ActiveCampaign Review: Thoughts from an Expert Copywriter
Is ActiveCampaign the game-changing automation software you need? A few things to understand before you commit…
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ActiveCampaign is best suited for SMEs/SMBs wanting to portray themselves as sophisticated brands, but they may not have the manpower or expertise to do it on their own.
As someone who has worked with various tools, overall, ActiveCampaign offers more robust features within an easier-to-use platform (compared to competitors).
Demo the software with a free trial of ActiveCampaign.
ActiveCampaign presents itself as one of the leading email and marketing automation software options on the market. And it definitely is… but is ActiveCampaign worth it?
I’m an experienced marketer (copywriter) who has personally used — or has worked with client teams that use – various types of marketing automation tools.
In this ActiveCampaign review, I want to break down what you’re getting and how these functionalities stack up against competitors.
If you haven’t already, demo the platform (for free). No credit card is required.
What Is ActiveCampaign Used For?
In other words, what exactly do you get with ActiveCampaign? Before we get into the meat of my ActiveCampaign review, let’s quickly get through some basics…
If you’re fairly new to the digital marketing or email marketing space, you may see different products and features and not totally understand what you’re getting when you invest in an email and marketing automation software.
As an email copywriter, I deal with these kinds of tools all the time; in my own business and alongside my clients! For many small business clients, I notice that they drastically under-utilize these tools.
Just for clarity, let me spell out how businesses can use email and marketing automation software in their business:
Elimination of Manual, Repetitive Tasks: Automates tasks, especially sending emails and follow-up messages, allowing you to focus on more important tasks in your day.
Consistent, Automated Workflows: Creates and manages workflows that run on their own, ensuring timely and consistent communication with every member of your audience.
Campaign Performance Tracking: Provides analytics and reporting on marketing campaign performance (e.g., open rates, click-through rates, conversion attribution).
Data-Driven Decision Making: Allows you to analyze customer behavior, identify trends, and ultimately, make better decisions to optimize your marketing strategies.
Scales with Your Business: Offers the scalability and flexibility to accommodate growing email lists, multiple marketing pipelines and complex campaigns as your business expands.
What Is Included When You Sign Up for ActiveCampaign?
As a business owner myself, I totally get it.
You know you need to invest in business software tools, but when you compare them, every provider says (pretty much) the same thing. Or, maybe each provider offers a unique suite of tools, and you’re not sure which is best.
Business software tools are inherently complex. Many people don’t understand everything they’re getting (or not) when choosing an email and marketing automation tool.
If you’re considering ActiveCampaign for email and marketing automation, let me lay out the core functionalities and some notable extras.
Core Products Included in Most ActiveCampaign Plans
There are various ActiveCampaign plans to choose from. For more details, click to head straight to their plan page.
Here, I want to talk about the core functionalities that make ActiveCampaign one of the top email and marketing automation software options available.
ActiveCampaign Automation Builder
When you sign up for ActiveCampaign, you can build out your own marketing automations, or choose from “automation recipes.”
What Kinds of Pre-Built Automation Templates Are Available in ActiveCampaign?
Product interest targeted follow-up
Engagement tagging
Abandoned cart sequences
Welcome series
Client onboarding series *Including sales team flows to ensure every client gets the same high-quality experience.
And more
If you have a sales team, there are many ways to create ActiveCampaign automations that will take care of all the reminders and routine back-and-forth with leads.
From the sales team’s perspective, much of the tedious follow-up work is eliminated, giving them more time and energy to focus on higher impact tasks. From a lead’s perspective, these automations ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.
What I Really Like About the ActiveCampaign Automation Builder…
ActiveCampaign automations have pretty sophisticated customer segmentation settings, which many other automation platforms can’t offer.
For example: ActiveCampaign allows you to set up very specific “goals” (e.g., lead has opened the email, lead has clicked to view). Basically, the lead gets tagged based on how they engaged, and then the messaging can change to target them more effectively.
From a marketing and copywriting perspective, using this feature alone can drastically increase your conversion rates.
When I work with clients – especially those lacking more sophisticated automation software – we often have to “generalize” some of our messaging.
With competitor automation systems, you can track where the lead is in the sequence, but you can’t always change the messaging with such granularity as you can in ActiveCampaign.
