ActiveCampaign overview
ActiveCampaign is an email marketing powerhouse with impressive automations, strong analytics, and an excellent in-house contact database. That, combined with its cheap starting price, makes it the best value option out of all the email marketing software we’ve tested.
We’ve put ActiveCampaign through its paces in user testing, and left no stone unturned throughout our research process. It scored 4.6 stars out of 5 overall, coming second in our list of the six best email marketing services.
ActiveCampaign is high quality email marketing software that we recommend most for dedicated marketing professionals. It’s got a learning curve, so it takes some time to get to grips with, but its automation features and in-house contact database are worth the effort.
ActiveCampaign emerged as the best value email marketing software out of all the ones we tested. Here’s a look at how it scored across all our research areas.
About ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign Is Designed for More Than Marketing, but Is It Right for You?
ActiveCampaign, if you believe the hype on its website, is your one-stop-shop for everything you could want in a marketing platform. There’s the email marketing, of course, but there’s also SMS messaging, social media integration, customer relations management (CRM) software, automation, and landing pages. Heck, there’s a tool specifically designed for running time-limited deals.
In short, ActiveCampaign definitely wants to do more than email. And it does. But does it really do that much more than any other of the top-rated email marketing platforms? That’s one of the big questions. The other one is, of course, if ActiveCampaign is right for you and your business, specifically.
Truth be told, I feel that ActiveCampaign falls short of its self-imposed goals in the one-stop-shop department. While it does have a few stand-out features, it doesn’t have things like a site builder or online store builder, which you’ll find in competing services such as the (admittedly inferior) Constant Contact.
On the other hand, ActiveCampaign’s marketing and automation plans come loaded with features that might make it the perfect companion service to go along with your existing infrastructure and marketing tools. I went undercover to find out exactly what’s so good about ActiveCampaign. I signed up for a paid account and tested every aspect of the service. Self-imposed goals or no, I found there was a lot to like.
Pros
- Best value email marketing software around – ActiveCampaign’s plans start at just $9 per month (billed annually) and come packed with features, so you’re guaranteed great value
- Best in-house contact database – you can expect list and subscriber management, contact profiles, task tracking, task automation, lead scoring, and interaction history, all built-in!
- Our users recommend it – they awarded it a 4.2 out of 5 customer score after testing it, making it the people’s favorite (tied at the top with GetResponse!)
Cons
- Missing some key features – ActiveCampaign doesn’t have a survey builder, and it doesn’t support transactional emails – which could be a big problem for some!
- Steep learning curve – you need time and patience to get to grips with ActiveCampaign, so it’s unsuitable if you need to create campaigns in a hurry
- Its templates could be better – and there could be more of them! There’s only 36, and they’re pretty barebones, so we recommend starting from scratch rather than using a template
