ActiveCampaign vs dotMailer

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is perfect for teams that want a lightweight, easy to use email software which still has the ability to deeply integrate with your codebase/business logic (through tagging via their API and automations).It strikes the balance nicely between allowing developers and marketers to collaborate --- simply instruct the developers to tag users appropriately in the business logic / code base, and then the marketers can use AC's automations initiated by a tag to come up with whatever complex follow-up they desire (all without bugging the developers again).

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Ben Gelsey

Staff Engineer

InsigniacLeisure, Travel & Tourism, 1-10 employees

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dotMailer

dotMailer is a great tool whether you are a standalone shop or a global company. I am not familiar with many other programs, but my favorite thing about dotMailer is the ability to have all of our constituents on the same account to share templates and ideas, as well as gauge our performance levels. To any colleague within our Group, I would 100% recommend dotMailer

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Amanda Kocefas

Marketing Manager

FiveTen GroupStaffing and Recruiting, 501-1000 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

ActiveCampaign

7.8

dotMailer

—

WYSIWYG email editor

7.7

—

Dynamic content

7.4

—

Ability to test dynamic content

7.5

—

Landing pages

6.7

—

A/B testing

7.2

—

Mobile optimization

7.7

—

Email deliverability

8.3

—

List management

8.1

—

Triggered drip sequences

9.3

—

ActiveCampaign

7.0

dotMailer

—

Dashboards

7.1

—

Standard reports

7.3

—

Custom reports

6.7

—

Pros

Marketing Automation
Click/Link Tracking
Email Integration with Gmail via a Chrome extension

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Verified User

Partner in Other

Graphic Design Company, 1-10 employees

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Easy Editor - no HTML required. It's very easy to drag and drop your elements, customizing the campaign according to your needs.
Reports- the reports are robust, showing you your open rates, browsers used, who clicked what, etc. It is easy to section out this information and deliver it to the appropriate stakeholders.
Templates - building your own template library makes creating and sending campaigns and quick and easy experience. In a global company like ours, it also enables consistency across the brand locations throughout the world.

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Amanda Kocefas

Marketing Manager

FiveTen GroupStaffing and Recruiting, 501-1000 employees

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Cons

Campaign sending has a few too many steps to go through, would love to see more on one page
More organizational tools for sent, drafts, and different list emails other than just one level tagging would be great
Visual email scheduling for newsletters on a calendar would be a huge improvement to the list style. Drag and drop to reschedule emails would be a godsend!

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Steena Brown

Sexual Empowerment and Life Coach

Steena MarieHealth, Wellness and Fitness, 1-10 employees

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Updating contact lists can be cumbersome. It would be much easier if we could just make mass update to contact lists without having to export and re-import them. For example, if you upload a list of Joe's contacts and then want them to all be individually tagged with Jane instead, you would have to export the list, change everyone's rep to Jane, and then import the list again.
The time zone on our account is set to London which creates challenges for the other cities (New York, Chicago, Seattle, Sao Paulo) that we send emails for. We definitely have to be cautious when scheduling out emails so that we get the timing correct.
I would love to be able to view previous months' activities and expand the comparison tool to view trends over time.

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Amanda Kocefas

Marketing Manager

FiveTen GroupStaffing and Recruiting, 501-1000 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

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dotMailer10.0

Based on 1 answer

Since this is used on a global scale and it is preferable to all of our brands, I cannot see us switching to a different provider. We have built years worth of contacts and templates within our current system, which saves our marketing team a lot of time when putting together future campaigns. All of them are mobile optimized which makes it even easier to work with

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Amanda Kocefas

Marketing Manager

FiveTen GroupStaffing and Recruiting, 501-1000 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Before ActiveCampaign we were using both MailChimp for some stuff as well as Hatchbuck for other stuff. The main reason we went with ActiveCampaign is the comprehensive automated campaigns you can set up. Hatchbuck's automated campaigns were very limited, you couldn't do much behavioral targeting. Same applied for MailChimp, automated features were limited. Plus, with MailChimp your contacts are stuck on one list and you can't easily move them around or segment across lists based on keywords/tags. That's where ActiveCampaign truly shines.

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Viktor Nagornyy

Marketing Strategist

ProjectArmyMarketing and Advertising, 1-10 employees

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Ultimately, we chose dotMailer over Constant Contact due to our opt-in process. Constant Contact requires a hard opt-in process where there is a formal sign up sheet. For us, we allow customers to sign up, register or just send us their details and we'll add them to the list. dotMailer allows us to have flexibility in the way people sign up and therefore we are able to reach more customers

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Amanda Kocefas

Marketing Manager

FiveTen GroupStaffing and Recruiting, 501-1000 employees

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Return on Investment

Creation of powerful marketing systems for our business and our clients' business.
Allowed us to cancel CRM services like Pipedrive with their Deals section.
Email design is easy, fast, and helps get our message out efficiently.

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Lauren Lopez

Co Founder

Web of ArcMarketing and Advertising, 1-10 employees

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