TrustRadius Insights for ActiveCampaign are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Recommendations
Users commonly recommend ActiveCampaign for its CRM, email marketing, and marketing automation capabilities. They suggest that businesses in need of these features should consider using ActiveCampaign as it provides all these functionalities in one platform.
Another common recommendation is to take advantage of ActiveCampaign's onboarding and support services. Users recommend trying the platform and utilizing their resources to ensure a smooth transition and effective use of the software.
ActiveCampaign is often praised as a robust system for small businesses on a budget. Users appreciate the value they receive from the platform, making it an attractive option for those with limited resources.
Additionally, users recommend ActiveCampaign for email marketing purposes, often highlighting it as an alternative to MailChimp. It is seen as a helpful tool for creating and managing email campaigns.
Furthermore, some users suggest using ActiveCampaign as a means to build a business without relying on advertising. The platform's features and support are seen as instrumental in achieving this goal.
Lastly, users express satisfaction with ActiveCampaign's support team, describing it as amazing. They find the support available through webinars, live chat, and other channels to be helpful in maximizing their use of the platform.
I use ActiveCampaign to automate the email communication with the users of my application. Setting up automation with ActiveCampaign is super easy and the email delivery is awesome. I don't have to worry about my emails hitting the spam folder.
Pros
Easy and robust marketing automation setup
Awesome email delivery
Great tracking feature
Easy email design
Cons
More modern email templates and easier to use builder
Email templates don't include subject lines!
Explanation/tooltips inside the application, especially in the automation, would be great.
Likelihood to Recommend
ActiveCampaign is a great tool to use for an automated marketing funnel. Great for basic autoresponder as well. Great for onboarding new users to your products and services.
We use ActiveCampaign to build our email list, to send mass emails to our list, and for funnel and email automations. It allows us to create email campaigns, sales and webinar funnels, so that subscribers move along the funnel automatically. Once the automations are built, it runs seamlessly with little effort from us.
I have used several other email platforms and I recommend ActiveCampaign to my clients and colleagues now.
Pros
Email Automations
Funnel Creation
List management
Easy-to-use templates
Cons
Better tag management for contacts
A visual calendar to see emails scheduled to go out to different lists.
Likelihood to Recommend
I’ve used ActiveCampaign with clients that are just starting out and with corporations that have huge emails lists and multiple funnels. I believe it can be a fit for any of those. It will need some planning to get the most from the software and to create funnels that turn subscribers into clients or buyers.
Our business is to handle email automation solutions for clients. We can offer more services to our client because we use ActiveCampaign then we ever could with any other product on the market. ActiveCampaign provides the 3 things that our clients are looking for in an automation package. CRM, Automation and Segmentation. Any service can send emails, but AC take this service to a whole new level. The full stack capabilities of AC allow for an unlimited expansion of services. AC does what they do better than anyone and they integrate with the top platforms to do the rest. I have tried using others in the past. Nobody does a better job of delivering quality support and services than ActiveCampaign.
Pros
Automations - We constantly use automations to do all kinds of things behind the scenes. Like move contact through the deals based upon actions they have taken, urls they have visited or emails they have opened.
Predictive Sending - We use predictive sending to enhance our open rates. We've seen a 20% increase in opens as a result.
Conversations - we use conversations instead of chatbot on our sites. While this feature is still in its early stages, we have made the switch now. My staff has the app downloaded to their phones and can interact as need. Not as robust as Intercom and some others, but it is a great personalization tool.
Deals/Tasks - We use the Deals and Tasks for all kinds of things. I can communicate with my VA using tasks related to clients in a way that keeps everything under the same hood.
Scoring - We use scoring to run "behind the scenes" context. We monitor the contacts actions, apply a score and send them rewards or reminders whichever is appropriate. This is a huge hit with our clients.
Cons
I would like to be able to sort contact based upon some fields or scores.
I would like to have a score report.
I would like to see the forms features more robust.
Likelihood to Recommend
The full stack approach does a great job of filling in the blanks.
ActiveCampaign is used within our marketing department for automated emails, newsletters, call-to-action emails and more. Specifically, it allows us to send conditional content which makes it easier for us to send emails that are specific to each individual and help them along their customer journey. The editor is simple to use so multiple users can create emails that are on-brand.
