ActiveCampaign Review: What is New in ActiveCampaign?
Do your emails deliver to the inbox of your target audience? Have you been losing money because your email service provider delivers your mails to the spam folder instead?
If that is you, take my word, you are not alone. Fussy email deliverability is a common challenge to most digital marketers. And it’s quite expensive, causing most online marketers to enter into depression.
But don’t worry! Maybe ActiveCampaign is what you are looking for. Because it’s known for its high deliverability rate. Before you hurriedly run into conclusion, this ActiveCampaign review will reveal whether it’s only high email deliverability rate that it can offer or are there other things going for or against it.
Come with me on this journey and let us see if there are additional benefits that ActiveCampaign offers over other email service providers.
Table of Contents
ACTIVECAMPAIGN REVIEW
This Chicago-based automation service boosts that it helps its 150,000 clients write fewer emails while achieving better results. This is highly commendable, if there’s proof.
They further claimed that they saved a whooping 38.4 million hours through automated workflows between July 2020 and July 2021, That equally sounds like a good value for money considering that their pricing structure is on the higher end of the price range of other competitors.
But does the value justify the price? Let’s find out.
They appear to be a strong email marketing tool, with a variety of features and connections, as well as quick and courteous support.
In this ActiveCampaign review, I’ll look at the company to see if it lives up to its lofty claims.
I’m sure you may have read some ActiveCampaign reviews online, and while they are typically positive, they may not provide you with the complete picture.
My ActiveCampaign review is methodical, and it is based on my actual experience and knowledge of hundreds of different basic and complex marketing automation solutions.
Summary of the ActiveCampaign Review
ActiveCampaign offers practically everything you need in a mail marketing system, yet its intricate automation might be tough to understand.
Their price structure may scare a lot of people away, especially the newbies and those on shoestring budget but to a lot of others, it’s moderately okay.
Remember that in the beginning of this ActiveCampaign review, I asked what is new in ActiveCampaign? Well, one of the things new in ActiveCampaign is the adjustment of their price structure.
The price structure is as follows according to the list size:
1000: Lite ($29), Plus ($49), Professional ($149), Enterprise (Negotiable)
2,500: Lite ($49), Plus ($99), Professional ($149), Enterprise-Negotiable
5,000: Lite ($79), Plus ($149), Professional ($149), Enterprise -Negotiable
10,000: Lite ($139), Plus ($229), Professional ($339), Enterp- Negotiable
25,000: Lite ($229), Plus ($379), Professional ($549), Enterp. – Negotiable
50,000: Lite ($339), Plus – Negotiable, Profess- Negotiable, Enterp- Nego
75,000: Lite (($449), Plus-Nego, Profess- Nego, Enterp – Negotiable
100,000: Lite ($549), Plus – Nego, Profess. – Nego, Enterp – Negotiable
100,000+: Lite – Nego, Plus- Nego, Profess.- Nego, Enterp.- Negotiable
All the premium features include an in-built CRM, lead scoring, landing pages, and SMS messaging.
One of its major advantages is marketing automation. You may use their CRM software to automate list and list maintenance, as well as sales, in addition to autoresponders, which can be triggered by a number of situations.
This is a good deal as it allows you to attach notes to contacts, organize appointments, send them direct messages, and do a variety of other things.
Another pretty component they have is ‘Conversations’. With conversations you can send personalized messages to your website visitors in order to improve your CRM and create a sales funnel to help you convert most of them.
This is what I call ‘compact action”, because with all of your necessary information and activities packed in one place, you have an overview of how your sales and marketing campaigns are performing right away.
Having fewer vendors for your numerous digital marketing campaigns can save you money and time.
As we go on, let’s take a closer look at ActiveCampaign:
Although I like and use ActiveCampaign, its cost should be considered. Despite the fact that the most affordable plan starts at $29, prices quickly climb as additional users are added.
ActiveCampaign is on the more expensive end of the email marketing price spectrum. You may compare it to other applications to see how it compares. Check out my Aweber review
The Benefits and Drawbacks:
PROS
Effective Automation: ActiveCampain has one of the best marketing automation platforms on the email marketing space. This essential ActiveCampaign feature is both powerful and simple to use.
Integrated engagement enables you to combine all of the channels accessible in automation marketing campaigns, sales follow-ups, text messages, and other channels. It is a wonderful marketing tool for Shopify because of its functionality.
Extensive Reporting: Complete reporting on all sections, including click-maps, geo-tracking, and page views. Purchase tracking is accessible on higher Shopify subscriptions.
