Category: Resources & Tools

Having tested & reviewed various marketing tools, I count ActiveCampaign amongst my top-notch choices.

This tool has powerful features that can be used to automate various marketing & sales processes for your business, whilst also allowing you to connect with potential & existing customers without sacrificing the personal touch.

Yes, without sacrificing the personal touch.

You can literally customize & personalize the entire customer journey using features like automation, segmentation, conditioning & much more that we’ll discuss down in this review guide.

When such powerful features are combined together, solves a lot of complex problems for your business, many problems for which you need to rely on third party paid solutions.

..for example, many eCommerce store rely on third party tool to implement the cart abandonment feature on their store – a feature that can be achieved by ActiveCampaign too.

No matter what business or industry you’re into – ActiveCampaign is an ideal marketing solution for you if:

• You wish to automate big part of marketing & sales processes like Email Marketing.
• You want to build a system that works on Auto-Pilot: automate process that nurture & convert leads for you.
• You want to create system & processes that triggers based on customer behaviour with your website, conversation over chatbot or engagement on your emails
• You don’t want you & your team to not waste time on simple tasks – that can be automated

Not to mention, ActiveCampaign is the #1 tool for email & marketing automations.

What is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one marketing solution for customer experience automation various sales & marketing processes

ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one marketing software for customer experience automations – combining various sales & marketing processes like email marketing, omni-channel marketing, sales automation, CRM & more.

What is ActiveCampaign Good For?

• Marketing Automation
• WorkFlows Automation
• Personalisation
• User Journey Customization
• Sequencing

Is ActiveCampaign a good email marketing service?

Yes, ActiveCampaign boasts a lot of features like marketing automation, site behavioral tracking, user journey customization based on conditions & segmentation, and more.

These powerful features when integrated, complements your marketing efforts so you can build outstanding campaigns.

ActiveCampaign Review: Features & Capabilities

1. ActiveCampaign has an Impressive Email Deliverability Rate

Email Deliverability is the likelihood of your emails getting delivered in the “primary inbox” folder of the recipient, rather than landing in “spam” or “promotions”.

All your efforts go in vain if the mails aren’t reaching the receiptent primary inbox.

This is where, ActiveCampaign steals the deal – this tool has an impressive email deliverability rate.

Takeaway Tool: You can use this free email deliverability tester tool to check your server’s email deliverability.

2. ActiveCampaign Offers Powerful Automation Features

Powerful automation features + easy to use interface makes ActiveCampaign the #1 marketing automation tool in the market.

The tool offers incredibly powerful automation capabilities – that you can leverage within email marketing, website messaging, sales pipeline/funnel creation & many more business processes.

You can literally not only personalize emails or site-messages, but also automate the entire user journey – that too based on what the contact is doing.

This helps your business offer a fluid customer experience.

Above us an example image of the “if-else” conditioning – a very powerful automation feature – that allows you to split customer journey based on various actions taken by user.

Below is an example of an email sequence – that’s triggering emails based on timings to achieve the highest open rate.

Another popular feature you can utilize with ActiveCampaign’s automation capabilities is the cart abandonment feature.

Cart Abandonment is a term used when a visitor abandons your eCommerce store website without taking the desired action – of purchasing items that was added in the cart.

With ActiveCampaign, you can achieve this feature too – creating a system that sends email to users who added items to the cart but didn’t made a purchase.

3. Site-Messaging

What’s better than initiating a chat with website visitor.

How about triggering messages to the only relevant website visitors – whose behaviour shows they might be interested in hearing / buying from you?

Or simply automate a chat & ask them if they may have any questions in mind?

ActiveCampaign allows businesses to leverage site messaging (or chatbot) feature wherein you can customize & automate coversations with website visitors – that too based on visitor’s action & behaviour.

ActiveCampaign has made this easy – let’s see a few ways how this tool helps:

Automate Chats & Generate Leads

Share Business Updates or Announcements – You can put relevant site messages across any or every pages.

Initiate Engagement & Qualify Leads – Engaging with website visitors to see if they’re still interested.

Personalize & Add Human Touch

Call to Action or Other Marketing Announcements

In short, you can offer a more personalized & better user experience with this feature.

Not only this, you can also segment these leads by adding tags to them – based on various behavioural actions; and then automate further communication with them.

All the leads (emails & other information) collected via chats are saved into an easy to use interface – that you can review anytime without missing any important information.

Various features (automation, segmentation, personalization) when combined with Chatbots helps businesses develop robust relationship with customers.

ActiveCampaign also has iOS & Android mobile apps that can be used to instantly respond to queries & chats.

