ActiveCampaign

Author: Kaitlyn Short

ActiveCampaign's email marketing allows you to send newsletters, design email campaigns, and keep in touch with contacts and customers. Their marketing automation technology automates your marketing channels using personal and behavioral data about your contacts. And their Sales & CRM solutions help you get more leads and close deals faster with their "refreshing take on customer relations."

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The Good

• Packages
• Customer support
• Marketing automation platform
• Templates

ActiveCampaign was created to meet the email marketing needs of small and medium-sized business. It has grown since it was founded in 2003 and now offers 3 packages ranging from $9 per month to $149 per month to meet the needs of a variety of business sizes from a small shop you run out of your home to a Fortune 500 company. If you're new to the email marketing game, ActiveCampaign provides countless user guides and video tutorials to walk you through their templates and tools. They also offer live interactive webinars and provide live chat and email support. The live chat representatives are friendly and quick to find answers to your question. Phone support is available if you are an Enterprise user. ActiveCampaign goes beyond many of its competitors by not just offering email marketing solutions; the company also provides what one reviewer described as a "robust marketing automation platform, complete with build-in CRM and sales automation features." They also provide real-time data analysis so that you can quickly see how effective your campaigns are and whether you're getting a good return on investment for your email marketing. ActiveCampaign provides free templates and free image hosting so you can start off with a clean canvas before dragging, dropping, and customizing it to your tastes and needs.

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The Bad

• Outdated resources
• No built-in survey tool
• Limited free trial

While it is generally a good thing that a company is constantly revising and improving, that means that a number of ActiveCampaigns otherwise helpful user guides and video tutorials may be out of date with their updates. ActiveCampaign used to provide a built-in survey creation tool, but that feature has currently been disabled. Instead, users have to use SurveyMonkey, which has been integrated into ActiveCampaign's platform. Unfortunately, you have to pay extra for this otherwise free service if your email list grows beyond 250 contacts. ActiveCampaign also doesn't offer a way of allowing you to host event websites. With only a 14-day free trial with limited tools, it's difficult to get a thorough picture of whether ActiveCampaign will work for your needs strictly from the free trial.

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The Bottom Line

With a variety of full customizable templates and free image hosting, you'll likely have the tools you need whether you're a beginner or an experienced email marketing creator. Using their data analysis tools, you'll be able to see how successfully you are in reaching your clients and be able to better tailor your campaigns in the future. The site isn't perfect and is missing a couple of helpful features like up to date user guides and a built-in survey creation tool, ActiveCampaign has been consistently updating their site to better meet the needs of their customers. The variety of pricing options allows business of all sizes to utilize ActiveCampaign's solutions.