Bigcommerce, Woocommerce, and other e-commerce systems, as well as ideas for your sector, can help you enhance purchases, loyalty, and engagement.
Great Delivery: In my deliverability testing, ActiveCampaigns showed to be one of the best systems for getting emails sent.
Free Migrating: ActiveCampaign will manage your migration from another email marketing platform for free.
CONS
Steeper Learning Curve: If you’re searching for a quick and straightforward email solution, this may be regarded a negative. There are more basic email newsletter services available, so if this is all you need, look elsewhere.
No Complimentary Plan: Unfortunately, there is no free plan available (only a free trial). If you only require a simple instrument, there are less expensive options.
Client Preview Fees: For a charge of $1 per test/client, you may see how your newsletter looks in different email clients.
Is ActiveCampaign your best option for email marketing?
Yes! If you’re serious about marketing automation:
Outside of Systeme.io, ActiveCampaign is by far the most powerful automation tool I’ve investigated, enabling you to design virtually any automation you can think, such as triggered campaigns, sales follow-ups, automated segmentation, dynamic email content, and so on.
You can send one-to-one sales emails directly from your inbox if you wish.
Yes! If your business need an integrated sales and marketing platform:
The built-in CRM in ActiveCampaign links to all of your email marketing data, allowing sales teams to reply quickly. Lead score and social data might also help you automate your sales follow-up actions.
Yes! If you require a tool for multi-channel marketing:
Aside from email marketing, ActiveCampaign lets you develop landing pages, send SMS and customized ‘Conversations’ to website visitors, automate chatbots, and even manage how Facebook adverts are presented to contacts.
It’s a great option if you want to centralize a major chunk of your marketing and provide your customers a better overall experience. However, if you need a low-maintenance, beginner-friendly instrument, this is not the instrument for you:
ActiveCampaign is a complex application that takes significantly more work to understand than other options. Not to mention the continual maintenance necessary to configure, operate, and enhance email programs.
All that is necessary is simple automation:
If you only need to create simple email sequences (such as a welcome campaign), I recommend Systeme.io, which is considerably easier to use. Otherwise, you’ll be paying for a plethora of features (and complexity) that you won’t utilize.
And, if you’re not sure if ActiveCampaign is right for you: There is no free plan, and with a 14-day trial period, you won’t have much time to determine if it’s right for you.
The design of ActiveCampaign is extremely user-friendly, with easily accessible menus.
The dashboard has a ‘Getting Started’ slider to aid novice users, as well as demo data to demonstrate how to use sections most effectively.
The Content Manager is a valuable tool that centralizes all of your content, making it easier to keep everything organized. With so many features, it may be a little perplexing at first for complete beginners.
Newsletter Production Editor:
The drag-and-drop email builder is simple to use and has a few handy features. The first is that you can save custom ‘blocks’ to reuse later, and the second is that you can examine other people’s edits, similar to Google Docs.
However, because of the large number of auto-saves that occur every minute, it may be difficult to recognize your prior action to reverse! Another issue I ran into was setting columns. However, in the case of products, the new product block came in handy. Surprisingly, there is no easy way to preview your newsletter; instead, go to the email settings.
Personalization? Yes!
Conditional content provides a basic If/Then/Else logic that allows you to show alternative information to different customers based on certain characteristics such as interests, links visited in the past, and so on.
You may now add unique signatures to one-to-one emails using the new signature personalization tag.
Classic newsletters, SMS, autoresponders, A/B testing, RSS triggers, and complicated automation are all accessible as email formats.
ActiveCampaign does not have a separate transactional email server.
Template Design Options & Flexibility:
ActiveCampaign provides over 125 modern, responsive templates. You may quickly preview them in another window on both mobile and desktop. Several tools inside the email builder offer much more features/content blocks. On the Plus and above subscriptions, users receive a free personalized email design.
Email Marketing Automation: Their marketing automation is without peer. It’s quite powerful and easy to use, allowing you to automate follow-up campaigns, change a number of criteria, and do a variety of other things.
All of this is done with the help of a simple flowchart-style automation builder.ation. You may also create your own automation from start.
List Administration:
In comparison to other applications, its automation functionalities, which allow you to organize persons into lists, making it easier to keep contacts and lists is a strong point for them.
Opt-in and out Forms of Registration:
It’s simple to use and lets you create your own custom fields. Aside from standard responsive forms, you may also create floating forms and models.
