ActiveCampaign Review (2023): The Height of Automation?

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ActiveCampaign Pricing

Though we recommend ActiveCampaign, its prices are something to take into consideration. Their most affordable Marketing plan is their lite plan which starts at $39. Their prices then rise quite quickly as you collect more subscribers. ActiveCampaign’s pricing is on the higher end of the email marketing spectrum. You can compare it to other email marketing programs here.

Pros and Cons

Is ActiveCampaign the right newsletter service for you?

Rating Details

A More Detailed Look at ActiveCampaign's Top Features

As you can see from what we’ve already covered in this ActiveCampaign review, it offers a good range of pro features. Let’s break those down a little and assess what works and what could be improved:

ActiveCampaign Marketing Automation

We’ve reviewed the marketing automation capabilities of dozens of ESPs and haven’t yet found a match for ActiveCampaign. Though ActiveCampaign’s competitors include marketing automation as part of their product, it isn’t necessarily at the center. ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, has made this their focus, allowing you to automate virtually anything: campaigns, deals, ecommerce automation, SMS, contact management, etc.

Marketing automation is included on all plans, however, sales automation is reserved for users on the Plus plan (from $23/mo) and higher.

One-to-one email automation is quite unique to ActiveCampaign. You’ll be able to trigger automations directly through your inbox communications with leads. The only downside is that you’ll need to be on the Professional plan ($187/mo) or higher, and this isn’t cheap at all.

We’ve been monitoring ActiveCampaign for years, and have seen them proactively add new features constantly, especially around the area of automation. This is a very good sign, as some other ActiveCampaign competitors haven’t been quite so forthcoming.

ActiveCampaign automation templates

We looked into ActiveCampaign’s automation templates, otherwise known as ‘recipes’ and found that they are both really well put together and easy to edit. There are tons to choose from (750 in fact!), and the categories make it easy to find what you’re looking for.

Other tools tend to provide quite general templates, whereas ActiveCampaign provides a whole host of integration-specific templates, like these automation recipes for Shopify:

The only downside is that, with so many templates, you can feel overwhelmed by the options. It may appear that some recipes are repeated, however, after revising the templates closely, you can see there are small differences between them. I can see how this could be a little confusing for some, but, at the end of the day, our experience tells us that the more targeted you can be with your campaigns the better.

ActiveCampaign SMS automation

SMS automation is included on the Plus plan and higher. You can integrate with a number of tools, such as ClickSend, MessageMedia and Twilio, and ActiveCampaign provides you with a variety of automation templates:

Be aware that SMS sending is only available on the Plus plan and higher, which starts at $23/month, so it’s not cheap. You’ll also need to be on the expensive Enterprise account if you want your own custom SMS number for sending.

ActiveCampaign CRM

As mentioned above, ActiveCampaign features a built-in CRM.

Small business owners looking for contact management software will find this feature particularly useful, to use alongside the advanced email marketing capabilities.

After extensive testing, we found that the software was pretty easy to use. You can set up multiple deal pipelines, and edit/add new stages to reflect your unique sales process. The drag and drop software makes it easy to manually move deals through the pipeline.

The more advanced user can benefit from this range of CRM automation templates, which covers everything from lead scoring to task management:

Pricing starts at $23/month for this feature, as it is reserved for those on the Plus plan and higher. It’s not exactly cheap, but when you consider everything you’re getting (advanced sales and marketing automation, contact & lead scoring, email & SMS sending, Facebook Custom Audience integration, etc.) it’s actually not a bad deal.

When compared against the best CRM software for small businesses, we found that most services charged per user, whereas ActiveCampaign included 25 user accounts, which will really help keep costs down.

We also conducted a detailed comparison of ActiveCampaign vs HubSpot and found that ActiveCampaign actually had a lot of advantages over the CRM giant. Most notably, it’s value for money.

ActiveCampaign Landing Pages

There are a total of 56 responsive landing page templates, and you can also build your own and save it as a custom page for future use.

