What is Email Marketing Automation?

Email marketing and automation platforms have multiple purposes, one being to drive sales, another to increase conversions, qualified leads and other factors also predetermined to be goals.

Focusing on email marketing, traditional platforms essentially allow you to send email blasts and track parameters like click through and open rate.

Adding automation to your email marketing campaigns enables you to first set conversion goals, and second – automate many of the elements of an email campaign, including:

• Sending thank you emails after a purchase is made
• Gaining insight as to which emails contacts open
• Sending special offers including discounts
• Sending abandoned cart reminders

Marketing automation software is capable of monitoring every digital interaction a lead has with your business, making it more sophisticated than traditional email marketing platforms.

how to integrate an active campaign with click funnels

1. From within ClickFunnels, go to Account Settings.
2. Select Integrations.
3. Select Add New Integration.
4. Search for ActiveCampaign in the search bar and click on the Icon.
5. Give your integration a Nickname.
6. Enter your API Key.
7. Enter your API URL.
8. Click Add Integration.

how to integrate active campaign form into WordPress

Active Campaign Review

This Chicago-based automation tool is helping their 90,000 customers send fewer emails while, at the same time, achieving better results. Boasting many features and integrations, as well as quick and friendly support, they do sound like a powerhouse newsletter marketing tool. We’ll put ActiveCampaign under the microscope to see if they measure up to their bold claims.

ActiveCampaign Summary

ActiveCampaign offers almost everything you need within a newsletter marketing tool, plus their advanced automation are hard to beat. The entry-level plan starts at $15 per month (for up to 500 subscribers, paid monthly), or, if you want to access pro features such as the in-built CRM and lead scoring, the Plus plan starts at $70 per month.

One of their most important features is automation. Not only does it allow autoresponders, based on myriad conditions, but it also allows automation of your contacts and list management, as well as automation within its CRM system (known as ‘Deals’). This ‘Deals’ system is also worth noting and allows you to add notes to contacts, set up appointments, or simply send direct messages to them.

In addition to that, they have a customer messages feature. Using it you can send targeted messages straight to your website visitors, therefore optimizing the overall customer experience. ActiveCampaign pride themselves on their approach to helping you build meaningful connections with your customers through their software.

And, while at first glance pages such as the Dashboard can seem a little busy and overly complicated, it’s not hard to understand how useful it is to have all your information in one place.

Let’s dive in and take a closer look at ActiveCampaign:

how much does an active campaign cost?

It’s no secret that ActiveCampaign is one of our favorite email marketing tools. We’ve had great experiences with their support, reports, and automation that are hard to beat. But which of their four different offers would we recommend? And does their product scale well if your subscriber count increases in the long term? Let’s break down the ActiveCampaign plans and prices below to find out.

ActiveCampaign Pricing: What Do I Get?

ActiveCampaign has four plans: Lite (from $15/month), Plus (from $70/month), Professional (from $159/month) and Enterprise (from $279/month). The entry-level plan includes features like a template editor and marketing automation. Higher plans add CRM and lead scoring. There is no setup fee.

It’s worth noting that they do not offer a free plan. However, you can still give it a test drive for 14 days without paying anything. Once you commit to a paid plan, you can even take advantage of their free migrations offer. And as to which plan is the right one for you, have a look at our complete breakdown below.

Prices & Plans in Detail

Additional Features:

Conversations

Conversations is a feature available on all plans and can be purchased as an add-on. It allows you to have two-way conversations with subscribers via chat and email and everything is stored in a unified inbox.

Price: $9/user/month

ActiveCampaign Plans & Prices Summary

When considering all the above, here’s what we would recommend each plan for:

ActiveCampaign Lite: This is fantastic for small teams. It only allows 3 users, but comes with most of the powerful email automation, design options, and social media integration. You certainly get a much more powerful product than with most competitors in the same price range.

The branding in the forms

Note that Lite doesn’t remove ActiveCampaign logos in certain elements like forms and confirmation emails – but if you add your forms via HTML this will not be an issue. And you can’t call them for support as it’s only live chat and email. However, we are using this plan for our sister site AppToolTester.com and we’re pretty happy with it – especially the ability to track the actions of website visitors.

ActiveCampaign Plus plan: This one is suitable for either bigger teams (up to 25 accounts) or organizations that need a CRM to manage their customers. Other interesting features of this upgrade are the landing page editor, the ability to send SMS, and the use of a custom domain name for your links. It also removes the ActiveCampaign branding so your forms look more professional. Finally, the 1 month of 1-to-1 training could be useful if you want to get the most from ActiveCampaign’s powerful automation.

ActiveCampaign Professional plan: Starting at $159 a month is a big increase in the monthly fee. But it comes with 50 user accounts, the ability to show site messages personalized to your users, and in-depth attribution analysis that will help you tailor marketing techniques and content for a successful campaign.

ActiveCampaign Enterprise plan: For really big companies with an equally big budget. Comes with unlimited user accounts and the most sophisticated features like the ability to customize your own mail server domain. You also get a custom phone number for sending SMS, phone support, unlimited one-on-one training, and a dedicated account manager who will assist you in various matters like strategy consultation, deliverability, and more.

> Try Active Campaign for free for 14 days

Conclusion

Starting at $15 a month with the Lite plan instead of a free offer may put some people off ActiveCampaign. Sure, you can find cheaper options, especially if you only need to send very basic newsletters. And in fact, the advanced features might also make email marketing newbies a bit nervous as you could think ActiveCampaign is harder to use (it’s not).

But if you are indeed serious about email marketing, we would definitely recommend ActiveCampaign. Their offer scales reasonably well, and larger organizations will benefit from very advanced tools, multi-platform, 24/7 support, and personal training at a reasonable price. And they are also very efficient in the way they count their subscribers, so you can easily segment and delete inactive subscribers without worrying about reaching your user limit.

How automation work in ActiveCampaign

If you’re new to marketing automation, automation in ActiveCampaign can be overwhelming. Automations are one of those features that are easy to use, but tricky to get started with because they’re so flexible.
Learn how automation work and how to get started building your first automation in this quick video excerpt from our Getting Started with ActiveCampaign course.
Key takeaways:

• Before building your first automation, make sure you know: What do I want this automation to achieve? What is the desired end result?
• Every automation begins with a start trigger (the event that triggers automation).
• The middle part of automation is the action. What do you want to happen after the triggering event takes place?
• Consider what you want to happen at the end of automation as well. Do contacts who go through this automation need to be sent to another automation, or is the process simply complete for them?

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