ActiveCampaign

An impossibly thorough platform, ActiveCampaign excels at capturing customer/prospect data that marketers can use to automate and personalize their email/social/web campaigns at scale.

Pros and Cons

Built-in sales CRM stores customer data that can be used to market right back to them

Powerful, easy-to-set up automations can run long-term campaigns from start to finish

Nearly 1,000 integrations with other apps and services gives new meaning to word “ominchannel”

Reporting could use more financial metrics to better measure the cost and effectiveness of advertising

Best for: Businesses of all sizes

Ratings

Features

5.0

Ease of Use

4.8

Reporting

4.8

Integrations

5.0

Overall Score:

4.9

As far as tools go, there’s a lot to love about software in general as far as its ability to make everyday tasks easier. Of all the nice things we could say about digital solutions, though, their longevity isn’t on the list. For the most part, software just doesn’t last: tech progresses too quickly for any given app to have a fighting chance. All of this is why you might be surprised to learn that ActiveCampaign, a marketing solutions platform, has been around for more than 20 years. How is that possible? In 2003, digital marketing was all banners, pop-ups, and emails.

Well, it didn’t hurt ActiveCampaign (AC) that email marketing is still one of the most effective forms of customer outreach around. A 4200% ROI is just one of the astounding statistics around email marketing’s effectiveness—and a solid reason that AC is still a leader in its industry two decades after its launch. But also, it would be disingenuous to say that today’s Active Campaign is the same software as the one that started it all. In fact, it wasn’t even software that started it all for Active Campaign.

Officially launched in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom, ActiveCampaign’s origin story begins a few years earlier, as its founder’s consultancy business—which he started as a teenager. VandeBoom was doing a lot of email marketing for his clients, but when he went off to get his fine arts degree in college he didn’t want his business to get in the way of his studies. So, he did what any college freshman would do: he got to work coding automations that would do his work for him. He still needed the money from those clients, after all. Art school isn’t cheap.

You can piece together what happened from there: his software worked so well he packaged it as its own product to sell, and he ended up building a modestly successful business that was doing a few million dollars in annual revenue 10 years in. In 2013, seeing the way the software world was going, VandeBoom made the decision to pull the plug on the existing product and move the solution to a SaaS model. It was a risky move, but one that turned out to be such a good call that the CEO is on record as saying he wished he’d done it sooner.

Growth accelerated following this shift. The customer base grew much more quickly and, 13 years into its profitable existence, ActiveCampaign raised $20 million in funding to help pay for that growth. These developments paid off big time: today, ActiveCampaign has more than 60,000 customers in over 170 different countries generating more than $40 million in revenue annually. They have more than 10,000 positive reviews on G2, one of only a handful of things that 10k people on the internet can agree on. Oh, and the platform does way, way more than just email marketing. 

The Details

Where to start? In its simplest terms, ActiveCampaign is an omnichannel marketing platform. But the prefix “omni” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because even though it means “everything,” it still feels insufficient.

Logging into a fully set up AC Dashboard gives you an idea of a lot of what it touches. You’ll see various summaries—of your contacts, of campaigns you’re running, of automations you’ve set up, etc. This is under the “marketing” section of the Dashboard. There’s also an Ecommerce section here, and if you’ve integrated with your online store you’ll see a bunch of data directly from that platform detailing the points along the customer journey you’d be interested to know. How many visits? How many people added an item to their cart? How many purchased something? How many were repeat customers? The information you get here is strictly about those people who ended up at your store through a campaign you’re running here, to better help you understand your AC-driven results.

The left side navigation menu is your next clue as to all the different components of ActiveCampaign, and it all starts with Contacts. ActiveCampaign is designed to scale your marketing, sure. But its real power is in the way that it personalizes your marketing even while scaling. For this reason, the contacts section is pretty important. It’s essentially a CRM built off the data that any of your integrated apps collect. Someone buys something on your Shopify store, ActiveCampaign ingests the information and creates the record. Someone fills out a form on a landing page, AC ingests the information and creates the record. Once they’re in your contacts, the platform updates the record any time that user takes any action in any of your integrated apps. Of course, you can always use ActiveCampaign to build landing pages and forms to collect new lead data.

For each contact record, you have a seemingly endless amount of attributes you can assign. There are built in fields for their name, contact information, location, and other easily obtained bits of data like that (you can also create your own fields for whatever purposes you like). But then each record is constantly updated with behavior and actions your contacts took, like whether they opened the last email newsletter you sent them or they filled out a form or followed a link. All of these attributes—from their basic contact information to whether they shared something on social media—can be used as the basis for audience segmentations and campaign automations.

As an example, you can create audience segments based on geography, but then automatically segment even further. Let’s say you sent a general email out to all your newsletter subscribers teasing an upcoming sale. You can then have follow up emails teed up based on whether or not they opened that first one, and tailor the message towards that. And within that, you can segment these even further by location to make sure you’re referencing the right currency. There’s just an incredible number of ways you can slice and dice your customers, both manually and automatically, giving you untold flexibility in just how personal you want to make your messages.

