ActiveCampaign

Has all the bells and whistles

Pros:

Active Campaign integrates with everything making it super easy to pick up new apps knowing I don't need to use a go-between. It has everything I need, email marketing, campaigns, automation, and great analytics. It's easy to look up my contacts and see their journey. There's lots of detail and I appreciate that. Customer Care is great. I've used a lot of different systems and Active Campaign has a lot of bang for your buck.

Cons:

It can be confusing especially when making if/then funnels, the terminology isn't intuitive. And it can be glitchy sometimes. Other than that, it works. It can be expensive, but if you want to scale then you need a good email/contact management app, and this fits the bill.

Active Campaign

Comments: I had tried using several other free email services in the past. Getting people to actually sign up was nearly impossible, even offering discounts and more, hardly anyone ever clicked "subscribe"- Active campaign allowed me to create a pop up window integrated with my website design, that will only pop up once on the main page for first time viewers (or until the cache is cleared). I also created a secondary sign up page where people can go to sign up if they missed the pop-up. This has taken me to large numbers of sign-ups, plus allowed me a way to integrate a 10% off coupon for subscribers after their email was confirmed. This has lead to numerous coupon uses of that 10% off in my store, proving the use of the pop up and offer. I send out monthly emails, keeping my subscribers informed and up to date on what is going on, increasing regular visits to my site and bumping regular sales. The email system is very easy to use.

Pros:

The sole reason I decided to start a free trial with this software was because of the complete customization allowed for your email sign-ups and pop-up windows. No one likes to click though email sign-ups that look out of place or run by a 3rd party. With this I could create a system that blended seamlessly with my current website, allowing everything to look 100% integrated into the site itself.

Cons:

So far the system has more functionalities than I will likely ever use. However, this is not a 'dislike'. While there are many functions I don't currently need (or understand) there may be a day that I use them, and there are several tutorials and documents available to help me understand these other features. Nothing about the system so far could qualify as something I dislike.

Automation Broken & Engineers Won't Fix

Comments: Kind & courteous customer service & onboarding. The chat support is decent & you can get questions answered; however, their achilles heel is that their engineering team is apparently asleep behind the wheel and not only don't fix bugs, but provide zero communication about fixing them.

Pros:

Pricing is excellent, features are great, and the company is very innovative. Overall, I really want the relationship to work.

Cons:

The automation rules are broken. I have one field update automation that's broken. It's a simple field update automation that says if field a) value = x, then update field b) to be y; however, it's broken and I sent ticket to them ~4 weeks ago. More importantly, I spend all of this time doing the implementation. ,and now their automated emails will not trigger. I submitted tickets to engineering ~4 weeks ago, and I haven't heard a PEEP from the engineers. They are kind enough to give me June service free; however, that's not what i actually want. I want the software to work so that all of the 100+ hours of time I've invested in building landing pages, automations, data imports, etc, can actually be realized.

Active Campaign: Very good CRM on a budget

Comments: I totally recommend AC. There may be better options there like Hubspot, but AC is at a fraction of the cost and I think it covers most of what you could need as a small-medium company.

Pros:

AC is a great solution, full of features that should be enough to cover Basic-To-Medium needs. It's very easy to use and the price is perfect for what you receive. Support is also great.

Cons:

The reporting side of things is a bit limited, I miss better tools to report on what's going on in terms of campaign activations or simply status on deals and contacts.

Fantastic Email Marketing Platform

Comments: As a digital marketing agency, we use all the major email platforms. Email/marketing creation, design and automation has become vital for our clients. AC provides a great design platform and in our opinion the best automation features for robust drip and funnel campaigns. It is now the only email marketing platform that I recommend to clients.

Pros:

Of the major email marketing platforms ActiveCampaign, IMO, provides the best design capabilities, the best email automation functionality (drip funnels), and excellent list management.

Cons:

While the platform does allow great and easy resend options, I wish it had the ability to make edits to the email body. You can edit the email campaign name and the subject line. But every once in a while you find the need to edit (or in our case a couple of times) correct some grammar from the original email prior to resending to the whole list or just to unopens.