4. Segmentation is easy with ActiveCampaign

Another super powerful feature that ActiveCampaign offers is the data segmentation feature that allows you to segment your contact list based on various parameters.

Segmentation plays a huge role in delivering the right marketing message to the right consumer – at the right timings.

With segmentation, you can customize your marketing content so that it feels more personal to the user – and this makes them more likely to engage or purchase from you.

In Email Marketing, segmenting your list correctly would bring in huge benefits.

Gone are the days when marketers used to send the same emails to everyone on their list. Now is the time for personalization & deliver content that the recipient is more likely to see.

Don’t forget that when you segment the data correctly, you also improve some important KPIs such as open rate, click rate

How would that be possible? How ActiveCampaign data segmentation feature works?

Data segmentation might feel overwhelming – but becomes bit easy while working with ActiveCampaign. You can segment audience based on various parameters like:

• Contact Details: Email, First & Last Name, Phone, Organization, Date & Time Subscribed, IP Address, Total Conversion Value
• Custom Fields: Any custom fields you’ve created in the newsletter or other lead generation forms
• Actions & Inactions: Has clicked / not-cliked on link, Has opened / unopened an email, Has / Hasn’t shared or forwarded Email, Has / Hasn’t Replied, In / Not in list, Has / Hasn’t Sunscribed
• Geographical Location: Country, State, City, Zip, Area Code
• On-Site Behaviour & Events: Has / Hasn’t visited, was referred from, visiting device, total page visits & total website visits
• Deal attributes: Has deal with status, Has deal in stage, Has deal with value, Has deal assigned to, Has total number of deals, Has total number of open deals, Has total number of lost deals, Has total number of won deals, and Has deal with title.
• Based on Attributions:  Has source, Does not have source, Has medium, Does not have medium, Has campaign, Does not have campaign, Has term, Does not have term, Has content, and Does not have content.

Tagging Feature

ActiveCampaign has a tagging feature that allows you to create custom tags that you can stick with emails. Later on – you use these tags to segment email list based on custom tagging.

The best part is that you can set auto-addition of these tags based on specific actions a user takes.

Example, when a visitor submits his information via free offer lead magnet form, I’d custom tag that subscriber with a tag “Downloaded Free Offer”.

Similarly, if I run an eCommerce store, I’d add a tagging trigger any of my Look at some example screenshots below:

When you start using the tool & it’s automation features, you’d come across many opportunities to get good ROI on you makreting efforts.

Once you’ve enough data after segmentation, you can send email content based on user behaviour keeps the customer happy. .

5. Landing Page Builder

ActiveCampaign also has a landing page builder that works pretty similar to other landing page builders consisting of

• Customizable Sections, Columns, Blocks
• Drag & Drop Elements
• Customizable Elements & Components
• Call to actions / buttons.

and all other stuff that you expect from a landing page builder.

You can also add custom codes (Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Google Adwords) & add meta data (favicon, custom URL, Title, Description) to improve SEO if you want the landing page to be found by Google or major search engines.

Also, if you want to add a cookie message & banner, you can do that via ActiveCampaign.

ActiveCampaign also has a wide range of pre-built templates that you can directly import & customize as per your requirements.

6. Subscription Forms Builder

ActiveCampaign allows you to create beautiful & customizable subscription forms of various different types:

• Inline Forms
• Floating Box
• Modal Pop-up
• Floating Bar

You can add your own custom fields & change the form design.

When these subscription forms are integrated with other marketing automation features, you’re likely to convert more leads captured via these forms.

7. Website Tracking & Analytics

Website tracking is a powerful technology feature to leverage.

Analytics solutions, such as Google Analytics, give you statistics about your website activity. It is aggregated data that is meant to identify trends and issues with your website.

How is ActiveCampaign tracking different from analytics solutions like Google Analytics?

Analytics Solutions like Google Analytics tell you the website usage to identify trends, user-activity & issues with your website.

On the other hand, modern tools like ActiveCampaign – when integrated with your CRM collects insights & lets you analyse what an individual contact is doing on your website. The insights collected can then be used to create personalised experience to the right user at the right time.

This site tracking feature when combined with marketing automation & behavioural data, helps you can automate various marketing/sales processes that triggers based on user’s behivour at your website.

Example –

• Trigger automations when a contact views your services page
• Trigger a message with a coupon code to contacts who viewed product page(s) of your site but didn’t make a purchase

& much more.

8. Analytics & Reporting

ActiveCampaign provides you with some pretty cool reporting reporting types to help you with insights for the better analysis & improvement of your campaigns.