With your contact list in place (and growing, presumably), you have the major pieces in place to start marketing to them. From there it’s a matter of building campaigns and automations, two tasks that feel like they should be a lot more complicated than ActiveCampaign makes it. The setup tools for each offer a ton of options, but the interface is clean and everything is explained as you go along. Take campaign creation, for example:

The software takes you step by step through the setup, from choosing your audience segment, to working with templates, to setting tracking options, to scheduling. If you’ve done your planning right, then the campaign setup process is a breeze—and if you haven’t done your planning right you’ll only make that mistake once. The setup for a campaign is so thorough, going through the steps does more than teach you how to work with ActiveCampaign, it teaches what makes a campaign successful to begin with.

But the real hero of ActiveCampaign is in its automations. It wouldn’t be possible to describe every single way that the platform saves you time by automating tasks. Actually, “automating tasks,” is an understatement. It can automate entire campaigns. Think of a common email drip campaign: while most platforms send out the emails in a time based “drip,” with ActiveCampaign you can go deep into conditional statements to determine which email gets sent next.

Example: you send out an initial email to everyone in your contact list promoting a sale a week in advance. From there, you can work your way through a whole series of emails, with a variety of different messages depending on conditions. People who opened the first email get the next one with an acknowledgement they saw the first one, and here’s some more information. People who didn’t open the first one get a second one telling them what they missed in the first. Did you include a tracking link in either of these messages? Add more conditions. Someone who followed the link gets a different message than someone who didn’t. After following the link, did they add something to their cart but then abandon it. They’ll get a different message telling them to hurry up before the sale ends. Did someone not add anything to their cart? They’ll get a different further message incentivizing them to make a purchase. The possible combinations of triggers and actions is seemingly endless. All of which sounds like it would be mind numbing to set up. Spoiler alert: it isn’t.

Just like with campaigns, the guided process for creating an automation makes things super easy. There are a bunch of prebuilt automation “recipes” that you can customize to your own needs, or you can start it from scratch. In both cases, though, you’ll be able to easily create the automations using a visual flowchart builder. Defining the triggers that set off different actions is as simple as dragging and dropping all the steps and then editing them slightly with your own details. It’s worth noting, too, that AC is currently beta testing an AI powered version of recipe creation. Using natural language instructions, you can tell the platform what you’d like your automation to do and it goes ahead and builds the recipe for you. It’s incredibly cool, but also there aren’t that many cases where you’ll need to build an automation from scratch. There are so many useful prebuilt recipes included, most users never need to look further than that.

Automations aren’t necessarily exclusive to ActiveCampaign’s functionality. Many of the companies whose software integrates with AC have built their own “apps” so that an automation can trigger an action elsewhere. Maybe you use Boomerangme for a digital loyalty program. You can run a promotion where you’re awarding double points, for example, and you can rely on an ActiveCampaign to make sure your users who participated get rewarded correctly. What’s especially cool about these apps is that they don’t require a huge rigamarole to get API access. The platform has an included “App Studio,” where customers and partners can build their own app to make available on the ActiveCampaign platform. For customers with their own in-house software or development team, this is another way that AC makes all the tedious parts of marketing that much simpler to tackle.

Integrations

As an omnichannel marketing platform, you’d expect ActiveCampaign to have quite a few integrations. You might not expect a list that’s more than 940 apps long, so please understand that we’re not even scratching the surface here. But to give you an idea of how AC will fit into just about any infrastructure, here are some integration highlights:

Accounting apps we’ve all heard of like Quickbooks, Zero, Zoho, Freshbooks can integrate with AC, and so can a few we’re not even sure how to pronounce: Vectera and Visma, anyone? CRMs like Salesforce, Agile, MS Dynamics are here, as are CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and Squarespace. Using a Project Management app like Asana or Trello? Active Campaign connects to it. Use Messaging apps like Whatsapp along with AC for a direct line to customer pockets. You can connect with just about any Ecommerce platform you can think of.

The list is exhaustive, and we feel pretty comfortable telling you that whatever it is you’re using, ActiveCampaign can integrate with it. You can always check the full list to see if your preferred software is in there.

We should also say that through the use of automations and ActiveCampaign apps, you aren’t limited to ActiveCampaign’s built-in mechanisms for data capture. Meaning: anywhere you’re capturing user data is another source for populating your Contacts list in ActiveCampaign. Do you use Calendly so prospects can reserve time for meetings/demos? There’s an app that’ll pull their contact info in when they book the time. 

TL;DR

ActiveCampaign has established itself as a powerful omnichannel marketing platform that serves businesses of all sizes.What really sets it apart from its competitors is its ability to personalize marketing efforts at scale. Using its robust, built-in CRM system that integrates with a vast array of third-party applications, ActiveCampaign excels at ingesting as much information as it can about your prospects and customers. Users can leverage all this data to automate complex marketing campaigns and segment their audience with incredible precision. The ability to personalize marketing messages based on a customer’s unique data points creates a more relevant and engaging experience, ultimately enhancing the customer journey—and your marketing.

While this review has explored the highlights of what ActiveCampaign offers, it’s important to remember that the software has a ton of features and uses beyond what we’ve covered here. From pre-built automation recipes to a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface for building custom workflows, ActiveCampaign empowers marketers to streamline their efforts and maximize customer engagement. By personalizing the customer journey at every step along the way, businesses can build stronger relationships and drive more conversions.