Active Campaign Review

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Date Established

2003

Location

Chicago, IL

Pros

• Low monthly costs
• Numerous features
• Good customer service

Cons

• Steep learning curve
• No mobile apps

Overview

Active Campaign is a versatile, affordable email marketing service with a powerful suite of reporting and automation tools. This company has a reputation for strong, responsive customer service, winning a Stevie Award for its 2013 update.

Active Campaign iterates and updates frequently, often in response to criticisms and critiques from its clients. First-time users may find the interface a little intimidating, but if you manage to stick with it, you’ll find a team-friendly application that offers tremendous functionality at a low price point.

Pricing

Active Campaign’s three tiers of service are all list-based, meaning you’ll be charged based on the size of your contact list. Paying for a full year saves you 15 percent off the listed price. For contact lists larger than what’s listed below, you’ll have to request a custom price. Curiously, the threshold for having to request a price is lower the more advanced the plan is — perhaps to avoid sticker shock? A free trial is available.

Lite

The basic plan supports up to three users, provides chat and email-based technical support and grants access to the newsletter, email, and marketing automation features.

• 500 contacts: $9/month
• 1,000 contacts: $17/month
• 2,500 contacts: $39/month
• 5,000 contacts: $69/month
• 10,000 contacts: $111/month
• 25,000 contacts: $179/month
• 50,000 contacts: $239/month
• 75,000 contacts: $299/month
• 100,000 contacts: $369/month

Plus

Plus raises the number of users all the way to 25, adds a custom domain and branding, one-on-one training, and some additional bells and whistles.

• 1,000 contacts: $49/month
• 2,500 contacts: $99/month
• 5,000 contacts: $135/month
• 10,000 contacts: $199/month
• 25,000 contacts: $319/month

Enterprise

With Enterprise, you can have up to 50 users. You’ll also get phone support, a dedicated service rep, and some additional reporting tools and a custom mail server domain.

• 2,500 contacts: $129/month
• 5,000 contacts: $199/month
• 10,000 contacts: $350/month
• 25,000 contacts: $479/month

Keep in mind that these prices are based on year-long subscriptions; the month-to-month plan is more expensive.

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Ease Of Use

The initial sign-up process is incredibly simple, requiring little more than basic contact info (business name, email address, name) and some questions designed to funnel you into the appropriate level of service. After that, you’re dropped into the UI and …

Yikes.

To call the initial amount of information Active Campaign puts on the screen overwhelming is not an understatement. There are seven options on the top menu (including Contacts, Campaigns, and Reports). Within each of these seven options, you will find an extensive left-hand side menu filled with even more choices. This is really just an indicator of how thoroughly designed Active Campaign is, but though these features are all extremely useful, it can all feel like a bit much.

If you thought this design would preclude the need for any navigation bars, you’ll be excited to note that there is still one at the top of the screen for Contacts, Campaigns, Automations, Deals, Lists, Apps, and Reports.

While this UI flies in the face of popular design conventions, there is a method to Active Campaign’s madness. Each of the windows I listed above can be dragged to a position on the screen or closed altogether. Clicking on these windows, which shows a simplified snapshot of the feature, takes you to a page with the full feature. Consider the initial offering more of a smorgasbord of features showing you what your UI could look like rather than what it must look like, and you’ll begin to appreciate Active Campaign’s strategy here. Or at least move past it.

Managing Contacts

Before you can send a campaign, you’ll have to make a list. This involves filling in a pop-up window that asks you to name the list itself and enter the name and address of your business, the URL the list is about, and a reminder to your contacts about why they’re on the list. The last two parts seem a bit like gratuitous anti-spam measures, but they’re required to move forward.

Luckily, things get a lot better after that. Active Campaign offers a wealth of list creation options ranging from simple copy and paste to importing a .csv file to importing a contact list from one of 94 sources (including popular ones like Google and Salesforce). Once you have your email addresses, you can add tags. This is useful down the road in case you want to sort your contacts by a method other than the list or their current status. You can export your contact list from Active Campaign as a .csv file.

One uncommon feature Active Campaign offers is the ability to set what it calls Lead Scoring. It’s a feature designed to help sales teams precisely target contacts by setting “rules” and then assigning a cumulative point value to contacts who meet the criteria. These rules can be things like geographic areas, rate of response, etc. It should give you an idea of who is being effectively reached and who is being neglected.

