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This Chicago-based automation tool is helping their 90,000 customers send fewer emails while, at the same time, achieving better results. Boasting many features and integrations, as well as quick and friendly support, they do sound like a powerhouse newsletter marketing tool. We'll put ActiveCampaign under the microscope to see if they measure up to their bold claims.
ActiveCampaign Summary
ActiveCampaign offer almost everything you need within a newsletter marketing tool, plus their advanced automations are hard to beat. The entry-level plan starts at $15 per month (for up to 500 subscribers, paid monthly), or, if you want to access pro features such as the in-built CRM and lead scoring, the Plus plan starts at $70 per month.
One of their most important features is automations. Not only does it allow autoresponders, based on myriad conditions, but it also allows automation of your contacts and list management, as well as automations within its CRM system (known as ‘Deals’). This ‘Deals’ system is also worth noting and allows you to add notes to contacts, set up appointments or simply send direct messages to them.
In addition to that, they have the 'conversations' feature. Using it you can send targeted messages straight to your website visitors, therefore optimizing the overall customer experience. ActiveCampaign pride themselves on their approach to helping you build meaningful connections with your customers through their software.
And, while at first glance pages such as the Dashboard can seem a little busy and overly complicated, it’s not hard to understand how useful it is to have all your information in one place.
Let’s dive in and take a closer look at ActiveCampaign:
ActiveCampaign screenshots
ActiveCampaign Pricing
Pros and Cons
Extremely powerful automation:
One of the best marketing automations out there. Not only extremely powerful but also easy to use.
Thorough reporting:
Offers reporting on all areas such as click-maps, geo-tracking and page visits. Purchase tracking is available on higher plans for Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce.
Great deliverability:
In our deliverability tests, ActiveCampaign proved to be one of the best tools in getting emails delivered.
Free migrations:
If you are coming from a different email marketing software, ActiveCampaign offers to do the account migration for free.
Features can be overwhelming:
This might only be considered a con if you’re after a quick and simple email solution. There are simpler newsletter services out there, so you may want to look elsewhere if this is all you need.
Is ActiveCampaign the right newsletter service for you?
Recommended if:
You’re serious about marketing automation:
ActiveCampaign is hands-down the most powerful automation tool we’ve tested, allowing you to set up virtually any automation you can think of – triggered campaigns, sales follow-ups, automated segmentation, dynamic email content and so on.
You need an integrated sales and marketing platform for your business:
ActiveCampaign’s inbuilt CRM seamlessly links up to all your email marketing data, allowing sales teams to act quickly. Features like lead scoring and social data can also help to streamline your sales follow-up processes.
You need a tool that performs multi-channel marketing:
Apart from sending emails, ActiveCampaign also allows you to set up landing pages, send SMS and personalized ‘Conversations’ to website visitors, and even manage how Facebook ads are displayed to contacts. It’s a great solution if you’d like to be able to centralize a good chunk of your marketing and give your customers a better all-round experience.
Not recommended if:
You need a low-maintenance, beginner-friendly tool:
ActiveCampaign is an advanced tool, and getting familiarized with it takes a lot more work than other tools. Not to mention the regular maintenance you’ll need to set up, monitor and optimize campaigns.
You only need simple automations:
If you only want to set up basic email sequences (for example, a welcome campaign), we’d recommend more budget-friendly options like MailerLite or Benchmark, which are far easier to use. Otherwise, you’ll be paying for a tonne of extras (and complexity) that you simply won’t need.
You’re not sure:
Unfortunately, there’s no free plan, and with a trial period of just 14 days, they don’t give you much time to assess whether it’s right for you.
