Item: ActiveCampaign
Rating: 9
Author: Bryan McAnulty

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ActiveCampaign powers all of our email marketing automation, our email newsletter campaigns, and acts as a CRM for prospects. Using it we are able to create complex automations that ensure our customers receive the right message at the right time.

We are able to measure and improve these automations over time to optimize our marketing funnel.

Pros and Cons

Best in class marketing automation building
Robust CRM capabilities that are interconnected with marketing activity
Easy to integrate API for more complex tagging and site event tracking

Forms can be prone to spam without an unsightly recaptcha making creating custom API driven forms better options for some businesses
Parts of the UI are slow to navigate
In rare events where a failure happens in an automation, there is no indication to the business that a failure happened.

Return on Investment

We've had a great experience with support except for one case where a complex issue took ActiveCampaign too long to solve which did impact our marketing campaign negatively.
Automation creation is quick and makes it easy to test new marketing ideas.
We're able to more clearly see what is working and what isn't when we try new campaigns and automations

Alternatives Considered

Autopilot

After evaluating almost every major email marketing platform, we migrated from Autopilot to ActiveCampaign a couple of years ago. ActiveCampaign allows us to run more advanced automations and its tagging system allows us to add much more detail and context to a particular contact on our email lists. The differences in automation and tagging functionality alone is enough reason for us to switch as a software company.

One thing we aren't particularly happy with from ActiveCampaign versus some other tools is how ActiveCampaign is unable to show the original lead source in its conversion attribution reporting. This might be related to a legal requirement, but it would be much nicer to know the original source of a contact rather than only sources that led to conversions after the contact was added.

Key Insights

Do you think ActiveCampaign delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with ActiveCampaign's feature set?

Yes

Did ActiveCampaign live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of ActiveCampaign go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy ActiveCampaign again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

ActiveCampaign is a great solution for both independent creators and software products. It has powerful tools that you can grow into without having to worry about migrating to another service as you grow. Small businesses may not need the more complex features to start, but if you want to build a state-of-the-art marketing automation sequence. ActiveCampaign will help you do that.

Our Choice of Marketing Automation Software After Comparing All the Popular Alternatives

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with ActiveCampaign