ActiveCampaign CRM 2022: Is It The Best for Small Businesses?

Do you use Activecampaign? Well, don’t worry if you don’t because we’ll look at all its essential features, including Activecampaign CRM, which is a combination of contact management and marketing automation:

How does it work?

What can you do with the campaign automation side?

How about contact management?

Which price plan should you go for?

And much more…

The big question, though, when I’m talking about ‘ActiveCampaign’s CRM’ with anybody is:

“Ok, so what does it do?”

The guide aims to answer that question.

What is ActiveCampaign CRM, And Who Should Use It?

Let’s define what a marketing automation platform is before we look at how brands use it as a CRM tool and why you might want to do so.

If you’re not yet familiar with marketing automation, then you may be wondering what exactly this means.

A good definition is from B2B Marketing:

“Marketing Automation simply refers to a series of computer-based tasks that help you manage your marketing campaigns and deliver a steady stream of qualified leads to your sales team. By assigning actions based on customer behavior, you can automate the delivery of personalized messages to drive customers closer and closer towards becoming paying clients”.

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing automation tool with built-in CRM features, so you can see your contacts in one place if they’re opening your emails or clicking on specific links. This helps build relationships over time, allowing you to gain trust from your prospects and customers — the key to success in any business endeavor.

Who Should Use It?

Well, several people should use the tool.

Here are some of them:

Anyone who wants to cut the cost and hassle of traditional CRM systems

If your team currently uses an expensive, time-consuming CRM system (if you haven’t already been priced out of the market), consider switching to ActiveCampaign CRM. It’ll save you a lot of money without losing any functionality. You’ll be able to track leads, closed deals, and custom fields for your team.

Small-medium businesses that want to manage their leads effectively

ActiveCampaign is great for prospecting platform features partners featured. It allows you to spot new opportunities in your database, nurture them until they become leads, and close deals faster.  You can quickly build workflows to automate your email marketing campaigns, help you reach out to more leads, and close deals faster. 

Teams who are not focused on a specific vertical need a flexible solution to cater to all business needs.

Consider switching to ActiveCampaign if you want a comprehensive solution for your business processes. You can continue using your existing website forms, purchase just two add-ons, and start using the smarter parts of CRM.

Why you should choose ActiveCampaign CRM over other CRMs

ActiveCampaign has the following key features which are not found in other CRMs. Let me elaborate on some of them:    

Automated sales funnel management and marketing automation.

Marketing automation is an excellent alternative to your current CRM, email marketing service, or autoresponder. You can create a fantastic automated sales funnel with all tasks under one roof, and also, you can integrate it with other essential apps like contact form 7, Zapier, etc., to automate a bunch of your tasks.

Lead scoring showed as lead grade

As per your needs, the tool defines how each lead should be graded by setting up rules for lead grading. After that, once you click on the grade button, they will be automatically assigned a grade. You can further filter and search the leads based on their grading.      

Email templates

You can create an unlimited number of email templates in ActiveCampaign, which you can use to send emails to your customers or potential clients.

In your newly created template, you can add a tracking link that will help you track who is opening your emails, from where they are opening them, etc. and how many times they have opened it via preview pane on the right side of the screen while writing an email.  

List segmentation

I like its ease of use. You can create a different list for different segments like Hot prospects, Warm prospects, etc., to get all the relevant updates for respective channels like webinar invitations, sales made, etc. Further, you can also add custom fields to segments and use them as segment filters.

Full-fledged analytics and great reporting

ActiveCampaign has very nice inbuilt analytics, which will help you know how your marketing campaigns are doing. You have all the graphs related to your leads, conversion rate, etc., and reports like the number of clicks on each link, open rates of emails sent, etc.

You can export reports into excel format or PDF at any point in time.  

Seamless Account linking  

You can log in to multiple accounts under one a/c so that you get a seamless experience and access to all different accounts without logging out. Further, you can also integrate with Zapier for even more seamless automation.

