I use ActiveCampaign as the hub of my business operations. My company runs on the internet, and I use ActiveCampaign automations, emails, forms, integrations and more to onboard clients and "employees" and maintain their account and stay in effective communication with both parties.
Pros
Customer service is readily available (via chatbot) for basic questions on how to use the CRM
Their automation flow makes more sense to me than some other CRMs.
Cons
In my opinion, their customer service is horrible. It took 38 emails over 2 weeks simply to "resolve" that my bank account was overdrawn due to an unauthorized renewal fee for a yearly subscription, when I had never purchased a yearly subscription before.
In my opinion, customer service could actually listen to the problem and respond like their customers are real people instead of giving canned, generic responses, making light of significant issue.
In my opinion, not threaten to remove access to contact data in the event of their own error (such as unauthorized charges, and then, in my experience, after refunding, threatening to remove access to contact data if I didn't purchase a plan).
In my opinion, not randomly change the functions on their platform that results in data loss, such as happened to me this week.
In my opinion, when receiving a complaint about customer data loss: apologize or acknowledge the loss.
In my opinion, reimburse a business for financial loss suffered due to, what I believe is incompetent and dishonest behavior, such as the auto-renew event last June.
Likelihood to Recommend
I would never recommend this company to a friend of mine, because, in my experience, I understand that doing so would jeopardize valuable data within their company, and they would likely never receive an apology from ActiveCampaign, their data back, or their money back. It feels as though an individual's business is literally jeopardized by doing business with this company. I've been building my company with ActiveCampaign for 2 years, we just launched in August, and I'm about to start finding a new CRM, learning it, and rebuilding my company on that CRM in my free time. So I can save my business from this company that, in my opinion, does not treat its customers in a decent manner.
Here is my experience: In my opinion, this is the worst customer service I have ever experienced. As a CRM that is supposed to hold data for people's customers, I felt they threatened me with the data loss of my clients in June, and now they have lost the data of my clients. In June it took 38 emails over two weeks to get the issue "sorted out". They caused me to go overdrawn in my bank account by making an unauthorized renewal charge on my card on file. I never purchased a yearly membership to begin with, and suddenly in June I was charged over $600 for a renewal of a yearly subscription. I had never had a yearly subscription before! Like I said, it took over 38 emails to get to a conclusion. I was initially told they do not provide refunds. I finally got a refund, was given a free year, then they took that free year away and, in my experience, threatened me with data loss if I didn't pay within about a week's timeframe! Then, in my experience, they gave me an extra week before they threatened to remove access to my clients data, as though they were being nice by giving me an extra week. I was literally about to launch a business I had been working on for two years, and they did this to me! And I'd been using them for about a year or more building up to my launch! I was never reimbursed for the overdraft fees, and ended up purchasing a yearly subscription simply because I was about to launch my business and it was set up to operate using ActiveCampaign so I couldn't afford to learn a whole new CRM and rewire my business right before a launch. I cannot begin to express how, in my opinion, bad the customer service representative was that handled this whole thing. I truly felt like a number not a person to them, and all they cared about was taking my money, not the fact that they were toying with my livelihood. Now this week there is a new issue. Since I have had ActiveCampaign, I have had a feature where I can attach files to my contacts. And I do. Signed, legal documents. Well this week all the files I've ever attached to any customers disappeared. And now suddenly there is no feature to even attach files. My experience: The first customer service representative I spoke with literally did not understand what I was asking and kept asking me about was I having trouble importing contacts, completely unrelated to my issue. I asked to speak with a manager or someone else and the customer service representative said they couldn't pass my ticket along to anyone else or let anyone else see it. In my opinion, lies. I left the chat conversation. I waited a day and went back. The next customer service representative said they would look into it and email me back. They emailed me back with no apology or even acknowledgment that customer data had been lost! They simply said the feature to add files to a contact is with their sales plan only, so I need to purchase the sales plan. I haven't had the sales plan for the 2 years I've had ActiveCampaign and I have always had the files feature. In my opinion, basic common sense says this does not answer the problem. Why did the feature suddenly disappear? The customer service representative did not even apologize for my data loss, say they would try to help find the lost files—nothing. I am now convinced, after this and reading other reviews here of similar, in my opinion, horrible neglect of their customers, that in my free time I need to begin learning another CRM and rebuilding my business to function on another platform. I do not understand how the owners can have a clean conscious knowing they support businesses function—help people maintain their livelihood—but, in my experience, treat those people with no dignity or respect. I am appalled. And hurt. In my experience, my business has been hurt by ActiveCampaign. Twice now. And in no small way.
AC is our CRM and email marketing tool. We keep all of our contacts in AC, use the powerful automations to tag them, and email them accordingly. These three aspects make it second to none in terms of stacking technologies into one easily manageable package. It beasts competitors by a landslide.
Pros
Email marketing
Automations
CRM
Automatically tagging contacts based on behaviour.
Cons
Some glitches when using with Chrome
Onboarding is way too fast - just blasted with info
Likelihood to Recommend
AC has allowed us to get rid of various pieces of software because of its combined power of email, automation, and CRM. Before we had a separate CRM, then used Zapier to link it up to an email marketing tool. Because of this, we can also see everything that's happening on one dashboard. Makes life so much easier. A specific scenario is trying to organise and communicate to your email list effectively and efficiently. It's hard to say where it's not appropriate in the areas of email and CRM. Maybe for a business with zero budget, you can get an email marketing tool that does automation for free. But It's not sustainable if you plan on growing; the features will dry up quickly.