Here is an overview of data that you can see in the reports section of ActiveCampaign:

Campaign Reports – In this report section, you can see a list of all the campaigns you’ve sent out with few metrics like

• Open rate
• Clicks or Engagement Rate
• Forwards
• Unsubscribers
• Bounces
• Unopened Emails
• Link CLicks
• GEO Reports –
• Email Clients –

You can also check the daily & hourly open trend graph of data to adjust your campaign timings in order to achieve the best open rates & improve ROI.

Automation Reports – Once you build some automations, you can track how these automations are doing.

Goals Reports – Gives you insights on your conversion rates & goals completion

Contacts Report – This report tells you about how your contacts are doing. Basically it gives you insights on your contacts growth in few metrics like:

• Contacts growth percentage
• Average contact growth per day
• Unsubscribed Contacts
• Active Contacts

Custom Reporting

With ActiveCampaign, you can also create custom reports for your business, however, that comes at the high-tier plans & useful for businesses who has large database & relies heavily on data.

9. ActiveCampaign Sales CRM

ActiveCampaign comes with powerful features like automation, email marketing & much more, and to complement these features, the tool comes with a powerful built in Sales CRM.

Different businesses can leverage this tool based on different use cases – such as managing current clients or keeping track of fulfillment.

Most people love ActiveCampaign CRM because of it’s simplicity & vast customizations.

With impressive data segmentation & marketing automation capabilities, it becomes smooth to build a sales pipeline using ActiveCampaign CRM.

In addition to that, the CRM also ensures a smooth workflow within your organization as well. You can add your team members & they can easily access CRM using their login credentials.

10. Lead Scoring by ActiveCampaign

Another impressive thing you can do with ActiveCampaign is assigning scores to each of your customers – based on how well they’re engaged with your business.

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is a methodology used by sales & marketing departments to identify which leads (contacts) are ready to buy & who needs further nurturing – based on some scores you assign to each lead. which you can plan out your sales pipeline & marketing strategies effectively.

This is done by assigning scores (adding & subtracting) to your contacts, based on various actions they take with your business & the total amount of score for a contact determine it’spotential value for your business.

By implementing this lead scoring methodology with ActiveCampaign, you assign points/scores to your contacts – based on a various actions they take with your business like:

• Opens Email
• Engage with Email
• Reply to Email
• Visit Sales page
• Visit checkout page
• Make a sale
• Replies to your email

.. and much more.

And finally, the total amount of points for a contact tells you how potential & valuable the contact is for your business – based on which you can plan out your sales pipeline & marketing strategies by segmenting contacts based on these scores.

• Contacts with high score/points = potential customer & more likely to purchase = or say, a hot lead
• Contacts with less score/points = less interested customer & need further nurturing = or say, a cold lead

I hope you’ve got an idea behind this lead scoring methodology for businesses.

For example, Ecommerce Stores can reward certain customers with discounted codes when their points reach a certain value

Blogging businesses can refresh their email list to people only who are engaging with newletter – based on scores assigned by opening an email, clicking on email links and more

Now how you’d implement this Lead Scoring methodology via ActiveCampaign for your business – depends on your business type, goals & objectives.

11. Implement Omni-Channel Marketing with ActiveCampaign

Omni-Channel marketing is connecting & engaging with customers via various different channels – to offer a more convenient & seamless experience.

This adds up to the overall good brand experience.

With advanced tools like ActiveCampaign, you can easily integrate omni-channel marketing strategy to your business.

Email Marketing

ActiveCampaign, being one of the most popular tool for email marketing allows you to:

• Broadcast Emails: You can create and run a simple one-email marketing campaign to anyone & everyone on your list
• Setup Triggers for Emails:
• Setup Email Autoresponders:
• Create Email Funnels:
• Schedule Emails:

With all feature being implemented with the power of automation

WhatsApp Marketing

WhatApp is another popular instant messenger tool used by over 2 billion people worldwide. (Source: Statista)

That means you’re missing money on the table if your customers or potential customers can’t reach out your business via WhatsApp.

With ActiveCampaign, you can pair up with WhatsApp to offer.

• Seamlessly connect with customers
• Broadcast messages
• Automate Message
• Customize & personalize user conversation

& more..

Similarly, you can integrate & utilize other possible communication channels like Facebook messenger, text messaging, website chatbot & more with ActiveCampaign – so they all work in sync and your brand stays one click away from your customers.

12. Type of Campaigns you can create with ActiveCampaign

Campaigns are the heart of of ActiveCampaign! It’s in the name as well.

