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Active Campaign Review
Active Campaign is making a splash based upon their innovations in the world of email marketing. Their strong points are without a doubt their strong automation and segmenting technologies. So if you want to engage email marketing based upon the behavior of your leads and subscribers, Active Campaign is one of the best solutions for you. So what does that mean for your business? It means being able to easily create adaptive content and email segmentation based upon what your subscribers read, open, click, and buy.
Active Campaign is all about behavioral content. So you can deploy dynamic content that changes based upon the behavioral patterns of your email subscribers. Don’t worry! You don’t need a degree in artificial intelligence in order to make this work, in fact, it’s quite easy with Active Campaign.
Active Campaign’s conditional content metrics allow you to interact according to your subscriber’s demographics, email open history, and even webpage visits, so you can target your subscribers with precision that may be impossible (or difficult) to achieve otherwise.
Active Campaign’s email automation is one of the most comprehensive of any email marketing autoresponder service. So you can automate emails, automate sales, and even trigger campaigns based upon your subscriber’s birthday or purchase history.
Active Campaign Advantages
Dynamic Email – Arguably the most important advantage that ActiveCampaign boasts is the ability to make your emails change based upon the actions that you predefine. So you can trigger unique campaigns based upon the behavior of your subscribers. If they click a link, or open an email, or even interact with a page on your own website, you can trigger automated email campaigns and segmenting based upon these behaviors.
Action Driven Segmenting – Have you ever been frustrated because your subscribers are getting emails when they’re no longer relevant to them? Or maybe you’ve thought about this logical error for your future campaigns. If that’s the case, you’ll be so happy to learn that ActiveCampaign can automatically segment all of your leads as they advance themselves in your business. So maybe you want to treat certain buyers in a very specific fashion.
Maybe you have a 30-day relationship campaign that’s designed specifically for buyers of a certain product. Or maybe, you’d like to begin promoting your future products to your customers when they buy one of your particular services. No matter how your business looks, or how you envision your emails behaving, it’s easily accomplishable using ActiveCampaign.
Demographic Intelligence – Where are your emails being opened? What is the average age of your subscriber? ActiveCampaign shines in their ability to extract real life information about your subscribers. You might be shocked to learn information about your leads that nobody else has, and information that’s very difficult to obtain through traditional methods, with ActiveCampaign, you acquire this information automatically.
Active Campaign Disadvantages
Do You Need A Ferrari? – If you’re a simple email marketer, and if you’re not looking for all the bells and whistles such as demographic intelligence, email segmenting, and marketing automation, then perhaps ActiveCampaign could be overkill? It’s for you to decide if you’d enjoy these advanced features that could benefit almost any business, but perhaps is not an avenue that you’re considering at this time.
Pricing Choices – Regardless of how large or small your email database is, there are three separate plans that you must choose from. The three plans are “Lite”, “Small Business”, and “Enterprise”. This might cause some confusion if you’re not sure which plan to choose, and there are more options present with ActiveCampaign than other email marketing service providers.
Luckily, later on in this review, you’re going to learn which plan will best suit your needs, however this might be cause for concern at first glance.
Certain Support Functions Require Extra Investment – Due to the advanced nature of many of the ActiveCampaign processes, certain support functions require extra investment. Services such as customized email campaigns, the importing of your existing subscribers, advanced API integrations, and the designing of your email automation may require additional investment.
Who Is Active Campaign Ideal For?
ActiveCampaign is ideal for the trailblazing entrepreneur who doesn’t want to email market their list of leads the same way that everyone else does.
ActiveCampaign is for you if you want to take your email marketing to the next level from day one, so you can build massive rapport and prestige with your subscribers while at the same time offering them content that’s tailored based upon their actions.
Furthermore, ActiveCampaign integrates with over 150 third party services, so if you’re worried about integration it’s safe to assume that ActiveCampaign has you covered right out of the box.
ActiveCampaign is ideal if you want more from your email marketing, and if you’re creative and bold enough to think outside of the box. So if you’re interested in interacting with your leads, prospects, customers and clients in a way that very few other email marketers have thought of, or have the capability of so doing, then you’ll absolutely love ActiveCampaign and they’re worthy of your consideration.
If you already have an email marketing list, you can import your leads into ActiveCampaign without your leads reconfirming their subscription.
Active Campaign Signup Process
Registering for ActiveCampaign is easy and doesn’t take long. Upon visiting their homepage, you’ll see a button that prompts you to start your free two-week trial.
Upon clicking that button, there’s a simple signup process that will ask you for your details, though no credit card is required to start your trial.
