ActiveCampaign vs ....

A detailed review of ActiveCampaign strengths & weaknesses.

Selling software and managed services to Enterprise level businesses was a rewarding career for many years; I loved simplifying and streamlining the processes various departments used, removing disparate systems and managing the change in the organization. Minimizing the consumption gap and increasing both productivity and profitability. When the world changed, and we were sent home, I couldn’t figure out who I could serve, much less the best way to serve them. So I spent years struggling to make money, learning new software & platforms. It was messy. Hopefully, by sharing some of what I learned in my struggles, you can navigate your digital path much more easily with a whole lot less of an investment!

So to start off, I want to share one of the leading platforms in the digital realm. I chose to cover ActiveCampaign because it is a solution that incorporates Email & Marketing automation, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and much more to improve data driven sales engagement. If you haven’t discovered the importance and potential of email marketing, you will. It is a fantastic revenue generator for almost any business that wants to stay top of mind to their audience. As if their mastery of email marketing wasn’t enough the platform captures a ton of data points that can help users enhance sales engagement, increase sales and improve customer satisfaction.

ActiveCampaign is a popular email marketing platform with industry-leading advanced automation features, analytics and reporting. While it’s not the most beginner-friendly platform on the market, it is a good value for businesses with large email lists as its entry-level plan costs $29 per month (with annual billing) and includes unlimited email sends per month for up to 250,000 contacts. To help you decide if it’s the right solution for your unique needs, the experts at Forbes Advisor put it to the test based on features and capabilities, pricing, customer support, and more with our hands-on ActiveCampaign review.

Pros

• All plans include unlimited email sends for up to 250,000 contacts
• Free contact migration service
• High deliverability rate
• Industry-leading automations
• Top-notch analytics and reporting
• Split test up to five emails at once
• SMS campaigns
• Free trial does not require a credit card

Cons

• No free plan
• Its free trial is very limited with a limit of 100 contacts and 100 emails
• It’s entry-level Lite plan offers very few integrations
• Its templates are fairly basic in terms of design
• It doesn’t have a built-in stock image library

ActiveCampaign The Basics

ActiveCampaign is a Chicago-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform and one of the oldest of its kind as it was founded in 2003.

In addition to its email marketing platform, it also offers marketing automation, customer relationship management (CRM) and sales engagement tools, giving users a comprehensive sales and marketing automation suite.

It’s designed with a focus on advanced automations and analytics.

The experts at Forbes Advisor ranked ActiveCampaign as the ninth-best email marketing platform in 2023 and the best email marketing platform for automations.

Pros

For businesses with large contact lists and high monthly email sends, ActiveCampaign is one of the best values in the market as all of its plans include unlimited monthly email sends for up to 250,000 contacts. For insight, most email marketing platforms have tiered pricing that is based on the number of contacts a user has and limits the number of emails they can send per month, making ActiveCampaign a very affordable solution.

Aside from price, ActiveCampaign is great for data-driven marketing teams that will take advantage of its advanced analytics and reporting capabilities, including website tracking and event tracking. It has industry-leading automations, giving users the ability to automate custom processes (or “workflows”) by segment. So, the experience for your contacts can be customized based on a variety of factors, such as how and when they subscribed, sales history, interests and actions.

Cons

Though ActiveCampaign is a robust email marketing platform, that’s not to say it’s the ideal solution for every business. To start, it doesn’t offer a free plan and its free trial is not only fairly short at just 14 days (shorter than most in the industry), but it’s also very limited in terms of functionality as users are limited to sending 100 emails to 100 contacts.

This hardly gives a new user enough time to become familiar with the platform, never mind learn all of its more advanced features. Speaking of which, it has a fairly steep learning curve compared to many of its competitors that are more beginner-friendly―although less feature-rich. So, while it offers a depth of useful features, these take time to learn and thus it’s not the email marketing platform for those that want the shortest learning curve possible.

How ActiveCampaign Works

ActiveCampaign is a SaaS platform that works to help users build workflows and automate email and SMS marketing campaigns although it’s a code-free platform. It has a drag-and-drop campaign builder where users can select and customize a pre-built template, select an audience, configure options for email tracking and either set up the triggers or schedule the email for a specific date and time. It does a good job of walking users through the setup process so, no matter which type of campaign you are building, it remains pretty straightforward.

After deploying an email campaign, ActiveCampaign tracks data and provides its users with detailed analytics and reports. This helps businesses make more informed decisions and optimizations that more effectively connect with their audiences, drive conversions and build loyalty. In return, it’s not surprising that ActiveCampaign is a very high-value email marketing platform that, when used strategically, has the potential to provide a tremendous amount of value for price.

ActiveCampaign Core Features

As a comprehensive platform, ActiveCampaign offers a variety of core features centered on marketing, sales, and e-commerce. For example, it has robust automation features that enable businesses to easily create email campaigns, foster leads and drive conversions. In addition to its email marketing suite complete with a user-friendly editor, it also has advanced tracking, data collection and reporting capabilities as well as a customer relationship management (CRM) to help users stay connected with contacts, build relationships and drive more sales.

