ActiveCampaign Review: All You Need To Know on ActiveCampaign

Are you looking for an email marketing tool that goes beyond just sending newsletters — something with powerful automation, CRM features, and smart segmentation? Then this review of ActiveCampaign is for you.

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing service that helps businesses of all kinds do better by using a wide range of marketing tools and great automation. However, the software is pretty complicated, so it might not be right for every business.

In this review, I’ll walk you through what ActiveCampaign has to offer, what it gets right, where it might fall short, and who it’s best suited for. By the end, you’ll have a clearer idea of whether it’s the right fit for your business or if you’re better off exploring other options.

ActiveCampaign Overview & Ratings

ActiveCampaign has come a long way over the years. What started as a simple email tool has evolved into a full-blown powerhouse for marketing, sales, CRM, and even transactional messaging. If you’re an experienced marketer who lives and breathes automation, this platform is basically your dream toolbox.

That being said, if you just want to send out simple newsletters, ActiveCampaign might feel a bit too much. It’s like using a spaceship when all you needed was a bicycle. And the pricing? It can sting a little, especially for small businesses on tight budgets. That said, many users agree it’s worth the cost once you tap into all the value it brings.

One thing users consistently rave about is email deliverability. Your emails won’t be chilling in spam folders—they’re hitting inboxes like clockwork.

The best part? ActiveCampaign can easily become your all-in-one hub for both marketing and sales. That means fewer tools to manage, fewer vendors to pay, and potentially, more money saved in the long run.

ActiveCampaign Review Rating Details

I took some time to explore ActiveCampaign, and here’s what I think about its main features. This is my personal take based on how it performed for me:

Now that we’ve got a feel for what it’s all about, let’s take a quick breakdown of what the ActiveCampaign platform really offers.

ActiveCampaign Reviews: Reviewing The Core Features

ActiveCampaign combines email marketing automation software with a sales CRM. But it does a lot more than that. It will surprise you when you first log in to ActiveCampaign and see all of its features in the dashboard.

Here are the most important things about ActiveCampaign:

• Send Email Newsletters: ActiveCampaign has more than 240 templates that look professional and an email builder that you can drag and drop.
• Create Automated Campaigns: The main thing that makes ActiveCampaign great is the marketing automation maker. The process of setting up automated ads is simple. There are more than 900 templates that you can use to start making automations. You can then change them to fit your needs.
• Close Sales Using ActiveCampaign CRM: Automate follow-up on sales and get rid of a lot of the work that needs to be done by hand to close deals and sales.
• Get more leads: With the ActiveCampaign landing page builder, you can get more leads and turn visitors into signups and buyers.
• ActiveCampaign AI: This helps with building automation, making content, segmenting, reports, and planning campaigns.

ActiveCampaign is one of the few tools that you can use for a lot of different things without getting too complicated. The ActiveCampaign features page only tells you a small part of what’s possible. However, email marketing and marketing automation tools are the most important parts.

ActiveCampaign Pros and Cons

Pros

• Extremely Effective Automation

One of the best tools for automating marketing that you can find. This important part of ActiveCampaign is both very strong and simple to use. You can also buy the CRM and SMS add-ons to make sales software and text messages work together. It’s a great email marketing tool for Shopify because it has strong ecommerce automations.

• Thorough Reporting

It gives you reports on everything, like click maps, geotracking, and page hits. On higher plans for Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and other platforms, you can track purchases. The “Recommendations for you” part is a nice addition that can help you get more people to buy, stay loyal, and interact with your brand.

• Free Migrations

ActiveCampaign will move your account for free if you are switching from another email marketing service.

• All-in-one sales and Marketing Platform

If you have an ActiveCampaign Plus plan or higher, you can buy the CRM as an add-on. The more information and activity you have in one place, the faster you can see how your sales and marketing efforts are going as a whole. You might also save money by putting all of your digital marketing efforts in one place.

Cons

• More difficult to learn

This might only be a con if you just want an easy and quick way to send emails. Another option is an email newsletter service that is easier to use. If this is all you need, you might want to look elsewhere.

• Not the cheapest

There is no free plan, but you can try it for free. Most of the time, the ActiveCampaign prices are higher than those of easier email marketing services. There are less expensive tools out there that you can use instead, but they aren’t as powerful.

• Entry-level plan

The starter plan is the least expensive, but it has some big problems. We learnt that we couldn’t do things like use conditional formatting or make automations with branches, which seem like pretty basic features. We had to find awkward ways to get things done because of this.

• Charges for Client Preview

If you want to see how your newsletter looks on different email clients, you’ll have to pay $1 for each test/client and buy a pack of 5.

PS: The only issue I ran into while using the website was the loading time. It felt a bit slow. 