Active Campaign Ease of Use
ActiveCampaign’s basic functions are very easy to deploy. Designing an email newsletter, adding new subscribers, viewing statistics, triggering basic actions, and email followups are all very easy to grasp.
That being said, as you know, there are advanced features within ActiveCampaign that will come with a slight learning curve.
Thankfully, ActiveCampaign boasts a vast library of video training, live support, and even support callback requests in the event that you ever hit a snag.
At the end of the day, the basic functionality of ActiveCampaign is easy to grasp, however as you might expect the complexity of some advanced features require focusing on the details.
Active Campaign Features
Drag And Drop Designer – While ActiveCampaign boasts some of the most innovative technologies of any email autoresponder, it’s also important to note that they also provide the simple things that email marketers love. A simple drag and drop email designer is mandatory so that you can create beautiful emails without knowing a single line of code, and even if you don’t know basic design principles you can still create beautiful looking emails with the click of a button.
Mobile Friendly Emails – You’ve probably noticed that most demographics absolutely love their mobile devices. For that reason, it’s vitally important that your emails look beautiful on mobile devices, as well as desktop devices. For that reason, ActiveCampaign ensures that your emails look good across all platforms, both traditional and mobile.
Zero Cost Image Hosting – Maybe you have a library of artwork that you’d love to integrate into your campaigns, but you’re frustrated from paying hand over fist for hosting? If that’s the case, you can rest easy because ActiveCampaign can host your image catalog for you at zero extra cost.
Intelligent Segmentation – If you want to segment your subscribers based upon their actions, their behavior, or even their social data, then ActiveCampaign will blow you away with their capabilities.
Next Level Demographic Data – Here’s where things get a little crazy. ActiveCampaign can pull extensive data about your subscriber such as their age, sex, geographic location, and even social profiles, even if you only know their email address.
Behavioral Based Email Campaigns – Maybe you only want your next promotions to go out if your leads click on a certain link? Or maybe they should only get your newest email campaign if they opened your latest email? Or maybe you’d like to prevent others from getting your new content until they take action on a trigger? Either way, you’ll be shocked to see all of the different ways ActiveCampaign can interact with your leads behaviorally.
Dynamic Content – Do you have a blog or an ecommerce platform that you’re always updating? If that’s the case, you can easily add this content directly into your future email campaigns without doing any extra work.
Rich Statistics And Reporting – If you love to look at data and statistics, ActiveCampaign will make your head spin with all of the beautiful charts, graphs, and more statistics, tracking and real-time data than you could ever need.
Real Time Geographic Tracking – Maybe you’re curious as to where your subscribers originate from? What locations garner the best interest from your campaigns? Knowing such information has been all but impossible in the past, but now this information is readily available to you, in real-time.
Innovative Sales Automation – Maybe you want to add new buyers into a dynamic campaign or an automated followup sequence so you can upsell, cross-sell, or provide massive value to their lives? Either way, ActiveCampaign allows you to dynamically interact giving you the opportunity to make more sales, or build unshakable relationships that will last for the entire life of your customer.
Active Campaign Integration's
Facebook – If you’re on Facebook, your Facebook page is probably one of your most underutilized properties to generate new leads, subscribers, and customers. Start turning your Facebook followers into a ravage following that’s easily accomplishable with ActiveCampaign.
SurveyMonkey – For any business, knowledge is power. That’s why surveying your customers or new leads can be one of the best strategies regardless of the size of your business. ActiveCampaign allows you to combine the power of surveys with email followups, so you can get to know your end users and better tailor your future content based upon the demand of your end users.
PayPal – When your subscribers and leads buy your products and services, you can start following up with them dynamically from day one. This will allow you to build your brand, and instant rapport that can last a lifetime. The best part is that it doesn’t require much effort.
WooCommerce – You probably realize by now that your ecommerce business relies on repeat customers and repeat sales. That’s why if you sell anything with WooCommerce, integration is a snap so you can followup intelligently, sell more products, and build your brand without any ongoing effort.
WordPress – If your company integrates any type of WordPress site you can easily turn almost any page into a beautiful lead capture page. So you can turn your blog into a lead capturing machine, and then segment dynamically using the power of ActiveCampaign.
Stripe – If you collect payments with Stripe then you can take your marketing to the next level with sales automation and campaign triggers the moment any of your customers, leads, or clients buy.
Google Contacts – Do your customers and subscribers already contact you on Google? If that’s the case ActiveCampaign allows you to intermingle the two services for easier seamless integration.