Email Editor

ActiveCampaign uses a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) email editor that makes it easy to create numerous types of email marketing campaigns. Users can select a pre-built template, which more realistically serves as a layout. This is then customized in real time, making it easy for users to see how their email will look to its recipients.

For more advanced users, it also has the option to create text-only emails as well as custom HTML emails. This adds a good deal of flexibility for teams of varying skill and experience levels, while helping to ensure the result always appears professional.

Email and Marketing Automations

Users of ActiveCampaign can build workflows and enable automations based on the actions taken by the customer or prospect, referred to as triggers or advanced triggers. This could be as simple as sending a welcome email to a new subscriber or one to re-engage someone that abandons a cart. More comprehensive workflows can contain conditional segmentation that sends certain emails when the recipients perform a specific function like click a link, buy something or just when they open the email.

Data Collection, Tracking and Reporting

One of the things that makes ActiveCampaign a leader in the market is the focus it puts on data. By leveraging data collected, tracking details and reporting made available to the end user we can see aspects of the campaigns well beyond the standards of open and conversion rates. Incorporate website data of users by integrating Google Analytics. Reporting allows users to strategically develop highly effective campaigns. Leverage reports like predictive content, open / read data, email client trends and overall campaign performance to make your campaigns shine!

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

The CRM built into ActiveCampaign is lightweight compared to something like Salesforce, but it is effective for smaller businesses. It allows lead management, create and assign tasks and capture customer data that can be leveraged in the future. Due to my sales background, I find its other functionality to be most impressive. It enables you to create a pipeline, forecast deals (revenue), establish goals and track progress. Each of these aspects are quantifiable, making them easy to leverage to enhance growth. If you do not yet use a CRM this will be a huge advantage, in my opinion.

Why ActiveCampaign is a Leader

If you haven’t used an email marketing platform, you may be surprised to know that they typically track open and conversion rates. ActiveCampaign’s data tracking is on a whole new level. This is one of the big reasons ActiveCampaign is a market leader. ActiveCampaign gives users power to strategically plan to grow their businesses with advanced tracking, data collection and analytics. When creating a standard email, users can select various tracking and analytics options, like open and read tracking. There are also link tracking, reply tracking and Google Analytics tracking for further insights in web analytics. It’s the information age and ActiveCampaign provides the relevant information its users need to improve their customer engagements.

ActiveCampaign Plans & Pricing

Lite

ActiveCampaign’s entry level marketing plan, Lite, starts at $29 per month with annual billing rising to$39 per month on a month to month basis. The plan does not have a limit on the number of monthly emails unlike most email marketing plans, and it includes up to 250,000 contacts. The plan includes all of the core email marketing features, like prebuilt email templates, the drag-and-drop editor, audience segmentation, automations, analytics, reporting and more. ActiveCampaign is focused on growth of its own brand, too. It includes a free contact list migration for those who are moving to ActiveCampaign from another email marketing platform, helping to uniquely capture new customers.

The Lite plan is a great option for businesses with high monthly email sends that want to leverage data to be more effective. It is not geared toward ecommerce businesses. The integrations with major ecommerce platforms, such as Shopify, Square, WooCommerce and BigCommerce are available starting on the next level.

Plus

The second level plan, Plus, costs $49 per month with annual billing or $70 per month when doing month to month. It includes everything from the Lite plan, plus some great additional features, specifically ecommerce integrations. The Plus plan also includes useful features for Facebook advertisers like Facebook Custom Audiences and lead ads. Businesses on this plan can better leverage social efforts and develop strategic email campaigns that effectively resonate with audiences and drive more sales.

The Plus plan is ideal for businesses with email marketing experience because of the inclusion of more advanced features that can take their campaigns to new levels. ActiveCampaign has some of the most advanced automation tools, as well as some of the most advanced analytics and reporting capabilities available.

The Plus plan is a good fit for businesses that want to make decisions based on data to optimize and build effective campaigns.

Professional

ActiveCampaign’s Professional plan costs $149 per month with annual billing and $187 per month on a month to month basis. It is designed for marketing teams allowing up to five users versus the three user limit of the Plus plan. Including everything from the Plus plan and, at first glance, doesn’t offer a large number of additional features―especially for being three times the price. Pulling back the curtain allows us to see why the drastic price increase, as well as the inherent value it derives. It includes site messages, split automations, predictive sending (AI), attribution reporting, and integrations for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

The split automations are useful for businesses that test performance and optimize campaigns based on specific datasets. Predictive sending is not available on lower-level plans which is odd because it is usually a common feature on mid level email marketing plans. Granted it can be a useful feature as it optimizes send time automatically to maximize engagement. The Professional plan is best suited for businesses leveraging Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365 or that have outgrown the Plus level.