Getting Started with ActiveCampaign

Signing up and getting started on ActiveCampaign is very easy. All you need to do to get started is as follows:

Step 1: Click the ‘Free Trial’ button at the top right corner. You’ll be directed to a page where you can enter your email address.

Step 2: After entering your email, you’ll be redirected to a page where you can enter your name and phone number.

Step 3: Next, you’ll be taken to a page to enter your company’s name.

Step 4: After entering your company’s name, you’ll be prompted to answer a few essential questions:

• How many contacts/prospects do you have?
• How many employees are in your business?
• What industry does your business operate in?

PS: This step is mandatory. You won’t be able to proceed to the next page until all fields are completed.

Step 5: After clicking ‘Next Step,’ a one-time password (OTP) will be sent to your email to verify your email address. Once verified, you’ll be directed to set your password. After setting your password, click on “Take Me to My Account’ to proceed.“

After clicking ‘Take Me to My Account,‘ your dashboard will appear as shown below.

Now that we’ve walked through how to open an account on ActiveCampaign, let’s take a quick look at some of its key features

ActiveCampaign Feature Overview

ActiveCampaign has a lot of tools that help users market more quickly, easily, and effectively. Let’s look at each one separately.

ActiveCampaign Email Marketing

An email marketing tool is what draws people to ActiveCampaign, and they stay for everything else. Email marketing can be both one-off emails and programs. You can pick from 6 different kinds, which are:

• The standard
• Automated
• RSS trigger
• Tests split up
• Autoresponder based on dates

After picking the type of email you want to send, you pick an email list in your account to send it to the right people. ActiveCampaign site and event tracking adds another level of targeting to your ads that goes beyond lists.

You might want to send emails to a certain list of people, but only if they’ve seen certain pages or done a certain thing on your site. This is pretty easy to do with ActiveCampaign. I’ll talk about it in more depth when I talk about the automation features.

ActiveCampaign Email Templates

There are 240 ActiveCampaign email templates to pick from when setting up your campaign. They are labelled with the use case in mind, and they all look good. For more than 30+ layouts, you can also find building blocks, but no design.

There is a drag-and-drop editor for text blocks that you can use when writing your email. The editor isn’t the smoothest, but it does the job. You can change the fonts, background colours, line height, space, and a lot more. When I send newsletters, I use emails that look easy and have a certain formatting. You can make a copy of an email and use it again.

The email builder includes a powerful feature called conditional content. This allows users to add tags to subscribers based on their profile or actions, such as link clicks or the list they signed up for. These tags, along with other contact data, can then be used to show or hide specific content within an email dynamically.

ActiveCampaign’s email editor comes equipped with AI-powered content and image generation. Simply enter a prompt describing the image you need, choose a style, and click “generate.” Having an image generator built directly into the editor makes it fast and easy to test different visual styles and find the perfect fit for your campaign.

Of course, a great builder means little if your emails don’t reach inboxes. Fortunately, ActiveCampaign excels at deliverability. Based on both my personal experience and independent tests, their performance ranks consistently high, so you can focus on your message without worrying whether it will land.

ActiveCampaign Marketing Automation

ActiveCampaign is widely regarded as one of the best marketing automation tools in the industry. Its automation feature—simply called ‘automations’—makes it easy to streamline and manage marketing tasks efficiently.

When creating a new automation in ActiveCampaign, you can either build one from scratch or choose from over 900 pre-built templates tailored to specific goals, such as:

• Following up based on site activity
• Welcoming new contacts with an onboarding workflow
• Recovering abandoned carts using data from your eCommerce store

Inside the automation builder, you have full flexibility to customize your flow. For example, you can set a condition to check whether a contact has made a recent purchase. If they have, they’ll automatically receive a follow-up email with accessory recommendations. If not, the automation simply ends there.

There is an AI in ActiveCampaign that can help you set up automations. To test Automations, I saw 5 workflow goals from which to choose. When I clicked on “Turn leads into loyal readers or buyers,” I got three automation templates.

I tried out the “Engage contacts for action with welcome series for new readers” automation and was pleasantly surprised—it came with pre-written email copy and a template that matched our brand style. You can easily change the copy yourself or use the AI content generator to refine it further. The email editor also makes it simple to adjust the design to your liking.

Within the automation builder, you can even prompt the AI to create entire email sequences. I typed “Send 3 emails with a 1-week wait between each,” and it delivered exactly that. With workflow templates, AI assistance, and your brand kit working together, getting started with automation in ActiveCampaign is incredibly smooth and efficient.

ActiveCampaign CRM

ActiveCampaign also has a sales CRM. You can create new contacts and deals manually or through sales automation, such as submitting a contact form or having a high lead score.

