ActiveCampaign Review 2024 : In today’s fast-paced digital marketing landscape, staying ahead of the curve is paramount. Automation has become the cornerstone of successful marketing strategies, and ActiveCampaign has been a prominent player in this field. As we usher in 2024, it’s crucial to assess the current capabilities and offerings of ActiveCampaign to determine if it aligns with your marketing objectives.

Marketing automation is no longer a luxury but a necessity for businesses of all sizes. It streamlines communication, maximizes efficiency, and enhances customer engagement. ActiveCampaign, a powerhouse in the realm of marketing automation, has been assisting businesses in achieving these goals for years.

Our ‘ActiveCampaign Review 2024’ aims to provide you with a comprehensive overview of this platform’s latest features and performance. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer looking to optimize your automation efforts or a newcomer seeking the right tool to kickstart your marketing journey. This review will serve as your guide.

We’ll explore the strengths and weaknesses of ActiveCampaign, delve into its pricing structure, and discuss real-world applications. By the end of this review, you’ll have a clear understanding of whether ActiveCampaign is the right fit for your marketing needs in 2024.

• ActiveCampaign is ideal for experienced email marketers who see marketing automation as a priority.
• Its features might be overwhelming for those who simply wish to send basic newsletters.
• You can choose between different packages: email marketing (Marketing plans from $39), CRM (Sales plans from $23) or both (Bundle from $116). Prices are fair and comparable to similar providers.
• In our tests, ActiveCampaign consistently showcases excellent deliverability, often ranking at the top.

One of their key features is marketing automation. Aside from autoresponders, which can be based on myriad conditions, you can automate list and contact management, as well as deals, if you decide to use their CRM software. This ‘Deals’ system (sales pipeline) also allows you to add notes to contacts, set up appointments, send direct messages to them, and much more.

Having all your information and activity in one place means that you can quickly get a holistic view of how your sales and marketing efforts are performing. Not having to use a number of providers for your various digital marketing efforts will also potentially save you money.

Let’s dive in and take a closer look at this ActiveCampaign review:

Though we recommend ActiveCampaign, its prices are something to take into consideration. Their most affordable Marketing plan is their lite plan which starts at $39. Their prices then rise quite quickly as you collect more subscribers. ActiveCampaign’s pricing is on the higher end of the email marketing spectrum.

As you can see from what we’ve already covered in this ActiveCampaign review, it offers a good range of pro features. Let’s break those down a little and assess what works and what could be improved:

We’ve reviewed the marketing automation capabilities of dozens of ESPs and haven’t yet found a match for ActiveCampaign. Though ActiveCampaign’s competitors include marketing automation as part of their product, it isn’t necessarily at the center. ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, has made this their focus, allowing you to automate virtually anything: campaigns, deals, ecommerce automation, SMS, contact management, etc.

Marketing automation is included on all plans, however, sales automation is reserved for users on the Plus plan (from $23/mo) and higher.

One-to-one email automation is quite unique to ActiveCampaign. You’ll be able to trigger automations directly through your inbox communications with leads. The only downside is that you’ll need to be on the Professional plan ($187/mo) or higher, and this isn’t cheap at all.

We’ve been monitoring ActiveCampaign for years, and have seen them proactively add new features constantly, especially around the area of automation.

We looked into ActiveCampaign’s automation templates, otherwise known as ‘recipes’ and found that they are both really well put together and easy to edit. There are tons to choose from (750 in fact!), and the categories make it easy to find what you’re looking for.

Other tools tend to provide quite general templates, whereas ActiveCampaign provides a whole host of integration-specific templates, like these automation recipes for Shopify:

The only downside is that, with so many templates, you can feel overwhelmed by the options. It may appear that some recipes are repeated, however, after revising the templates closely, you can see there are small differences between them. I can see how this could be a little confusing for some, but, at the end of the day, our experience tells us that the more targeted you can be with your campaigns the better.

SMS automation is included on the Plus plan and higher. You can integrate with a number of tools, such as ClickSend, MessageMedia and Twilio, and ActiveCampaign provides you with a variety of automation templates:

Be aware that SMS sending is only available on the Plus plan and higher, which starts at $23/month, so it’s not cheap. You’ll also need to be on the expensive Enterprise account if you want your own custom SMS number for sending.

As mentioned above, ActiveCampaign features a built-in CRM.

Small business owners looking for contact management software will find this feature particularly useful, to use alongside the advanced email marketing capabilities.

After extensive testing, we found that the software was pretty easy to use. You can set up multiple deal pipelines, and edit/add new stages to reflect your unique sales process. The drag and drop software makes it easy to manually move deals through the pipeline.

The more advanced user can benefit from this range of CRM automation templates, which covers everything from lead scoring to task management:

Pricing starts at $23/month for this feature, as it is reserved for those on the Plus plan and higher. It’s not exactly cheap, but when you consider everything you’re getting (advanced sales and marketing automation, contact & lead scoring, email & SMS sending, Facebook Custom Audience integration, etc.) it’s actually not a bad deal.

When compared against the best CRM software for small businesses, we found that most services charged per user, whereas ActiveCampaign included 25 user accounts, which will really help keep costs down.

We also conducted a detailed comparison of ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot and found that ActiveCampaign actually had a lot of advantages over the CRM giant. Most notably, it’s value for money.

There are a total of 56 responsive landing page templates, and you can also build your own and save it as a custom page for future use.

After analyzing the designs and editor, we’d say they are attractive and modern, the only thing is that it isn’t so easy to move blocks around the page when editing. For example, you can’t move an element up or down slightly, instead, you can only move it between the outlined sections. I imagine ActiveCampaign has set it up like this so that every element is aligned, but it means you have less creative freedom than with other website and landing page builders like Wix.

The cool (and unique) thing about ActiveCampaign’s landing pages is that you can include dynamic content (web personalization) so that each user sees exactly what’s relevant to them. This will help you to target leads in an intelligent way, e.g. only showing users content that’s relevant to their geolocation or industry or showing them products based on their purchase history. You can also enable tracking on your pages. Check out our complete guide to ActiveCampaign’s landing pages here.

ActiveCampaign also boasts strong email deliverability rates. It achieves this through a combination of sophisticated email infrastructure and stringent anti-spam measures. ActiveCampaign emphasizes the importance of clean email lists and user engagement for better deliverability. Additionally, it provides detailed reporting on email campaign performance, allowing users to track and optimize their email strategies for the best deliverability outcomes.

So do we recommend ActiveCampaign?

As this ActiveCampaign review highlights, it’s really tough to fault ActiveCampaign, not only do they offer almost everything you need within an email marketing platform, but they do it very well.

The reporting offers you insight into almost all facets, such as page visits, geo-tracking, openers, ecommerce and more. One area that is slightly lacking is the email builder, not offering an experience as slick as other services out there, with a few niggling features that could be done better (like the revision history).

The support is as advertised: friendly, helpful and fast. Email and chat support are great, with a personal feel to the communications. Their knowledge base is easily searchable and actually returns relevant results a high percentage of the time. With their ‘Plus’ plan you even get access to one-on-one training and helpful webinars, which is a nice addition.