ActiveCampaign is one of the most extensive marketing automation tools available as a service. According to Builtwith, more than 218,734 businesses worldwide use ActiveCampaign to automate various parts of their workflow. Its features allow businesses and course creators to automate marketing tasks that would take hours to do manually. This allows businesses to create and adhere to marketing plans they can set up months in advance.
In this blog post, we’ll review ActiveCampaign’s top course-creator-friendly features. We’ll then consider other online course creators who use it to give you an idea of how your business can use it to automate marketing processes. This ActiveCampaign review also discusses the pros and cons compared to other popular marketing platforms.
What Is ActiveCampaign?
ActiveCampaign is a customer relationship management software that helps businesses of all sizes create automated marketing and sales campaigns. This automation tool is designed for beginner to expert-level marketers and is easy to use, even for first-time users. As a course creator, you can use ActiveCampaign to:
- Build automated customer journeys for leads and customers.
- Create personalized customer experiences with segmentation and automation.
- Engage customers in real-time with two-way communication.
- Use marketing automation to nurture leads and convert them into paying customers.
These services and more can keep your brand relevant by opening a communication channel between you and your customers and leads. You can also track your campaigns’ effectiveness and use this information to improve how you market going forward.
Best Features of ActiveCampaign for Online Course Creators
If you’re a course creator or small business owner, you probably already have an idea of what you’re looking for in a marketing automation tool. The good news is that ActiveCampaign has a lot of tools, so it most likely offers what you need.
The downside is that the wide selection can feel overwhelming. To make it easier to pick, we’ve outlined five of the best features to help online course creators and small to medium business owners.
1. ActiveCampaign Email Marketing Service
ActiveCampaign is one of the most popular email marketing services. This email marketing software creates, sends, and tracks your campaigns. It also offers a drag-and-drop builder that drafts emails quickly.
ActiveCampaign also integrates with many email providers, so you can quickly receive important notifications on your mobile phone. Here are some email campaigns you can send with this email automation tool:
- Broadcast emails: These are one-off emails sent to all subscribers.
- Email autoresponders: Emails sent in response to customer actions.
- Marketing emails: Emails sent to advertise offers
- Nurturing emails: These are sent to keep in contact with your customers or leads
- Scheduled emails: Emails sent at a specific time.
- Targeted emails: These are emails for a specific customer segment.
- Transactional emails: Automatically generated messages sent in response to purchase-related actions. This service does cost extra.
- Triggered campaigns: Emails sent based on customer behavior.
ActiveCampaign’s email marketing service also makes it easy to track how effective your emails are. A built-in option to add a “Campaign” name to each email makes it possible to see that emails create on your website.
2. ActiveCampaign Marketing Automation Tools
ActiveCampaign’s Marketing Automation tools allow you to create and automate different types of campaigns. These tools can:
- Automate your email follow-up: Easily set up automated emails to follow up with customers and prospects after they take certain actions.
- Find your most engaged contacts: Identify and segment your most engaged customers so you can target them with additional campaigns.
- Integrate your favorite apps: Connect ActiveCampaign to hundreds of apps, such as Google Analytics, to help your automation process.
Here are some of ActiveCampaign’s Marketing Automation tools:
Lead Scoring
ActiveCampaign offers lead scoring to qualify leads and determine which ones are ready to be contacted. Lead scoring helps you focus on the prospects who are more likely to convert into paying customers. Note that this feature isn’t available on the Lite Marketing Plan.
Sign-Up Forms
ActiveCampaign’s sign-up form builder creates dynamic forms in minutes. You can customize the design, add text and images, and personalize the form to capture customer information. Here are three major types of web forms you can build with ActiveCampaign:
- InlineForm: An inline form appears on the specified page so customers can fill it out directly.
- Floating Box: A floating box appears on the screen even when customers scroll down.
- Modal Pop-up: A modal pop-up form appears in a window box when customers click on a button or link.
You can also set notifications to alert your team of new form submissions.
Facebook Custom Audiences
If your audience is active on Facebook, you can grow your advertising audiences with ActiveCampaign. How? When prospective students sign up for your lead magnets, you can add them to a custom audience
How?
When prospective students sign up for your lead magnets, you can add them to a custom audience through direct integration with Facebook Ads.
You can easily add or remove these within your marketing automation to make sure that the most relevant leads are advertised too. Note that this does work best with large audiences! This is why the custom audience feature isn’t available on the Lite Package.
Goal Tracking
With ActiveCampaign, you can monitor the progress of your campaigns with goal tracking. You can define goals for each marketing activity and measure its success rate.
List Segmentation
ActiveCampaign’s list segmentation feature is a powerful tool to prioritize and target customers based on their behavior. It shares or divides your contacts into smaller groups based on their data, activities, and interests. With list segmentation, you can:
- Add Tags: You can automatically add tags to contacts based on their data, activities, or interests.
