ActiveCampaign Review 2020: Customer Experience Automation
Are you wondering why ActiveCampaign stands out of the pack above all the other email marketing autoresponders available in 2020?
If you are a digital marketer or online entrepreneur looking for a viable, effective, and innovative way of connecting with your email list, ActiveCampaign needs to be seriously considered.
With their vast experience in the sales and marketing ecosystem, ActiveCampaign is a platform that will help you manage your contacts on complete autopilot.
As digital marketers and online entrepreneurs, we certainly understand the significance of providing our audiences with what they need by tapping into the conversations they’re already having.
From personalized messages to targeted newsletters, ActiveCampaign has the arsenal you need to market your business out of oblivion and turn leads into repeat customers.
Do more than automate your email — activate your entire customer experience
So in this ActiveCampaign review, we will thoroughly dissect this email marketing autoresponder to convey what we’ve found to be the best option available in regards to all-in-one email marketing autoresponders.
In this ActiveCampaign review, we’ve put the bold claims of ActiveCampaign to the test to see if they are congruent with our email marketing standards.
ActiveCampaign Review Contents:
ActiveCampaign Review Part #1: What is Active Campaign?
Well…it’s an email autoresponder. But more than that….
ActiveCampaign is everything a business needs for an email marketing tool that create advanced email automations.
ActiveCampaign is an email automation tool that automates many of the behind-the-scenes sales, marketing, and support processes to create optimized customer experiences.
Through its automation platform, ActiveCampaign provides hundreds of pre-built automations that include email marketing, machine learning, CRM, and email marketing automations for powerful cross-channel segmentation, and personalization to businesses of all different sizes.
Active Campaign boasts of many features and integrations, including quick and friendly customer support, that makes them sound like a virtual powerhouse when it comes to email marketing automation tools.
ActiveCampaign email automations not only allow custom automations (based on numerous conditions) but also the automation of contacts and list management, plus automations within their CRM system called ‘Deals’. This unique Deal System is important as it allows features such as adding notes to contacts, setting up appointments, or simply sending messages directly to them.
ActiveCampaign prides themselves on their professional approach in helping their customers build meaningful connections with people through the use of their email marketing automation software.
At the end of the day, there’s no better way to see if Active Campaign is right for you unless you sit in the driver’s seat and test it yourself.
Now, let’s dive deeper into what I’ve personally found over the years after using ActiveCampaign for my businesses.
ActiveCampaign Review Part #2: How Much Does It Cost?
Wondering about the ActiveCampaign pricing plans?
This is an important question as you look forward to grow your business exponentially with email marketing. Luckily, ActiveCampaign has the option of choosing the package that works best for you.
There are different pricing plans you can take advantage of depending on your current needs and goals in your business. Of course, every plan has a specific amount of contacts you can reach out to depending on the size of your business.
ActiveCampaign has pricing plans that offer an Entry-level Plan for up to 500 subscribers that starts at $15 per month and a Plus Plan with access to pro features such as lead scoring and in-built CRM starting at $70 per month. The entry-level plan is $15 for 500 subscribers. You can even opt for the $299 for 50,000 subscribers.
The great thing about the ActiveCampaign email marketing automation platform, from experience, is that you can grow your business to new levels you might never have anticipated.
In other words, your business can grow from having had 500 contacts to over 10,000 because of the lead generation & retention tools and quality customer experiences made possible with ActiveCampaign.
ActiveCampaign Review Part #3: Is It Worth It?
It’s important to ask yourself whether this platform is the best for you and if it's worth investing in. After all, the choice of which autoresponder to use could make your break your profitability on the back end.
For this ActiveCampaign review, it's not about the hype. Rather, it's more about validating what you expect to get once you consider using this incredibly popular email marketing, sales automation, and marketing automation solution.
Therefore, ActiveCampaign is right for you ONLY if…
I. You would want marketing automation to be an essential pillar for your business.
ActiveCampaign is, indeed, a tried and true automation tool you can rely on to grow your business. If marketing automation is something you are seriously thinking about, ActiveCampaign will help you take significant strides in the following directions: automated email marketing campaigns, automated segmentation, and effective sales follow-up emails.
