Powerful marketing automation tools, CRM, and the power to understand your audience.

Setting Activecampaign for a client with a limited budget and limited technical skills, we were able to set up and automate many of the lead funnels for this B2B SAAS company. The tools are comparable to what you'll pay 10X for, and one of the features I love about Activecampaign are their Marketing Automation Workflows - allowing you to setup, segment, and activate the inactive. By using this tool, we achieved 25% open rates in the HR industry where 10% is often average; by integrating the online tools with our inbound marketing Team - both phone and online support - we were able to increase sales Demos 10X over the previous 6 months because Activecampaign helped us motivate the inactive, as well as those who take action. One of the tools I recommend most to clients is Activecampaign because it's performance marketing at a reasonable price.

Pros

Marketing automation tools and templates
Deliverability excellent in our experience
CRM was enough for our needs, helping coordinate 5 staff.
Can use in Gmail, which helped our non-Tech sales people.
Reporting that helps quantify engagement and ROI

Cons

CRM was not the strongest, yet enough for our needs
Marketing automation services generally are separate from emails you send to larger lists in my approach. Would like an option for sending mail outside the automation to lists, but that may simply be different skill sets (haven't found a solution we like).

The Best Kept Secret in Marketing Automation

Pros

ActiveCampaign is one of the best kept secrets in the marketing world. The automation builder is both easy-to-use AND powerful. You can trigger actions and segment by almost any criteria you can imagine. In a lot of ways, the automation builder rivals the (what I consider) best-in-class solutions such as Marketo. The email builder is intuitive and the template library comes with a lot of good looking emails to start from. Zero HTML/CSS needed. The built-in SMS messaging is really cool and somewhat unique in the industry. Building an automation consisting of emails and SMS messages is drag and drop, with no integrations needed. While it's limited (as of today) the CRM is really intuitive and clean. If they continue to add functionality in this area they may have something incredible in a couple years. Importing contacts is simple and goes far beyond the typical CSV file. Google contacts, Google Sheets, other email providers. no problem. Possibly the best import tools I've seen in this industry.

Cons

The most obvious one is the lack of a landing page builder. Having landing pages in the tool would be ideal, but solutions such as LeadPages can be easily integrated. Having to pay for email compatibility testing (for different devices) is a bit annoying, feels like you're being "nickel and dimed." The reporting leaves a lot to be desired. I'm really hoping they invest in this area (much more important than having built-in landing pages in my view), as it would really elevate the solution and make it an easy choice vs the Infusionsofts of the world.

Great value marketing automation platform.

Pros

The marketing automation side of the software is excellent as is the customer support. We are very happy that we upgraded to a package that includes an account manager - she is very responsive and helpful.

The outline/map view of automations works great on all screen sizes - I can work with it as easily on my laptop as I can on my desktop and this was a big difference compared to our previous marketing automation software.

Campaign / newsletter set up is easy and reporting on campaign performance is detailed and insightful.

The iPhone app is really user friendly for quick updates to the CRM - tasks and notes - on the go.

Cons

I find the CRM / Deal reporting a little simplistic. I would really like to be able to get more detailed information such as detail of deals by user and ability to filter deals based on the lead source.

The List Clean Up feature doesn't allow you to preview your list before it deletes contacts. eg. if I want to clean up bounced or unsubscribed contacts I only have one choice and that is to delete them all, I can't preview that list and cherry pick. Neither can I seperate the bounced list by bounce type. These would be really good features to have.

One-stop shop for more than just emails

Active Campaign gives you a one-stop email marketing shop offering campaigns, automation, and even a CRM system that allows you to keep everything in one place.

Pros

Active campaign can handle a lot of your customer contact metrics. You can run email campaigns, track engagement, and retargeting campaigns.

The software is easy and straightforward to use. With a grasp on how email marketing works, you can easily find your way around the software and get to the campaigns, contacts, lists, and automation you need to access.

Also, your payment plan is based on the number of contacts you have, so if your contact is subscribed to multiple lists, you are not charged any extra.

Cons

The email editor is a bit plain. If you don't know coding, your emails will all look similar or you're stuck using the templates they provide, many of which look outdated.

Integrations are available, but you have to be careful as some will fire off false tags or contact updates.

Powerful automation system collaborating e-mail marketing and customer relationship management

Pros

If you select trigger, you can send emails to the targeted customers. The application is easy to use and is an affordable solution when compared to other similar applications. Presence of additional features like sort and organize and provision of filters by analyzing customer records based on their purchase lists and event engagements. Integrations to meet all business types. Integrates with Google applications like spreadsheets, docs etc. Sales pipeline component and the campaign automation features are the best for active campaigns. Templates available and you can create your own templates, with which you can work to personalize emails and add-on graphics. Assigning tags to each customer based on their interactions is another unique feature.

Cons

Attachment of an image to the email message is time-consuming. Real-time custom recording of events is absent. Manipulation of data and exporting feature is also absent. An outdated application program interface. It is an affordable solution but lacks a lot of features that similar automation systems have.

Powerful Email Marketing with Automation

Pros

ActiveCampaign is incredible email marketing software that allows you to build powerful automations and logic into any campaign. You can assign tags based on behaviors in emails, on your website or when filling out forms. It also provides many integrations.

Cons

The email builder is nice, but it fails at providing a way to create simple letter-style emails with multiple images inserted inside the text (ie text flowing around left or right aligned images). To insert an image in an email, you need to add a text-block, then an image-block, and then another text-block. It doesn't work like a typical WYSISYG HTML editor like WordPress.

A really slick product with a few performance issues that keep it under 5 stars

Pros

ActiveCampaign's feature set is really hard to beat (I know, because we had some performance hiccups that had me researching alternatives); the automation tool is unequaled by any competitors, and ties in very neatly with their sales pipeline component.

Cons

My only real complaint is that the server infrastructure their product sits on appears to be a little underpowered; at times the system is unusable due to slow loading pages. We have had some hiccups with the software where it was absolutely not working correctly, but support was able to provide a workaround eventually until the issue was resolved. Those issues did cause some major disruption to a large campaign. Additionally, their SMS solution can only send 1 message per second, which is fine, but that limitation wasn't noted anywhere, so we made the mistake of broadcasting to a large list, and the final messages weren't delivered for over a week.

Great email marketing app with in built split testing and custom tagging capabilities

Easy to use and powerful email marketing app.

Pros

Straight out of the gate Active Campaign is an impressive email marketing app, even if you don't take advantage of it's impressive CRM capabilities.

It offers similar record-based database features to other apps 10x the price and allows you to quickly get up and running with an intuitive, drag and drop, campaign builder.

Probably the best feature is the inbuilt split testing functions. Any good marketer will tell you that you're probably only a few split tests away from scoring a home-run campaign but split testing individual emails in a campaign sequence or split testing across different campaign sequences can be near impossible in most apps. Active Campaign makes this easy enough to do that you've no excuse not to be testing all the time.

Cons

At times the UI can feel a little hard to navigate with some of the features seemingly buried in menu options. It's been a while since the interface was refreshed and it feels over due for an update.

Powerful but bad email editor

There isn't a focus on a specific audience, which makes the platform too big & complicated.

Pros

ActiveCampaign has so many integrations, a strong API, a marketplace for everything (including automation) a strong community and so much more. It's a mature platform, that's constantly getting more powerful.

Cons

The email editor is just horrible. It's clunky, it's ugly, it doesn't show all the sequence, even editing an email is a hassle. That's why I left ActiveCampaign. And customer service is reachable only by email. Which slows down the resolution of any issue.