Item: ActiveCampaign
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We're using ActiveCampaign for a number of marketing functions:

Lead gen efforts that are part of our content strategy.
Broadcasting our newsletters.
Managing pipelines.
Automations.

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 and Cons

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.

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.

Return on Investment

Email is an effective channel for us, so ActiveCampaign pays for itself over and over.
You can save a lot of time if you set it up properly.
It's not really suitable for cold outreach, which is allowed, but in a very limited format.

Alternatives Considered

Autopilot, Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor

ActiveCampaign has a much more powerful and flexible automation builder, as well as the pipeline function (Deal) that is fully integrated with the rest of the product.
For example, you can set up automation with conditions that push a contact across a sales pipeline based on behavioral data: an email is opened, a link is clicked, or a web page is visited.
Ease of use is a key factor too as it allows me to set things up very quickly.

Other Software Used

Buffer, Google Analytics, Freshdesk

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 a solid option for small business

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with ActiveCampaign