About the ESP

ActiveCampaign tries to position itself as the “all-in-one” buffet, where you just get an ActiveCampaign subscription and all of your marketing and business are taken care of. Is this true, or are there some tradeoffs? Let’s talk about this.

If your business has sales and marketing as completely separate teams, both are likely to find that the platform doesn’t cater to them as much as specialized sales or marketing platforms. Furthermore, if you actually want to unlock more advanced features, you’re forced to buy higher-tiers (pro tier for segmentation and conditional content), or pricey addons (the pipelines addon for even basic sales features).

Note that the platform tries to make it seem like standard email marketing features rely on their “Marketing CRM”, which is essentially nothing but basic contact management. For anything beyond that, you have to purchase the “Enhanced CRM” add-on. 

Things such as segmenting off of customer data, behavior, events (etc) are available on all modern email marketing platforms, and pretty much standard, even if other platforms don’t call it “Deep CRM integration”.

The other thing to note is that the platform seems to prioritize getting you to upgrade to higher tiers. This can be seen by the user experience which is highly focused on presenting everything as equally important, which can lead to overwhelm if you’re just starting out. 

You can’t just decide to focus on say just one foundational area of marketing, and add more complexity as you grow. Everything is presented as if it were equally important to implement from day one in your business. This means that using the platform involves a larger learning curve than for example a platform that focuses on email marketing first and foremost.

They do offer an impressive library with hundreds of design templates (both email and landing pages) as well as automation recipes. They also boast an equally impressive (and unmatched) number of native integrations. One however gets the impression that you’re charged a severe penalty by paying a lot more simply because you have access to more templates than with other platforms.

Onboarding Process

The onboarding process is the first point at which you get a glimpse at their tiered philosophy. It differs heavily based on what plan you have chosen. While the basic plans emphasize documentation and tutorial videos, higher-tier plans include personalized onboarding sessions with a dedicated specialist. This differs from other platforms where human support for onboarding is more accessible even if you’re on a more basic plan.

The platform guides you through initial setup steps like importing contacts, setting up your first campaign, and then configuring basic automations.

Ease of Use

ActiveCampaign aims to be an all-in-one platform, offering a wide range of features beyond email marketing. While this can be beneficial for businesses that need a comprehensive solution, it can also make the platform feel overwhelming for new users. The interface, while visually appealing, can appear cluttered and complex, especially for those primarily focused on email marketing.

The platform throws a lot of information at you from the start, presenting all features as equally important, regardless of your immediate needs. This can lead to a steep learning curve, as you’re bombarded with options and functionalities that may not be relevant to your current marketing goals.

For example, if you’re primarily focused on building email lists and sending targeted campaigns, you might find yourself navigating through numerous menus and features related to CRM, sales automation, and other functionalities that you may not need immediately.

While ActiveCampaign offers helpful resources like tutorials and a knowledge base, the initial onboarding experience could be more streamlined for users who are primarily interested in email marketing.

Broadcast Feature

ActiveCampaign’s broadcast functionality can be a little confusing at first if you’re mostly experienced with traditional email-marketing platforms. There is essentially no feature called “broadcasts” in ActiveCampaign.

What you do have is a screen called “Campaigns” which lists multiple ways of targeting customers with email. This includes 3 automated types of campaigns (“Automations”, RSS-Triggered and Date Based). It also includes two types of broadcast campaigns which they refer to as “Standard Emails” and “Split Testing” (which is essentially A/B split broadcast.

The broadcast creation process is designed in a clever way where you’re presented with a single, elegant screen. At first glance it seems a bit too basic. On the top left it only presents you with 4 fields. The sender, recipients list, preheader text and subject line.

At first glance it seems underwhelming. That is until you select the recipient list and see that you can go a lot more granular than this. You may choose any segment you’ve predefined or built before. But in addition to that it has a nice unique feature labelled “Send using custom conditions”.

This opens up a popup where you can define your exact targeting.  The core targeting capabilities are similar to what you’d find in any robust ESP – you can combine multiple conditions based on subscriber behavior, custom fields, tags, and engagement metrics. What makes this really convenient is that it allows you to easily set conditions for one given campaign, without having to build a segment first. You can do it all on the campaign screen.

