What is ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign (www.activecampaign.com/) is one of the most popular software of Email Marketing Automation with a CRM integrated sales tool that allows you to cultivate potential contacts, create email marketing campaigns with an intuitive drag & drop editor and automated workflows based on numerous triggers.
Let's go over an overview of ActiveCampaign's functionality.
How ActiveCampaign works
ActiveCampaign's strengths are 4: Email Marketing and DeliverabilityMarketing Automation and CRM. Let's see them in detail.
Email Marketing
Let's start with the Email Marketing features (https://www.activecampaign.com/email-marketing): ActiveCampaign offers
- Six types of campaigns to get you started, from broadcast emails to emails sent automatically based on certain triggers;
- a drag & drop block editor that also allows you to hide and show specific content blocks on mobile devices and format them as you like;
- Pre-built email templates and the ability to create templates that can be reused for future campaigns.
Delivery Rate (Deliverability)
The Deliverability (https://www.activecampaign.com/it/email-marketing/deliverability) or the email delivery rate is one of the main KPIs of email marketing, we could say the fundamental assumption: if an email does not reach its destination, it will not be opened and clicked on. Hard Bounce and Soft Bounce can compromise deliverability.
ActiveCampaign provides one of the highest email delivery rates by ensuring that your emails reach as many people as possible in their main inbox (not in spam or promotional tabs) thanks to features like fully in-house send management.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is one of the aspects that distinguishes ActiveCampaign (https://www.activecampaign.com/it/marketing-automation).
With Active Campaign you can create workflows with a visual block editor.
CRM & Sales Automation
The ActiveCampaign CRM (https://www.activecampaign.com/it/sales-crm) offers functionality to manage the sales pipeline, like PipeDrive.
Active Campaign's Sales CRM tool has numerous features such as
- inform your sales team when a new contact is acquired
- create new activities
- update the status of the negotiation
- automatically feeds leads for further follow-ups
- segment leads based on their activities
- allows you to track the performance of your team members and assign tasks to them
- sends notifications to your sales team when the lead is hot by assigning a score (Lead Scoring) calculated on the probability of conversion of the contact into a customer. Let's delve into this functionality.
Lead Scoring
The instrument of lead scoring of ActiveCampaign (https://www.activecampaign.com/it/sales-crm/lead-scoring) allows marketing and sales teams to identify the contacts most ready to move forward in the sales pipeline by assigning points to contacts based on their engagement.
There are two types of scoring offered by ActiveCampaign:
- offer score: this is a numerical value assigned to open negotiations in the sales pipeline.
- contact score: this is a value assigned to cold leads acquired through contact activities. Lead Generation such as subscribing to newsletters or downloading resources and is useful in identifying the most engaged and therefore qualified contacts for marketing.
ActiveCampaign allows you to customize lead scoring by assigning points and creating specific rules to add or subtract points based on various factors such as page visits, purchase history, resource downloads, email opening, link clicks, and many others.
Site Tracking
The site monitoring (https://www.activecampaign.com/it/email-marketing/website-tracking) is a feature found in ActiveCampaign and other email marketing software which allows you to install a Javascript Snippet in your website with cu you can:
- monitor visitor behavior;
- enable automation when a contact views any page on your site and apply lead or contact scores based on visits or views of specific pages.
Messaging & Chatbot
In addition to email, ActiveCampaign offers tools for multichannel conversationincluding Facebook Messenger, text messages, chatbots and live chat (https://www.activecampaign.com/it/customer-messaging/conversations).
All conversations are managed in a unified interface and connected with email marketing: when a site visitor sends their email address to the chat agent, you can create automated workflows to start communicating with them.
ActiveCampaign's Chatbot allows you to customize each chat, update custom field data as often as needed, and add tags to contacts, which helps to segment your contacts effectively.
It also allows you to send automated text messages such as appointment reminders, thank you messages, sale notifications, coupon code delivery.
