ActiveCampaign Review – Detailed Features & 100% Honest Guide (2022)

Are you thinking about how you can automate your entire business by sending emails?

ActiveCampaign is a comprehensive email marketing solution tool that also includes CRM, marketing automation and other unique features that can help you achieve better results.

In this ActiveCampaign Review, I will guide you on everything you need to know about this platform, including in-depth features, pricing, pros & cons, and also advice on other best alternative solutions you can consider.

What is ActiveCampaign Overview

ActiveCampaign is a suite of digital marketing solutions combined into one user-friendly platform with pre-built automation technology that integrates marketing automation, email marketing, machine learning, CRM, personalization, segmentation and many more.

The platform helps you, whether you have a small or medium business, to connect and engage with customers.

Some of the things you can perform with ActiveCampaign includes;

So, what kind of solution does ActiveCampaign solve?

Well, if you are running a personal business that involves selling products online, ActiveCampaign offers the following options;

• Email Marketing
• Marketing Automation
• CRM & Sales Automation
• Service & Support

But for industries, ActiveCampaign comes with the following solutions;

• Technology
• Blogger & Influencer
• Ecommerce
• Education
• Agency
• Small Business
• Entertainment & Events
• Travel & Hospitality
• Non-Profit
• Healthcare
• Real Estate
• Fitness & Nutrition
• Enterprise

Overall, ActiveCampaign is dedicated to bringing a lot of functionality together without overwhelming you. 

The tool also supports seamless integration with hundreds of applications to give you all the freedom you need to work with some of your favorite platforms.

What's also amazing about ActiveCampaign is that it's easy to set up and you don’t need to involve your credit card details to start using it.

So, for the best email marketing and automation experience, ActiveCampaign has proved its worth.

A Little History About ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing and email automation platform, a privately-held software company that was co-founded by Jason VandeBoom in 2003.

VandeBoom's objective was to provide multiple marketing solutions for small-mid-sized businesses.

How Does ActiveCampaign Work

ActiveCampaign comes with lots of powerful features, all of them under a simple-to-use dashboard.

Well known for its email marketing, ActiveCampaign works by automating your entire marketing system, hence creating a customer journey that will engage your customers and establish your brand loyalty.

So, the platform works in a number of ways, including site tracking, 3rd party apps integrations, artificial intelligence and many more, making it the most popular and preferred solution for CRM. 

All you need to get started with ActiveCampaign is to create your account, using the following simple steps;

Step 1: Go to the ActiveCampaign official website and sign up for a 14-Day Free Trial.

Step 2: Enroll for ActiveCampaign getting started courses for free.

Step 3: Enable site tracking 

Step 4: Create your first list

Step 5: Import your contacts 

Step 6: Segment your contacts

Step 7: Build your first automation

Step 8: Create and manage your sales pipeline

Is ActiveCampaign Right for Me?

The question of whether this platform is for you or not will largely depend on the nature of your business and your objectives.

For instance;

ActiveCampaign Review & Detailed Features Look Inside

ActiveCampaign comes with many powerful features that will make your marketing easier, faster, and more effective. 

Now, let's go into details on some of the key features you gain access to when using ActiveCampaign;

Email Marketing

ActiveCampaign is popularly one of the best email marketing platforms in the market.

And since they know that email is an essential method of communication in online marketing, they are dedicated to giving you powerful email marketing tools that you need for a successful campaign.

So, if you want to work with a platform to help you send a one-time email storm to everybody on your list, ActiveCampaign has got you covered.

The platform also enables you to target an email to a specific list segment.

You can even set up your emails to be sent to your specific contacts on a schedule by simply setting up your dates and letting the platform do all the work.

In addition to this, ActiveCampaign also enables you to create a simple message across to your customers, and you can tailor these messages for more personalized content. 

With ActiveCampaign, you can send nearly all types of emails, including Broadcast emails, Triggered emails, Scheduled emails, Targeted emails, Email autoresponders and Email funnels.