Another feature that I really like about ActiveCampaign’s CRM is the lead scoring feature. You can assign scores to your leads either manually or automatically, which makes it easy to spot your hottest prospects. Even better, ActiveCampaign’s AI can actually predict the chances of closing a deal with them.

Setting up scoring rules is pretty straightforward—you can base them on things like email opens, link clicks, or form submissions. And once a contact hits a certain score, the system can automatically send a notification to your sales rep so they can jump in and follow up directly.

Plus, you’ve got all the usual CRM perks—adding notes to contacts, integrating with tools like Gmail, pulling up sales reports, and assigning tasks, whether you want to do it yourself or let automation handle it.

ActiveCampaign Landing Pages and Forms

ActiveCampaign includes a drag-and-drop landing page editor, 60+ templates, and a basic form editor. It won’t take you long to get used to the landing page and form editors because they are a lot like the email editors. And it’s simple to set off automations when people fill out forms on landing pages.

The landing page templates are top-notch. I was able to put this page together in just about 10 minutes using one of them—it was super easy!

It’s simple to drag and drop blocks from the right sidebar. I also liked how you could change the template’s whole style. It saves a lot of time because you don’t have to change the colour of each part separately.

Now, let’s take a look at the form options in ActiveCampaign. You’ve got four types to choose from: inline forms, floating bars, floating boxes, and modals. Each one serves a different purpose depending on how you want to engage your audience.

Additionally, you may use a form to initiate four other actions: tag subscribers, add them to a list, add them to an offer, or send them an email. I like that it’s simple to set off automations from a page. You can place these forms around your website.

The only issue I ran into while using the website was the loading time. It felt a bit slow.

ActiveCampaign Integrations

ActiveCampaign has over 950 integrations, with new ones being added regularly. You can connect any (homemade) software with Zapier or the open API.

There are premium integrations for Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics, among other CRM and e-commerce systems. These go beyond the surface to collect more contact information, apply tags, implement automated actions, retrieve purchase history, and more.

Here are some of the most common integrations:

• E-commerce platforms, such as Shopify, Sellfy, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce.
• Editors for email templates, such as Stripo
• Customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Pipedrive and Salesforce
• Online course systems, like Thinkific
• Tools for checking emails, like Kickbox
• Platforms for SMS marketing, such as Slicktext
• Platforms for ads and social media, like Facebook and Google Ads
• CMS software, such as WordPress
• Tools for making reports, like Google Analytics

ActiveCampaign AI: The Smart Stuff

The ActiveCampaign AI shows up in various parts of the tool. There are seven tools that will help you with your email marketing campaigns:

• Text Generation uses your commands to write subject lines and email copy, and improve them.
• You can use Image Generation to add attractive images that go with your email design and text. Use writing prompts and select from 17 styles to get visuals.
• You can group users into segments based on contact information and how engaged they are. This helps you find the right contacts and what they want.
• AI Automation Builder makes automations based on what you tell it to do. It can be used to completely automate a process or just add steps to a system that is already in place.
• Predictive Sending looks at how your contacts respond to your emails to figure out the best time to send.
• Predictive Content is like multivariate testing, but it is a lot better. You write and send different forms of an email. Machine learning and natural language processing in ActiveCampaign help figure out who the best receiver is.
• Based on a URL, AI Brand Kit gets your image, three brand colours, fonts, social links, and makes email templates.

For a better understanding of the types of deals that will close, you can use machine learning with CRM to put more time and effort into those deals.

ActiveCampaign Pricing & Plan 

When you take a closer look at the ActiveCampaign pricing, you’ll notice that it leans towards the higher side of the email marketing range. The Starter plan is the most budget-friendly option, starting at just $15 per month, but keep in mind that prices go up as your subscriber count grows.

You can choose to pay monthly or yearly, but if you want to get the best value for your buck, going with yearly billing is the way to go.

Additionally, we think the main issue for users will be the brief 14-day free trial since there’s no free plan available. We mention this because, honestly, you probably don’t have enough time to try out all the different features, and that means you might not get a clear picture of the software.

To better understand each of the plans, you can check them out here.

There are add-ons for ActiveCampaign that improve CRM, SMS, custom reporting, and transactional email.

You can obtain Transactional Email with any plan. The Plus, Pro, and Enterprise plans offer the Enhanced CRM and SMS add-ons. Custom reporting is part of the ActiveCampaign Enterprise plan, and you can also get it with the Plus and Pro plans. Here’s what the add-ons cost:

Does ActiveCampaign offer a discount?

Yes, if you sign up for ActiveCampaign for a year, you can save 20%. This means that ActiveCampaign prices are very low compared to other marketing automation tools. Nonprofits can also get 20% off all ActiveCampaign plans.