Process automation is the best solution for providing rapid and low-cost customer support. Furthermore, Digital Marketing and CRM are not outliers. For these reasons, many email marketing systems, such as ActiveCampaign, can automate a considerable portion of the labor of these two aspects.
There are several tools for automating marketing campaigns, but many are inefficient and difficult to use. That is why we will give an ActiveCampaign review and discuss everything you need to know before purchasing it.
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ActiveCampaign Overview:
ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation program that includes a sales CRM. It allows you to foster prospective leads, develop automated campaigns depending on various parameters, and give an easy-to-use drag-and-drop email builder.
Active Campaign bills itself as the ideal platform for customer experience automation. It offers various features that might help you get a competitive advantage in creating loyal customer connections.
To see whether ActiveCampaign is the right automation platform for your sales and marketing team, let’s take a deeper look at each feature.
ActiveCampaign Features:
The next part of our ActiveCampaign review examines some of ActiveCampaign’s features.
Ease Of Use:
ActiveCampaign has been operating since 2003, so it has had plenty of time to perfect its user interface. The tool’s sleek, the contemporary layout allows you to browse it swiftly, utilizing the easy options.
If you want some assistance getting started, you may join a weekly ‘getting started’ webinar. Their website also has an extensive knowledge base with articles and on-demand videos.
The contents are carefully organized into topics. After you’ve finished the getting started training, you may go on to more in-depth lectures on email marketing, marketing automation, and how to get the most out of the CRM.
The technology is managed via a centralized dashboard, which provides access to helpful tutorials for getting started, developing campaigns, and automating processes. The number of contacts, active automation, and current sales funnels performance are visible.
Email List And Tag Management:
Your email list’s potential is maximized when you divide it up into subsets and label the addresses so you can deliver more specific communications. ActiveCampaign provides two options.
To begin, you may rapidly construct bulk list subgroups such as ‘purchasing customers’ and ‘non-buying customers’ with a few mouse clicks. Second, you may further qualify those groups using relevant tags, such as clients with more than 50 workers.
Aside from manual segmentation and tagging, ActiveCampaign also allows you to assign contacts using automatic triggers.
You may configure an automated trigger to apply a tag when one of your contacts downloads your white paper or visits a specific page on your website.
Marketing Automation:
Prospects often become clients after several contacts with your marketing message. ActiveCampaign assists in automating these many and, at times, little interactions.
It may be an email sent automatically on a contact’s birthday, or a whole cart abandonment email sequence triggered when a prospect fails to finish the checkout process.
Several marketing processes are built into ActiveCampaign’s automation function, but you may also develop and implement your own.
You may develop automation that starts when a prospect browses your website by adding a brief piece of code to your website. For example, you might send them an email with a discount code for a product they previously browsed.
Without the optimization feature of A/B testing, no automation program would be complete. A/B testing is the practice of replicating a campaign, adding minor changes to one version, and distributing each campaign to an equal number of contacts.
You may assess campaign performance and choose the most effective to optimize using split testing for customer success.
Email Editor And Templates:
Naturally, you’ll want the emails you send to your contacts to seem professional. ActiveCampaign offers 25 tried-and-true pre-built email templates from which to pick.
Templates are based on business objectives, such as selling a product or making an announcement, and may be altered to match your brand’s designs and color schemes.
ActiveCampaign polled its current customers to find out what they needed the most from email templates. The outcome was seven basic styles. You need to update the text and graphics in the templates using the straightforward drag-and-drop editor, and it’s ready to send to your contact list.
If for some reason you can’t find a template that suits your needs, you can always use the program’s built-in editor to create anything from scratch.
You may send emails in two forms with ActiveCampaign: plain text and HTML. Although plain text emails are more likely to be sent, HTML emails provide a more interactive experience for your contacts.
Form Design Types:
Email capture forms are an essential component of the email marketing process. You must design a form that grabs attention, is straightforward to complete, and does not cause resistance to provide contact information. If you screw this first step, you’ll set your marketing back from the get-go.
ActiveCampaign has four distinct sorts of forms from which to select.
- The Form inline
- Box Floating
- Pop-up Modal
- The Floating Bar
After you’ve decided on a form design, you may further adjust its look by adding or removing data input fields. You may also specify whether data fields should be compulsory or optional. Furthermore, button colors, photos, and CTA wording may all be modified.
Finally, to add the form to your website, paste the provided Javascript code straight into your website’s HTML or use the ActiveCampaign WordPress plugin if you have a WordPress site.
Landing Pages (New)
You should use a landing page for your company for a variety of reasons. Maybe you want to try out a new concept before committing to a website, or perhaps you want to give a clean page to help convert paid advertising visitors.
ActiveCampaign customers have long complained about the lack of a landing page function. Thus, in 2020, ActiveCampaign announced the new landing page tool, ‘ Pages.’
Like the form generation tool, the landing page portion offers an easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor to help you create appealing landing pages. You may work from a template library, which will help you speed up the rollout.