The platform helps you to send automated emails that are triggered depending on the following options;

Lists & Tags Management

ActiveCampaign offers a fantastic experience when it comes to managing your contact list. 

The platform enables you to segment your contacts into separate lists and you can also tag your contacts to segment your clients in a single list further.

And if you want to edit your contacts in bulk, the platform also allows you to do it with just a few clicks.

ActiveCampaign Split-Testing

ActiveCampaign Split-Testing functionality allows you to test different elements in order to choose the one that will perform best.

This tool is also easy to use as it offers different options for use.

These include;

i) A Traditional Approach

This approach is ideal, especially if you are new to A/B split testing functionality.

With this approach, you can compare a control against a variant. 

So, for instance, if you want to test two subject lines for your email and see which one will perform best in terms of the highest open rate, you compare the two different subjects. 

ActiveCampaign will then split your list and send control to half your contacts and the variant to the other half. 

ii) An Advanced Approach

With this approach, ActiveCampaign enables you to split-test your entire marketing automation system, creating a powerful experience for your A/B Testing functionality. 

This means that you will be able to set up an automated workflow that will split your contacts manually, send the control to the half and variant to the other a half, and choose the winning one.

The Email Capture Form

In order to capture your audience email address and other essential information, you need to integrate email capture forms in your campaigns. 

Fortunately, ActiveCampaign offers email capture forms that you can easily add to your site to enable you to capture their email address.

So with this tool, you can create a wide range of email capture forms, including an inline form (for lower tier) and a floating bar, a floating box, or a modal dialogue (on higher-tier plans).

ActiveCampaign Email Templates

ActiveCampaign's also offers professionally designed stunning templates so that you don’t have to struggle to create your templates from scratch.

However, compared to other email marketing solutions, you don’t have lots of options for choosing ActiveCampaign templates since there are only about 30 of them.

But if you are a professional entrepreneur who doesn't want to waste much of your time designing templates from scratch, the ActiveCampaign email templates still will save you a lot.

ActiveCampaign Sales & CRM

ActiveCampaign is also integrated with robust Sales & CRM tools, meaning you can manage your business and sell your products without using a different platform.

But when you manage or sell your products manually, the process might be inefficient and you will consume a lot of time to achieve your desired goals.

However, ActiveCampaign supports the automation of your sales.

With its custom-designed forms, you can generate quality leads that will help you grow your business potentially. 

ActiveCampaign also offers a central dashboard that helps you view your contact details and level of engagement, saving you the time of manually searching through different forms.

With its CRM tools, you can create new contacts and deals manually or based on specific marketing automation that you can easily set up.

The platform also enables you to manage lead scoring, either manually or automatically, so that you can segment your prospect as hot or cold leads.

For example, you can set up scoring rules based on email opens, clicks, and form submissions.

So when someone gets to a specific score, ActiveCampaign will automatically trigger a notification email so that you can follow up with them.

Generally, ActiveCampaign Sales & CRM tool is a time-saving feature that is highly effective.

Marketing Automation

ActiveCampaign comes with unique experience besides email marketing - a powerful and highly effective marketing automation.

The platform enables you to automate your entire campaign, which saves you lots of time. With its simple drag and drop automation builder, you can customize your workflows as you want and set up everything to run independently.

You can automate your marketing funnels to catch consumers at the point they are likely to buy.

With the ActiveCampaign marketing automation feature, you can also;

So, when you want to create a new automation with ActiveCampaign, the platform enables you to start from scratch or choose from stunning automation templates already available and are designed for specific tasks, including

So, with ActiveCampaign Marketing Automation, you can set up more complicated automated workflows and let the system do the work for you;

You can set your automation to work when;

ActiveCampaign Messaging, Chats & SMS

ActiveCampaign also comes with messaging functionality as a comprehensive communication option. 

So, if your objective is to leverage both email marketing and messaging, ActiveCampaign enables you to do that.