We use ActiveCampaign to track leads coming in from our website, email, and phone calls. We use the Deals Pipelines to assist with lead tracking across our sales team. We use the automation features to automate reply emails, notifications, add leads to Deals Pipelines, and more. We use the Campaigns feature to send bulk emails to leads and customers. Using Lists and Tags, we can segment our audience to connect with them.
Pros
Automations
Lead tracking.
Bulk email.
On-Boarding.
Customer Service.
Cons
Attribution - we have to manually set up UT parameters to learn how leads are coming to our website.
Contact sorting - Contacts are automatically sorted alphabetically by email, which is absurd. In order to view contacts by most recent (which to me would be the most desired view), we have to click "Date Created" twice every time we go to the contacts screen.
Likelihood to Recommend
For our small business, ActiveCampaign is a home-run hit! It has a clean interface that is easy to use. Their how-tos are very helpful. And if you get really stuck, their customer support team is absolutely stellar. It provides everything we need in a CRM plus some without being too overwhelming for our small marketing team. I love that they integrate with so many platforms, too.
We switched to ActiveCampaign earlier this year, and the onboarding experience was superb. They helped us migrate all our information from our previous CRM and walked us through how to use it according to our specific needs. We were very happy with the ease of the transition.
To top it off, ActiveCampaign is so affordable for us. It offers great value, not only with the features included in the platform itself but also with the top-notch customer support. I'm so glad we switched to ActiveCampaign!
Our entire growth team uses Active Campaign in some capacity. We use it for marketing efforts with email campaigns. We use it for sales with the marketing automation that can be created - email sequences, etc. And our sales team uses it for our sales pipeline - implementing lead scoring and more. We also have it set up to use for custom CRM purposes for customer success - it's an all-in-one growth tool for us.
Pros
Email marketing
Sales pipeline
Automations
Cons
Task management
Integrations with third parties
Reporting
Likelihood to Recommend
If you're looking for an all-in-one tool to manage email marketing, and lead nurturing automation up until the conversion. It may not be the best option for managing all the data points of your customer base if there is not a direct integration with your POS system. However, if you're looking to simplify your stack for marketing and sales, Active Campaign is a great place to look!
VU
Verified User
C-Level Executive in Corporate (Staffing & Recruiting company, 11-50 employees)
ActiveCampaign is an integral feature in our client acquisition.
We use the Forms as a first point of capturing inquiry details. This then drops into automations appropriate to the client's journey they need to take.
We have a whole sequence of follow-up that is all managed via ActiveCampaign using event triggers and tags.
We find the system easy to use.
Pros
Form integration on to website
Email campaigns
Automations
Generally a place to keep track of a client and their actions
Cons
Review - offer regular reviews to see how the system can be used better once someone is established with the basics
More [how to] video training
Keep educating the user of how to get the most out of the system (with video)
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are in business and dealing with customers, this system can do so much for you.
We use this as our sales software to engage in client communication [on] a 24-hr/365-day basis.
We could not manage without the system with the number of leads we have per month.
We have an active contact capture on our Squarespace site and have used ActiveCampaign to contact existing customers by email. We are conscious that we underutilise the potential afforded by ActiveCampaign. This is in part due to the time investment required to get over the learning curve required for this tool.
Pros
Support
Email automation
Lists
Cons
It's complicated
Likelihood to Recommend
ActiveCampaign is fully featured and will meet a wide range of future CRM and automation needs, quite likely it can do a lot more than you're currently looking for.
ActiveCampaign is my new go-to for email automation and CRM. When I first began, I'll admit there was a learning curve, as with most technology, but it was well worth my effort. ActiveCampaign gives me so much flexibility to communicate, send single emails, and automate my business messages to my clients and community. The main problem that I needed to address was scalability. I needed a solution that laid a foundation to build a long-term relationship. ActiveCampaign provides me with the framework I needed to support my business through all stages of growth, and for that, I am committed for the long haul.
Pros
Customer relationship management capabilities
Ability to send single emails
Annual subscription pricing
Cons
Learning curve for beginners
Likelihood to Recommend
ActiveCampaign is well suited for the professional and growth-minded entrepreneur, and less suited for anyone impatient or unwilling to put in the time to hire an expert or set up the account to realize all the benefits of this service.
ActiveCampaign is being used by the company I am contracting with to send out company emails. This includes announcements, newsletters, client communications, and employee communications. I helped them move from another email marketing system that was not suiting their needs. The main problem for me was that their old system did not give me enough control as a graphic designer trying to set up custom templates for them. They just signed up, but I know this platform will be solving other issues for them, including ease of use.
Pros
Ease of use
Design control
Automation
Integrated SMS responses
Cons
Upload and organization of assets.
Saving multiple blocks as one unit.
Needs to provide more templates.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think that ActiveCampaign is well suited for all users, beginners to advanced. In fact, this was one of the decision making factors based on going with this platform. I cannot think of a scenario where it is less appropriate.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Marketing (Staffing & Recruiting company, 201-500 employees)
We are using Active Campaign to engage with our community - from Newsletter, to event info, from ticketing to personal follow ups. Active Campaign is really a life saver and makes communication with my audience so easy!
Pros
Easy to use, you don't need any coding skills.
Simple design templates help to create something beautiful without troubles.
Automations can be set up easily.
Campaigns, Automations, and Messages can be easily duplicated so you can reuse your campaigns.
Cons
Some of the functions in more complex automations are not super simple to understand.
Likelihood to Recommend
It's great for every company that want to engage with their community via email. Great to build newsletter opt-in messages, automations and simple newsletters.
VU
Verified User
Director (Events Services company, 1-10 employees)
