comparison with similar tools
- budget-friendly pricing
Cons:
- the number of features can be overwhelming
- not suitable for the affiliate marketing
Conclusion
ActiveCampaign is really one of the best choices you can make if you’re looking for an email marketing tool for your business.
Their powerful marketing automation definitely makes ActiveCampaign stand out among competitors, however, it’s extremely easy to use.
Additionally, ActiveCampaign offers features (like CRM, landing pages, Facebook audience management, etc.) you won’t see in other email marketing tools.
The pricing is very affordable even if you’re just starting. The lowest pricing tier includes all the basic features you may need. The higher pricing tiers offer more advanced functionality and are a perfect fit for established businesses and enterprises. This makes ActiveCampaign a great email marketing solution for a business of any size.
We hope that this review helped you to understand if ActiveCampaign is the tool you were looking for. And again, you can start a free 14-day trial to test all the features yourself before paying.
What is ActiveCampaign used for?
ActiveCampaign is an email marketing platform with powerful marketing automation possibilities. It lets you easily create complex automated email sequences, campaigns, lists' segmentation, and much more. ActiveCampaign also offers additional native features like CRM, SMS, Facebook audiences management.
Is ActiveCampaign free?
ActiveCampaign offers a free 14-day trial you can start right now. After that, you need to choose a subscription plan - the lowest one starts at $15/mo.
Is ActiveCampaign a CRM?
ActiveCampaign offers a built-in CRM feature on the Plus, Professional, and Enterprise plans. However, the main ActiveCampaign functionality is built around email marketing.
Does ActiveCampaign have landing pages?
Yes, landing pages is one of the features ActiveCampaign offers to its users on the Plus, Professional, and Enterprise plans.
How much does ActiveCampaign cost?
ActiveCampaign pricing starts at $15/mo for 500 contacts on your list. You can also use a free 14-day trial to test the functionality of the platform before even paying something.
How long is ActiveCampaign free trial?
The ActiveCampaign free trial allows you to test the platform for 14 days. During the trial, you get access to the features of the Professional plan.
