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ActiveCampaign Review: The best email marketing tool we’ve found

Email marketing is not always easy, especially when you have thousands of potential clients in your mailing list.

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You’d have to send thousands of emails which is not only monotonous but also time-consuming. Fortunately, with email marketing automation tools like ActiveCampaign, you can send fewer emails while achieving better results.

What is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is an advanced marketing and sales automation software, and CRM platform. It allows users to do email marketing, powerful automation, and customer relationship management.

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It provides a cloud-based solution to marketing automation and includes features to create email marketing campaigns, lead generation, web analytics, and CRM. The platform gives users access to more advanced user tracking and market segmentation to create customized campaigns for different audiences.

How to Use ActiveCampaign Marketing Automation Software

Once you register on ActiveCampaign, you’ll instantly access a dashboard with all the features. These include:

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  • Google Analytics
  • Email list management
  • Campaigns
  • Automation templates
  • Deal creation and management
  • Contact management
  • Conversations
  • Lead scoring
  • And much more

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Activecampaign dashboard

The first adjustment you should make is to add an address. This enables you to send emails (by law, every email must have a physical address.) To add an address:

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  1. Click theΒ SettingsΒ icon
  2. SelectΒ Addresses
  3. ClickΒ Add address
  4. Enter your Address information

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Next, navigate toΒ WebsiteΒ and turnΒ onΒ theΒ site trackingΒ option. You can then enter your domain name, and copy the tracking code so that you can paste it into the header of your website so that when people visit, they can be tracked in ActiveCampaign.

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You might also want to create a list because every contact in ActiveCampaign has to exist in at least one list. To create a list:

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  1. ClickΒ contactsΒ on the navigation menu.
  2. ClickΒ listsΒ on the secondary menu. If the menu is collapsed, hover your mouse over the ActiveCampaign logo at the top left and click the arrows that appear to the right to expand.
  3. ClickΒ Add a list.
  4. Fill in the fields in the modal window that appears.
  5. Click theΒ AddΒ button.

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You can also import contacts by selectingΒ contacts, and then clicking onΒ import. You can import contacts through ActiveCampaign integrations like Google sheets, Calendly and Typeform. You can also connect automatically with services like:

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  • 123 Form Builder.
  • Bigcommerce.
  • Bigcontacts.
  • Asana.
  • Basecamp classic/3
  • Clevertim CRM.
  • Cheddar.
  • And many more.

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Connect with tens of services to have new contacts added automatically

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ActiveCampaign Marketing Automation Features

ActiveCampaign is one of the most popular email automation and marketing tools. So, what are its key features?

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Email Marketing

ActiveCampaign lets you create all types of email campaigns for your business. Its drag-and-drop email builder makes it easy for anyone to create an email from scratch. You can also use one of their email templates for an even easier experience.

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Subscriber Management

You can create simple signup forms to capture your audience’s contact information and tag them based on their interests. From the forms, you can create welcome messages and follow-up emails.

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Dynamic Content

You can combine conditional content and tagging to send your audiences customized messages based on what they want to see. Dynamic content lets you edit the text and media sent to your audience based on who they are. This allows you to engage with different segments of your audience in a way that appeals to them.

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Dynamic content on ActiveCampaign

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Split Testing

With ActiveCampaign, you can split test email copy, subject lines, calls to action, and even media within the email to see which one the audience prefers. If you’re running complex automation. you can test the entire workflow to ensure your sales funnel is converting as well as it should.

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Email Segmentation

When you’re trying to engage multiple audience segments, generic email blasts are not enough. Once you’ve created your dynamic content, you can segment your emails so that each campaign goes to the right audience. With automated segmentation, you can rest assured each contact received the email they want to see which leads to higher engagement rates.

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Pros and Cons of ActiveCampaign

Overall, ActiveCampaign is a good email marketing tool with only a few flaws. Let’s look at its pros and cons.

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ActiveCampaign Pros

  • User-friendly:Β ActiveCampaign is the platform that pioneered the visual marketing automation builder. Its user interface is intuitive and well-designed.
  • Zapier integration:Β ActiveCampaign integrates with more than 2000 tools through its Zapier integration. Although this allows you to access a wide range of tools, you’ll need a Zapier subscription to access it.
  • Machine learning:Β ActiveCampaign has introduced a number of innovative machine learning features in the past couple of years. These include predictive content, predictive sending, and predictive win-probability scoring of leads to help you automate even more of your sales process.
  • Affordable:Β ActiveCampaign is an affordable option for businesses that don’t want to commit thousands of dollars annually to marketing automation.
  • Automation split testing:Β ActiveCampaign allows you to A/B test entire sequences against each other, unlike most marketing automation tools which test individual emails.

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ActiveCampaign Cons

  • CRM:Β ActiveCampaign has an inbuilt CRM system, which isn’t as robust as standalone CRM tools like Salesforce or PipeDrive. However, this might be a reasonable tradeoff given ActiveCampaign’s powerful automation features.
  • Reporting:Β Although ActiveCampaign’s reporting is quite comprehensive and provides insights on sales and goal conversions, it can be crowded at times, making it difficult to navigate.

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How Much Does ActiveCampaign Cost?

Image: ActiveCampaign pricing

ActiveCampaign pricing varies depending on the number of features you need and the number of contacts you have. Pricing starts at $9 per month for the lite plan with 500 contacts with the plus and professional plans costing $49 and $149 respectively.

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If you want the enterprise plan or have more than 100,000 contacts, you’ll need toΒ talk to the sales teamΒ to get custom pricing.

Final Recommendation

If your business uses email campaigns then it would benefit from email marketing software. It not only allows you to send multiple emails in a short time, but it also gives you more access to customer data.

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ActiveCampaign is an impressive email marketing platform with class-leading features. While it has some setbacks like the built-in CRM, the superb automation features make up for them. It is also great for small businesses thanks to its affordable pricing.

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