II. You want sales and marketing integration
With the help of ActiveCampaign, the sales team in your business will be proactive. By using the platform's CRM feature, you will succeed in integrating your sales and marketing programs for optimal results. Particularly, ActiveCampaign will enable you to capitalize on lead scoring to improve your sales-follow up systems.
III. You want to embrace multi-channeling
If you are looking for a way to cultivate a broad-spectrum avenue of reaching out to your customers, then ActiveCampaign is the way to go. You don't have to settle for emails alone. Rather, you can explore the option of sending SMSs as well as displaying Facebook adverts to your contacts.
ActiveCampaign Review Part #4: Favourite Features
Active Campaign Favourite Feature #1: Newsletter Creation
Personalization is a major factor in effective newsletter creation. Through personalization, you are able to reach out to different customers with personalized content. Your customers have different interests, thus you will be reaching out to them based on their specific differences.
For example, newsletter creation can be based on the links that your clients clicked. Moreover, ActiveCampaign allows you to send different types of emails to your customers.
Examples of email categories here include:
classic newsletters
date-base
autoresponders
Innovative newsletter creation is a strong point that ActiveCampaign handles beautifully without a doubt.
Active Campaign Favourite Feature #2: Ease of Use
The design of ActiveCampaign is user-friendly. It is easy for you to navigate through it. Additionally, it provides users with demo data that shows them how to use it. If you are new to this platform, you will have the benefit of developing an idea of how to use it for maximum and quality results.
Active Campaign Favourite Feature #3: Template Designs
There are various templates offered by ActiveCampaign for you to choose from. The templates are quite responsive, which is a plus for you as you seek to grow your business. They are also flexible enough for you to pick the one that suits your tastes and preferences the best.
Active Campaign Favourite Feature #4: Customer Support
ActiveCampaign has phenomenal customer support. One thing that makes them stand out is how fast they respond to customers. They are also reliable across all platforms. They offer video tutorials and trainings on their plans especially the Plus plan. You will always feel a personal touch in their communication, which is a great advantage to you. In short, the support team is highly dependable.
Active Campaign Favourite Feature #5: Features Available
There are multiple features that ActiveCampaign offers. If you choose this as your email automation tool, you are going to benefit from the following features: bounce management, storage for data and images, design testing, and spam testing.
Active Campaign Favourite Feature #6: Email Automation
The ActiveCampaign email automation is powerful. It is also user-friendly, which will allow you to undertake functions like follow-up campaigns and much more. There are already-made ideas for you to explore but you can still create your own automations. This is why ActiveCampaign stands out as an email and marketing automation tool you can use to facilitate the growth of your business.
ActiveCampaign Review Part #5: Pros & Cons
ActiveCampaign Pros:
Extremely Powerful Email Automations
Easy to use and one of the best marketing automation softwares available out there
Thorough Reporting
Reporting & analytics on all areas such as geo-tracking, click maps, and page visits. Higher plans offer purchase tacking for BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and Shopify.
Great Deliverability
Deliverability tests have proven that ActiveCampaign has one of the best tools to get emails delivered.
Free Account Migration offered if you are using a different email marketing software tool.
ActiveCampaign Cons:
Slightly more expensive than competing softwares (for a good reason, cheaper tools have less capabilities)
Large learning curve on how to properly use the software if you’re brand new to email marketing
Creating columns can be quite finicky and there is also no quick way to preview the newsletter.
Landing Page Editor is not available on ActiveCampaign.
ActiveCampaign Review Part #6: Is It Right For Me?
I believe ActiveCampaign is 100% worth the investment ONLY if:
You are serious about using the most powerful automation tool that will allow you to set up any automation you can possibly think of including triggered campaigns, automated segmentation, dynamic email content, sales follow-ups, etc.
You need an integrated marketing and sales platform with an inbuilt CRM that seamlessly links all your email marketing data that allow sales teams to act quickly.
You are looking for additional features like social data and lead scoring that will help you streamline your follow-up sales processes.
You need a powerful tool to perform multi-channel marketing. In addition to sending emails, ActiveCampaign will also allow you to send personalized SMS ‘conversations’ to your website visitors and manage how Facebook ads are displayed to your contacts.
ActiveCampaign is an excellent solution if you would like to centralize a large portion of your marketing and provide an all around better customer experience.