If you use Shopify, you can embed a form on your site quickly rather than copying and pasting it into your store’s code. This form may include a discount code to persuade customers to make a purchase.
Deliverability: ActiveCampaign routinely outperforms in my deliverability testing, with emails landing in the major inboxes of the most popular providers such as Gmail, AOL,, and Outlook.
ActiveCampaign’s deliverability is typically consistent, which is great news for email marketers.
Reports and Analysis: Reports on nearly anything are possible (opens, click-maps, page visits, geo-tracking). Some Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and other plans provide e-commerce reports.
The “Recommendations for you” section provides helpful guidance on next steps. There are also contact trends, transaction reports, chat conversion, automation reports, and other data available.
Custom reports, on the other hand, are only available on the Enterprise plan.
Languages:
Both their website and customer support are available in English and five other languages. You may change the language of your user profile to one of over 20 different languages (including Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, etc.).
Additional Advantages:
Spam and design testing
Both of these options are accessible. Spam testing is just a ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ that you receive before sending out your campaign, with no aspects to help you understand the outcome.
A preview of an email client is also available, although it costs $1 per test/client, which seems a little excessive. You may now send a test email for approval to up to 5 email recipients.
Bounce management? Yes!
They are considered hard bounces after three soft bounces and are placed on an exclusion list.
Blocklist? Yes!
This is the aforementioned ‘exclusion list.’ You may directly import and export contacts into this list. There is unlimited data and image storage available. Images with dimensions more than 1000px will be scaled.
Authentication is a beneficial feature, too.
SPF and DKIM are both supported.
Yes, you are eligible to a free domain, but only if you subscribe to a higher-tier plan. Using your own tracking domain might help to strengthen the corporate branding of your mailing.
Yes, several levels of account access are available.
This is a highly customizable system with no preset parameters. Using checkboxes, you define the group names as well as the particular access for each of those groups. As an added security layer, 2-Factor Authentication is available.
Integrations? Yes!
PayPal, Shopify, Google Analytics, and WordPress are among the connectivity options available in ActiveCampaign. It also works with numerous forms and survey platforms, including Typeform and SurveyMonkey.
Because they are linked with Zapier, you should have no problem locating what you’re searching for. All integrations may be found in this section.
They provide a Landing Page Builder.
The templates are various and easy to personalize. You can host landing pages on a custom domain or subdomain. On the Professional plan and higher, you may create unique online experiences by hiding or removing individual elements.
You might also include buttons that allow you to dial a phone number, download a file, or send an email.
Their customer service is excellent.
Support is prompt and courteous, available across all channels, and available in a variety of languages. Their information library is really useful and easily accessible.
I had no difficulty finding appropriate search results. They also provide video classes, webinars (both live and recorded), and one-on-one instruction on the ‘Plus’ plan. All choices include live chat as well, but no phone support.
My overall assessment. 4.5/5
ActiveCampaign is one of the most powerful email marketing solutions on the market, with virtually no gaps in professional capabilities.
Small companies will benefit from robust sales automation, automatic subscription management, and new features that are constantly added.
Let’s Take a Closer Look at ActiveCampaign’s Highlights:
As previously stated, ActiveCampaign includes a wide range of professional features. Let’s break them down and evaluate what works and what may be improved:
Marketing Automation using ActiveCampaign:
Their automation feature is excellent. Marketing automation is featured in ActiveCampaign’s competitors’ solutions, however it is not always at the forefront.
On the other hand, ActiveCampaign has made this their major focus, allowing you to automate nearly anything: campaigns, offers, e-commerce automation, SMS, contact management, and so on.
Marketing automation is available at all levels, while sales automation is only available to Plus plan customers (beginning at $49/mo, if your email list size is about 1000) and higher.
ActiveCampaign is the exclusive provider of one-to-one email automation. Automations will be triggered instantly from interactions with leads in your inbox. The only disadvantage is that you must be on the Professional plan ($149/mo depending on the size of your list) or above, which is not cheap.
ActiveCampaign has consistently introduced new services, notably in the sphere of email marketing, which is impressive.
ActiveCampaign automation templates:
My research of ActiveCampaign’s automation templates, also known as’recipes,’ revealed that the templates are well-designed and easy to alter.
There are a lot of alternatives (750 in all!) and the categories make it easy to find what you’re looking for.
Other platforms often provide more broad templates. However, ActiveCampaign provides a wealth of integration-specific templates, such as the following Shopify automation recipes:
Shopify automation via ActiveCampaign:
The only negative is that with so many layouts to choose from, you may feel overwhelmed. Certain recipes may appear to be duplicated. However, if you carefully examine the templates, you will detect slight differences.
