Should You Use ActiveCampaign for Email Marketing?
Over the past several weeks, we’ve been taking a closer look at launch platforms to help our BFFs (that’s you!) decide which one is best for you and your business. Now, we’re turning our focus to email and SMS marketing – two tactics that can help make any future offers and launches more successful.
We’ve already highlighted one of our favorite underrated marketing tools, Drip. Now, it’s time to talk about one of the more common tools for email and SMS marketing – ActiveCampaign. Let’s break down what we like about it, what we don’t like about it, and whether we think it’s worth the hype.
What is ActiveCampaign?
Before we dive in, let’s get to know ActiveCampaign* a little better. In their own words, ActiveCampaign helps automate your email marketing and sales CRM in a few simple clicks. It also touts additional features like email and SMS automation (who doesn’t love that?) and the ability to add and manage a chat tool feature to your website.
Pros of using ActiveCampaign for email marketing
At a glance, ActiveCampaign has a lot of good features we can get behind. First, we really like that this platform has a lot of functionality without being too overwhelming for newbies. You can also integrate tons of third-party apps with ActiveCampaign, so you don’t have to worry about abandoning anything else you use currently. Here’s a look at some of the other pros of using ActiveCampaign:
- Easily create and customize email templates with a drag-and-drop builder
- Build landing pages to grow email list signups
- Automate sales follow-ups through Deals
- Manage lists and nurture leads through the in-house contact database
- Add chat functionality to your website to enhance customers’ experience
- Get one-on-one training through ActiveCampaign to scale your email and SMS marketing over time
Cons of ActiveCampaign
Of course, with the good – comes the not-so-good. While there are lots of great features we love about ActiveCampaign, there are a few things we’re not so keen about.
Even though we’ve mentioned how much we like the functionality of ActiveCampaign, we feel it has too steep of a learning curve for those who are new to email marketing and automations or those who just want to keep things simple. The app can also take a while to load sometimes, making it that much harder to use and navigate for newbies.
We also mentioned the fact that we love the chat tool feature. However, it doesn’t come with any of ActiveCampaign’s standard plans – you’ll have to pay more to get this functionality on your website.
Here’s a quick look at some additional elements we feel are lacking with ActiveCampaign:
- It doesn’t offer a survey builder (getting feedback from your audiences is crucial!)
- It doesn’t support transactional emails
- It doesn’t have many templates to choose from, which are already lacking in design
Our final verdict for ActiveCampaign? Pass.
Although there’s a lot we do like about ActiveCampaign, we feel like it doesn’t quite stack up to our personal favorite marketing tool, Drip.
If you still decide to make the switch, however, you can breathe easy knowing that ActiveCampaign offers free expert migration services and bases your pricing based on the number of contacts you have. So, if you’re starting small, it could be a great budget-friendly way to break into email and SMS marketing before you scale up to something better.
Bottom line: If you’re dedicated to stepping up your game, we advise that you pass on ActiveCampaign and go for something that’s more intuitive, capable, and impressive, like Drip. Like with every new tool, though, we encourage you to try it out for yourself, first. Who knows, this one could be a great match for you and your business!
Don’t sleep on email and SMS marketing, and don’t sleep on Drip. It’s one of the most impressive underrated tools we use, and we hope you get the same excitement and success from it as we have!
Start your free trial with ActiveCampaign*
*Affiliate link