ActiveCampaign: Our review

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 enquiries, it can be important to make these distinctions. But if you are an SME, you probably just need a quick and easy way to view and manage all your active opportunities.

This is where ActiveCampaign’s simple 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 that deal – is managed from one place.

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

Source: ActiveCampaign Help Center

You have the possibility to perform different actions on each deal:

• Adding tasks
• Taking notes
• Sending emails

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

Salesdorado’s view
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.

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Opportunity management on ActiveCampaign

Ease of use

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

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 and 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 owner of the assigned deal.

The steps are fully customisable, so you can create as many as you like to fit your existing sales process. If you have multiple sales processes (for example, for each product or service you sell), you can also create a pipeline for each one.

The lead scoring module

ActiveCampaign offers a great lead scoring module that can be configured by rules or automation and allows you to score contacts based on their demographics or actions:

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

As you can see below the home menu shows you the contacts with the highest scores.

Source: Wild Audience

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

But what about later in the process, once you have a deal in hand? For this, ActiveCampaign offers a deal scoring 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 related to current deals.

The Salesdorado opinion
Overall, the product is very flexible, enough to accommodate 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.

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ActiveCampaign’s strength: automation

This is the great strength of this tool, Active Campaign offers advanced marketing automation scenarios that will allow you to advance your sales processes.

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

You’ve set up an auto-responder 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, specifically at the enquiry stage.

ActiveCampaign has no problem setting up this type of automation. In fact, it gives you several options to do so. When you want to create a new scenario, the tool offers you a library of pre-designed scenarios to inspire you. These examples are very useful in that they are categorised by industry and will help you to find a basis that you can adapt to your needs.

To continue with our example, we select a scoring scenario associated with submitting a form. You can then adapt the workflow to your business using the configuration wizard on the right.

But it doesn’t stop there. The automatisms go 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 line.

The process assumes that the quote has already been sent by email (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.

Again, ActiveCampaign makes it very easy to set up this type of scenario.

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

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Reporting on ActiveCampaign

Active Campaign offers many different types of reports, including those related to itsemailing solution, but here we will focus on the sales performance reports. This report is accessible from the “Reports” tab and then the “Offer Report” section.

Salesdorado’s opinion
Active Campaign offers many reports related to campaigns and automated scenarios, so be careful not to get lost in tracking the performance of your sales team.

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Customer reviews of ActiveCampaign

With a rating of 4.6/5 on Capterra and G2 the feedback from users of the tool is excellent. Users like Active Campaign for its functional depth and in particular the automation solutions we described earlier. After all, 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’s customers understand that the tool is more expensive than its competitors, simply because it offers more solutions.

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ActiveCampaign pricing

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

On the basis of 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 part described throughout the 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 through machine learning, training sessions to learn how to use the tool, up to 50 users.
• Corporate: $225/month, for larger organisations, more extensive support with a dedicated account officer and unlimited users.

ActiveCampaign offers a 14-day free trial that does not require a credit card to get a feel for the solution.

Salesdorado’s opinion
A rather top-of-the-range positioning in the segment of CRMs resolutely oriented towards SMEs. A reasonable price considering the multiple possibilities that Active Campaign offers.

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