ActiveCampaign gives lots of advertising and marketing options, which end up in a cluttered interface, although that is balanced by its prime quality online support.Price$9.00
PROS
Many third-party integrations and auto-responder options
Excellent online assist
CONS
Comparatively short free trial
No phone support
Busy dashboard
As a one-stop email marketing service, ActiveCampaign, which begins at $9 monthly has quite a bit to supply, together with unlimited emails with all of its plans, third-party integrations, and a wide range of auto-responders. This leads to a slightly busy interface, which can be hard to take in at first look. ActiveCampaign (which begins at $9 monthly) additionally gives a relatively short, 14-day free trial, when most competitors provide at least 30 days (however at least it does not require a credit card). ActiveCampaign has a large library of online support resources and onboarding services, and you can receive help via live chat, but not by phone. It's comparable to Campaign Monitor in some ways, though each bests the other one in some areas.
Overall Review: EXCELLENT (4.0)
Pricing and Features
Like a number of different email advertising and marketing packages, ActiveCampaign also extends its features into marketing automation as you will see below. The company organizes its plans depending on the number of subscribers you're looking to reach. Plans start at $9 monthly for up to 500 contacts and unlimited emails. At each subscriber level, you'll be able to upgrade to a Plus plan that provides a number of options including customer relationship management (CRM), a custom domain, and custom branding. There's also an Enterprise plan that includes a dedicated account representative, onboarding, and more. Plans go all the way up to 100,000 contacts; in case you want extra, you can contact ActiveCampaign for a custom plan. In between, you can opt for 2,500 contacts for $29 monthly, 5,000 contacts for $45 monthly, and so on. All plans include unlimited emails, unlike Campaign Monitor, which offers both basic plans with limited emails, and more expensive unlimited plans. You can save 15 percent off the monthly value by paying annually; however, ActiveCampaign doesn't offer pay-as-you-go plans, as Campaign Monitor and MailChimp do.
ActiveCampaign gives a 14-day free trial that doesn't require a credit card. To get started, all you want is your company name and e-mail address. Next, you set up a password after which select the service you are searching for—in addition to email marketing, it gives marketing automation, CRM, and gross sales automation. Then choose the number of contacts you have and whether you need any help setting up your account.
The dashboard is overwhelming at first look. It's hard to know where to look first. On the right rail is a social activity feed, including social shares, unsubscribes, click rates, and more. To the left of that is an overview of your campaign activity. Part of the confusion is that it is filled with sample information that vanishes when you mouse over it. This gives you an idea of what your dashboard will look like once you're up and running, but it's jarring to see that on your first login. It's additionally complicated since ActiveCampaign also gives CRM and other features that you may not plan to use, but show up on the dashboard anyway in case you're utilizing the free trial. Along the top of the screen are your main options: contacts, campaigns, lists, and other non-email marketing-related features.
Click on the contacts tab to add and manage subscribers. From here you'll be able to import and export CSV information or import from a third-party service, such as Asana ($0.00 at Asana) , Base CRM, Zoho CRM , and lots of extras. This is another area where it bests Campaign Monitor, which has no third-party integration. You can also copy and paste contacts into a form or add them one-by-one. Before you add any contacts, though, you have to create a list, just like with Campaign Monitor.
When you create a list, you need to give it a name, provide your company's mailing address for the footer, company URL, and a note letting subscribers know why they're receiving the e-mail (this may reduce spam reports from forgetful users.) Next, you can import contacts to that list. When you use the paste option, you will have to map fields after the upload. You can also opt to not import a certain field. I tried out adding e-mail, name, and birthday. It recognized email, but not the other two, but I was able to simply create custom fields. You can also tag contacts for easy searching.
Setting Up a Campaign
Click on the Campaigns tab to create a newsletter. Give it a name, after which choose the type. You'll probably send standard emails the most, but you can also select automated (based on logic you create), autoresponder (based on an action by the subscriber), A/B test, RSS-triggered, or date-based. Then choose the list you want to send to; you can also segment that list using contact details, location, pages they visited on your site, and more. The "next" button is on the top right and out of the way, so I kept forgetting where it was, which was a bit annoying.
After you select who will get the e-mail, you can start designing, either from scratch or by utilizing one of their pre-designed templates. Starting from scratch means you'll be able to select the format, colors, and theme. You can also add elements via drag and drop to the page together with textual content, picture, button, HTML, video, and spacers. Click the settings symbol of a component to duplicate it, hide it on mobile devices (in case you think it will not work appropriately or will look out of place), save it to the content library, or delete it. You may also make a component conditional based on data from your contacts, such as if they've made a recent purchase. You may also drag elements around the page to change their position, which didn't always work in my tests. Once you add a picture to a newsletter, it's saved in your library for reuse; you'll be able to even create folders for better organization.