ActiveCampaign is Not Recommended For You ONLY If:
You require a beginner-friendly, low-maintenance tool. ActiveCampaign is an advanced tool that demands a lot of time to get familiar with and a lot more work to be put in than other marketing tools. In addition, ActiveCampaign will need regular attention to set up, optimize, and monitor campaigns.
You only need simple automations to set up basic email sequences like a welcome campaign, for example. There are much more budget-friendly options available that are much easier to use. This will help you avoid paying for a lot of extras and complexities in ActiveCampaign that you simply won’t need.
You’re not entirely sure yet that you need ActiveCampaign’s powerful automation tool. Even though there is a free ActiveCampaign trial period, unfortunately I think 14 days is just not enough time to assess the tool and decide whether it is right for you.
ActiveCampaign Review Part #7: A Closer Look
ActiveCampaign Ease of Use
ActiveCampaign rates 4 out of 5 on ‘Ease of Use’ for its easily navigable menus and user-friendly design. The dashboard has been cleverly designed to avoid being overcrowded and it has a useful ‘Getting Started’ slider for new users. Handy demo data gives users ideas on how to best use different sections although it can be somewhat complicated for an absolute beginner.
ActiveCampaign Newsletter Creation
The ActiveCampaign Editor rates 4 out of 5 for its speed and 2 handy features: how to save custom ‘blocks’ for reuse; and allowing you, (Google Docs-style), to view changes others have made. However, due to multiple minute-by-minute auto-saving, it can be a pain trying to find the last action you want to undo.
ActiveCampaign Personalization Via ‘Conditional Content’
There is an easy-to-use ‘If/Then/Else' logic available which will allow you to show different content to certain customers based on specific conditions such as past links clicked, interests, and so on.
ActiveCampaign Email Types
Email types rate 5 out of 5 for classic newsletters, autoresponders, SMS, RSS triggered, A/B testing, and date-based birthdays.
ActiveCampaign Choice & Flexibility of Template Designs
Rating 4 out of 5, ActiveCampaign has about 40 modern and responsive templates to choose from that can be easily previewed in a separate window. There are other tools with more template options as well as slightly more content blocks/features within the editor.
ActiveCampaign Email Automations
Rating 5 out of 5, the ActiveCampaign email automation feature is really the best of all email marketing automation tools and it makes the tool stand out from the others. Extremely user-friendly and very powerful it allows you to automate your follow-up campaigns and edit multiple conditions via an easy-to-follow flowchart system. It also features pre-made ‘recipes' to follow or to get ideas from. If you prefer you can also start your own automation from the beginning.
ActiveCampaign List Management
When compared to other tools, ActiveCampaign makes it much easier to manage and organize your contacts and lists. By using their functions and automation features it becomes easy to organize contacts into lists.
ActiveCampaign Opt-In and Opt-Out Process
The ActiveCampaign Registration process rates 5 out of 5 for its easy to use forms that allow you to create your own fields. Apart from the fully responsive standard forms you are also able to create floating modals and forms that are simple and effective.
ActiveCampaign email Deliverability
Deliverability rates 4 and a half out of 5 as ActiveCampaign scores very high in deliverability tests for landing emails in the main inboxes of top providers like Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, and Outlook. Although there has been a slight dip in recent test rounds it will be interesting to see if they manage to bring it back up.
ActiveCampaign Reports and Analyses
ActiveCampaign scores 4 and a half out of 5 for reports and analysis. It basically allows for reporting on everything from opens, page visits, click-maps, and geo-tracking to e-commerce reports available on certain plans for WooCommerce, Shopify, and BigCommerce.
ActiveCampaign Languages
In languages, ActiveCampaign scores 4 out of 5. The website is published in English and Portuguese but your user-profile can be changed to one of 15 available languages including French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Russian. However, support is only provided in English.
ActiveCampaign Spam and Design Testing
Rating 3 and a half out of 5, both spam and design testing are available. Spam testing consists of a simple ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ before sending out your campaign, however, there are no factors to help you understand the ruling. An email client-preview feature is available at a cost of $1 per client/test which could be viewed as a bit steep by some.
ActiveCampaign Bounce Management
Soft bounces turn into hard bounces after three bounces which bumps them into an exclusion list.
ActiveCampaign Blacklist
The Blacklist is the Exclusion List mentioned above. Contacts can be imported directly into the blacklist as well as exported.