With ActiveCampaign, you can create 6 different types of campaigns (as of 2022):

1. Standard: Used to send a regular & one time email campaign. Or say, broadcasting. You can use this campaign type if you don’t want automation in this email funnel & just wanted to share a single email. For example – a discounted sale.
2. Automated: Used to create custom sequences of emails based on various actions taken or conditions. As we discussed above in this article.
3. AutoResponders: Used to send one time email to contacts that triggers if someone subscribe or take desired action. Example – Newsletter welcome email
4. Split Testing or A/B Test: Used to compare compare various version of your email content (subject line, email content, etc) to test what works best for your goals.
5. RSS Triggers: Used to automatically deliver new content to your subscriber base whenever your RSS based feed is updated.
6. Date Based or Scheduled: Used to schedule messages based on dates set. Some simple campaigns can be “send on birthday, anniversaries”

13. Integrations are easy with ActiveCampaign

If you wish to go with ActiveCampaign as your email marketing tool, you don’t have to worry about integration.

ActiveCampain integrates with almost every popular & most of the third party softwares, CRM, CMS & more.

They’ve mentioned integration availabiaround over 860+ apps, you can connect with the tools that make the most sense for your business

If you’re a developer or have one in team, you can leverage their API docs to get a deeper understanding with fleibilties of this tool.

In worst case, if you mess up somewhere, their quality support team is ready for paying customers.

14. Cart Abandonment Feature for eCommerce & Other Businesses

This feature is worth giving a mention because is very important for many businesses, mostly the eCommerce sellers.

Did you know that the average cart abandonment rate across all industries is ~70% (Verified Source: )

For Mobile users, it’s even higher ~86%.

That’s why it’s important to not miss money on the table & try to re-engage abandoned customers.

This process is known as Abandoned Cart Recovery – t

15. Other Remarkable Features of ActiveCampaign that Businesses should know

OmniChannel is Easy with ActiveCampaign

For businesses, data management becomes tuogh as the business increases.

In order to hassle-free connect with customers across many channels, ActiveCampaign is a good tool because your data is with this tool so using all other channels become easy.

As they say, with ActiveCampaign, you can offer a fluid experience through the customer journey

Only Pay for Active Customers

This value offered by ActiveCampaign might interest you!

While most of the email marketing tools charge you based on your email list, ActiveCampaign only charges you for the email subscribers who’re engaged & segmented as active on your list.

Pause the Campaign & Billing – and Resume when Needed

When you’re running campaigns very occasionally, there may be time when it’s better to pause the billing.

If you don’t like being charged for the month you’ve rarely used the tool, just pause the campaigns & billing, and you won’t be charged for that time period

Free Migration Services

For businesses, the decision for migrating data & switching to another email service might feel technical.

With ActiveCampaign, you need to worry less for that.

If you stuck somewhere or have no idea for switching to another email service provider, just raise a query & wait for one of their representative to help you out.

They’ve a remarkable support team I must say!

Business Onboarding Support & Training

ActiveCampaign tried their best to educate you about ActiveCampaign & how to make the best use of it’s automation & marketing capabilities.

If you sign up for with ActiveCampaign, you’d be invited to pre-recorded webinars, training videos & resources to help you understand why you should leverage marketing automation in your business & how ActiveCampaign suits almost all of your automation needs – to deliver the best possible customer experience.

ActiveCampaign Plans & Pricing Review

Good Things come at expensive prices!

Remember that ActiveCampaign is not just an email marketing tool – but it’s much more than that – as discussed in the article.

ActiveCampaign pricing may be on a higher side for some, but keeping in mind the features & capabilities this tool offers, it is worth investing & giving ActiveCampaign a try.

What’s good to know is that, unlike other software providers that provide advanced functionalities on higher plans, ActiveCampaign offer it’s most important feature “marketing automation’ in all of its plans.

If you’re a business starting with Email Marketing or wanna try Marketing Automation, you should definitely explore this Lite plan that comes with necessary marketing features – including the most important ones.

1. Lite Plan ($15/month) – Best for small businesses or if you’re just starting with email marketing & marketing automations. Some of the basic features you can use in the Lite plan are: send newsletters, email marketing, marketing automation, email designer, access to email templates, autoresponders & more.
2. Plus Plan ($70/month) – This plan include more features like automations mapping, CRM, sales automation, lead scoring & more.
3. Professional Plan ($187/month) – As we move to the higher plans, you can use advanced features like Split automations, one-to-one email automation, site messages, predictive content & messages sending, web personalization etc
4. Enterprise Plan ($323/month) – This plan boasts all the features that ActiveCampaign has to offer.

For the full breakdown of features & price comparasion of different plans, you can visit here.

When various features like automation, segmentation, email marketing work together, you can create outstanding marketing campaigns – that delivers a personalized & fluid customer experience.

.. and that’s why ActiveCampaign has “Campaign” in it’s name!