ActiveCampaign is an email marketing automation software that also has a sales CRM built into it. To be honest, when you first sign up for ActiveCampaign and look at the dashboard, you will be amazed at how many functions there are. It does a lot more than that.
What is ActiveCampaign?
ActiveCampaign’s customer experience automation platform (CXA) helps more than 130,000 businesses in 170 countries connect with their customers in a meaningful way.
500+ pre-built automations are available on the platform for businesses of all sizes.
These automations combine email marketing with marketing automation and CRM to create powerful segmentation and personalization across social media and email and
messaging, chat, and text. Over 75% of ActiveCampaign’s customers use its 850+ integrations, including Microsoft, Shopify, Square, Facebook, and Salesforce, to do their jobs.
One of its key features is marketing automation. If you use their CRM software, you can set up autoresponders based on various conditions.
You can also set up lists and contacts, as well as deals, to be generated automatically.
You can also use this “Deals” system (sales pipeline) to add notes to contacts, set up appointments, send direct messages to them, and do a lot more.
There is also a “Conversations” feature that you should keep an eye out for.
If you want to improve the customer experience and build a sales funnel, you can use this tool to send personalized messages to people who visit your website.
Having all your information and activity in one place means that you can quickly get a holistic view of how your sales and marketing efforts are performing.
You may also be able to save money by not using a lot of different companies and tools for your various digital marketing projects.
Is ActiveCampaign the right service for you?
You want Marketing automation:
ActiveCampaign is the most powerful automation tool I’ve tried. It lets you set up almost any kind of automation you can think of,
from sales follow-ups to automated segmentation to dynamic email content. You can now send one-to-one sales emails from your email.
You need an integrated sales and marketing platform for your business:
Using ActiveCampaign’s in-built CRM, sales teams can act quickly because all of their email marketing data is linked up to the CRM.
This isn’t the only thing that features like lead scoring, and social data can do for your sales follow-up.
You need a tool that performs multi-channel marketing:
ActiveCampaign lets you do more than just send emails.
You can also set up landing pages, send SMS and personalized “Conversations” to website visitors, set up chatbot automations, and even control how Facebook ads are shown to your contacts.
It’s a good idea if you want to be able to centralize a lot of your marketing and give your customers a better all-around experience.
ActiveCampaign Features
ActiveCampaign has many features that make marketing easier, faster, and more effective for the end-user. Let’s look at them one by one.
ActiveCampaign Email Marketing
ActiveCampaign’s email marketing tool draws people in, but they stay for the rest of the site. Using email to market can be done with individual emails or in groups. The six types are:
Standard
Automated
Standard
Split testing
Date based
Autoresponder
After you pick the type of email you want to send, you pick the right people to send it to by going to an email list in your account.
Beyond lists, ActiveCampaign site tracking and event tracking add another targeting layer to your campaigns. You can use this in individual campaigns.
People on a certain list may only get emails if they’ve visited certain pages or done a certain thing on your site.
It’s relatively straightforward with ActiveCampaign.
In ActiveCampaign, there are pre-made email templates that you can use.
There are a lot of email templates that you can choose from when you start the email creation process.
All of them are labeled based on what they are used for, and they all look very clean and professional. Drag-and-drop editors are used when you write your email. It’s not the slickest editor, but it gets the job done.
You can change everything from the fonts to background colours. You can also change line height, spacing, and more.
When I send out newsletters, I send simple emails with specific formatting. As a rule, you can save emails as a template so that you can use them again and again.
The conditional blocks in the email builder are one of the things I use all the time.
There are ways for you to add tags to your subscribers based on things they do or who they are, like when they click or sign up for a list.
Email content can be shown or hidden based on your tags and other criteria.
We group people into lists and then add tags based on what they say. To show the right conditional blocks for someone’s situation, show them the ones that match.
For example: if you’re starting a business and are pre-revenue, there are many things to consider such as the type of business (course sales, eCommerce, affiliate marketing, etc.) This lets us make one email that works for everyone on one list.
Using their name, company name, and a lot of other things, we make the email even more interesting.
To get the complete picture of the email builder experience, you should try it out for yourself.
Having all of these features doesn’t matter if you can’t get your emails to the inbox.
ActiveCampaign’s deliverability, from my own experience and tests by other people, is very useful.
ActiveCampaign Marketing automation
If you want to make your marketing more efficient, ActiveCampaign is one of the best tools. This is why I’ve been using this tool for years.
In ActiveCampaign, it is called an “automation.” There are three screens you can use.
The main screen is called automations. This is where you can see all of your automations in one place and make new ones.
The manage message screen allows you to view, edit, and delete all the messages associated with an automated campaign.
The last screen is called an automations map, and it shows you how each automation works with other automations.