And the last feature is; ActiveCampaign holds free webinars. You can attend these webinars without having to pay or signup for anything. I found some of the resourceful.

Some other times, they do advanced campaign training so that you can learn more about marketing automations. All you need to do is join their company Facebook group.

How to sign up for an account, create a campaign, and set up automation rules

To get started with your campaign(s), you need to create an ActiveCampaign account. You can do this from the ActiveCampaign website.

Once there, choose a plan and click on “Start my free trial.” You’ll be taken through the signup process to enter in your credit card details. Please enter a valid email address to continue the language. You will then automatically be directed to an onboarding tutorial on how to use ActiveCampaign best.

I recommend watching this video if you have a few minutes to spare, as it gives a good overview of the software.

The basic version is free to use for up to 500 subscribers. They will not charge you anything if you do not send out any

emails. But they limit the number of contacts to 5,000. So, it’s an excellent way to test out if this software works for you.

Step 2 – Creating your campaign

Once you’ve signed up for ActiveCampaign, you’ll be given a default email address. You’ll also be required to set up an “Active Campaign” and add your first campaign (or email automation rule) to your sales process.

To do so, go to the “Automation” tab at the top of your dashboard and click on “Create New Automation.”

Select “New Campaign.”

You’ll be taken to another page where you can enter in a name for your campaign and add some details. You should also set up your first rule (A straightforward one), as we’ll be automating this later.

You can add the words “Welcome” and “Thank You” to your campaign subject.

We’ll go into more detail on this later, but it’s also a good idea to set up a valid email address to continue separate from your main one (for example, [email protected]). That will allow you to send emails without having them appear in the inbox of all your contacts.

Step 3 – Automation rules

The first email sales automation rule creation is adding your welcome series, whether a new or an existing customer. That is a simple automated sequence sent out to all new subscribers. It’s a great way to start building your relationship with your clients.

To do so, click on “Automation” and then select “New Rule.”

You can then add in the name of your campaign, assign the conditions (which we will cover next), and the actions you want it to perform. You can even add a default welcome email with a link to your blog.

After you review everything, click on “Save and exit” at the top of your screen.

Step 4 – Conditions and actions

The next thing you want to do is add some conditions to your rule. That allows you only to trigger if it meets specific criteria, such as whether someone opens your email, clicks on a link, or if it’s been x days since contact has been added to your list.

If you want to add more conditions, check the box next to each one and click on “Save & Exit.” If you don’t have any additional rules that need specific conditions, there’s no need to continue this step.

Why the free plan will work for most small businesses

The free ActiveCampaign plan is perfect for small businesses. You can use the free plan to drive 200-300 targeted signups per month without paying a single cent.

And it’s all because the tool has everything you need to build an email list, nurture that list, and then convert prospects into sales – all with simple drag and drop features, automated workflows, and integration tools for even the most basic webmaster.

It’s a simple and intuitive system, even with someone who has no experience with email marketing. It works for small businesses because it has something most of the other platforms don’t; simplicity.

It may not have all the bells and whistles of some of the other platforms, but that’s not what it’s designed to do. It is designed to help small businesses and bloggers grow their lists.

The benefits of using ActiveCampaign over other marketing tools such as Facebook ads or Google Adwords

ActiveCampaign is so much more powerful when it comes to automating your marketing process.

Here are its benefits over other marketing tools such as Facebook ads or Google Adwords:

You can send bulk emails to your lists and tailor them according to your audience

You can customize every emailer each contact/list that you have. That allows you to send effective ememailshat to speak the language of the customers.

With Facebook ads or AdWords, you’re limited by what types of ads you can create. For example, suppose you want to advertise a high ticket item like an online training course. In that case, Facebook won’t allow you to promote it directly as that might lower the overall quality of their visitors.

That is why Facebook ads often perform worse than ememaillasts when it comes to lead generation.

You save on time

One of the biggest pains with Adwords / Facebook ads is creating several variations and testing multiple ad sets to see which one performs better. This process can be excruciating, especially when you’re targeting multiple niches.