ActiveCampaign’s marketing automation technologies may also help your landing pages. Suppose the visitor to your landing page is an active lead in your contact list. In that case, you may change the page to display multiple landing page versions for different segments.
The Pages feature new to ActiveCampaign and is not included in the 14-day trial. If this feature is crucial to you, signing up for the Lite package will allow you to evaluate its capabilities.
Apps & Integrations:
Most organizations today need hundreds of different programs to function. As a result, the autoresponder you choose must work in tandem with the rest of your software stack. ActiveCampaign supports connectivity with over 310 additional popular apps at the time of writing.
ActiveCampaign integrates nicely with the obvious suspects, such as Facebook and Salesforce, and many more in the following areas.
- Accounting
- Analytics
- CMS
- CRM
- Databases
- Development Tools
- Ecommerce
- Event Administration
- Forms
- Creating Leads
- Sales
- Internet of Things
- Support
With the easy-to-use API, you can establish custom integrations with other packages or sync up with any in-house programs you operate.
Email Tracking & Statistics:
When you open the reporting window in ActiveCampaign, you’ll see the standard performance data for your marketing activity, such as email openings, clicks, and unsubscribes.
ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, may go far further. Perhaps a better question is: what data points do you NOT want to obtain? You can also integrate ActiveCampaign’s reporting feature with Google Analytics to drill down into any data aspect you can think of.
How long does it take for a niche market to respond to an offer? That is possible using ActiveCampaign.
Because ActiveCampaign provides a plethora of data, some users may prefer the reporting function over the facing feature. Some consumers may feel compelled to schedule a one-on-one training session.
Additional connectors are available to construct beautiful dashboards to present real-time corporate statistics and analyze campaign performance.
Customer Support:
Despite the potential difficulties of ActiveCampaign, the program is well regarded for the help it offers. Real-world customers of the program score customer assistance 9 out of 10 on the technology review website G2.com.
ActiveCampaign provides an extensive knowledge base and access to recorded and live webinars. From the ‘Professional’ membership level and higher, one-on-one instruction is also included in the monthly fee.
On ActiveCampaign’s community forum, you may learn from other users. You may also chat with ActiveCampaign’s support staff if you have any queries. Phone assistance is also available to enterprise-level customers. Support is available in 10 key categories: automation, contact management, and CRM software.
ActiveCampaign Pricing:
ActiveCampaign has four subscription options to choose from:
Lite:
Small enterprises would benefit most from the Lite plan. It’s inexpensive and full of helpful features. You may create three multi-user accounts, send an unlimited number of emails, and utilize essential email marketing and automation.
CRM tools and platforms like SMS marketing and site messaging are missing. If you need additional marketing channels, you should consider upgrading.
Plus:
The Plus plan is perfect for companies who want to increase their marketing automation and integrations. With 25 multi-user accounts, your team can access all the capabilities necessary to help your company flourish. The fundamental functions are included, as well as CRM tools, prospect tracking, lead scoring, a landing page builder, a drag-and-drop editor, SMS marketing, and more.
Professional:
The Professional plan will automate your procedures. Advanced features like chatbots and machine learning technologies allow you to provide a more customized experience for your website users.
Along with high-level functionality, the Professional plan includes one-on-one consultations and training to assist you (up to 50 users) in properly using the tool. This plan is ideal for medium-sized companies.
Enterprise:
The Enterprise plan is ideal if you want an all-in-one marketing automation platform for unlimited users that provides a tailored corporate solution. It is appropriate for medium to big organizations with the funds to pay for a one-on-one service to handle their marketing activities.
This plan includes a custom domain, design services, in-depth reporting, and other unique features.
The price of each plan indicated above is determined by the number of contacts you have, which ranges from 500 to more than 100,000. The pricing structure is very scalable, making it suitable for small and big organizations.
All plans may be invoiced monthly or annually, depending on your joining date. Monthly rates begin at $15 per month, and yearly plans are also available at a reduced cost. Check ActiveCampaign’s website for the most up-to-date pricing. They now offer new clients a 25% discount for the first three months.
After this timeframe, the usual price rate will be applied. So take advantage of this limited-time promotion.
ActiveCampaign Pros and Cons
Pros | Cons |
Provides robust email and sales funnel automation. | Too many features – this might be daunting for newcomers. |
CRM skills that are extensive. | There is no free plan. |
It has several features and supports numerous integrations. | As the number of connections increases, it might become costly. |
Extensive reporting. | Ideal for tech-savvy entrepreneurs |
Excellent deliverability rates. | |
There is no entry-level setup price. | |
Can progress to higher levels |
Conclusion:
ActiveCampaign is the best value email marketing tool we examined, and its automation and analytics capabilities pleased us. It received a low design grade, and its absence of transactional emails makes it inappropriate for eCommerce enterprises.
It is a platform for companies with dedicated email marketing staff or individuals with the time to learn their way around the dashboard and design campaigns from the ground up.
ActiveCampaign’s deficient beginning plan and feature-rich backend provide excellent value. Its comprehensive automation and analytics will assist you in testing and tailoring your campaigns for success.
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