ActiveCampaign: Nailed the Sweet Spot of Power vs. Ease-of-Use
October 30, 2018
ActiveCampaign: Nailed the Sweet Spot of Power vs. Ease-of-Use
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Small Business
Overall Satisfaction with ActiveCampaign
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.
- 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)
- 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)
- The majority of our website traffic comes from emailing our userbase with ActiveCampaign
- Automations have allowed us to upsell our best users on additional products
- With their shared IP address management, we get high deliverability rates on our email campaigns
ActiveCampaign strikes the right balance of simplicity versus power. Unlike heavyweights such as AWeber, ActiveCampaign is a breeze to use. However, at the other side of the spectrum other easy to use tools like MailChimp are severely lacking in their ability to integrate automations with your website's business logic. Based on hitting the sweet spot, I can clearly recommend ActiveCampaign over it's competitors to most website businesses.