Creating The Email Campaign

Once your contact list is set up the way you want it, you can get down to the business of actually creating and sending your emails. Active Campaign provides a large variety of pre-built, mobile-friendly templates that you can customize to your specific needs, but you can always start from scratch, either using HTML or working with their “one-column,” “left column,” or “right column” basic templates.

Once you are actually working on your email, you’re in a pretty good place. The drag and drop editor is more robust than most and allows for limited image editing even after you upload. While there’s some responsive design, you also have the option to flag individual elements so that they’re hidden when the message is viewed on a mobile device. If you’re HMTL savvy but prefer to work with templates, you can add custom HTML to any element to work around some of the limitations.

Sending The Campaign

When you’re ready to send the campaign, you’ll be given a number of tracking options that you can opt in or out of: Open/Read, Link Tracking, Reply Tracking, and Google Analytics. You can then select an email address to which you can send a preview and schedule the campaign to be sent immediately at any given time and date.

There’s also a Spam counter on the bottom that notes any potential issues you might have sending the campaign. As my “sending” email address was from a free account (Gmail), I received a warning that it might trigger spam detection. This turned out to be correct, as Gmail and MSN both redirected my campaign to their respective junk folders.

The messages did, however, arrive almost immediately and in the format in which I’d created them. The responsive design elements translated nicely to mobile, missing only the elements I’d instructed the editor to hide on those devices.

Just for fun, I also set up an automated email that would be sent to anyone who opened the initial campaign. The follow-up email arrived quicker to the Gmail account than others, although it did eventually arrive for all of them.

Email Campaign Reporting

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that reporting is what Active Campaign is really about. Each step of the to-do list, from creating your list to designing your email, is about choosing custom parameters that can be used to create useful reports.

One of the benefits of Active Campaign’s busy default layout is that it puts a lot of feedback from your campaigns front and center. The beauty of it is you can be as anal-retentive or relaxed about the details you’re tracking as you’re comfortable with. Without any integrations or the help of Google Analytics, you can track opens, clicks, shares, and geographic locations, as well as trends for most of the above.

This information can be put to use with a built-in deals system that lets you customize special offers to segments of your contact list. There’s some built-in scheduling software here that will help sales teams coordinate offers and campaigns, but it might also be helpful to individual merchants who want plan marketing strategies in advance.

It’s a good package, especially considering that it’s available at every price tier.

Customer Service & Support

Like many SaaS applications, variable customer service is built into the business model. You’ll only have access to phone support at the Enterprise level. For everyone else, you can access the entirety of Active Campaign’s help system by clicking on one of the two question mark icons on the right side of the screen. These will lead you to the following options:

• Video Tutorials: 12 videos covering both tutorials and contact strategies
• Knowledge Base: 8 topics with numerous articles
• Directed Training: In the form of one-on-one sessions and webinars (availability varies by your plan)
• Ticketing Or Messaging: You can submit a ticket to customer support or try to IM with a live representative. When no one is available you can leave a message instead.
• Blog: Updated frequently, if somewhat irregularly, the blog covers marketing topics and strategies
• Facebook: Active Campaign maintains a Facebook account with almost 10,000 likes. It’s updated frequently and features links to third-party articles and events relevant to its users.
• Twitter: Active Campaign is also active on Twitter, with over 6,000 followers.

Negative Reviews & Complaints

Active Campaign has a minimal history with the BBB, with only one resolved complaint on record regarding billing. Criticisms of Active Campaign tend to amount more to gripes than serious problems.

• Learning Curve: Active Campaign throws you into, maybe not the deep end of the pool, but the part where you have to stand on your toes to keep your head above water. It’s not hard to use, but it’s definitely not the easiest ESP to learn.
• Limited Mobile App: While Active Campaign has in the last year released a mobile app for their product, it only has some of the features in the web app and is only limited in its use.
• Delivery Rate: One customer said his delivery rate was below that of Active Campaign’s popular competitor, MailChimp.

Positive Reviews & Testimonials

It’s a lot easier to find positive testimonials about Active Campaign than negative ones. Out of an aggregated 28 user reviews, Active Campaign is currently rating 4.9/5.0 stars on G2Crowd. Here’s what people like about Active Campaign:

• Frequent Updates: Active Campaign iterates often and several customers noted that their complaints had been addressed in updates.
• Excellent Value: Active Campaign is priced on the lower end for ESPs (email service providers) but still manages to offer a wealth of options.
• Robust Features: While overwhelming at first, users appreciated the number and breadth of Active Campaign’s features.
• Customer Service: Multiple users spoke highly of Active Campaign’s quick and effective customer service.

