ActiveCampaign Review: Everything You Need to Know in 2022

ActiveCampaign is a one-stop email marketing platform, enabling over 150,000 businesses worldwide to make a meaningful connection with their customers. 

The platform, widely recognised as the best for automated email marketing, also hosts many unique features and boasts a 91.6% deliverability rate. Keep reading this ActiveCampaign review and find out why it is one of the top-ranking email marketing tools today.

What is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign has been on the market since 2003, offering email marketing solutions, as well as marketing automation, CRM and sales automation.

With its focus on customer experience automation, this email marketing tool can save small-mid-sized businesses time and money, while still allowing them to nurture a personal connection with their customers. 

ActiveCampaign Pricing

ActiveCampaign pricing starts as low as $9/month if paid on an annual basis, putting the company’s plans on the lower end of the spectrum compared to its main rivals. 

Like most email marketing platforms, ActiveCampaign has several plans to choose from, the price of which depends on the number of contacts you have in your campaign. Thus, you could end up paying as little as $149/month for 500 subscribers in the company’s most popular plan, or around $549/month for 100,000 contacts in the Lite Plan. 

Bigger companies would have no issue settling the bill, but the price tag might be too high for small businesses. These organisations might consider cheaper email marketing solutions or take a look at Sendinblue, another platform that offers similar features but at a fraction of the price.

*Prices are for 500 subscribers 

There is no available free plan, but there is a 14-day trial period. The free trial could be longer; CleverReach offers a one-month risk-free trial, but at least you don’t need to provide any payment details upfront. 

If a free plan is a must for you, there are plenty of other options to choose from, although keep in mind that free editions tend to come with many restrictions.

ActiveCampaign Features

Now that we’ve covered prices, let’s go over ActiveCampaign’s key features. 

Email Marketing

Creating an email is a breeze with the platform’s user-friendly email design tool. Users can choose from over 125 beautifully designed email templates and make them unique with ActiveCampaign’s straightforward drag and drop editor. Email templates cover every occasion and are responsive, so they look amazing on any device. 

Although not the most sophisticated, the ActiveCampaign email editor is quite versatile, giving you complete control over the design from image placement to inclusion of dynamic content. 

ActiveCampaign takes deliverability seriously by ensuring that each email you send goes in your recipient’s inbox and doesn’t end up as spam. In fact, at the latest testing of the most popular email services, ActiveCampaign’s 91.6% deliverability rate was preceded only by ConvertKit with 93.6%

Email Segmentation

ActiveCampaign makes contact management a walk in the park. Tags can be added automatically based on your contact’s interest, their interactions with your campaign or any of the information on consumer behaviour you collect through website tracking, custom form fields or subscription forms. 

Moreover, the platform offers plenty of options when it comes to tailoring your campaign to your target market, ranging from conditional content, which adds another message within the email only displayed to a specific part of your mailing list, to lead scoring so you can assign scores to each action subscribers take and start an automation when a contact reaches a certain score.

Predictive sending is one of ActiveCampaign’s more unique features, allowing you to track when your subscribers open your emails and using machine learning to send out personalised content at the optimal time. 

Reporting and Analytics 

Different data sets are available from campaigns, automations, contacts and deals. All these reports can help understand numbers and activities and yield better results in the process. 

Reports show the overall performance of a campaign, including standard metrics like opens, clicks, bounce and unsubscribe rates, as well as results of split testing campaigns and the amount of ecommerce revenue generated.

ActiveCampaign also integrates with Google Analytics to give you even more info on your progress. 

Although detailed, if you want complete insight into how your campaign is going right from the Automation editor, take a look at Omnisend.  

SMS Marketing 

Similar to Sendinblue, ActiveCampaign lets you reach out to potential customers via SMS. Seeing as how 76% of Brits still text regularly, SMS marketing is definitely an avenue worth pursuing and a great way to send reminders of flash sale notifications.

But ActiveCampaign goes beyond texting. It also allows you to generate leads through site messages and Facebook Ads, which are automatically created based on subscribers’ interests and actions. This enables a whole level of personalisation, significantly improving the consumer’s overall experience and brand awareness. 

Campaign Setup and Contact List

Getting started with ActiveCampaign is relatively easy, mainly thanks to the site’s handy checklist that goes through all the important steps. The user interface itself, though, can feel a bit clunky and overwhelming. Even though ActiveCampaign provides detailed guides on how to get started, if ease of use is your primary concern, you might want to take a closer look at other platforms. 

There are several ways to import contacts, including a .CSV file, manual copy/pasting or through integrations with various apps. From here, you can add personalisation tags and create scoring models for leads and contacts as a way to stay organised. 

The next step is getting a campaign set up. 

ActiveCampaign offers 6 types of campaigns, so you are sure to find one that meets your requirements.

Marketing Automation

No ActiveCampaign review would be complete without mentioning one of the platform’s stellar features. 

ActiveCampaign offers 200+ automation recipes that can be customised to suit your particular needs, or you can build one from scratch. One can choose from 20+ triggers (cart abandonment, site visits, RSS based and more) and even include multiple triggers so that users are brought into alternate automations. 

Automation is flexible as well, letting you bypass certain stages of the workflow when a subscriber has taken the action you have set. 

Automations also integrate natively with the ActiveCampaign CRM software (Pro Plan and beyond), so you can automate the sales pipeline, thus taking out the manual work of closing deals and improving your organisation’s efficiency.

With event tracking, A/B testing and other advanced customisation features, ActiveCampaign easily outperforms other email marketing services in this area, even AWeber, one of the oldest platforms around. 

Note: You could also opt for an Autoresponder campaign, a more straightforward version in which you respond to a contact after they have met the conditions of the particular list or segment they’ve been included in. Bear in mind that there are no further automation capabilities here; however, autoresponders are an effective way to send a one-off response to a subscriber of a specific list. 

Integrations

ActiveCampaign integrates with 870+ apps from Facebook and WordPress to Woocommerce and everything in between. If you can’t find an app for your needs, the platform integrates with Zapier as well, so you can connect to thousands of the most popular apps. 

There is plenty on offer here, but integrating apps is more complicated than it seems, especially when compared to Constant Contact’s action blocks, which automatically add other apps into the email.  

Training and Support

ActiveCampaign tries to be available for any and all issues, providing a live chat and email service for all its customers. 

There is a dedicated telephone hotline for Enterprise plans too.

On top of the interactive customer support channels and onboarding training, it’s worth noting that their resources are quite comprehensive as the platform hosts a community, a forum, and even an ActiveCampaign University with detailed guides, blogs and videos to take you step by step through all the company’s features.

Is ActiveCampaign Worth it?

ActiveCampaign packs a lot of features even in its lower-priced plans; however, its top-tier products might be too costly for small businesses and bloggers.  It can also be confusing to use at times, even though the company provides guides and tutorials every step of the way.

Despite minor drawbacks, there is a lot one can do with the platform thanks to its advanced automation options, personalisation features and seamless CRM and sales integration.