They are also manageable via a mobile app for iOS and Android devices, allowing your team members to respond instantly from anywhere.
Landing Pages and Form Builder
ActiveCampaign allows you to create landing page personalized and contact forms with a builder and provides a wide range of templates preconstituted (https://www.activecampaign.com/it/landing-pages), as well as the ability to trigger automation as soon as a contact registers via the contact form or the form on the Landing Page.
Analytics & Reporting
ActiveCampaign offers numerous options for reporting that you can use to analyze campaign performance and optimize it for better results such as:
- Campaign reports such as openings by time of day, day of the week that allows you to change the frequency of sending emails;
- Automation reports such as , the number of people who have interacted with your automation and how many of them have completed it;
- Bid reports such as status, value, pipeline type, duration.
Support
ActiveCampaign offers email and chat support. At the highest level, you can get phone support. Typically, you'll receive a response to your support email within 24 hours. The website also hosts a knowledge base. It includes how-to guides, videos, and even webinars.
Other features of ActiveCampaign
- A/B Test on automationThis feature allows you to run A/B tests of entire sequences against each other, rather than just testing individual emails;
- Automatic learning: In recent years, ActiveCampaign has created a number of innovative machine learning-based features, including predictive dispatch, predictive content, and predictive scoring (Lead Scoring);
- Easy-to-use API: well native integrations exist for many popular services, ActiveCampaign can easily and fully integrate with the app ecosystem you're already using thanks to the API.
Integrations
ActiveCampaign currently integrates with over 150 tools (https://www.activecampaign.com/apps/), including:
- CMS: WordPress, Weebly;
- CRM: Freshsales, Agile CRM, Integrately, LeadFeeder, MailFlossPipeDrive, Streak;
- Ecommerce: Memberpress, LearnDash, WooCommerce;
- Optin, Landing Page Builder and Form: ClickFunnels, Gravity Forms, Instapage, LeadPages, MailMunchNinjaForms, OptinMonster, Thrive Leads, WPForms, ManyChat;
Opinions and reviews on ActiveCampaign
With over 100,000 customers, Active Campaign is a well-known and widely used tool for lead generation and email marketing automation.
Check out the customer reviews here: https://www.g2.com/products/activecampaign/reviews.
Alternatives to ActiveCampaign
Not sure if ActiveCampaign is the right tool for your business? Here are some alternatives.
SendInBlue
SendInBlue and ActiveCampaign have many features in common: from email marketing to marketing automation, CRM and Landing Page Builder. But let's come to the differences: the French email marketing software (Sendinblue) also has a free plan unlike ActiveCampaign which lacks it, having only a trial. But SendinBlue doesn't have a chat service, the automation is not considered at the level of ActiveCampaign and the CRM is certainly not suitable for a sales pipeline management like ActiveCampaign's.
So? If you're a business that needs a good service to send newsletters, do some email marketing automation and send SMS choose SendInBlue. If you need a more sophisticated tool for managing automation and CRM, ActiveCampaign might be more for you.
GetResponse
Both ActiveCampaign and GetResponse have similar functionality apart from Webinars, where GetResponse is the only email marketing software to provide this functionality.
AWeber
AWeberApart from telephone support and recording modules that integrate audio or video files, it has no additional functionality to ActiveCampaign.
Omnisend.
Omnisend. provides advanced (email) marketing automation tools but specifically for ecommerce sites.
Prices of ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign's pricing plans (https://www.activecampaign.com/pricing) start at just $ 9 per month, with email marketing, email marketing automation and email or chat support. You can have up to three users.
Higher levels of service will cost more. The price of the plan Enterprise starts at $ 229 per month, billed annually. For this, you get the above features and also:
- CRM
- Sales automation
- Lead Scoring
- Data Integrations
- White Label
- SMS marketing
- A custom mail server domain
- A dedicated account representative
- Telephone assistance
ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day free trial and doesn't require a credit card, plus they have a service that follows you through the trial.
