Are you looking for a tool that helps you automate marketing tasks? Active Campaign is a great choice. This software allows you to create automated emails, landing pages, social media posts, and much more. Active Campaign has been around since 2003 and was originally designed for small businesses. Today, it’s considered one of the top email automation tools on the market. Active Campaign lets you build personalized campaigns and send them automatically to prospects or customers. It also offers advanced features such as split testing, segmentation, workflow management, and reporting.
There are a lot of great customer experience automation (CXA) solutions on the market today, like ActiveCampaign, Marketo, Hubspot, and Campaign Monitor to name just a few.
What exactly is a Customer Experience Automation platform and how can it help you?
This ActiveCampaign review will answer these questions and more.
Dive deep into this ActiveCampaign review and learn why it's great for startups and advanced marketers alike.
Table of Contents
What is Customer Experience Automation (CXA)?
Definition according to ActiveCampaign: Customer Experience Automation accelerates business growth with automated 1:1 communications that connect across all channels and through the entire customer lifecycle.
Active Campaign Main Features
If you're looking for software that gets the job done and is easy to use, ActiveCampaign is a great choice. From marketing automation flows to real-time triggers, validations & workflows, you can do it all with ActiveCampaign.
You get a clean admin interface and a mobile app for on the go management which makes this software very user friendly.
Here are the four main features in ActiveCampaign:
- Firstly, Personalized email marketing campaigns using dynamic content, email segmentation, and messaging
- Secondly, powerful Marketing automation and contact management
- At number three on the list is A Smart CRM to automate sales, lead scoring, and calculate win probability. Use landing page feature to generate more leads
- And lastly, Customer support using website messaging (Chat), SMS, and engagement tracking.
Customer Experience Automation
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ActiveCampaign is not just about email marketing
The ActiveCampaign team keeps adding new features to improve their service offering.
- Advanced Reporting to find opportunities for growth.
- Integrated forms to collect prospect contact information and start automations.
- Site tracking to understand how people are using your website.
- Migration services are free from your current service provider.
- Email segmentation to help you send the right messages, at the right time to the right prospects and customers alike.
- Automation Goals can be customized so you measure your campaign performance against those goals.
- CRM mobile App gives you access to your ActiveCampaign platform so you can update your deals on the go.
ActiveCampaign Pricing Plans
ActiveCampaign has four pricing plans, they are as follows:
- Lite ($9/month),
- Unlimited ($49/month),
- Professional ($99/month) and
- Enterprise ($499/month).
The starter plan has features like email marketing and marketing automation. In addition to lite features, the higher plans add features like the ActiveCampaign CRM, landing pages and lead scoring.
Most of how the pricing is structured is influenced by the number of contacts you will be working. They also offer a 25% discount on yearly plans. Features are further differentiated by the type of business getting the solution. For example
- B2B
- B2C
- Ecommerce
A Closer Look at key ActiveCampaign features
As I mentioned before, ActiveCampaign offers four main solutions,
- Email Marketing
- Marketing Automation
- Customer Relationship management (CRM)
- Service and Support (Messaging SMS & Chat)
1. Email Marketing
A lot of people come to ActiveCampaign for their email marketing tool. But once they start using it, they stay for the rest of platform. Email marketing can be individual emails and campaigns.
ActiveCampaign is one of the big names in email marketing, and for good reason. Not only does the software offer a large variety of features, it also offers a friendly user interface. It has everything you need to easily grow your contact list, send targeted email campaigns, and increase conversions.
When working on running an email marketing campaign, you have a choice from six different types of campaigns
- Standard
- Automated
- RSS triggered
- Split testing
- Date based
- Autoresponders
Once you have the type of email campaign, you just pick the right mailing list to send the campaign to. Individual campaigns get an opportunity when site tracking identifies an individual who has visited some pages on the site or had taken action on the website.
The email can be specific to specific group or a specific individual as long as the message is suited for that action.
The email builder has readymade templates you can pick from when designing your email. You can easily use their drag and drop feature tool to customize your email design.
You can make changes to your fonts, colors and more. Conditional blocks allow you to create and tag your subscribers so you can make their email specific to them based on the subscription, and/ or based on the action they have taken on your website.
Personalized emails help convert sales more frequently. For instance, a simple gesture of referring to your subscriber by name can go a long way in building stronger relationships.
The best part, ActiveCampaign deliverability ranks high.
Customer Experience Automation
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2. Marketing Automation
ActiveCampaign ranks with the top marketing automation software. When it comes to creating great customer experiences you can’t do everything yourself. This is why a tool like ActiveCampaign works in your favor to automate the small details that you would otherwise have missed.
But, what can you automate with ActiveCampaign marketing automation? The first and most important is data collection.
You can automate, tracking contact engagement, Analytics and performance reporting and customer engagement.
Let’s look at this scenario…
- Someone fill out a form to subscribe to your mailing list. As promised you keep them engaged with your valuable content, sending those updates, blog posts and more.