Rating details
| criterion | rating | comments |
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Ease of Use |
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ActiveCampaign have a very user-friendly design, with menus being easily navigable. The dashboard, which could feel crowded if not designed correctly, has a useful ‘Getting Started’ slider to help new users. And it has demo data to give you an idea of how best to use sections. It may be a little complicated for the absolute beginner though. |
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Newsletter Creation |
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Editor |
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The editor is fast, and has a couple of handy features. One is saving custom ‘blocks’ to reuse, and the other is allowing you to see changes other people have made, Google Docs-style. Although finding your last action to undo can be painstaking due to multiple auto-saves every minute! Another issue we had was in creating columns, this was needlessly finicky. Also, there is no quick way to preview your newsletter. |
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Personalization |
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An easy to use If/Then/Else logic is available via ‘conditional content’ which allows you to show certain customers different content based on certain conditions like interests, links clicked in the past etc. |
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Email types |
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Classic newsletters, SMS, autoresponders, A/B testing, RSS triggered, birthdays (date-based). |
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Choice and Flexibility of Template Designs |
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ActiveCampaign have around 40 modern, responsive templates to choose from. You can handily preview them in another window. Other tools offer more template options, and also slightly more features/content blocks within the editor. |
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Email Automation |
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Their marketing automation really is the one to beat for newsletter tools. It’s extremely powerful, and very user-friendly, allowing you to automate follow-up campaigns, edit multiple conditions and much more. This is all done via an easy-to-use flowchart-style system. There are also pre-made ‘recipes’ for you to use, or get ideas from. Otherwise, you can start your own automation from scratch. Learn more in these video tutorials. |
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List Management |
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Compared to some other tools, managing contacts and lists is made much easier, and automated, due to being able to use their automation functions to organize people into lists. Learn more here. |
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Registration Forms/ Opt-in & Opt-out- Process |
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Easy to use, lets you create your own fields. Next to the standard forms, which are fully responsive, it also allows you to create floating forms and modals. Simple but effective. |
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Deliverability |
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In our deliverability tests ActiveCampaign tends to score very highly, landing emails in the main inbox of the most popular providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook and AOL. In recent rounds, they have seen quite a dip, so we’re keeping an eye on them. |
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Reports and Analysis |
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Basically allows reporting on everything (opens, click-maps, page visits, geo-tracking). Ecommerce reports are also available on certain plans for Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce. |
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Languages |
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Their website and support are both available in English, plus 5 other languages. You can change your user profile to one of more than 15 languages (including Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, etc.). |
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Further Features |
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Spam- and Design-Testing |
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These are both available. Spam testing is simply a ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ that you get before you send out your campaign, yet there are no factors present to help understand the ruling. An email client preview is available, too, but at a price of $1 per test/client, which seems a bit steep. |
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Bounce Management |
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Soft bounces are counted as hard bounces after three times, and this then puts them in an exclusion list. |
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Blacklist |
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This is the aforementioned ‘exclusion list’. You can import contacts directly into this list, and export too. |
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Storage available for data and images |
Unlimited |
Images above 1000px will be downsized. |
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Pro Features |
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Authentication |
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SPF and DKIM are supported. |
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Own Domain |
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It’s possible to use your own tracking domain to improve your newsletter’s company branding. |
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Different levels of account access |
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This is a very flexible system, without specific levels. You define the group names and also the exact access for each of those groups via tick-boxes. 2-Factor Authentication for an additional security layer is available too. |
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Integrations |
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ActiveCampaign offer a massive amount of integration options, such as PayPal, Shopify, Google Analytics, Facebook and WordPress. You shouldn’t have a problem finding what you need. Find all integrations here. |
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Landing Page Editor |
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The templates are varied and easy to edit. Landing pages are hosted on a custom domain or subdomain. |
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Support |
5/5 |
Support is fast and friendly, via all mediums. Their knowledge base is particularly useful and easily searchable, I had very little difficulty finding relevant search results. They also have video tutorials available, webinars (live and archived) and one-on-one training on the ‘Plus’ plan. |
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Overall rating |
4.5/5 |
ActiveCampaign is one of the most powerful newsletter tools on the market. Hardly missing a thing when it comes to features, and also simple enough for most people to make full use of them. |
Conclusion
It’s really tough to fault ActiveCampaign, not only do they offer almost everything you need within a newsletter marketing tool, 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 newsletter editor, not offering an experience as slick as other tools 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.
ActiveCampaign really are one of the best choices you could make if you’re looking for an all-in-one newsletter marketing tool. Their automation is the real deal, and makes other tool’s versions of this pale in comparison. You’ll need to be prepared to put in a bit of time, 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.
ActiveCampaign Alternatives
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 well modern-looking templates. It’s also one of the easiest tools we’ve ever used.
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.
Sendinblue 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.
Still not sure which is the right newsletter tool for you? Try our Smart Finder.
About Roberta Phillips
Latest Updates
02 Aug 2020 - ActiveCampaign increased prices
03 Apr 2020 - Updated screenshots
07 Mar 2019 - Smaller updates (including available languages)
7 Jan 2019 - Deliverability rating updated
12 Jul 2018 - Recommended section added
20 Mar 2018 - Deliverability rating added
25 Oct 2017 - ActiveCampaign changed prices
25 Apr 2017 - Site messaging added.
09 Aug 2016 - Minor text updates, top choice banner added.
10 Aug 2016 - Video review added.
09 Mar 2016 - Initial tests.
