ActiveCampaign was founded in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom as a solution for business owners to keep in contact with their customers. Initially, the company offered several solutions for purchase but switched to an SaaS model as the industry changed. Although small, the company has been profitable since its founding year; in 2016, ActiveCampaign accepted $20 million in private funding for the first time as its employees grew from fourteen employees to over seventy-five. ActiveCampaign is particularly effective for small to midsized businesses that seek effective email marketing tools with the potential to go beyond that - automated marketing campaigns and customer retention. In 2014, its average customer was a company with one to five employees; now, the average ActiveCampaign customer has twenty to eighty employees. ActiveCampaign is based in Chicago, Illinois. Its revenue in 2014 was more than $10 million.  

ActiveCampaign Pricing and Services

Intended Customers Small to Midsize Businesses

Free Trial 14-Day Free Trial on Enterprise Plan

Features

• Email, Web & Mobile Marketing
• Lead Management
• Marketing Automation
• Segmentation
• Service & Support
• Integrations

All Available Plans & Services ActiveCampaign offers three subscription tiers - Lite, Small Business and Enterprise. Each has flexible pricing based on your number of contacts. The Lite plan pricing can be scaled down to 500 contacts, while the Small Business and Enterprise plans can be priced for 1,000 contacts. Users can subscribe to month-to-month plans with no contract or setup fee and the ability to cancel anytime. Paying upfront for an annual plan yields a 15% discount, and non-profit organizations are eligible for a further 20% discount.

Editor’s Bottom Line of ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign offers an Enterprise plan but its features, pricing and subscription model is all geared towards small to midsized businesses. The platform offers considerable functionality, especially for its price, a highly intuitive user interface welcoming the uninitiated, helpful notifications to build properly-functioning workflows and the ability to subscribe or cancel your plan with no setup costs or termination fees. The cheapest plan, Lite, can be used for up to three users for only $9 per month - far below any other marketing automation vendor. ActiveCampaign also offers a free trial, which many of its rivals in the marketing automation space don’t do. All that points to a solution that aims to ease users into marketing automation. What about the quality of features? As mentioned, they’re useful for the price, but they can accomplish a fair bit in their own right. ActiveCampaign’s email marketing and newsletter features include a drag-and-drop interface, email triggers, templates, image hosting, A/B testing, dynamic content and responsive design. Contacts and leads can be segmented by contact data, campaign interactions, website activity and demographic information for targeted campaigns and automations. ActiveCampaign also tracks email and website activity for real-time interaction insights and reports for trends and campaign performance. The marketing platform includes a CRM with sales automation. The CRM includes an activity timeline, drag-and-drop sales pipelines, contacts’ profiles augmented with social and behavioral data and automations. ActiveCampaign offers integrations with over 150 third-party applications ranging from CRMs, developer tools, content management, analytics and more. Its Small Business and Enterprise plans offer one-on-one training and in-depth onboarding, respectively, and its online resources include a knowledge base with training articles and video guides and community forums. Overall, ActiveCampaign is a credible, capable marketing automation solution at an astonishingly fair price. Whether you’re a marketing newbie getting your feet wet or an established business seeking a scalable, low-cost yet nimble and powerful tool, ActiveCampaign delivers the goods and helps you along in a format anyone can understand.