- Create personalized content: With list segmentation, you can create personalized emails tailored to your customer segments.
- Optimize campaigns: You can optimize your campaigns by targeting the right contacts with relevant messages.
Website Tracking
ActiveCampaign’s website tracking feature tracks customer behavior on your website. As a course creator, this can show your customers’ actions on your website. With ActiveCampaign’s website tracking feature, you can:
- Get notifications when a contact visits a page so you can offer targeted help.
- Track the performance of any campaign you set out.
- Connect to your WordPress Blog to track site performance.
- Activate event tracking to gain detailed insights.
SMS Marketing
SMS marketing is one of the most popular forms of digital marketing. With ActiveCampaign, you can send bulk SMS messages to your list and instantly reach your target audience. The SMS marketing feature isn’t available on the Lite Marketing Plan.
3. ActiveCampaign Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Automation
Course creators can use ActiveCampaign’s sales and CRM tools to automatically guide leads from the point of acquisition to the sale. These tools are the perfect way to cultivate relationships with prospects and customers.
You can track customer activities, follow up on leads, and capture more sales opportunities. Here are some of the sales and CRM features:
- Automated deal updates: ActiveCampaign enables you to automate updates on deals so team members can stay informed.
- Complete customer view: With ActiveCampaign’s CRM tools, you can get a complete view of all your interactions with and data on your customers in one place.
- Note creation: You can create notes to track customer conversations.
- Notification emails: You can set up automated emails to inform your sales team when a contact takes specific steps in the sales process.
- Sales reporting: With ActiveCampaign’s sales reporting, you can track leads and team members. Note that custom reports aren’t available on Plus and Professional Sales Plans.
- Task assignment: You can assign tasks to different sales representatives and keep track of their progress.
- Trigger automation: ActiveCampaign triggers automated messages based on customer behavior.
- Pipeline automation: You can automate the end-to-end sales process and reduce manual data entry.
- Win probability: ActiveCampaign’s win probability feature uses data to show your leads’ chances to convert into customers. This feature isn’t available on the Plus Sales Plan.
4. ActiveCampaign eCommerce Tools
ActiveCampaign’s eCommerce tools maximize profits when used strategically. You can use these tools to increase sales by monitoring customers’ purchases. Here are three ways course creators can use ActiveCampaigns tools to increase sales:
- Product Catalog: Create and send customized offers and catalogs based on customer activity. This feature isn’t available with the Lite Marketing Plan.
- Abandoned Cart Reminders: Set up automated reminders that let customers know when they have an item left in their cart. This feature isn’t available with the Lite Marketing Plan.
- Cross-Sell Emails: Send out cross-sell emails that suggest related products to your customers after they purchase. This is a great way to market your other courses or offers.
5. ActiveCampaign Landing Page Builder
Course creators can use the landing page builder to create landing pages and launch campaigns quickly. The drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to design landing pages optimized for conversions.
ActiveCampaign also offers customizable landing pages that you can use as a template. You can create and monitor unlimited landing pages by integrating with Google Analytics. ActiveCampaign’s landing page builder isn’t availble on the Lite Marketing Plan, but is available on others.
ActiveCampaign Pricing
ActiveCampaign offers three types of plans; marketing, sales, and bundles, which combine the previous two. It offers tiered pricing based on the number of contacts, so getting started is affordable. Unfortunately, ActiveCampaign doesn’t offer a free plan, but it offers Lite and Plus packages for small businesses.
For larger businesses, plans range from $149 to $386 monthly (paid yearly). Enterprises can also contact ActiveCampaign for custom pricing.
Active Campaign Pricing Summary Table
This table summarizes ActiveCampaign’s yearly pricing options:
All plans come with the following:
- Accelerated onboarding
- Chat and ticket support
- Contact migration
- Customer enablement workshops
- Free migration
- Knowledge base and help guides
- Video tutorials
You should also note that these prices are for yearly payments, meaning you’re required to pay for 12 months. ActiveCampaign’s monthly prices are significantly higher.
ActiveCampaign Pros and Cons
Before using ActiveCampaign for your business, you should clearly understand its pros and cons.
ActiveCampaign is a powerful marketing automation platform offering many features to help businesses automate their marketing processes.
This automation tool is better for online course creators with some marketing experience. It’s also easier on the bank if you already have email subscribers you want to grow.
ActiveCampaign Reviews and Success Stories from Online Course Creators
Many online course creators have used ActiveCampaign to help them create more effective marketing campaigns and drive more sales. Here are some of the success stories shared by online course creators:
How These Online Course Creators Built Successful Courses on ActiveCampaign
Automate Onboarding of New Students
“ActiveCampaign has helped me send campaigns to my email list, and also to automate my onboarding process to my online course students. This allows me to run my business more smoothly.”
From Chani M. via G2
Pay as you grow
“We’re launching an online course to help people in toxic/abusive relationships get their lives back. The first thing we needed to do was build our list, which was less than 100 when we started. Next, we needed to engage our audience to build relationships with them.