GotoWebinar – Turn your webinar presentations into dynamic marketing powerhouses by combining ActiveCampaign’s dynamic marketing triggers with your awesome webinar performances. So you can followup, and automate the entire process using seamless technology that’s easy to use.
SumoMe – SumoMe is perfect if you’re a blogger and want to dynamically add new subscribers to your ActiveCampaign email list. Add popups, welcome bars, and lead capture pages to almost any page that you want.
ClickFunnels – Turn all of your beautiful ClickFunnel marketing pages into active and engaging email followups so you can engage your audience using the full power of ActiveCampaign.
Active Campaign Pricing
ActiveCampaign pricing is based upon your number of subscribers, and the size of your business. So, each plan, regardless of how large your email database is, contains three options. There’s the “Lite” option, the “Small Business” option, and the “Enterprise” option.
The three different flavors come with graduating benefits. The “Lite” option includes unlimited email sending, email marketing, marketing automation, chat and email support, plus up to 3 users so you can have a third party help manage your email campaigns.
The “Small Business” package includes everything that the “Lite” option does, in addition to sales automation, contact and lead scoring, custom permissions, the ability to have custom domains and branding, one on one training, SMS marketing, and the ability to add up to 25 users.
The “Enterprise” package includes everything that the “Small Business” does, in addition to custom email servers, a dedicated account representative, free graphic design services, free social data, an uptime service level agreement, and unlimited users.
So, at the end of the day, the package you choose will depend upon how large your organization is. If you’re a one man (or one woman) organization, you can easily get by on the “Lite” plan, however if you’re a heavy hitting organization you might consider upgrading to either “Small Business” or “Enterprise” based upon your specific requirements.
The pricing itself is probably less than you expect. If you have up to 500 subscribers, the “Lite” version is $9 per month, the “Small Business” version is $49 per month, and the “Enterprise” version is $149 per month. If you have up to 10,000 subscribers, the “Lite” version is $70 per month, the “Small Business” version is $175 per month, and the “Enterprise” version is $350 per month.
Active Campaign Support
As you might imagine, the support roles within ActiveCampaign are immense. The technicalities and all of the advanced features that ActiveCampaign provides must surely be a costly endeavor for ActiveCampaign to manage and upkeep.
For that reason, ActiveCampaign provides a wide array of training material, including one-on-one training, a “call back” feature, 30 minute calls, marketing and strategy support, in-person training (Located in Chicago, USA), an active forum, video demonstrations, in addition to an email ticketing system, a telephone helpdesk, and live chat on their website.
If you have advanced questions that require specialization or unique development, ActiveCampaign also provides advanced design, development, and consulting services for a fee.
At the end of the day, with such a rich set of features and technology, you’ll be accommodated regardless of how big, or small your requirements are.
Active Campaign Reputation
After conducting copious quantities of research into the reputation of ActiveCampaign, it would seem that they are nearly unrivaled with regards to the future of email marketing. It has long been the case that the traditional heavy hitters were the only game in town so to speak, however ActiveCampaign has caused a tidal wave in the email marketing landscape by creating innovations that many of the traditional email marketing providers simply can’t offer.
ActiveCampaign is known for their next level improvements to traditional email marketing. Moreover, they have provided such innovative functionality at a very low price.
Their reputation is therefore, one of futuristic campaigns, and of enabling the “little guy” entrepreneur or business to create dynamic email marketing campaigns without having a PhD in computer science or a team of 20 developers at their disposal.
Active Campaign Conclusion
If you’re an entrepreneur or business who wants to create email marketing that’s totally customizable and unique for your business, so that each of your customers have a uniquely tailored experience based upon their individuality, ActiveCampaign is arguably the best in class.
If you wanted to achieve the rich features that ActiveCampaign offered just a few years ago, you would have had to shell out thousands of dollars for even a meagerly sized email list.
These days, with ActiveCampaign you can change the dynamic of email marketing forever without a big marketing budget, and even if the thought of email automation frightens you.
You can try ActiveCampaign with absolutely zero risk for a two-week trial, so you have nothing to lose. Register, and see if you find their campaigns to be truly worthy of your devotion. You might be shocked to learn what they can do for your business, regardless of the size, or nature of your current email database.
So if your business could benefit from interacting with your subscribers based upon their demographics, their geographic region, their behavior, or their buying habits, put ActiveCampaign at the top of your short list of possibilities to take your email marketing strategies to the next level in the fastest time possible.
About Mike DeVincent
Mike researches and reviews products for Top 10 Marketing Software. Mike has vast experience in blogging, teaching and internet marketing. See Mike's profile on Google+.
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