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Overview of active campaign email marketing service

by Roger G. Digital Entrepreneur, Online Marketer at Onireview

ActiveCampaign offers low-priced advertising and sales automation. With a integrated CRM, on-website online messaging and textual content messaging, ActiveCampaign gives the entirety a small commercial enterprise, startup or blogger would possibly want for advertising. Although it's misisng a few features, the low price makes it a splendid answer for small organizations.

Like Infusionsoft, ActiveCampaign is also an "all-in-one" marketing tool. That is, it has features to address every degree of the consumer lifecycle, from taking pictures leads to turning them into consumers.

Broadly speakme, ActiveCampaign's functions cover the subsequent:

Email marketing
Marketing automation
Sales automation and CRM
Let me preface this assessment by using pronouncing that not one of the functions indexed above are great-in-magnificence. There are better e mail advertising equipment than ActiveCampaign (my recommendation: ConvertKit). There are higher advertising automation equipment (InfusionSoft). And there are virtually higher income and CRM tools (Salesforce).

What ActiveCampaign has operating in its choose, however, is its closely integrated design and approachability. Marketing automation software is notoriously tough to apply. ActiveCampaign brings a ConvertKit-like ease of use to this category.

Another issue ActiveCampaign has going for it's miles low charge. You do not want hundreds of bucks to start using this software. The cheapest plan starts offevolved at simply $17/month. There isn't any onboarding or schooling value. And you handiest pay on a monthly basis - no annual agreement.

About ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign seems like a more youthful employer, but it has in reality been round seeing that 2003. With simply beneath one hundred employees, it's miles run just like the sort of enterprise it serves: small, but speedy developing.

ActiveCampaign has raised just $20M in non-public fairness. It is genuinely no longer an enterprise behemoth like Salesforce or a near-unicorn like Infusionsoft. It is a small business slowly evolving right into a medium-sized enterprise.

Should the corporation's decidedly "startup" profile fear you?

If you're an agency patron, the answer is probably yes. Enterprise agencies normally work nice with other organization companies. If that describes you, pick some thing like Salesforce or Eloqua.

For other organizations, but, ActiveCampaign represents a decidedly non-Silicon Valley technique to tech enterprise (it's run out of Chicago) - small, solid with a focus on profitability over boom. The commercial enterprise has been around for almost 15 years; it will be round inside the destiny too.

Review Methodology

As constantly, my ActiveCampaign evaluate makes a speciality of 3 middle things:

Marketing automation competencies and functions
User-enjoy, pricing and assist
Insight from industry specialists amassed via surveys and conversations
Understand that the score reflects how appropriate I experience the software is for its target audience, now not the common person. If I provide a software a five megastar score and say that it is target audience is "corporation companies", it approach that I even have discounted things like pricing (which doesn't genuinely rely to company clients). Instead, I've focused more on what corporation clients might want.

I also run a advertising employer in which I address a number of marketing automation instances. A lot of perception and evaluations come from my non-public experience the usage of and testing these equipment and their use instances.

Features

ActiveCampaign's advertising automation features is powerful, just no longer as effective as greater pricey alternatives like Salesforce. It does have some standout capabilities that others don't (including on-website online messaging and tracking).

Likewise, the income automation and CRM capabilities are confined; you won't be "blown away" by anything. But the usability way you may be more likely to want to apply it. Some integrated sales features together with e-mail tracking come in very reachable.

Although e mail stays a focus of the software, the email editor leaves plenty to be preferred. Still, maximum businesses won't have a whole lot to complain approximately given the price.

Let's examine ActiveCampaign's features in more detail underneath.

Marketing Automation Builder Works Great

ActiveCampaign's automation builder has just the proper blend of ease-of-use and functions that makes me genuinely want to use it. Like any visible editor, you could drag-drop elements and automation policies to create complex workflows.

You get quite a few room for personalization for each element. You can train ActiveCampaign to wait to send emails until a specific event is fulfilled (inclusive of a person touring a 'thank you' page). You can use if/then rules to define automation good judgment and create complicated workflows. You can even use webhhooks to automatically extract information.