You can also adjust your automations based on contacts who are and who are not converting. Now, this can be done with competitor systems – but usually – you have to create very complex, multi-branched automations that are solely based on conditional “if/else” reasoning.
ActiveCampaign Email Builder
ActiveCampaign’s email builder prioritizes ease of use, which is great for small business owners who don’t want to spend hours making their emails look “just right.”
I am very much a perfectionist and typically want to tweak things, but these pre-built email templates satisfy my need for professional-looking, clean emails.
Word of advice: Just use ActiveCampaign’s pre-built email templates and move on!
More recently, there have been some updates to the original ActiveCampaign email builder. The new version makes email design so much faster and easier – especially if you like to add brand personalization and flair.
In the past, I’ve run into various issues with email builders. One of the most disgruntling issues is always how long it takes to customize your emails, even from a template.
As a copywriter, I don’t have design skills. But I do run branches of my own business, and I’ve had to create visually appealing branded emails.
Nowadays, many email builders are modular and “drag-and-drop,” which is great!
Most email design tools I’ve used are too modular. If I want to change the background color of one section, I have to go to each section of the email and update it. Not with ActiveCampaign.
With the newer version of ActiveCampaign templates, you have the option to change individual modular sections, or you can update the entire email as a whole through the “Appearance” tab.
This override is great for the detail-oriented perfectionists who can’t stand if their background hex color is off by 1-2 hues. I get you, and I see you!
ActiveCampaign lets you make changes to the overall email, which is a huge time saver.
Another perk of the updated email builder? You can quickly change ALL your headers (i.e., fonts, size, color, spacing) throughout the entire email based on heading hierarchies.
You’d think this would already be standard practice, but I have used email builders that cannot do this. In other email builders, you have to go to each header and reset the settings one by one. In those cases, I always jot down all the details or risk forgetting my original settings.
ActiveCampaign Form Builder
Let’s talk about the notables of the ActiveCampaign form builder.
The drag-and-drop form interface is very easy to use, and this is very common in competitor products as well. You can also get very granular about what information you want to capture in your form, which again, is standard.
From a marketing and copywriting perspective, the more granular you can get with your forms, the better your messaging can be written (and the better your conversions).
Since ActiveCampaign’s form builder is very easy to set up and customize, you can leverage forms to capture leads based on specific circumstances, including:
Leads who want to be a part of your newsletter
Leads who want to book a consult
Leads who want a specific lead magnet
Leads who want a software demo
And on top of all that, you can obtain so many other details to further segment your audience.
I always tell my clients that the more targeted and specific we can be in segmenting out the target audience into different groups, the better the messaging will be.
And as you would hope, ActiveCampaign forms integrate seamlessly into the other ActiveCampaign tools.
For example: The submission of a form can trigger an entire automation series (standard practice). However…
What I specifically like about ActiveCampaign forms is the ability to automatically assign a source to the form.
If I have a form for a whitepaper that I’m promoting on Meta, I can designate that the lead came from Meta.
With other tools, I’ve had to create unique URLs to track which form was used and where it came from. In ActiveCampaign, you just create a form and “label” where it came from – way faster and way more streamlined!
There is also a tab to easily view form performance, which obviously is crucial to know.
I’ve used website builders and form tools that either don’t give you these insights, or, it’s very difficult to generate a bird’s eye view of how all forms are performing against each other.
With other tools, I’ve had to manually assign tags to track form sourcing and/or sift through long lists of forms manually to assess conversion rates.
ActiveCampaign Landing Page Builder
As a solopreneur in charge of my own websites, I’ve done a ton of hands-on landing page work.
And when I work with clients – while I don’t design landing pages for them – I’ve had to work alongside the designers and developers once my copywriting was in layout.
Needless to say, I’ve seen all sorts of landing page builders, from easy drag-and-drop builders to code-heavy tools that are extremely easy to mess up.
Just like many landing page tools, the ActiveCampaign Landing Page Builder allows you to start from scratch or choose from a wide selection of pre-built templates that you can further customize. Again, this is standard practice.
Things That Stand Out About the ActiveCampaign Landing Page Builder
You can add a countdown timer, which is not always available in landing page tools. When I’ve used other landing page tools, oftentimes you have to embed code or a plug-in to install a countdown timer. From a marketing perspective, attaching a countdown timer to your page adds urgency and can inspire significantly more conversions. So, if you can automatically include a countdown timer on your sales page… do it for the greater revenue potential!
