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Great place to get started with marketing automation, but reporting is weak
October 10, 2019

Great place to get started with marketing automation, but reporting is weak

Josh Summerhays | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Small Business

Overall Satisfaction with ActiveCampaign

We use ActiveCampaign both on the marketing and fulfillment sides of the business. ActiveCampaign helps us segment and target our audience so that we can market the most relevant programs and offers to each person. We also use ActiveCampaign to deliver digital course content and help our clients stay on schedule with their learning and development. We've just started taking advantage of the SMS capabilities of ActiveCampaign in this regard as well.
  • Makes it easy to set up automation flows without necessarily having the whole thing planned beforehand. Other tools that I have used require more advanced planning done upfront and then you implement all it once. I like that ActiveCampaign allows me to use the platform as part of the planning and iterative process. I don't have to have every email or another message pre-written and created and then inserted into an automation. I can even create empty placeholders and come back later to fill in the content.
  • Email creation is simple and I can duplicate a previous email and edit it very easily without the risk of inadvertently modifying the original.
  • Integrates well with other tools in our tech stack.
  • The CRM is easy to customize in terms of the type of information that we collect, but it is not as easy as I would like to customize the layout and prioritization of the information presented. It's a little clunky to get around a contact record.
  • Reporting needs a massive upgrade. I don't get half of the email performance data that I need to optimize the performance of our campaigns and automation.
  • System uptime isn't terrible, but I get more notifications of system-wide email delivery problems than any other tool I've used in the past.
  • The ROI for ActiveCampaign comes mostly in terms of time saved. Our use case is mostly on the product/fulfillment side and it has saved hundreds of hours compared with our old MailChimp setup of digitally delivering course content.
  • We built our email list to receive regular free content from us to about 1,000 subscribers.
HubSpot Marketing Hub is mostly a superior platform, but for a bootstrapped startup or small business, HubSpot is WAY too expensive. ActiveCampaign gets you really critical pieces of marketing automation for a small fraction of what HubSpot costs. HubSpot has landing page tools and a much better CRM interface, as well as far superior reporting tools. Ultimately, though, we couldn't afford $800+ per month for marketing automation when our particular needs were met by ActiveCampaign for $125 per month.
ActiveCampaign is great for small businesses that need to easily get something built and deployed quickly. It's a simple system to use, but with enough power to grow with your business for quite a while. It has a pretty good number of integrations with other small business marketing tech tools and hopefully, this will expand over time as well. The price point is palatable for a lot of small businesses as well, but once your contact list really starts taking off, you may need a different system.

ActiveCampaign Feature Ratings

7.0
WYSIWYG email editor
8
Dynamic content
7
Ability to test dynamic content
Not Rated
A/B testing
7
Mobile optimization
6
Email deliverability reporting
7
List management
6
Triggered drip sequences
8
Lead Management ()
Not Rated
Campaign Management ()
Not Rated
Social Media Marketing ()
Not Rated
4.3
Dashboards
4
Standard reports
5
Custom reports
4
Platform & Infrastructure ()
Not Rated

Using ActiveCampaign

2 - Product development, marketing, fulfillment, and customer support
1 - Basic understanding of the platform itself. You don't need any other technical or development skills to use any aspect of the platform. You do need to understand basic CRM architecture and list management.
  • Email delivery of digital course content (audio and video files, PDF documents).
  • Build a lead list with marketing content.
  • Manage customer history effectively (past courses, review emails opened in each course).
Our use case is primarily product-focused. We've adapted the functionality to work for our needs, but we don't use it as much for its intended marketing functions. Once we evolve our product to a more traditional LMS, we won't need ActiveCampaign anymore.