Pros
Targeted email segmentation.
Easy to duplicate previous campaigns.
Quality WYSIWIG editor.
Cons
Difficult to send "one-off" emails.
Reporting is lacking.
Likelihood to Recommend
ActiveCampaign is well suited to "set it and forget it" email automation campaigns. It is geared more for smart email marketing based on conditions, actions, etc., that segment your audience based on interaction. It is not well suited for scenarios where you need to send to one-off lists like an event or other scenarios because of the process involved with manually subscribing or unsubscribing individuals.
We're using ActiveCampaign for a number of marketing functions:
<ul><li>Lead gen efforts that are part of our content strategy.</li><li>Broadcasting our newsletters.</li><li>Managing pipelines.</li><li>Automations.</li></ul>What works particularly well is that it features both your usual email and marketing automation tools, as well as a 'Deals' function, which are sales pipelines at all the effects that are fully integrated and feed off the same contact database.
It is also flexible enough to allow us to do this for multiple brands too.
Pros
The marketing automation 'canvas' is very intuitive and easy to use -- you can set up sophisticated automation in minutes.
Using the sales pipelines for other tasks such as outreach efforts to source blog contributors.
Website tracking is a powerful option too, that helps you build a very good 'picture' of your contacts.
ActiveCampaign's main USP is that it fully integrates email marketing, marketing automation, and sales pipelines.
Cons
As a CRM, it lacks the sophistication to track companies and contacts.
The new live chat function is still very much a 'minimum viable product.'
There is no landing page function.
Likelihood to Recommend
For the price, ActiveCampaign has no rivals. To get the same number of features, you would need to sign up with a much costlier platform. Another advantage is that it can be used for email marketing as well as your B2B sales efforts -- a well-implemented setup will automate most tasks, and your sales team will not need to use spreadsheets anymore.
ActiveCampaign features a number of 'deep data' integrations with third-party platforms, but doesn't handle transactional data such as e-commerce orders well -- you can't associate multiple records (eg. purchase orders) to a single contact.
ActiveCampaign is used across our whole organization, from Program Director to Office Manager to Executive Director, in order to organize, promote, and provide registration for our various music education programs. We can also track trends for registration, run reports on t-shirt sizes, do a demographics breakdown, create coupon codes, and send emails internally.
Pros
ActiveCampaign is great at organizing and storing information about our email lists.
ActiveCampaign is an incredible tool for marketing automation, setting up blasts to go out.
Their reaction time is great for help desk questions.
Cons
The Customer messaging tools aren't necessarily a huge improvement on doing it yourself, but I really appreciate the option.
The automated text messages for sales have gotten us a little bit of negative feedback but it has also helped with awareness! So it's a toss-up.
I'm not positive that ActiveCampaign is the very best email marketing on the market, but it's super sleek and easy to use.
Likelihood to Recommend
ActiveCampaign is fantastic for getting a plan together and organizing a bird's-eye view of your sales and marketing. It's super helpful to set up automation and educate yourself on the options available to you in that realm of sales. It's not necessarily the best email blast system, I personally prefer Campaign Monitor.
ActiveCampaign (AC) is an easy and effective marketing automation tool for small businesses. I have implemented AC in the marketing department in order to send different and multiple types of campaigns (simple newsletters, invites, nurturing campaigns) and also to create lead funnel automations. If you have a little customer base (<5000 contacts), AC is a good tool and it is easy to use for lead generation.
Pros
Creating emails or templates is VERY easy as well as the automation builder is easy to use.
Affordable for small companies. Even if your database is growing, the price will of course increase but it is still affordable.
Cons
You can't create landing pages :(
The reporting section can be improve. The interface is not user-friendly at all. We have used another tool to visualize and analyze the results of our campaigns.
Likelihood to Recommend
ActiveCampaign is well suited for basic scenarios such as daily emailing, follow-up emails, invites, thank you emails or reminders. If you want to create nurturing campaigns with multiple possibilities, AC is also pretty effective with the automation builder. If you want to do very personalized automated email campaigns, ActiveCampaign might not be the best tool to use.
We use ActiveCampaign to generate and nurture leads, manage sales pipeline with a built-in CRM to help close sales, and stay in touch with existing customers. It's an integral part of the business as it helps bring in new customers and keep existing customers while <b>increasing their lifetime value with new orders and services</b>.