To get the most bang for your buck, you’ll want to run many different tests, such as split testing the color schemes, images, and even ad headlines you could use.

With ActiveCampaign, this is no longer an issue because once you create the perfect ememailemplate and send it out to your list, you’re pretty much done.       

Better conversion rates

The ememailarketing industry has been an enormous success because it allows marketers to get more people into their pipeline in less time. That is why most businesses are switching over to using ememailarketing as their primary source of revenue.

EmEmailarketing also has one of the highest conversion rates out of all the marketing methods available.

Using Facebook or Adwords to bring in sales doesn’t make sense if you’re not an eCommerce company because they are both pay-per-click (PPC) platforms. That means your only option is to purchase ads and wait for people to click on them and then follow the link to your site. That’s not the case with ActiveCampaign.

Here is a simple illustration:

Let’s say you have 2,000 subscribers on your list. If you were to mail out an initial series of emails to promote a product where only 20% of the people open it and click on the link, you could then follow up with an email that converts at a rate of 50%. 

It’s extremely easy to use

Depending on your experience in using marketing tools like Adwords or Facebook ads, you’ll find that they aren’t very user-friendly when making changes or testing new campaigns.

With ActiveCampaign, you’ll be able to set up new campaigns within a matter of minutes and then build out the templates to your heart’s content.

Once my campaigns are in place, I don’t have to worry about them again because they will run themselves.

Yes, You can do everything from sending out bulk emails, tracking leads, creating reports within the AC interface.

You’ll never have to worry about your email account going down

With ActiveCampaign, you don’t need to worry about your page going offline when the tool goes down. That’s because their platform is built on top of 3 separate servers, which are all monitored 24/7 by developers.

If a certain node goes down, then the other two will pick up the slack, allowing them to have a failover mechanism that ensures the entire page never goes offline (even if one server goes down).

You can easily create emails that are targeted towards specific customer groups.

You’ll be able to do this by setting up an email autoresponder campaign that is sent out based on people’s actions after they sign up to your site, like when they visit a specific page or submit their email address.

That allows you to easily create targeted and relevant campaigns for specific groups of people, so you don’t have to worry about sending out anything unwanted or irrelevant, which will ultimately increase your email open rates.

FAQs

Let’s answer a few questions you might have in mind:

Can you use ActiveCampaign as a CRM?

Yes, you can. A CRM is the meeting point between business and customer. It should help you gather all information about your customers, their contact details, preferences, and behavior in one place where it would be easy to search for them. Thus, the time that you previously spent on searching and managing customer data would be saved.

A typical CRM system has three main groups of users: Business Analysts, Sales and Marketing teams, or other employees responsible for contacting clients and partners.

What is ActiveCampaign used for?

ActiveCampaign is a do-it-yourself email marketing tool that helps small business and eCommerce stores drive sales, generate leads, and increase customer engagement.

It can be used to send one-way broadcasts, build lists of customers or subscribers, create on-site popups, score leads with tags/qualifiers/segments/funnels, and send personalized emails in a drag-and-drop interface.

How do I use ActiveCampaign deals?

The first thing to know about ActiveCampaign deals CRM is the difference between a Campaign Deal and a product by industry resources/Feature Deal.

The main difference is that if your deal is for a product or feature, it will automatically expire after its period has elapsed (the default length being 30 days).

It is a great way to get more users within a set period. If you are doing repeated promotions on similar products or features, group them and bundle them as part of a deal. That will create an incentive to get customers on board.

How do you integrate ActiveCampaign?

How do Do you integrate ActiveCampaign with other applications using Zapier?

There are many tools in the Zapier database. You can follow the steps below to get started on setting up correctly within a few minutes.

Step 1: Go to the Zapier main page and click on create a zap button.

Step 2: Choose ActiveCampaign as the trigger app, another app as the action app, and select ‘Send an Email.

The above will give you a blank space in which to arrange your zaps. It is possible to have multiple integrations try it free, please.

Conclusion