Connecting an ActiveCampaign landing page to an ActiveCampaign form is seamless. If you’ve previously used a bunch of disjointed business and website tools, you may be aware of how finicky things can get when connecting a website landing page to a form that is supposed to trigger the “next step” for a lead. I have heard many colleagues and clients talk about how they thought they had their lead form set up correctly on their website, only to discover that it wasn’t working for weeks. And they missed out on leads. The connection between your forms and landing pages HAS to work! Luckily, when you bundle these components within the same digital marketing system (such as with ActiveCampaign), you know it all works together.
Side note: I’m hypervigilant about testing all my website forms on a monthly basis, but you really don’t have to worry about that with ActiveCampaign.
ActiveCampaign Pipeline Builder (Sales CRM)
If you’ve never used CRM pipeline builders, the amazing thing about them is that they track your leads and customers and assign a dollar value to them.
This helps you understand where your revenue is coming from and when each lead is profitable.
In ActiveCampaign’s pipeline builder, I like how you can choose to view your pipelines horizontally or vertically. This is not offered in all other builders.
Especially if you’re new to pipelines, sometimes the flow of it can be confusing, so having a vertical option is nice. Learn more about the benefits of CRM here.
Reporting Tools
Unless you have an entire analytics team to monitor your KPIs – luckily – ActiveCampaign has robust reporting options to give you quick insights about your marketing efforts.
Many of these reporting tools are now industry standard in terms of what competitors are offering, but I want to make sure you’re aware of what ActiveCampaign can track for you.
What ActiveCampaign Can Track
Automation performance
Goal achievement *Based on highly specific goals built into your automations.
Sales engagement
Contact trends *Other platforms allow you to gather contact data; ActiveCampaign goes a step further to showcase trends.
Campaign performance *Open/Read trends, predictive trends, etc.
Website form and page metrics
Deals and funnel performance
Conversion attribution
Marketing revenue
Some custom reports
Integrations
Another concern that is front of mind for many business owners and marketers is how well their email and marketing automation software can integrate with other tools.
The last thing you want is to invest in a tool that can’t integrate easily! In the past, I’ve run into that issue or have seen it happen with my clients. In such cases, the chosen product was a bit of an “oddball,” and things couldn’t connect seamlessly. Or, these “oddball” tools needed the expertise of a web developer to get them to work.
Luckily that is not the case with ActiveCampaign…
ActiveCampaign has integrations with all sorts of tools, including common ones like tools for HR, finance, CRMs and SMS marketing. However, ActiveCampaign can also accommodate integrations for things like e-sign documents, live chat messaging and more.
Special ActiveCampaign Features to Highlight
I want to talk about a few more notable features of ActiveCampaign that make it stand out from competitors.
These ActiveCampaign features are actually very small when compared to the main tools they offer, but I’m including them here because – I believe – they can have a significant impact on your branding, sales and marketing conversions.
Seriously!
Brand Kits
This is a very small feature of ActiveCampaign that I’m sure is overlooked by many of its users…
You might be familiar with “brand kits” from tools like Canva, but what’s interesting is that ActiveCampaign allows you to create a brand kit that can automatically be applied to your landing page templates, email templates and more.
ActiveCampaign even places the brand kit feature within your main account settings – where you have your business name, address, domains – so you KNOW the brand kit is something that can be applied across your account.
Speaking from experience, having your ActiveCampaign Brand Kit automatically applied is a huge time saver, especially when you’re first diving into brand new software.
The learning curve and time commitment to onboard can be incredible!
What’s cool about the ActiveCampaign Brand Kit is that you have the option to just type in your website URL, and it will generate a brand kit for you (if you want a totally hands-off approach). You can also set a few customizations manually and apply it.
Open/Read Trends for Emails
As an email copywriter, I’m very attuned to how an audience interacts with emails. And as a marketer or business owner yourself, you should be too.
I’ve used other email and marketing automation tools – all of which have analytics – but I oftentimes find myself having to manually analyze email open rates and read behaviors to some extent.
Yes. Most email marketing software will show you open rates, and even heatmaps, to help you understand your email engagement.
However, one tiny ActiveCampaign feature that caught my attention from the get-go is called “Open/Read Trends.”
This feature shows email opens by weekday and email opens by hour, which is incredibly helpful to know – especially if you’re trying to figure the best days and times to send emails.