ActiveCampaign Storage for Data and Imaging
Unlimited storage is available but images above 1000 pixels will be downsized.
ActiveCampaign Custom Domain
You can use your own tracking domain if you want to improve company branding in your newsletters.
Different Levels of ActiveCampaign Account Access
The ActiveCampaign system is very flexible without any specific levels. It allows you to define, via tick boxes, the group names as well as the exact access for each group. Also available is a Factor Authentication feature for additional security.
ActiveCampaign Integrations
A huge amount of integration options are available including Facebook, Google Analytics, PayPal, WordPress, and Shopify that ensures you won’t have a problem finding the integrations you need.
ActiveCampaign Support
ActiveCampaign rates 5 out of 5 for its fast and friendly support on all mediums. Particularly useful is their knowledge base that is easily searchable. You won’t find any difficulty when searching for relevant results. Live and archived video tutorials and webinars are also available as well as one-on-one training with the Plus Plan.
ActiveCampaign Review Part #8: Overall Rating
The overall rating for ActiveCampaign is 4.5. Hardly missing a beat when it comes to features, they offer one of the most powerful newsletter tools on the market while also being simple enough for most to get full use out of.
ActiveCampaign Review Part #9: My FREE Bonuses
Did this comprehensive ActiveCampaign review get you interested in taking advantage of the free trial?
I’ve put together a valuable list of ActiveCampaign bonuses exclusive to those who start a free ActiveCampaign trial using my link below.
Below you'll find all the details about my exclusive ActiveCampaign bonus experience you'll get access to when you claim your free trial via my affiliate link.
Bonus #1: Unlimited Email/Chat Support:
I will guide and help you in getting the best from this software (it can be confusing sometimes).
Bonus #2: My Personal CF Crash Course:
My comprehensive 12+ hour membership course on getting ClickFunnels to pay for itself (over 50 video lessons).
Bonus #3: CF Share Funnel Library + White Label Rights:
31 share funnels you can directly import into your CF account.
Bonus #4: DFY Email Marketing Automations + White Label Rights:
Done-for-you email automations you can use to promote any affiliate offers.
Bonus #5: Definitive List of the Top 130 Lifetime Recurring Affiliate Programs + White label rights:
List of over 130+ affiliate programs that offer lifetime recurring commissions.
Bonus #6: Million Dollar Ad Swipe Library + White Label Rights
Get the exact Facebook ads that 40 of the top internet entrepreneurs are running right now.
To get this exclusive ActiveCampaign bonus offer, use this link and then email me here with your receipt and I will send you the bonuses within 24 hours if my Active Campaign autoresponder didn’t already send them to you automatically.
ActiveCampaign Review Part #10: Closing Thoughts
It's really hard to find many ways to go wrong with ActiveCampaign. Not only do they provide almost anything needed for an email marketing tool, but they also do it very well.
The ActiveCampaign reporting feature allows insight into most facets such as geo-tracking, page visits, eCommerce, openers, and many more.
ActiveCampaign is easy to use and actually delivers relevant results most of the time. The Plus Plan provides access to helpful webinars as well as one-on-one training which is a nice addition.
If you’re looking for an all-encompassing newsletter marketing tool, ActiveCampaign is really one of the best options out there.
Their ‘real deal’ automation makes other versions of these tools rudimentary in comparison. If you are prepared to put in the time and pay a little more, your business will certainly reap the benefits.
However, if you are just looking for a simple tool to blast out your newsletters, you will be better off with a cheaper solution which will be easier for you to understand and navigate.
After having read through this comprehensive ActiveCampaign review, it's evident that this is an email automation tool you should consider to use for improving communication with your target audience.
Moreover, it is a viable option when looking for a platform to fuel lead generation and conversion rates.
Results will surely come, but you will have to invest time and money either way. If you are still not sure about it, you can try out their 14-day free trial so that you witness for yourself.
Undoubtedly, this is a tool that I would highly recommend for the growth of your email list and business profitability over the long term.
Affiliate Disclaimer: I hope you enjoyed this ActiveCampaign review. Please note that any links inside this article may be affiliate links to ActiveCampgin. That means that if you click on one of the links and sign up, I may be compensated for it. If you do happen to click, thanks! Any money we make keeps this site running and allows us to keep producing high-quality reviews.