Getting Started

The setup for new users tends to be quick and easy. There are only a couple of simple steps to sign up for the 14-day free trial, which involves providing your pertinent information and answering a couple of basic questions about your business. ActiveCampaign’s free trial does not require a credit card, A free contact migration service is available to new users so they can transition from a competitive service easily. You can also go old school with a CSV file or copy and paste your contacts directly into the platform.

Consumption Gap

ActiveCampaign is easy to use for building and deploying automated email campaigns. Compared to competing email marketing platforms, ActiveCampaign is more intuitive, so automated campaigns even with advanced triggers and features are easier to build. However the more advanced features will have a longer learning curve and add to the consumption gap. In my opinion the gap with ActiveCampaign will still be substantially less than the competitors.

Creating an email campaign with ActiveCampaign is simple. Start by clicking the option to create a campaign. Name your campaign and choose the type of email campaign you wish to create. There are choices about triggers then you select an audience before customizing a template. Finally, schedule when to send the emails! That’s it!

Security

Data security has to be a priority for every business. How data is handled says a lot about a business and its concern for its customers. ActiveCampaign protects user data and takes a comprehensive approach to data security. Restricting data, classifying data, employing a secure software development lifecycle, are some of the approaches as well as continuous penetration tests being run by their in-house team and more. Outside of internal measures, ActiveCampaign gives users the ability to protect their data with multi factor authentication (MFA); session management to restrict abandoned sessions, and single sign-on (SSO).

Customer Service and Support

Although I have not used the available 24/7 customer support personally the reviews are promising. There is not a phone option for support but is available via live chat and email. Personally I prefer to speak to someone, but the reviews state that the live chat is so personable you feel like you are engaging a member of your own team. Another reason ActiveCampaign is a leader in the industry.

Exceptions

Typically free trials of a paid plan gives users access to the full paid plan for a set period of time. ActiveCampaign’s trial does not, so you will not be able to test all of the components without financial investment. Admittedly this is disappointing especially if you are just starting out and your learning curve is still exaggerated.

ActiveCampaign Alternatives

Campaign vs. Zoho Campaigns

ActiveCampaign compared to Zoho Campaigns unveils a glaring difference in price and function. Offering a robust free plan, Zoho Campaigns allows up to 2,000 contacts; becoming an obvious choice for budget-minded businesses or those with a small email list. ActiveCampaign costs a lot more with a starting price of $149 per month with annual billing. It is more aligned with the needs of strategic marketing teams trying to build more complex campaigns and acquire more meaningful data.

ActiveCampaign vs. Brevo

ActiveCampaign versus Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is another story. Brevo stands out with a free forever plan and unlimited contacts for $25 per month. Brevo has more modern email templates, with designs versus the layouts boasted by ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign is the better choice for data-driven teams and businesses because Brevo does not have the same level of data collection or tracking.

ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp

ActiveCampaign’s biggest competitors include Mailchimp, with over 13 million users worldwide. It’s a beginner-friendly platform with more budget-friendly plans. Mailchimp has a free forever plan servicing up to 50 contacts and 1,000 emails per month. ActiveCampaign becomes a better value for those who have over 1,500 contacts because Mailchimp is on a tiered pricing model increasing based on the number of contacts of a user. Mailchimp’s pricing jumps quickly when there are more than 1,500 users. This makes ActiveCampaign a more affordable option for businesses with contact lists in the thousands and Mailchimp for less than 1,500 contacts.

ActiveCampaign vs GrooveMail

GrooveMail is a leading autoresponder that is an ideal choice for beginners being part of a larger solution called Groove.CM. Groove ties together 17 different marketing tools so GrooveMail can be used for multiple automations based on triggers forms populated in blogs, funnels, sites, membership sites, ecommerce and more. Groove offers a free account with a majority of the features available. If you want to scale however you will need to buy into the full solution starting at $42 per month. ActiveCampaign becomes the better option if you only need the automations and tracking, but Groove has a distinct advantage if you are willing to migrate your sites, ecommerce stores, landing pages, etc to manage them under a single umbrella. Recently Groove released its AI engine. Like most of them, it is based off of ChatGPT but it has been trained specifically for Digital Marketers and our day to day needs.

Who Needs ActiveCampaign the Most?

ActiveCampaign is a great option for most small businesses. The user-friendly interface, automation capabilities and substantial performance insights are ideal for most users. It’s not the most affordable option for businesses with a small email list, but it is one of the most affordable options in the market for businesses with a few thousand or more contacts and / or high monthly emails with the inclusion of unlimited monthly sends and up to 250,000 contacts with all plans. It’s also a solid option for data-driven businesses because of the insights it provides to optimize user efforts building successful campaigns.

Conclusion

Since I am a terrible typist, I should wrap this up. ActiveCampaign proves why their growth continues with fair pricing and specific audiences. There are so many options that I did not cover, so do your research. Personally, I chose to go with Groove a couple of years ago and find it to be everything I need it to be. In fairness most of my revenue is not generated from my list at this point so my needs may change as my business evolves. Don't take my word for it, take it for a test drive: HERE!