After all, when you send your emails is almost as important as what you say in your emails!
What’s So Great About ActiveCampaign?
Aside from what I’ve mentioned here, ActiveCampaign maintains a positive reputation with many customers and organizations.
In fact, ActiveCampaign claims they are the most positively-reviewed marketing automation platform in the world. Here are a few stats that speak to ActiveCampaign’s ongoing success:
12,500+ positive customer reviews
4.5 out of 5 star rating (out of 13,500 G2 reviews)
Top 50 in best software for small businesses (G2)
Top 100 in highest satisfaction products (G2)
Top 50 in marketing and digital advertising products (G2)
What’s Not So Great About ActiveCampaign?
I’m not here to hide anything. No business software tool is perfect! Let me talk about a few disadvantages and downfalls to choosing ActiveCampaign.
Things to Consider Before Investing in ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign pricing increases as your contact list grows: No one likes to pay more, but ideally, more contacts means more revenue for you (as long as your email marketing copy is converting well).
ActiveCampaign is not great for highly complex, massive businesses: Small to mid-size businesses with basic to moderately complex marketing needs can usually find everything they need in ActiveCampaign.
ActiveCampaign is not the most cost-effective option if you’re just sending newsletter emails: Even the lowest ActiveCampaign plan offers a large suite of features, so if you don’t plan on utilizing all of them, you may want to consider cheaper options.
ActiveCampaign features can seem too complex for new or unfamiliar users: This one I don’t really agree with, but it has been said in user reviews. I actually think ActiveCampaigns is easier to understand at the outset than other tools!
More ActiveCampaign FAQs
I’ve already covered a ton in this ActiveCampaign review, but here are a few more FAQs to sift through at your leisure.
Is ActiveCampaign Worth It?
While I truly can’t make that decision for you, I can give you a few insights based on common circumstances.
If you want to save time without compromising the professional “look” of your email marketing: Yes, ActiveCampaign is worth it.
If you want to automate your email marketing, website marketing and other funnels – without needing technical expertise: Yes, ActiveCampaign is worth it.
If you want to ensure your landing pages, forms, emails and automation all “talk” to each other correctly – without having to embed crazy codes: Yes, ActiveCampaign is worth it.
If you want simplified, but insightful campaign metrics to grow your business: Yes, ActiveCampaign is worth it.
If you want an established email and marketing automation product that can accommodate all your integrations and support needs: Yes, ActiveCampaign is worth it.
And, if you’re still unsure, I recommend testing it out with an ActiveCampaign free trial.
How Much Does ActiveCampaign Cost?
ActiveCampaign is often more expensive than relevant competitors. However, this price difference may be substantiated by ActiveCampaign’s more robust features and enhanced capabilities.
Businesses that need or want more complex marketing and automation capabilities should consider ActiveCampaign.
For the most up-to-date pricing information, visit their website.
ActiveCampaign Pricing
Pricing varies depending on the ActiveCampaign plan you choose. Currently, there are four ActiveCampaign plans: Starter, Plus, Pro and Enterprise.
When you go to the ActiveCampaign pricing page, you can use an interactive pricing calculator that adjusts the pricing based on the number of contacts you have.
You’ll also see a detailed overview of what features are included within each plan.
Is ActiveCampaign Easy to Use?
Yes! Compared to my experience with other types of marketing automation software, ActiveCampaign’s user interface is very clean, simple and easy to use.
When I first started using ActiveCampaign, I watched their initial tutorial videos and poked through all the tabs and features, which took me less than an hour to complete.
Setting up your domains, account information and starting to create your first campaigns will take additional time, but the starter videos were very helpful!
Compared to email marketing and automation tools like HubSpot and Instantly, ActiveCampaign is significantly easier to use at the outset.
ActiveCampaign Review: The Takeaways
While I can’t make any decisions on behalf of your business, I hope this ActiveCampaign review was insightful, practical and helpful.
Overall, ActiveCampaign is more robust than its competitors, but it also has a higher price tag. However…
ActiveCampaign’s ROI lies deep within the time saved, the ease of operating your business and the potential for significantly better conversions, thanks to microtargeting and data-driven insights.
I highly encourage you to (at least) demo the platform with a free trial. It won’t take you long to gain a good understanding of what is offered and if it is right for your business.
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ActiveCampaign Review