Finally, you'll be able to add the subject, verify the list, and set what you'd like to track in your email such as open rate, link clicks, replies, and you can also connect your account with Google Analytics. Then you can send a test, or schedule delivery. At the bottom of this display, you'll be able to see your spam score. In my first newsletter, I was warned about using a free email provider. Custom emails are usually better for trust. You can also preview by e-mail client and on desktop. When I attempted to send a test to and from my own email address, I was flagged that it might be marked as spam. ActiveCampaign supports multi-user editing, which works similarly to Microsoft Word's track changes feature.
Autoresponders will be triggered by subscribes, unsubscribes, email opens or link clicks, and events, such as birthdays and anniversaries. You have to first set up an email in order to set up an auto-responder, which is a bit annoying since you do not find out till you are already working through the process. That said, there are a lot of options here, including if/then logic and the ability to create workflows with multiple actions.
Tracking a Campaign and Customer Support
As I discussed earlier, you'll be able to select what to track and add Google Analytics integration. On the reports tab, you'll be able to view all of the campaigns you have sent, along with opens and clicks. Clicking on a campaign brings you deeper; you'll be able to view which subscribers have opened your email, link clicks, a map showing where your subscribers are, which email clients they use, and unsubscribes. Reports were quick to update when I clicked on an email and opened a link. Note that, like all email advertising and marketing companies, you'll only be able to see views if your email displays images or if a recipient clicks a link.
There are a number of methods to get help in ActiveCampaign. On each display, you will see a button with a question mark on it with links to the knowledgebase, training resources, and live chat with support. On some screens, such as when you're designing an email, ActiveCampaign offers a walkthrough by displaying a blinking dot that you can click on for extra info.
The knowledgebase includes videos and articles on ActiveCampaign features. Under training, you'll be able to schedule a 30-minute phone call or an in-person meeting in Chicago to get a detailed walkthrough of the service ($65 or free with a Plus or Enterprise account). You may also register for a webinar, which is usually scheduled once every week. Disappointingly, there is no phone support available except for the sales team.
ActiveCampaign stands among the many greatest advertising and marketing automation instruments in the industry. Although it's not as complete as our Editors' Choice tools Pardot and HubSpot (50.00 Per Month at HubSpot), ActiveCampaign, is more than enough to help most businesses accomplish basic and mildly complex goals. The tool offers dozens of pre-built workflows that may be customized to suit your specific needs. You're guided through the workflow creation process through an intuitive step-by-step navigator. The tool is drag and drops at every stage so you're never mired in endless scrolls through dozens and dozens of options the way you're in tools like Zoho Campaigns and SendinBlue.
ActiveCampaign makes it straightforward to regulate workflows without having to leave the design template. For instance: You can create emails immediately inside your workflow without having to hop back and forth between the automation and email marketing campaign dashboards. This sounds basic, but we discovered that half of the tools we tested lacked this back feature. ActiveCampaign can also be one of the few automation tools that allow you to combine Short Message Service (SMS) into a workflow. The tool's Split Action feature lets you A/B test for everything: emails, wait times, SMS versus email, or any kind of custom action you've created within the tool. Split Action additionally helps you to differentiate the types of offers people receive based on when they enter the workflow; this is a good way to reward early birds during time-sensitive promotions.
ActiveCampaign's "Goals" feature lets you bypass certain stages of the automation if a contact performs an action you'd like them to perform. So, as an example, if somebody makes a purchase during the first stage of a nurturing campaign, you can incorporate the Goals tag to skip the contact to the upsell or resell stage of a workflow. Achieving a goal is one of the starts triggers ActiveCampaign provides, so you can automatically add someone to a new workflow if they full the workflow when they accomplish the goal. You can also add an End Automation rule that pulls someone from a workflow.
The tool also natively integrates with ActiveCampaign's CRM software at the Pro plan and higher. This gives you the ability to automate the sales pipeline by adding to the CRM roster once they've signed up for a deal. You can assign contacts to specific salespeople. You can add relationship-driven tasks, or notes so that you're constantly in communication from marketing to sales. Sales groups can mark deals as won, which will then trigger new automation so that you're always driving people from marketing to sales.
Unfortunately, ActiveCampaign is still behind the industry's frontrunners in terms of its ability to post content to social media and to work within the tool to perform search marketing research, and to use search marketing knowledge to improve campaigns (something Pardot does in a genius fashion). ActiveCampaign does not offer an iOS or Android app, which is completely unacceptable. Other than these minor quibbles, ActiveCampaign is definitely worth a trial run in case you're focused on complex and interactive workflows.
ActiveCampaign offers lots of options for a relatively low price. The downside is that it can be confusing to use at times; thankfully, its help resources are plentiful, and if you're really lost you can open a live chat with support.
With a plethora of third-party integrations and custom auto-responders, most users will be happy with its choices. It beats out the similar Campaign Monitor by a nose but still does not offer quite the level of service you'll find on Campaigner and MailChimp.
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