Note that while you can also target based on pipeline-specific data like deal stages and sales pipeline position, this requires purchasing the additional add-on.

Autoresponder/Automation Feature

This is probably the one feature that ActiveCampaign is best known for. It features a marketplace with over 900 pre-built automation recipes as well as guided tutorials. The automation builder itself uses a flowchart-style interface where you drag in the different types of actions, triggers, and conditions. As of recently they have also integrated some AI-powered tools for content generation and optimization.

Some standout features include:

• Site tracking integration that allows you to trigger automations based on website behavior
• A large library of native integrations with third-party platforms
• Pipeline-specific conditions like deal stage changes or sales rep assignments (if you own the add-on)
• Win probability predictions for sales opportunities (if you own the add-on)
• Lead scoring functionality that can automatically adjust based on subscriber behavior (if you own the add-on)

It’s important to note however that except for the pipeline-specific conditions and the large library of pre-built recipes, all of this is standard fare in any robust ESP. And while on paper the number of native integrations provided by ActiveCampaign appears impressive, this advantage is severely reduced in today’s era. This is thanks to the likes of Zapier, Make and webhook functionality making it possible to connect virtually any two platforms, regardless of native integrations.

Furthermore, while ActiveCampaign tries to present things in a way where it appears that the CRM functionality is necessary for robust automation, the truth is that most of these automation capabilities are quite common in email marketing platforms.

Templates

ActiveCampaign boasts an absolutely massive library for various use cases and industries. The templates themselves as well designed and responsive. Whilst this would have been a huge advantage in the past where people relied more on a platform’s provided templates, today it is much less of an advantage. With options like Stripo nowadays, a big library of ready-made templates inside the ESP is a “nice to have”, but no longer makes as big of a difference.

Email Template Editor

HTML WYSIWYG Editor: The WYSIWYG editor is provided for those who prefer to work with HTML directly. It includes syntax highlighting and a preview mode, allowing you to avoid any big mistakes.

Drag and Drop Editor: The drag-and-drop editor is modern, intuitive and offers all the elements you would need to build out your emails. You can easily insert basic personalization tags, dynamic content, and conditional blocks directly within the editor. The editor also includes mobile preview capabilities and spam testing features to help ensure your emails look good and reach the inbox.

List Management

ActiveCampaign emphasizes a “Marketing CRM” approach to list management. While this sounds sophisticated, it essentially refers to basic contact management features. You can organize contacts into lists, add custom fields, and segment based on simple criteria.

However, to leverage more advanced segmentation options, such as those based on customer behavior, events, or sophisticated scoring models, you’ll need to upgrade to a higher tier or purchase the “Enhanced CRM” add-on.

This creates a situation where seemingly standard email marketing features are presented as reliant on premium add-ons. Segmenting based on customer data, behavior, and events should be a core functionality of any modern email marketing platform, not an extra expense.

This approach can lead to frustration and confusion, especially for businesses that don’t have a sales team, or prefer a different sales CRM and may not require the full suite of “Enhanced CRM” features, but still need robust segmentation capabilities for effective email campaigns. If this is you, look elsewhere.

ActiveCampaign is essentially tying what should be basic list management to the concept of an “Enhanced CRM”. But this “Enhanced CRM” is a sales team feature. And there’s no reason why you’re forced to buy a sales add-on to get basic marketing features. It’s just another pointer to how things are unnecessarily tied together to force you into paying for things you don’t need, to get what you do need.

Analytics

ActiveCampaign provides comprehensive analytics across all aspects of your email marketing and automation efforts. The reporting interface offers both high-level overviews and the ability to drill down into specific metrics.

The platform tracks standard email metrics like opens, clicks, and bounces, but also provides deeper insights into:

• Automation performance
• Campaign comparisons
• Geographic data
• Device statistics
• Contact source reporting
• Revenue attribution (for e-commerce integrations)

Note that the analytics functionality is limited by your tier. This is another area that differs from traditional email-marketing platforms that tend to give you all analytics functionality, regardless of your tier.