- One day the contact clicks one of the links shared visits the blog then in the process a service page. All this activity is being tracked because you have site tracking setup. When they visit this service page, it triggers an email sequence for the product or service.
- With when thy end the session, the automated message/ email is sent to the prospect. For example, an email with subject line “Did you find what you were looking for”
The contact can either respond or not respond. If they don’t respond the sequence continues and if they do, depending on their response the automation can end or continue, or one of the members of the sales team is notified of the lead for them to get in contact.
When you have set up the automated email sequence, it now becomes a qualifying sequence for all you prospects. This ways your sales team receives and deals with only sales qualified leads.
3. The ActiveCampaign CRM
A CRM is always at the center of managing customer relationships and crafting great customer experiences. For this reason, ActiveCampaign has a CRM to set the contact management process in the right rails.
With the ActiveCampaign CRM you can manage deals, tasks, appointments, and lead scoring.
Lead scoring with ActiveCampaign works well for you because you can do it manually, or automatically. Sales teams can use this tools to focus on more qualified leads or simply leads that are closer to making a purchase.
The automatic lead scoring setting allows you to get a notification when a lead has reached a certain score based on their engagement with your content, or emails.
Also, the CRM gives you great tools to work with and integrate into your whole customer experience. The one a lot of customers very much appreciate is messaging which includes
- Text messages and SMS
- Onsite chat and conversations
- Facebook ads integration.
ActiveCampaign use its machine learning and AI capabilities in several parts of the platform to understand user engagement. All in all, you will be able to send the right email, to the right person at the right time.
ActiveCampaign machine learning can predict which content is right for who.
4. Integrations
A marketing automation platform like ActiveCampaign helps your business run more smoothly at every stage of growth. While you can use it to automate sales and marketing processes, it’s flexible enough for everything from customer service to HR processes.
And when you integrate other tools into your ActiveCampaign account using Zapier or the open API, the possibilities are endless.
You can intergrate ActiveCampaign with some of your most poplar apps including
- WordPress
- Zapier
- Google Analytics
- Shopify
- Click funnels
- Unbounce
- Salesforce
- WooCommerce and more
The third part apps include everything from accounting, lead generation, analytics, CMS, CRM, and more.
ActiveCampaign integrations are a great way to expand the functionality of your account. There are 3 ways to integrate with ActiveCampaign:
- Zapier: Zapier is a web based application that “zaps” pieces of information from one app to another. It can be used to connect with CRMs, Email Marketing platforms, Helpdesks, and lots more.
- API: ActiveCampaign has a powerful API that allows you to add new contacts, update contact information, and move them between lists and campaigns, and more. You can find documentation on the API here.
- App Studio: ActiveCampaign has an app ecosystem. Anyone can create their own integration and make it available for use by other customers in the Marketplace. This can be done using the App Studio.
5. Customer Service and Support
ActiveCampaign has a service and support solution. Here you can get insight on what your customers are using the content for and how well they are using it.
You can tailor your customer service to be more personal using ActiveCampaign tools like Chat, and more. This is because it gives you the ability to track your customer’s behavior so you can tailor support specific to them.
You can also anticipate bad customer experiences and prevent them from happening looking at the lead scores. Additionally, you can assist customers from anywhere and anyhow beyond even your traditional support systems.
Customer Experience Automation
ActiveCampaign
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Benefits of using ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a great tool for small businesses and marketers who want to do basic marketing automation, email marketing, and sales CRM. And, with ActiveCampaign, you can do this without the complexity of some of the larger tools like HubSpot or Keap.
ActiveCampaign is a good value if you are looking to get started with marketing automation, but don't have a lot of contacts in your database. ActiveCampaign's pricing is based on the number of contacts in your database, so it goes up as you grow.
However, ActiveCampaign's machine learning features are getting better and better every year, so if you have a clean database with good quality data about your contacts' behavior and interactions with your company (whether it be site visits, email opens/clicks, or purchasing history), then this tool can help you improve the performance of your marketing campaigns over time.
The Downside of ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a great option for small businesses that want to make an impact with their email marketing campaigns.
But it’s not perfect. There are some potential downsides to using ActiveCampaign for your email marketing:
- It’s not the cheapest option out there (only if you are looking for cheap).
- The CRM is not the best when put head to head with standalone platforms like Salesforce or PipeDrive.
- There is a learning curve around the advanced features if you’re new to email marketing automation.
- The lite plan does not offer CRM or A/B testing
- It can be difficult to navigate the reports.
In Summary: ActiveCampaign Review
ActiveCampaign is a great email marketing software for companies of all sizes. With the help of their team of experts, they can make sure your emails campaigns get delivered successfully. Their team of professionals will help you choose the right plan based on your needs.
With just $9 per month, you get unlimited emails sent, up to 500 contacts, and the ability to create automated campaigns.
If you're just starting out with email marketing, then you don't need to be an expert. Beginners should watch the onboarding videos and you're good to go.
Check out this ActiveCampaign vs Mailchimp Comparison to see how ActiveCampaign stacks up again Mailchimp