After analyzing the designs and editor, we’d say they are attractive and modern, the only thing is that it isn’t so easy to move blocks around the page when editing. For example, you can’t move an element up or down slightly, instead, you can only move it between the outlined sections. I imagine ActiveCampaign has set it up like this so that every element is aligned, but it means you have less creative freedom than with other website and landing page builders like Wix.

I also couldn’t find a way to add a link to images, which isn’t ideal.

The cool (and unique) thing about ActiveCampaign’s landing pages is that you can include dynamic content (web personalization) so that each user sees exactly what’s relevant to them. This will help you to target leads in an intelligent way, e.g. only showing users content that’s relevant to their geolocation or industry or showing them products based on their purchase history. You can also enable tracking on your pages. Check out our complete guide to ActiveCampaign’s landing pages here.

ActiveCampaign Deliverability

We’ve tested ActiveCampaign’s deliverability in our bi-annual tests over the course of five years and found that it has some of the highest delivery rates amongst top email marketing services. In fact, ActiveCampaign won our best email deliverability award after coming out top in the tests we ran in Jan 2023. Unfortunately, they dropped to fourth place during our last round, although they still finished with 93.1%, which isn’t bad compared to other providers. We’re eager to see if they climb back up to the top next time – seems as though the competition is heating up!

Find out how it’s performed over the years, and how it compares to other emailing services in our detailed deliverability analysis.

Conclusion

So do we recommend ActiveCampaign?

As this ActiveCampaign review highlights, it’s really tough to fault ActiveCampaign, not only do they offer almost everything you need within an email marketing platform, but they do it very well.

The reporting offers you insight into almost all facets, such as page visits, geo-tracking, openers, ecommerce and more. One area that is slightly lacking is the email builder, not offering an experience as slick as other services out there, with a few niggling features that could be done better (like the revision history).

The support is as advertised: friendly, helpful and fast. Email and chat support are great, with a personal feel to the communications. Their knowledge base is easily searchable and actually returns relevant results a high percentage of the time. With their ‘Plus’ plan you even get access to one-on-one training and helpful webinars, which is a nice addition.

I think this ActiveCampaign review shows that it is really one of the best choices you could make if you’re looking for an all-in-one digital marketing tool as part of your email marketing strategy.

Their marketing and sales automation is the real deal and makes other tools’ automated workflows look pale in comparison. (See why it makes an excellent Mailchimp alternative here, and a great Constant Contact alternative, for that matter!)

You’ll need to be prepared to put in a bit of time due to the slightly steeper learning curve, and perhaps spend a little more money, but your business will reap the rewards. If, on the other hand, you’re just looking for a simple way to blast out newsletters, a solution like GetResponse or MailerLite might be a bit easier to get your head around.

On a side note, ActiveCampaign offers a range of really useful free tools, regardless of whether you’re a customer or not. You can find everything from content and social media calendar templates to a subject line generator. Check out the free tools here

Try ActiveCampaign now for free for 14 days.

I hope you’ve found this ActiveCampaign review helpful. Feel free to leave us a comment if you have any questions!

ActiveCampaign Alternatives

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There are plenty of excellent ActiveCampaign alternatives.

GetResponse is a powerful alternative to ActiveCampaign with loads of pro options (e.g. a webinar tool) and good automations. Unlike ActiveCampaign, they offer their platform in more than 20 languages, and their design and testing tools are excellent. Read the full comparison in our GetResponse vs ActiveCampaign guide.

Brevo is one of the cheapest all-in-one email marketing tools on the market. It’s available in 6 languages and comes with advanced automation options and a built-in CRM.

MailerLite is one of the most affordable solutions, in fact, their free plan is very generous. Their approach to email marketing design is admirable, offering modern-looking templates. It’s also one of the easiest tools we’ve ever used. (Read more about MailerLite vs ActiveCampaign.)

See how Mailchimp compares to ActiveCampaign. You can also compare it to newcomer tinyEmail in our ActiveCampaign vs tinyEmail guide.

Still not sure which is the right newsletter tool for you? Try our Smart Finder.