ActiveCampaign vs Freshsales

• Email automation - Automated email marketing to potential customers, follow up with existing customers, and automated messaging to outside parties.
• Flow building - This software allows companies to build simple or complicated sequences in a visual builder so that you can see exactly where people are in the sequence of messages.
• CRM - Customer relationship data. Maintaining data points across a user journey (tagging a UTM source, current activity. If you have someone - and want to know where they are in the journey, there's a way to find that data and label a profile with that).
• Integrations - ActiveCampaign integrates with almost everything. Seamlessly. You can trigger behaviors in other apps through Zapier, or import data from other software you use. It's a very easy experience to integrate with others.
• Customer support - Every team member I've encountered has been exceptionally helpful. They are probably the bar for customer support in the tech industry, to be honest.
• Email systems for the long-haul (and for sequences and emails that are expected to bring in a lot of $$$). Email marketing should be 30-50% of revenue for most businesses. It's THE platform that we recommend for coaches and other businesses to help them earn 6 & 7 figures from email. You can track A LOT of data through this software as a platform, which makes it a great candidate for businesses who want to grow and visualize where their customers are in the overall purchase process, as well as maintaining them as multiple purchases customers.

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• It has a comprehensive set of tools and gives me options for how I interact with prospects and clients.
• It syncs both ways with email, which is a big timesaver.
• It is easy to set up, and support has been very helpful.

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• ActiveCampaign is so powerful and so versatile that it can sometimes be a challenge to use. There are certainly plenty of online resources available to help you get up to speed, but there are times when the process can seem a little overwhelming. I got a lot of help by attending a "Study Hall" in-person classroom session that was sponsored by the company. Chris Davis was the instructor; he did an amazing job of clarifying priorities and procedures for getting the most out of ActiveCampaign. After going to that session my productivity with ActiveCampaign increased enormously, but in retrospect, I felt like I should have been able to get that kind of expert guidance with the software much earlier, instead of using ActiveCampaign at far less than its maximum capability for several years before feeling like I was really getting my feet on the ground.
• There doesn't seem to be a way to create or accommodate multiple email addresses for a single contact in the system. When people get into the system with multiple email addresses, they show up as multiple contacts. This can create problems with proper list segmentation; it should be easy enough to resolve this problem, but it's a nagging headache whenever it pops up.

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• Automation ('workflows') need a bit of work. In comparison to other sales CRMs that automatically 'nudge' sales staff when a phone call or email hasn't been returned (for example), these nudges can be created as 'tasks' in Freshsales, but only by someone who knows what they're doing, setting explicit trigger and action rules that don't always cover all scenarios.
• Event tracking with Segment (or just with their JS library) is a little bit haphazard. I'm sure it works well for in-app actions, but if a user visits your website and interacts with you and you aren't using the Freshsales forms on your website, it can be hard to identify users and track website visits and actions etc.
• Learning curve– seems to be aimed at users with a bit more technical know-how; so might work well for SaaS sales teams or sales engineers, but not so much for users in other industries. Our non-technical staff have found it to be confusing.
• Mobile Application– works very well as a contact directory, retrieving a quick overview of interactions, and now you can place voice notes that sync with the web app; these features aren't necessarily critical to our field salespeople. A user will still need to 'come back to the office' to retrieve missed voicemails, update deals notes, as well as place calls from their VoIP number. Freshsales will forward calls to a mobile, but won't allow the sales staff to place calls from their mobile device using their VoIP numbers (or receive calls from these lines).

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• The fortune is in the follow through, and ActiveCampaign makes the follow through easier. Drip campaigns and triggers strengthen granular follow up opportunities.
• The granular messaging options coupled with attractive pricing have made this our go to service for businesses who need more automation features, but are just getting started in the space.

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• We currently have a pipeline which should enable us to meet our goals. The sales campaign alone has resulted in many more demos at this time of year than we would normally have. We feel that moving into the seasonal selling cycle we have, there will be several more touches which will have occurred and that will give us a sale edge.

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