This feature includes the following options;

ActiveCampgain Customized Tracking & Reporting Tools

ActiveCampaign offers you amazing tracking and reporting tools that track all the marketing campaigns without limitation.

So, whatever metric you want to see, you will find.

Some of the things you can track includes;

The tool also enables you to go the extra mile of analyzing, But the report also allows you to analyze each contact. 

This will help you to design a new campaign, for example, that sends another email to everybody who didn’t open the first email. 

Machine Learning

With lots of valuable stats available about your visitor’s behaviour, the ActiveCampaign Machine Learning tools enable you to make the right decision to bring you better success. 

The tool is integrated into all the ActiveCampaign features.

For instance;

• For CRM: The tool can help you analyze and filter the most likely leads and understand better the types of deals that will close to focus more time and energy there.
• For Email Marketing & Automation: The tool will help you to send email campaigns to the right audience at the right time.

You can use this information to see where you need improvement to your campaign and adjust accordingly.

Integrations

ActiveCampains also integrate with other, more popular tools.

So, if you need to work with other third-party tools, ActiveCampaign fulfils that expectation.

It integrates with; 

ActiveCampaign Other Features

ActiveCampaign Pricing Plans

ActiveCampaign comes with 4 plans pricing that depends on the number of contacts you have.

These plans include (For 500 contacts...);

All 4 packages include advanced features for B2C, B2B and Ecommerce businesses, making its cost to be very competitive compared to other marketing automation solutions.

Here is my ActiveCampaign Pricing guide for in-depth ideas to choose the right option.

ActiveCampaign Discounts, Offers & Coupon Codes

ActiveCampaign offers 20% unique for nonprofits. What you need to do is to contact them with proof of non-profit status. 

You can also apply for this offer by simply contacting them.

Besides, ActiveCampaign also offers various discounts in case you need to opt for their yearly subscription.

For instance, for the 500 contacts package, you will get a discount of 40% for ActiveCampaign Lite Plan, 30% discount for the Plus plan, 18.87% for their Professional plan and 17.92% for the ActiveCampaign Enterprise plan.

Free Trial

ActiveCampaign offers a 14-Day Free Trial that allows you to test its functionalities before deciding on its paid packages.

Here is my post about ActiveCampaign Free Trial for more ideas Guarantee & Refund Policy

ActiveCampaign Testimonials & Success Stories

Where Does ActiveCampaign Fails?

Unfortunately, ActiveCampaign is missing any payment features, one of the essential features of all-in-one marketing solution tools.

So, if you were planning to market your products as well as receive sales through ActiveCampaign, this is bad news for you.

Don’t expect to use the platform to sell products or accept payments. You’ll have to look at other tools for those features. You also won’t be able to create order forms or use ActiveCampaign to add a shopping cart to your website.

ActiveCampaign Pros & Cons

ActiveCampaign Alternatives & Comparison

1. Kartra

While you can use ActiveCampaign primarily for running targeted email marketing campaigns and marketing automation, Kartra is more of an all-in-one marketing solution if you want to build sales funnels and run your business online.

So, in this Kartra vs ActiveCampaign comparison, I suggest you go with ActiveCampaign if you exclusively want an email marketing and automation tool.

But if you have the best platform that will enable you to perform everything in your business perfectly, including email marketing Automation, membership, funnels campaigns, calendar scheduling and many more, I would highly advise you to go with Kartra (read full Kartra review here).

2. ClickFunnels

When you compare both ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign, both tools are great to work with.

However, if your objective is to have a marketing platform that will help you quickly build sales funnels, landing pages and sell your products, ClickFunnels will be the best option.

But if you want a powerful email marketing and automation platform that empowers you to build your audience, run email campaigns, grow your email list and manage your audience - all under one roof, ActiveCampaign is the real deal in this category.

Here is a detailed ClickFunnels vs ActiveCampaigns Comparison for your idea, when you are just starting then need just a single platform but top ClickFunnels users use ActiveCampaign to supercharge their automation.

