ActiveCampaign review: what is it and why is it so popular?

The word ActiveCampaign may sound familiar to you. That may be correct because this marketing automation & CRM tool is increasing in popularity. In 2020, the company raised a further growth capital of $ 100 million. Companies are switching from MailChimp and SendinBlue to start using ActiveCampaign. Therefore the time for an extensive dive into this tool. In this article, we answer the question: What is ActiveCampaign, what can you do with it, and the alternatives. Let's dive right in through this ActiveCampaign review.

What exactly is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation software with CRM that allows you to manage contacts, keep track of deals and participate in email marketing. ActiveCampaign is a tool that offers a lot of functionality in terms of Marketing Automation, CRM and email marketing.

This makes it an interesting option for many companies (from small to large) to fulfil the marketing automation challenges. Because CRM plays an essential role in the software architecture of ActiveCampaigin, it is a tool that makes personalizing e-mail messages easy.

This combination (CRM, Marketing Automation and a good email marketing engine) makes it an interesting tool, all the more so because it is a relatively reasonably priced tool for this type of functionality.

What exactly can you do with ActiveCampaign?

It is an extensive tool with many different functionalities, good support and a wide partner network. In this article, we will tackle several important topics to have an idea of ​​the extensive possibilities ActiveCampaign has to offer.

Some functionalities correspond to other tools such as MailChimp, Sendinblue, ConvertKit or GetRespond. Some things make ActiveCampaign unique and distinguish it from this tool, not always because of the individual functionality, but because of the combination and the intelligent design of the software architecture.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) with ActiveCampaign

Marketing often starts with a good database. You obviously have different goals: building a database, using the database, supplementing the database, keeping up with sales opportunities, retaining customers and so on. The CRM database will play a role in every phase of the Customer Journey. At least, that's usually the marketer's goal.

The more data you have about prospects and customers, the more effective and efficient you can conduct marketing. From that perspective, ActiveCampaign has CRM functionality at the heart of the tool. Several things are important in this.

1. Manage contacts and companies

The most important function of any CRM system is to record prospect and customer data. ActiveCampaign supports this by offering a neat CRM function. You can decide which data you want to track and use it to create segments for your marketing campaigns. The lists of companies and contacts can be displayed and sorted in various ways. You can also easily search through the entire database.

2. Lists and Tags as powerful features in ActiveCampaign

An essential part of keeping a grip on segments is adding and tag organizations to lists. Tagging provides a lot of interesting possibilities. You can use these tags to create segments of target groups. You can then set up various marketing campaigns for this.

Conditional content

You can also use tags to serve certain content to certain users. So you create an e-mail newsletter in which 1 content block has several variants. The correct variant is sent to the recipient based on the tag.

3. Track opportunities

CRM software goes further than just managing contact details. Most CRM systems support multiple stages in the funnels and provide marketing and sales functions. For sales, a key function is to manage sales opportunities. With ActiveCampaign, you have (from the Plus version) a CRM solution that supports this well. You can:

• Create and track opportunities
• Set up campaigns for companies at a particular stage of the opportunity
• Create tasks for sales reps for opportunities
• Create overviews of the pipeline

If the CRM functionality is not adequate, it is always possible to use other CRM solutions. In some cases, this may be interesting (because of an existing software landscape or specific functionalities).

In that case, ActiveCampaign has more than 50 links with CRM systems. In this way, you can make optimal use of e-mail marketing and marketing automation power based on an integrated software idea.

Email marketing campaigns with ActiveCampaign

1. Campaign design

You create a campaign in which you enter all relevant variables such as

• Link tracking
• Open / read tracking
• Answer tracking
• Google Analytics
• and other settings.

You can send or schedule the campaign immediately and therefore has autoresponder functionality.

ActiveCampaign's email marketing machine is excellent. You can set up e-mail newsletters fairly quickly and intuitively from standard templates. Templates are available for all types of email newsletters and marketing emails. You can take that as a starting point and then adjust it as desired.

2. Personalization and custom content

Because you can draw on an extensive CRM database, you can personalize the e-mail well. Not only can you fill in the fields from the database, but you can also offer complete content blocks to relations that meet a certain condition (conditional content). If someone has a certain 'tag', you can specifically offer them a suitable content block for this person. The ActiveCampaign e-mail builder works well and is easy to master.

3. Measure and report

Measuring, learning, and adjusting is part of campaign managers' standard approach, online marketers and sales professionals. As well as reporting results to teams/customers and managers. Accountability can no longer be ignored in the field of marketing and sales.

ActiveCampaign supports this with extensive reporting options regarding email marketing campaigns. Data such as:

• number of sent and opened emails
• number of clicks on links
• number of deregistrations
• number of bounce emails

… Are part of that.

Marketing Automation with ActiveCampaign

For many users, the visual Marketing Automation builder is a reason to choose ActiveCampaign. You can easily click together automated campaigns via visual flow charts.

1. Automate different scenarios

With this tool, you automate various scenarios that the target group goes through in your marketing funnel. Again, you can choose predefined campaigns such as a '7-day drip'. This is a campaign that sends a new email to the recipient every day. It is possibly based on actions that the recipient takes, such as a click on a link in a previous e-mail. You can also set up your own flow schedule with different types of e-mails or text messages.

2. Forms

A useful functionality to start your marketing funnel is the form builder. This allows you to click forms together to place them on your website conveniently. The advantage of this is that the data from these forms can flow directly into your CRM and can be used for marketing automation workflows. You can add new prospects directly to a configured automation flow with various e-mail messages.

The difference with other marketing software?

You can see that ActiveCampaign covers a wide spectrum of functionality to set up beautiful marketing funnels. If you use this tool, you basically no longer need a CRM system or other marketing automation software. So you have a total solution that offers a lot of functionality, so you no longer need many other tools.

For example, other systems, such as MailChimp, focus much more on a certain part of email marketing. This also applies to a system like GetRespond. You can also see that more and more of these tools are also shifting to more of a total provider.

That means that they will also add CRM and Marketing Automation functions. ActiveCampaign is clearly at the forefront of this, and you can see that in the relationship between the different disciplines in the tool.

The biggest differences can be seen in these areas:

1. ActiveCampaign offers more functionality on email marketing, marketing automation and CRM than, for example, MailChimp for a more attractive price.
2. ActiveCampaign is user-friendly and easy to learn. This differs per tool, but if you look at a tool like ConvertKit, this is absolutely true in my experience.
3. ActiveCampaign has a broad support base. You can expect a lot of support from ActiveCampaign itself or certified consultants who provide services around this tool.
4. The software can also be linked very well to other tools. If you want to get more out of ActiveCampaign and integrate the software with tools such as accounting programs, CRM systems or CMS systems, that is no problem.

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