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Features

As I mentioned above, Active Campaign provides a feature-rich environment, and to try and spell out every single one of them would take up a tree’s worth of digital space. Here are some of the highlights:

• Email Segmentation: This feature allows you to create a number of “segments” in your email and send those customized segments only to certain members of your list. Want to send a version of your email to single men in Portland? You can do that. Want to send another version of the same email to married women in Connecticut? You can do that too.
• Subscription Forms: Easily encourage new customers to subscribe to your marketing emails with one of four form types. From there, automate what happens to their information, from adding them to a contact list to sending welcome emails to starting the sales process.
• Dynamic Content: Active Campaign wants to make sure your emails keep their fresh feel and so makes it possible to add RSS feeds and websites to your emails. Those sections will update with the latest content, ensuring your emails stay current. Add to this the ability to customize what subscribers see based on their individual preferences and you have a powerful tool at your disposal.
• Split Testing: With this perennial email marketing feature, you can create variations within your email–a different subject line, picture, or phrase–and see which variant performs better.
• Site & Event Tracking: Active Campaign provides a “small snippet of code” that you can add to your website, allowing you to track in detail what pages people visit, what links they click, and what videos they watch. All of this data comes back to you to use in growing your business.
• SMS Marketing: Active Campaign makes it possible for you to send text alerts to your subscribers in addition to emails. (These can also include discount codes, which help prospective customers along towards a sale.)
• Sales Automation: This is one of Active Campaign’s biggest party tricks. The sales automation feature allows you to create a chain-of-events flow chart for your emails, ensuring that customers receive emails at just the right time to help them towards making a purchase.
• Contact & Lead Scoring: Using this feature, Active Campaign will score your subscribers based on their activity and demographics. Once you know what contacts are most likely to convert to a sale, you can focus on them and help them along that much more accurately.
• CRM & Deals App: Designed to handle customer relations and deals, the Active Campaign app allows users to find contacts, access communication, and track deals. Unfortunately, that is the extent of what the app can handle; you cant create or send campaigns out from your phone or another mobile device.

Integrations

Active Campaign is a beast when it comes to add-ons, allowing users to choose from a comprehensive list of over 150 integrations and apps. If you’re using a 3rd party app, there’s a good chance it’s on the list.

Security

Active Campaign’s security policy isn’t spelled out in detail on the site, but the company does assure that information is only accessible to authorized individuals. Active Campaign encourages users to report security vulnerabilities to the company. You can read more about their security and privacy policies if you’re interested.

Anti-Spam Policy

Outgoing campaigns are flagged for potential spam issues prior to being sent using a point-based system, granting would-be offenders some warning. While there’s no set point at which Active Campaign will suspend an account, they do review accounts with unusually high rates of unsubscribers.

Final Verdict

Active Campaign manages to be an excellent ESP in the broad sense while also aiming for a niche not clearly occupied by its competitors.

This ESP could certainly work for any sized company, but its ideal fit is probably a mid-sized firm with a dedicated sales team that can take advantage of Active Campaign’s generous multi-user and scheduling features but doesn’t necessarily have the budget to build a lot of its own tools.

One minor gripe is the supplemental charge for previewing emails on mobile devices, but in general, that’s fairly safe to either ignore or just test with your own device. Active Campaign’s pricing is affordable, even cheap, but there’s no free plan, so marketers with very modest email campaign needs would be better off looking at MailChimp or SendinBlue.

While your first login may be a little overwhelming, Active Campaign is ultimately a lot more approachable than it appears at a glance. Step-by-step tutorials will hold your hand as you navigate what might be one of the most robust, non-premium feature sets available in an ESP. Active Campaign is as simple or detailed as you need it to be, whether you want to do high-level marketing or just keep some contacts up to date with a newsletter, and that’s an impressive accomplishment.

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Chris Motola

Finance Writer at Merchant Maverick

Chris Motola is a writer, programmer, game designer, and product of NY. These days he's mostly writing about financial products, but in a past life he wrote about health care and business. He's a graduate of the University of Central Florida.

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