When you start to make automation, you can start from scratch or choose from dozens of ActiveCampaign automation templates that are already set up for a certain goal.
A follow-up based on what you’re interested in will be sent.
People get a welcome campaign when they sign up.
A follow-up from your ecommerce system when a customer leaves their cart.
You can change it in many ways for the automation builder to get it just right.
During the process of setting up your automation, you can add emails or other things by clicking the “+” icon.
A menu opens up, dividing the options based on sending an email, different conditions (split automation, end automation, goals, etc), contact actions (subscribe to a list, unsubscribe, add a tag, etc.), salesforce, and CX apps.
ActiveCampaign Automation Example
There are many things you can do with ActiveCampaign automations, so let’s look at a simple example.
You get an email from someone who fills out a form and joins your email list.
They go through the normal welcome process, but they don’t buy anything. You send them emails about the industry, new features or products, and blogs.
They click on one of those emails, visit a blog post, and also visit a services page.
Because you have ActiveCampaign site tracking set up, it sends out emails about that product.
If they don’t fill out the contact form on the services page in one hour, an email is sent out that asks them if they want to talk.
Because of their actions, the automation ends and starts a new one that tags the person as interested, or it continues by telling a team member who should reach out to them.
All of the automation takes place behind the scenes and can be set up with simple logic.
There are also more advanced options for people who use ActiveCampaign.
You can use ActiveCampaign PRO with event tracking. You can also tag people, give them scores, and do other things.
ActiveCampaign CRM
There is an ActiveCampaign sales CRM as well.
People and deals can be made by hand or through sales automation, like filling out a contact form or having a high lead score.
ActiveCampaign lead scoring is good for marketing automation.
Still, it really shines with the ActiveCampaign CRM because you can apply scores (manually or automatically) and find out who your best prospects are.
You can also see how many leads you have. From there, the machine learning engine can figure out how likely it is to win.
People who open emails, click on links, and fill out forms could get points for each of these things.
Sales reps will get an email if someone meets a certain score. They can call or follow up with the person personally.
It’s also possible to use third-party apps like Gmail, look at sales reports, assign tasks manually or automatically, and write notes for each person.
Messaging, SMS and Chat
Using ActiveCampaign, you can build an omnichannel messaging experience that helps customers and boosts sales, all at the same time.
SMS, on-site chat, and Facebook are all under the umbrella term “Messaging.” Let’s look at them a little more in-depth.
1.Text messages and SMS
Text messages get opened at least 50% of the time and have proven effective. When you use ActiveCampaign, you can let people sign up for text messages or from their own account (if they give their phone number).
2. On-site chats and conversations
They’ve become popular over the last few years. There is a good chat feature in ActiveCampaign. People will be able to reach out when they have questions or problems.
You can also send proactive messages to people who visit your site. You can give them a CTA or let them know about your company.
The on-site messages and conversations features are not separate from each other.
Site tracking and other ActiveCampaign features let you send personalized messages and reach specific people based on how they’ve been interacting with your brand.
People can be targeted with messages on your site. To figure out what works best for you, play around with different targeting options to see what works best for you.
3. Facebook users
ActiveCampaign has a very good connection with Facebook Ads.
You can add and remove people from custom audiences with this connection, too. When people go through a funnel, you can change your messages to match the stage they’re in, retarget them, and lead them to what they need.
SMS can be a part of any kind of computerized process. Then you can use them to show off flash sales, send coupons, and remind people about important appointments or events.
Machine Learning & AI
ActiveCampaign’s machine learning pops up across different parts of the software.
With CRM, you can use machine learning to figure out which deals will close so you can spend more time and energy on them.
There are two things for email marketing programs that can be useful to know about. When you use predictive send, you can send emails to the right person at the right time.
After you turn it on, it will look at each of your contacts to see how they respond to your messages and then wait for the best time to send them.
The second way you can use machine learning is to make content that is more likely to be what you want.
It’s like multivariate testing, but it’s a lot smarter. You write a lot of different emails and send them. ActiveCampaign’s machine learning and natural language processing help determine who the best recipient is.
Integrations with ActiveCampaign
There are a lot of ActiveCampaign integrations and new ones are added daily. With Zapier or the open API, you can connect any software that you make yourself.
Ecommerce software like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Woocommerce, have what you’d call “deep integrations,” which means they work well together. That’s not all: You can also apply tags, add extra fields to a contact’s record, get their purchase history, etc.
A few of the most popular integrations include:
Shopify, BigCommerce and Woocommerce
BEE, email editor for ActiveCampaign
Facebook
WordPress Plugin
Google analytics
Calendly
SalesForce CRM
Basecamp
There are over 100 integrations so they’re divided into categories such as online course software, lead generation software, CRMs, and more.
