While ActiveCampaign provides a substantial library of online support resources and onboarding services, customer assistance is available solely through live chat, excluding phone support.

In comparison to Campaign Monitor, it shares similarities but excels in different aspects.

Once an email campaign is launched, ActiveCampaign diligently tracks data and furnishes users with comprehensive analytics and reports.

This valuable information empowers businesses to make informed decisions and optimizations, fostering more effective connections with their audiences, driving conversions, and building loyalty. Consequently, ActiveCampaign emerges as a high-value email marketing platform that, when strategically utilized, has the potential to deliver substantial value for its cost.

For users with advanced skills, ActiveCampaign provides the option to create text-only emails and custom HTML emails. This feature enhances flexibility, accommodating teams with varying skill levels and experiences, and ensures a consistently professional appearance for the end result.

ActiveCampaign empowers users to utilize automations and construct workflows using advanced triggers. This can range from basic tasks, such as automatically sending a welcome email to new subscribers or following up with an email when a potential customer abandons their cart, to more intricate workflows. The system supports conditional segmentation, allowing users to send specific emails based on recipients' interactions with previous emails. This includes factors like whether they opened the email, clicked a link, or completed a purchase.

ActiveCampaign stands out as a premier platform in its category, particularly due to its exceptional tracking, data collection, and reporting capabilities. Users can delve into various aspects of their campaign's performance well beyond standard metrics like open rates or conversion rates. The platform allows for comprehensive tracking of user interactions on the website, integrating data from Google Analytics. On the reporting front, ActiveCampaign offers a variety of reports, covering areas such as campaign performance, email client trends, predictive content, and open/read trends. This wealth of information provides users with a strategic advantage in developing high-performing campaigns.

ActiveCampaign's built-in CRM stands out as another notable feature. It proves particularly beneficial for businesses lacking an existing CRM but seeking an effective means to nurture incoming leads as their contact list expands. While ActiveCampaign's CRM features may not match the robustness of the market's top CRMs, they offer a lightweight yet functional solution. Users can establish a custom pipeline, generate and assign tasks, set up personalized goals, forecast deals, and monitor progress. Overall, it serves as a reliable CRM for those heavily dependent on email marketing who have yet to establish a dedicated CRM system.

ActiveCampaign's Lite plan serves as the introductory tier, priced at $29 per month with annual billing. Unlike many email marketing plans, it doesn't impose a limit on the number of monthly email sends and accommodates up to 250,000 contacts. The plan encompasses essential email marketing features, including prebuilt templates, a drag-and-drop editor, audience segmentation, automations, and comprehensive analytics and reporting. Notably, it stands out by offering a free contact list migration, simplifying the onboarding process for users transitioning from another email marketing platform.

This plan is an excellent choice for data-driven businesses with substantial monthly email sends. However, it may not be the ideal fit for ecommerce enterprises, lacking integrations with major platforms like Shopify, Square, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce. Additionally, it doesn't incorporate ecommerce-specific features found in other plans, such as a product catalog or abandoned cart functionality. Check price

Priced at $49 per month with annual billing, the Plus Plan encompasses all features of the Lite plan while introducing additional elements, particularly focusing on ecommerce. Beyond offering ecommerce integrations, it incorporates features tailored for businesses engaged in Facebook Advertising, such as Facebook Custom Audiences and lead ads. These additions empower businesses to enhance their social media efforts and devise more strategic email campaigns, resonating effectively with audiences and driving increased sales.

Designed for businesses experienced in email marketing and seeking elevated campaign performance, the Plus plan stands out with its advanced features. ActiveCampaign not only provides some of the most sophisticated automation tools but also boasts industry-leading analytics and reporting capabilities. For businesses aiming to make data-driven decisions for optimizing and crafting more effective campaigns, the Plus plan proves to be an excellent choice.

New users will find the setup process to be quick and easy. To start, there are only a couple of simple steps to sign up for the 14-day free trial, which involves providing your email address, name, password and answering a couple of basic questions about your business, such as the number of contacts you have, number of employees and industry. The free trial does not require a credit card and ActiveCampaign offers a free contact migration service, which makes it very easy to transfer your contact list from another email marketing platform. Alternatively, users can simply import contact lists from a CSV file or copy and paste contacts into ActiveCampaign.

ActiveCampaign offers a vast number of advanced features, which can lend to a longer learning curve for those looking to take advantage of said features. However, it’s also very easy to use for those looking to build and deploy automated email campaigns.

Compared to many competing email marketing platforms, it’s far more intuitive, making it easier to build automated campaigns with more advanced triggers and features.

The steps to create an email campaign with ActiveCampaign is very straightforward.

To start, click the option from the dashboard to create a campaign. Then, create a name for your campaign and select the type of email campaign you wish to create, such as a standard, one-time email, an auto-responder to send after someone subscribes automatically, split testing to send multiple emails and discover which works best, RSS-triggered or based on a certain date. From there, users are prompted to select an audience, choose a template, customize it and determine when it sends.

Customer support is available 24/7 via live chat and email. While it’s not ideal that it does not offer phone support, its live chat support is quick, helpful and very personable as if you’re speaking to a colleague rather than someone in a random call center. This is not only my personal experience with ActiveCampaign’s support but a large majority of users note the same in hundreds of reviews as well.