Pros
Automation campaigns are excellent in ActiveCampaign. It allows granular control over what happens when to whom and how. You can create very complex automated campaigns to nurture leads at the right time with the right content.
Ability to create custom pipelines is great as it allows us to cater to different sales processes that vary depending on customer type and/or different services, so we can track the right information in a flow that makes sense in specific situations.
Sending 1-to-1 emails in CRM that are tracked so we know when contacts open emails.
Chrome extension for Gmail is really useful to access contact data within emails in Gmail and being able to track emails sent in Gmail.
Cons
You can't add a contact without an email address.
Site tracking of visitors sometimes doesn't work, so when they submit a form their activity prior to form submission is lost.
Sales/CRM reporting is very limited. Anyone coming from a proper CRM like Salesforce would find reporting unusable, especially sales teams.
Email builder needs some work, it has certain limitations and doesn't allow custom designs to be editable in the builder.
No Android app for CRM (suppose to be in the works as we were told).
Likelihood to Recommend
ActiveCampaign has its shortcomings, but it is a very good marketing automation platform and can do wonders for a business. The best feature is the automated campaigns. It allows very targeted communication that some larger (enterprise focused) marketing automation platforms can't provide. That's why a lot of businesses, especially online businesses, flock to ActiveCampaign. They want to take advantage of the automatons that ActiveCampaign provides to generate leads and sales.
Where I wouldn't recommend ActiveCampaign (at least not right now) is when a business has a sales team. The limited CRM functionality and poor reporting compared to dedicated CRMs would make it very difficult for a sales team to function, especially for a sales manager to get proper reporting to know how everyone is doing and where they are as a sales organization.
My company uses ActiveCampaign for email marketing for one of my clients. We specifically use ActiveCampaign vs any other email marketing programs because of the ability to set up automations and its ability to integrate with their WooCommerce website and the ability to track events in Google Analytics.
Pros
Easy to create and format emails with a "drag and drop" interface. Anyone can easily create an email with little instruction.
You can also use custom HTML to create an email or email template so that you can be assured the email you are sending looks EXACTLY like you want it to or matches your website exactly.
Cons
There is no media database/library. All images uploaded for use just kind of "live" with the user that uploaded them in the emails and there is no easy way to organize them and there is no way to share them amongst different users. So needless to say, images are just kind of a mess.
Campaigns can be organized by various methods - type, status, label and list. But there is no way to organize by campaign name, date created or date scheduled/sent which would be helpful for the person creating all the emails to keep track of what's done and needs to be done. (You can sort by 'last modified' but if you jump around a bit between emails, that doesn't help.)
Likelihood to Recommend
ActiveCampaign is not for everyone. It is well suited for those who understand email marketing or have experience with email marketing and automations. If you are not going to use it for the automations, it's probably not worth using it. You are just as well served using a less expensive and simpler program that is easier to use.
ActiveCampaign (AC) is the lifeblood of my email flight deal alert company, Flights Machine. We are in AC everyday, since our subscribers rely on our emails as the main way they get notified about our flight deals. The campaign builder in AC is nice, but where it stands out over other offerings such as MailChimp (our former email tool) is in its automation builder. They have a strong API to tag users based on arbitrarily complex business logic in your codebase, with an easy to use automation builder than can be triggered when tags get added to a user.
Pros
Automations (based on tagging a user from your codebase via their API, start sending that user an email sequence)
Campaign Builder (as good as other tools such as Mailchimp)
Pricing (pay per contact, not per email sent. AND email addresses can be added to multiple lists and only count as 1 contact, unlike Mailchimp which would consider that 2 contacts)
Cons
The Admin Dashboard Contacts Search tool is very limited in functionality
The pricing buckets are very large... It goes 10,000 to 25,000 to 50,000 ... Being more granular would help a lot for businesses just over the cusp of one of these limits
Provide an API to validate email addresses as valid or invalid. Mailchimp does this for free when you try to add to your list, but ActiveCampaign allows adding garbage typo-ed email addresses like *@gmail.con to your list (forcing you to use a 3rd party vendor for this)
Likelihood to Recommend
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).