ActiveCampaign offers tiered pricing based on the number of contacts, so it was very inexpensive to start. Then, when our list (happily) began to explode, we were able to add on as we went, and this is still happening.
I’m somewhat technical, but certainly no developer or anything like that. I find AC very easy to use, and it integrates seamlessly with our WordPress site. We’re able to capture leads very effectively, and AC’s Automations give us everything we need to customize our audience’s journey from first discovering us to signing up for our course.”
From Chris B. via G2
Case Studies of ActiveCampaign Course Creators
ActiveCampaign has helped us centralize automations
“The visual mapping to understand flow of campaigns, email nurture sequences or any sort of sales flow is really helpful. All of the automations are great and we haven’t even scratched the surface there. We are using it for sales pipeline work, CRM, and course offerings, which has allowed us to centralize these pieces for clarity.”
From Colby S. via G2
ActiveCampaign has helped me market my course profitably
“I like the workshops where they teach you how to use features and the 1:1 calls for specific help. Live chat is also very helpful. It is helping me market my course and nurture my email list. I am profiting from selling my course.”
From Alexis T. via G2
ActiveCampaign vs. Convertkit for Creators
ActiveCampaign and ConvertKit offer marketing solutions for customers. They are two of the most popular marketing automation tools, and creators often need help picking. So let’s compare the similarities between ActiveCampaign and Convertkit.
Comparing Convertkit vs. ActiveCampaign
Convertkit vs. ActiveCampaign: Price
Convertkit offers a flat-rate plan, where you pay one price for all features, whereas ActiveCampaign has a tiered pricing structure, meaning the more advanced features come with an additional cost.
Convertkit vs. ActiveCampaign: User Interface
Convertkit has a simple, intuitive interface that easily creates emails and builds automated workflows. ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, has a more complex and feature-rich interface that takes some time to learn and navigate.
Convertkit vs. ActiveCampaign: Simplicity
Convertkit is ideal for bloggers and entrepreneurs who want to create simple segmented emails, while ActiveCampaign is better for larger businesses that need more complex automation workflows.
Convertkit vs. ActiveCampaign: Niche
Convertkit focuses more on email marketing, whereas Activecampaign offers digital marketing tools such as SMS campaigns, landing pages, and webinar hosting. This is why Convertkit is targeted at online creators specifically, while businesses of all types use ActiveCampaign.
Convertkit vs. ActiveCampaign: Free Trial
Convertkit offers a free trial period, while Activecampaign requires payment before you can use the platform.
Convertkit vs. ActiveCampaign: A/B Testing
Convertkit lacks A/B testing, which is available in ActiveCampaign.
Convertkit vs. ActiveCampaign Comparison Table
The table below summarizes Convertkit vs. ActiveCampaign:
FAQs About ActiveCampaign
Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about ActiveCampaign:
What is ActiveCampaign best for?
ActiveCampaign is best for email marketers and small to medium businesses. Its suite of email marketing features can help companies create, manage and track email campaigns all in one place.
Does ActiveCampaign integrate with Gmail?
Yes, ActiveCampaign integrates with Gmail. It has an easy-to-use integration that allows users to automatically manage and track their email campaigns directly from their mobile devices.
Is ActiveCampaign better than HubSpot?
It depends on your needs and budget. ActiveCampaign and HubSpot offer powerful email marketing tools that serve different purposes. Hubspot has more features and is used by more businesses (1,301,575 ).
ActiveCampaign is more targeted toward marketing, while HubSpot is a software hub for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service tools.
Does ActiveCampaign offer monthly packages?
Yes, ActiveCampaign offers monthly packages. However, they aren’t as cost-effective as the marketing yearly plan. For example, when paid yearly, the lLite Marketing Plan costs $29 per month, totaling $348. When paid monthly, it costs $39 per month.
What is ActiveCampaign best for?
ActiveCampaign is best for email marketers and small to medium businesses. Its suite of email marketing features can help companies create, manage and track email campaigns all in one place.
Conclusion: Should You Buy ActiveCampaign?
As a creator, it can be tough to market online courses without an automation tool. ActiveCampaign automation can help you automate several tasks and save time. Its easy-to-use tools will increase sales and bring in leads if used strategically.
ActiveCampaign is not for everyone. If you’re a course creator just starting and only want to focus on basic email marketing, you should look to other email automation tools like Convertkit and Hubspot.
Getting Started with ActiveCampaign as an Online Course Creator
To use ActiveCampaign more efficiently, you’ll need to dedicate some time to learning the ropes. If you’d like to jump right over this learning curve and straight to the conversions, a marketing expert with ActiveCampaign experience can help.
My team and I specialize in helping online course creators like you drive results with tools like ActiveCampaign. Let’s create a customized strategy that speaks directly to your audience and helps you grow your business. Book a free consultation today and let’s get started.AQs