ActiveCampaign Has Detailed Statistics and Reports
Statistics are one of the main parts of marketing.
There are also likely to be general knowledge of what people want to buy, the ability to write in plain English (or whatever language you’re using), and a wide range of acronyms that only people who know them can understand.
We need to do some things before we can look at the numbers, though:
The best email analytics will help you figure out who is responding the best to your emails and how you can do it again.
ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, generates reports on email campaigns, automation workflows, contacts, and even goals that you set for yourself.
That’s right, you can set goals in the admin interface and get reports on how well you’ve done.
How many people opened and clicked on your emails and how many people forwarded or unsubscribed from your mailing list.
This is what the email campaign report will show you. They’ll also tell you who opened your emails, who clicked on the links, and so on.
That’s the kind of information you need to draw conclusions and come up with a plan.
Customer Support
As many businesses get bigger, they have trouble with customer service.
ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, seems to be getting better. It used only to have email support if you wanted to talk to a person and a knowledge base to help you solve problems on your own.
Today, you also get free onboarding/training webinars, live chat, and a lot of videos on YouTube to help you learn. People at the store are knowledgeable and kind.
ActiveCampaign gets an 8 out of 10 for customer service based on how I’ve dealt with them personally.
How to Systemize sales funnels, CRM & lead scoring
One of my favourite things about ActiveCampaign is their deal pipelines.
ActiveCampaign’s deal pipelines are a way to make sales more agile. In the past, you might have used “kanban boards.” If you are familiar with agile or have used them before, these will be familiar to you.
1.Break your sales funnel into stages
An important part of making money has a deal pipeline.
ActiveCampaign makes you break down your sales process into a series of steps.
Because sales can be messy and unpredictable, you can start to think about the stages your deals must go through to the finish.
The sales funnel for one of our projects is broken into five stages, starting with cold leads and ending with people who buy them.
2. Create a deal pipeline
It might not be suitable to put all of your deals on the same pipeline.
If you work with both big businesses and small businesses, your average deal size and average time to close will be skewed.
ActiveCampaign lets you make as many deal pipelines as you want so that you can make different pipelines for each of your different audience groups.
The four pipelines for us are enterprise leads, startup leads, agency leads, and small business leads. In this way, it’s quick and easy to see all of our leads in each category and compare their report.
3. Leave no leads untouched
Tasks make sure that you know when to follow up with every single lead in your database again.
It’s easy to find out if any leads in ActiveCampaign don’t have any tasks set up for them. You can still train your sales team to ensure that every lead always has a task assigned.
4. Assign deals
Automatically assigning deals to different salespeople is easy thanks to ActiveCampaign, which makes it simple to do.
A round-robin approach, for example. You can also set up your own automation rules to assign deals to people based on other factors, like where they live or what kind of leads they have.
5. Lead scoring
This is one of the things that can make or break your whole sales process. Lead scoring is one of them. Setting up the right way helps people know which leads to focus on and how well your marketing team is turning cold leads into qualified leads.
We use lead scoring to do this. It helps us figure out whether a lead is cold, marketing qualified, or sales qualified. We also use it to measure the health of existing customers.
The process of setting up lead scoring in ActiveCampaign is very simple. This makes it much easier to set clear KPIs for marketing and sales.
You can also see if the percentage of leads that you’re turning into marketing-qualified or sales-qualified leads is going up or down, and a lot more.
Pricing
ActiveCampaign is one of the best email marketing tools it because it’s cheap. Starting at $17 per month, you can get a plan that fits your needs.
That’s low enough that even the most cash-strapped startup can use the service.
However, that price point only allows you to reach a thousand people at that point in time. That said, ActiveCampaign doesn’t count the number of people who unsubscribe from your mailing list as part of your subscriber count.
If you want to unsubscribe from a service, you might be charged. Also, that fee is for a year. You pay $17 a month, but you pay for 12 months at once.
Then you get email marketing, newsletters, automation, and help by email or chat. You can also have as many as three users.
Obviously, more services will cost more. It costs $229 a month if you pay for it all of the features each year. For that, you get everything mentioned above plus:
CRM
Sales automation
Lead scoring
Data integrations
Custom branding
SMS marketing
A custom mail server domain
A custom mail server domain
Free design services
Free social data
Phone support
The Lite plan starts at $17/month. It has enough features for small businesses, but not as many as the Pro plan.
The Plus plan starts at $49 a month, and it comes with lead scoring, SMS marketing, CRM, and more to help your business grow.
The Professional plan costs $129 a month and comes with extra features like the chance of winning and split automation.
Finally, the Enterprise plan starts at $229 a month, which is a complete powerhouse of advanced features that can only be found in this plan.