Support

Support varies significantly based on your plan level, and this tiered approach to support often compounds the overwhelm problem. While all users have access to email support and documentation, the support team tends to emphasize the platform’s full feature set rather than helping users focus on what matters most for their specific needs.

Higher-tier plans include phone support and dedicated account representatives, but even these resources often seem more focused on helping you implement every available feature rather than identifying which ones will actually drive results for your business.

In addition we’ve seen mixed reports on support times. Whilst some users report good experiences, others, such as the folks at WPFusion report sometimes waiting for weeks, or even months to get a reply.

Pricing

ActiveCampaign’s pricing structure is multi-tiered and can become quite expensive as your contact list grows. The platform offers four main tiers:

• Lite: Basic email marketing and simple automations only, just one user (starts at 19$ for 1000 contacts)
• Plus: Remove the limit on automations and add landing pages ($59/month for 1,000 contacts)
• Professional: Added conditional content and split automation features ($89/month for 1,000 contacts)
• Enterprise: Added custom reporting and priority support ($159/month for 1,000 contacts)

The one thing that stands out here is how they artificially tie some features to a higher-tier. Such as for example conditional content requiring a professional plan, or segmentation offering less control on lower and mid-tier plans.

What’s particularly notable is how quickly costs escalate with contact count. For example, even basic features for 25,000 contacts will cost $489/month. This means that you pay $489 every month and don’t even get access to granular segmentation, conditional content and are limited to very simple automations (just 5 actions per automation).

Note that these are features that on other email-centric platforms are considered basic features and provided on even the most basic plans. The pricing seems designed to push users toward higher tiers by taking what is essentially considered a basic feature and limiting it to the higher-tiers.

In addition note that many features are sold as add-ons, and these scale with the plan. For example adding the pipelines add-on to an enterprise plan is an additional $107 a month just to add pipelines and deals. If you also want to add win-probability, this will set you back $179 a month.

Pros

Powerful Automation Capabilities

The automation builder is incredibly versatile and can handle complex marketing scenarios. The visual interface makes it accessible while still offering advanced capabilities.

Comprehensive Feature Set

ActiveCampaign offers a wide range of features, including email marketing, CRM, lead scoring, and sales automation. However note that by the time you add all of these features, either via add-ons or upgrading your tier, this can get quite expensive.

Extensive Integration Options

ActiveCampaign integrates with a vast number of third-party platforms, making it slightly easier to fit into existing business workflows. Though the advantage over using something like Zapier or Webhooks is minimal.

Cons

Feature Overwhelm and Priority Confusion

The platform presents essential and non-essential features with equal prominence, making it difficult for users to know what to focus on first. This creates a paradox where having more features actually makes it harder to effectively use the core ones that matter most to your business.

Forced Feature Bundling

Their philosophy of bundling and tying things together means you’re often forced to pay for features you don’t need just to access specific capabilities you want. 

Price Scaling with Bundled Features

Costs increase significantly as your contact list grows, and you’re paying for the entire ecosystem rather than just the specific features you need. This can make it much more expensive than combining best-of-breed solutions for your specific needs.

Limited Flexibility in Feature Selection

The rigid tier structure means you can’t pick and choose which features you want. This can be particularly frustrating for businesses that prefer to build their own stack using specialized tools for each function.

Final words

ActiveCampaign presents itself as a comprehensive marketing automation platform that goes beyond simple email marketing. Its powerful automation capabilities, integrated CRM, and extensive feature set make it particularly appealing to businesses looking for a sophisticated marketing tool that can grow with them.

The platform’s strength lies in its ability to handle complex marketing scenarios while still maintaining accessibility for simpler use cases. However, this comes with the trade-off of a steeper learning curve and a pricing structure that may not suit all businesses.

Whether ActiveCampaign is right for you largely depends on your philosophy about marketing tools. If you’re looking for an all-in-one platform and are willing to pay for features you might not need, while investing the time to learn a complex system, it could be worth considering.

However, if you prefer the flexibility of choosing best-of-breed solutions for each specific need, or if you want to pay only for the features you’ll actually use, you might want to explore more focused alternatives. The platform’s bundled approach to features and pricing can make it an expensive choice compared to combining specialized tools that excel in their specific areas.