I can see how this would be puzzling for some, but my experience has shown me that the more specialized your marketing, the better.
ActiveCampaign SMS automation:
The Plus and above levels feature SMS automation. You may connect to several technologies, such as ClickSend, MessageMedia, and Twilio, and ActiveCampaign provides a number of automation templates:
ActiveCampaign SMS templates:
Remember that SMS transmission is only available on the Plus plan and above, which starts at $49, per month, depending on the size of your list.
To have your own unique SMS number for sending texts, you must have to be the more expensive Enterprise account.
CRM ActiveCampaign:
ActiveCampaign, as previously stated, contains a CRM.
This feature, which can be utilized in conjunction with sophisticated email marketing skills, will appeal to small business owners looking for contact management software.
After much testing, I learned that the application was quite straightforward to use. You may establish many deal pipelines and edit or add new phases to meet your own sales process. The drag-and-drop program simplifies manually moving transactions along the pipeline.
This collection of CRM automation templates, which includes everything from lead scoring to task management, will assist the more advanced user in the following ways:
CRM Activities in ActiveCampaign:
This function is only available to Plus plan or above subscribers and costs much more depending on the size of the mailing list.
It’s obviously not cheap, but in view of what it contains (email and SMS sending, sophisticated sales and marketing automation, Facebook Custom Audience integration, contact and lead scoring, and so on), the cost is worthwhile.
When I compared ActiveCampaign to the finest CRM software for small businesses, I discovered that the majority of services were priced per user.
ActiveCampaign Landing Pages:
ActiveCampaign offers a total of 56 responsive landing page templates. You can design your own template and save it as a custom page for future use, if you prefer it that way.
ActiveCampaign landing page templates:
After assessing the designs and editor, I’d say they’re trendy and up to date; but, moving blocks around the page while editing isn’t as straightforward. It’s impossible to move an element slightly up or down, though you can manage to move it between the stated areas.
I believe ActiveCampaign did this on purpose to make sure that everything is in place, but it restricts your freedom to create things constructively as obtainable with other website and landing page builders, such as Wix.
I also couldn’t find a way to attach to photos, which was problematic.
Builder of landing pages for ActiveCampaign:
The ability to integrate dynamic content (web customisation) so that each user sees just what is relevant to them is a remarkable (and unique) feature of ActiveCampaign’s landing pages.
This enables you to intelligently target leads, for as by simply presenting articles relevant to their area or niche, or by displaying things based on their purchase history.
Tracking may be enabled on your pages as well.
So, what is my concluding word on ActiveCampaign?
I recommend ActiveCampaign to small businesses looking for good value. They offer excellent functionality and a high rate of delivery.
If you’re tight-up on cash, however, you might consider other cheaper options like Systeme.io.
It is tough to criticize ActiveCampaign because they not only give almost everything you need in an email marketing platform, but they do it extremely well.
The data includes information on almost every element, including page visits, geo-tracking, openers, e-commerce, and more.
The email builder, which does not deliver as seamless an experience as other services available and has a few unpleasant components, is one area that may be improved (like the revision history).
Customer service is exactly as advertised: courteous, helpful, and prompt. The email and chat support option is wonderful, making you feel that you are dealing with real human beings.
Their deep data base is easily searchable and, for the most part, returns desired results. One-on-one training and instructive webinars are included in their ‘Plus’ subscription, which is a nice extra.
In this ActiveCampaign review, I’ve tried to demonstrate why it’s one of the best options if you’re searching for an all-in-one digital marketing platform. They have an advantage over their rivals on their marketing and sales automation. Who doesn’t love automated operations, anyway?
Because of the somewhat steeper learning curve, you’ll have to put in a little more time and maybe spend a little more money, but your business will profit.
If, on the other hand, all you need is a simple means to send out newsletters, GetResponse could be a better fit.
Aside from that, whether you’re a customer or not, ActiveCampaign offers a retinue of useful freebies, like content and social media calendar templates, subject line generator and others.
The Free Plan.
ActiveCampaign does not have a free but rather offers a 14-day free trial.
I hope you found this ActiveCampaign review useful. Please leave a comment if you feel there’s something I’ve not added. I’ll do my best to update it, if and where necessary.
If you wish to try out the 14-day free trial, click on this button below.
Great article! Active Campaign has been a great addition to my business toolkit. Thanks for your review.
active campaign certified
I’m glad you got value from the article.