ActiveCampaign Review - The Height of Automation?

ActiveCampaign in Detail

Criterion	Rating/Info	Notes
Ease of Use		ActiveCampaign have a very user-friendly design, with menus being easily navigable. The dashboard, which could feel crowded if not designed correctly, has a useful ‘Getting Started’ slider to help new users. And it has demo data to give you an idea of how best to use sections. It may be a little complicated for the absolute beginner though.
Newsletter Creation
-Editor		The editor is fast, and has a couple of handy features One is saving custom ‘blocks’ to reuse, and the other is allowing you to see changes other people have made, Google Docs-style. Although finding your last action to undo can be painstaking due to multiple auto-saves every minute! Another issue we had was in trying to create columns, this was needlessly finicky and didn’t give us the desired effect.
-Personalization	yes	An easy to use If/Then/Else logic is available via ‘conditional content’ which allows you to show certain customers different content based on certain conditions like interests, links clicked in the past etc.
-Types of Emails		Classic newsletters, SMS, autoresponders, A/B testing, RSS triggered, birthdays (date-based).
Choice and Flexibility of Template Designs		ActiveCampaign have around 25 modern, responsive templates to choose from. You can handily preview them in another window. Other tools offer more template options, and also slightly more features/content blocks within the editor.
Marketing Automation		Their marketing automation really is the one to beat for newsletter tools. It’s extremely powerful, and very user-friendly, allowing you to automate follow-up campaigns, edit multiple conditions and much more. This is all done via an easy-to-use flow chart-style system. There are also pre-made ‘recipes’ for you to use, or get ideas from, otherwise you can start your own automation from scratch. Learn more in these video tutorials.
List Management		Compared to some other tools, managing contacts and lists is made much easier, and automated, due to being able to use their automation functions to organise people into lists. Learn more here.
Registration Forms/ Opt-in & Opt-out- Process		Easy to use, can create your own fields, and it also allows you to create floating forms. If you input the web address you want to add the form to, it even brings up the page in the background to see how it looks together. Simple but effective.
Reports and Analysis		Basically allows reporting on everything (opens, click-maps, page visits, geo-tracking) except for eCommerce, there is no purchase-tracking available.
Languages		The site is only available in English, yet they pick up points for the implementation of a volunteer translation site for multiple languages. You still have to search and implement these yourself though.
Further Features
-Spam- and Design-Testing		These are both available. Spam testing is simply a ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ that you get before you send out your campaign, yet there are no factors present to help understand the ruling. An email client preview is available, too, but at a price of $1 per test/client, which seems a bit steep.
-Bounce Management	yes	Soft bounces are counted as hard bounces after three times, and this then puts them in an exclusion list.
-Blacklist	yes	This is the aforementioned ‘exclusion list’. You can import contacts directly into this list, and export too.
-Storage Available for Data and Images	unlimited	Images above 1000px will be downsized.
-Social Media Integration		There are many integration options available for social media within ActiveCampaign.
-Newsletter Archive	no	Only a basic internal archive of old newsletters.
Pro Features
-Authentication	yes	SPF and DKIM are supported.
-Own Domain?	yes	It’s possible to use your own tracking domain to improve your newsletter’s company branding.
-Different Access Levels	yes	This is a very flexible system, without specific levels. You define the group names and also the exact access for each of those groups via tickboxes.
-Integrations	yes	ActiveCampaign offer a massive amount of integration options, such as PayPal,  Shopify , Google Analytics, Facebook and WordPress. You shouldn’t have a problem finding what you need. Find all integr ations here.
-Landing Page Editor	no
Support		Support is fast and friendly, via all mediums. Their knowledge base is particularly useful and easily searchable, I had very little difficulty finding relevant search results. They also have video tutorials available, webinars (live and archived) and one-on-one training on the ‘Plus’ plan.
Overall Rating	4.7/5	ActiveCampaign is one of the most powerful newsletter tools on the market. Hardly missing a thing when it comes to features, and also simple enough for most people to make full use of them.

© EmailToolTester Matrix

Conclusion:

It’s really tough to fault ActiveCampaign, not only do they offer almost everything you need within a newsletter marketing tool, but they do it very well. The reporting offers you insight into almost all facets, such as page visits, geo-tracking, openers and more. The only thing lacking in that area is the ability to track purchases on your website. Another area that is slightly lacking is the newsletter editor, not offering an experience as slick as other tools out there, with a few niggling features that could be done better (like the revision history).

The support is as advertised: friendly, helpful and fast. Email and chat support are great, with a personal feel to the communications. Their knowledge base is easily searchable and actually returns relevant results a high percentage of the time. With their ‘Plus’ plan you even get access to one-on-one training and helpful webinars, which is a nice addition.

ActiveCampaign really are one of the best choices you could make if you’re looking for an all-in-one newsletter marketing tool. Their automation is the real deal, and makes other tool’s versions of this pale in comparison. You’ll need to be prepared to put in a bit of time, and perhaps spend a little more money, but your business will reap the rewards. If, on the other hand, you’re just looking for a simple way to blast out newsletters, a solution like GetResponse or  MailChimp  might be a bit easier to get your head around.

  > Try ActiveCampaign now for free for 15 days.  

Updates

09 Aug 2016 - Minor text updates, top choice banner added.
10 Aug 2016 - Video review added.
09 Mar 2016 - Initial tests.
 

Last Update: 09 Aug 2016 | Steve Lamattina