3. BuilderAll

In this ActiveCampaign vs Builderall Comparison, ActiveCampaign is all about email and email automation, while Builderall offers an all-in-one solution with a ton of different perks and features at an affordable price.

So, if you want a platform that gives you everything for building and growing your online business under one roof, I would advise you to go with Builderall.

ActiveCampaign FAQs

Q. Does ActiveCampiagn charge setup cost?

No. ActiveCampaign offers month to month plans with no setup fees or any hidden fees.

Q. Does ActiveCampaign restrict features with its free trial?

Yes. The free trial is limited, but you will still be able to access most of the ActiveCampaign features. More advanced features are locked in their higher-tier plan.

Q. Is ActiveCampaign a CRM platform?

Yes, ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation tool that also includes a CRM, which helps you to manage all your leads.

Q. What is ActiveCampaign used for?

You can use ActiveCampaign for anything from newsletter creation to contact management. It is one of the best all-in-one marketing automation software, with powerful features ideal for small and medium-sized businesses.

Q. Is ActiveCampaign better than Mailchimp?

ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp comparison, ActiveCampaign comes with more automation options, a CRM, and other powerful features that will help you generate leads. Mailchimp is better with email design and more affordable when you are just looking for a basic email solution platform.

Q. Is ActiveCampaign free to use?

No. They don’t have a free package. However, ActiveCampaign offers a free trial for 14 days, where you will have to buy a paid plan if you find them ideal for your business. They charge their packages depending on the number of contacts you want. 

Q. Do I need a lot of technical experience to use ActiveCampaign?

No. You don’t need to have any technical skills for you to use ActiveCampaign. The platform comes with easy to use drag and drop email and automation builder that enables you to create email marketing campaigns and marketing automation without hassle. Their customer support is also ready to help whenever you face challenges.

Q. How does ActiveCampaign 14 Days Free Trial work?

ActiveCampaign14-day free trial allows you to test the platform with a limit of 100 contacts and 100 emails sent. All the features that come with the free trial match with their professional features in a paid tier. ActiveCampaign does not charge you a coin during your free trial unless you manually upgrade to a paid account.

Q. What payment methods do ActiveCampaign accept?

ActiveCampaigns accept all major credit and debit cards. For annual plans, they also accept PayPal, checks, and wire transfers.

Q. Can ActiveCampaign help me migrate from another platform?

Yes, ActiveCampaign offers free migration services based on the plan you choose.

Q. Can I change plans?

Yes, they allow you to change your plan anytime you want with a single click on the dashboard.

Q. Does ActiveCampaign offer landing pages?

Yes. ActiveCampaign comes with an unlimited number of high-converting landing pages you can choose from. 

Q. Does ActiveCampaign support languages other than English?

Yes, the platform offers full support for the other languages including, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Danish, Simplified Chinese, Turkish  and Vietnamese

Final Thought

If you aim to have a comprehensive all-in-one email marketing solution that includes CRM and impressive, powerful marketing automation, you should consider ActiveCampaign.

The platform comes with unique features ideal for both starters and advanced marketers. 

Marketing automation is where ActiveCampaign shines. It enables you to perform every automation you ever imagine for your business, which helps you save a huge amount of time.

ActiveCampaign is also easy to set up and use. The platform is also the most affordable, starting at $15 or $70 with CRM and all the powerful features are included.

With all the powerful email marketing and automation features it offers, I recommend you look at ActiveCampaign 14 Days Free Trial and see if it fits your business.

However, keep in mind that all of the ActiveCampaign features might not be the best, especially for your specific business needs!

So, If you want the best all in one solution with powerful features, I recommend you choose Kartra.

And if you want to use a marketing platform that will help you quickly build sales funnels, landing pages and sell your products under one roof, you should probably check out ClickFunnels.

I hope this ActiveCampaign Review will help you to choose the right tool for your business.