Screenshot of ActiveCampaign automation builder
ActiveCampaign's advertising automatin builder has a friendly user-interface and tons of automation alternatives

Ready Made Automations from Automation Marketplace

ActiveCampaign has a solution: the automation market.

Marketers can sell their custom automations on this market. You can purchase an automation (many are unfastened) and plug it immediately into your automation builder.

Essentially, you get a excessive-converting, confirmed workflow in minutes. The downside is that importing a custom automation into the automation builder can buggy.

Activecampaign automation market
Above: a number of the automations to be had inside the automation market

In-Depth Email Segmentation

Salesforce Marketing Cloud has the fine segmentation talents among automation gear, however in phrases of usability, you can not beat ActiveCampaign.

You can section your list primarily based on a number of conditions - us of a of starting place, tool, electronic mail opens, page visits, etc. You can then stack more than one situations to get a rather focused list.

Further, you could dynamically upload tags to create segments robotically. For instance, you could set up an automation rule to add each consumer who visits the "thank you" web page to a "Customers" list.

Activecampaign electronic mail segmentation
Chaining multiple segmentation regulations collectively allows you zero-in in your audience. Above: the section is based on touch location, visited URLs and tags.

Personalized/Dynamic Content in Emails is Very Promising

Pull your present day weblog posts through RSS and upload them to a e-newsletter
Pull content from any website and upload it to an electronic mail template
Create personalised content based totally on the subscriber's place, section, and so on.
I'll admit it - I do not use it a whole lot, however it is better than quite a few competitors.

Adaptive content in ActiveCampaign

You can use conditional content blocks to goal folks that fit a positive tag, region or present segment.

Split Testing Built-in

One of my biggest puppy peeves with Infusionsoft is the lack of integrated cut up testing. If you will boom your open/CTR quotes, checking out is a must.

This isn't a hassle with ActiveCampaign. Split trying out is a core characteristic inside the e mail tool.

Besides fundamental A/B checking out, you may customise what number of contacts acquire which variation. Once you have a winner, you may automatically use it for the rest of the marketing campaign.

It's speedy, intuitive and works properly with the automation builder.

Split trying out in Activecampaign

You can plug break up checks into your automation drift. In the above example, automation could would run best until one hundred contacts have been split.

Site Event Tracking and Messaging

With ActiveCampaign, you could song web page pastime by way of installing a chunk of code on a web page. Once established, ActiveCampaign will track every body who visits the web site and what moves they carry out (such as custom events).

This gives you information on whether or not someone crammed a shape, clicked a link or watched a video (and if sure, then for a way long). Think of it as an stronger model of Google Analytics' on-web page facts.

Once you have captured the statistics, you may plug it into the automation builder to create complicated automations. For instance, you can tune a blog submit and handiest goal users who've watched an embedded video.

Additionally, you can additionally use ActiveCampaign to reveal web site messages (which include useful records or aid links).

Event tracking in ActiveCampaign

You can see every contact's site hobby within the CRM. This gives you character-degree perception to how people are the usage of your site.

SMS Marketing Built-in

Two functions I specially like about ActiveCampaign: you may send automatic textual content messages and your readers can subscribe thru SMS.

The only other device I recognise that gives integrated SMS capability is Ontraport. And even that does not allow users to subscribe through textual content message.

If you run a neighborhood enterprise, that is a powerful merchandising device. You possibly already use SMS to ship promos. Now you could use the equal to get greater subscribers in your list.

SMS advertising in ActiveCampaign />
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Above: an example of SMS advertising in ActiveCampaign

Useful Sales Automation Features

ActiveCampaign's CRM is right, not exceptional. You get a respectable amount of insight. With the brand new 'Deals', it also doubles up as a Trello-like projecct control device - though I'm no longer positive if this selection turned into in reality necessary.

One feature I like is automatic lead scoring. ActiveCampaign robotically assigns a rating to each lead based on its likelihood to transform. This manner you could direct your resources in your best possibilities.

You also can send and tune emails from within the CRM. I recognize most salespeople pick Gmail, however for folks that do not, that is a massive timesaver.

To finish it, I hope you find something useful here. For more details and access to its homepage, read through my reviews: onireview.com