Our review of ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign started out as a marketing automation software for B2B, and has since grown considerably, particularly in the CRM area.

While more traditional sales CRMs like Pipedrive & Salesforce can optimize your pure sales performance, an alternative like ActiveCampaign can be interesting for working further upstream in the funnel and optimizing your lead generation.

My opinion of Active Campaign in a nutshell

Contact management on ActiveCampaign

If you’ve ever used Salesforce, you probably know how confusing it can be. Why are there different sections for opportunities, leads, contacts and accounts – and what’s the difference between them anyway?

For large companies that receive many inquiries, it can be important to make these distinctions. But if you’re an SME, you probably just need a quick and easy way to view and manage all your active opportunities.

This is where ActiveCampaign’s straightforward approach really stands out. The concept of leads and accounts doesn’t really exist in the tool. Everyone is a contact, and everything related to a deal/opportunity – be it the deal itself or the contact(s) associated with it – is managed from a single location.

And all this is recorded in the deal file, which you can easily access from your own pipeline.

Source: ActiveCampaign Help Center

You can perform different actions on each deal:

• Add tasks
• Taking notes
• Send e-mails

Every time you perform one of these actions, it is recorded in the deal in question, so you can keep track of what has been done and what remains to be done.

Salesdorado’s opinion
By de-cluttering the tool and eliminating any potential source of confusion, ActiveCampaign helps you focus on what’s really important: getting sales and marketing to work together to drive deals forward.

Try Active Campaign CRM free of charge

Managing opportunities on ActiveCampaign

Ease of use

CRMs are often too complicated. They can be riddled with unnecessary features, and sometimes even require extensive training to master. Refreshingly, this is not the case with ActiveCampaign CRM.

Anyone familiar with Trello will quickly become familiar with ActiveCampaign CRM’s card-based “Kanban view” of the pipeline, where deals can be easily moved from one stage to the next with a simple drag & drop.

Source: ActiveCampaign

Deals are easy to create and associate with pipelines and stages, with your standard fields for description, value, stage, contact details and assigned deal owner.

The steps are fully customizable, so you can create as many as you like to match your existing sales process. If you have several sales processes (for example, for each product or service you sell), you can also create a pipeline for each of them.

The lead scoring module

ActiveCampaign offers an excellent lead scoring module that can be configured by rules or automations and allows you to assign scores to contacts based on their demographic characteristics or the actions they take :

• Visit a page
• Opening an e-mail
• Clicks on an e-mail
• …

As you can see below, the home menu brings up the contacts with the highest scores.

Source : Wild Audience

Contact scores are useful at an earlier stage in the sales process to help you track down individual contacts that are more likely to turn into opportunities.

But what about later in the process, once you’ve got a case underway? To achieve this, ActiveCampaign offers a deal rating system.

Like contact scoring, deal scoring also assigns scores to contacts based on their characteristics or actions, but this time it does so only for contacts linked to current deals.

Salesdorado’s opinion
Overall, the product offers a high degree of flexibility, sufficient to adapt to companies with both simple and more complex sales processes. The scoring module is very well done and will help your sales team identify the deals most likely to be closed and allocate resources accordingly.

Try Active Campaign CRM free of charge

ActiveCampaign’s strength: automation

This is the great strength of this tool: Active Campaign offers advanced marketing automation scenarios that will enable you to take your sales processes to the next level.

How exactly? Let’s take this example: your company offers web design services, and you have a form on your site that visitors can use to request a quote.

You’ve set up an automatic response system to let the prospect know you’ll be in touch soon, but you also want anyone who fills in the form to enter your pipeline as a buyer, and more specifically, at the inquiry stage.

ActiveCampaign has no problem implementing this type of automation. In fact, it gives you several options for doing so. When you want to create a new scenario, the tool offers you a library of pre-designed scenarios for inspiration. These examples are very useful as they are classified by industry, and will help you find a base that you can adapt to your needs.

To continue with our example, we select a scoring scenario associated with the submission of a form. You can then customize the workflow to suit your business by using the configuration wizard on the right.

But it doesn’t stop there. Automation works both ways – from marketing to sales, and vice versa.

Let’s say I want to set up marketing automation for the moment a contact has reached the stage of sending a quote, a little further down the process.

The process assumes that the quote has already been sent by e-mail (via another ActiveCampaign automation). My automation should check if the contact has responded after 1 day. If not, the automation should send a follow-up email, asking if the contact needs more information.

Once again, ActiveCampaign makes it easy to set up this type of scenario.

Salesdorado’s opinion
ActiveCampaign’s marketing automation tools are among the most advanced on the SMB CRM market, and it’s a great advantage that they can be tightly integrated with your sales processes.

Try Active Campaign CRM free of charge

Reporting on ActiveCampaign

Active Campaign offers a wide range of reports, mainly related to its emailing solution, but here we’ll focus on sales performance reports. This report can be accessed from the “Reports” tab, then the “Offer Report” section.

Salesdorado’s opinion
Active Campaign offers a wide range of reports linked to campaigns and automated scenarios, so make sure you don’t get lost in tracking your sales team’s performance.

Try Active Campaign CRM free of charge

ActiveCampaign customer reviews

With a rating of 4.6/5 on Capterra and G2, feedback from tool users is excellent. Users love Active Campaign for its functional depth, and in particular the automation solutions we described earlier. Indeed, just because you run a medium-sized company doesn’t mean you don’t want to strengthen your sales & marketing processes with advanced tools. Active Campaign customers therefore understand why the tool is more expensive than its competitors, simply because it puts more solutions at your disposal.

Try Active Campaign CRM free of charge

ActiveCampaign prices

As you can see above, Active Campaign charges you according to the number of contacts you have in your database.

Based on 500 contacts, we have :

• Lite: $9 per month for up to 500 contacts, unlimited emails and up to 3 users. This plan does not include the CRM section described throughout this article.
• Plus: $49/month with CRM functionality, lead scoring module and up to 25 users.
• Professional: $129/month with even more advanced features, including predictive content thanks to machine learning, training sessions to learn how to use the tool, and up to 50 users.
• Enterprise: $225/month, for larger organizations, more in-depth support with a dedicated account manager and unlimited users.

ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day free trial, which doesn’t require a credit card, so you can get a feel for the solution.

Salesdorado’s opinion
A rather high-end positioning in the segment from CRMs resolutely focused on SMEs. A reasonable price, considering the many possibilities Active Campaign offers.

Try Active Campaign CRM free of charge