ActiveCampaign started out as an email marketing platform, but it also has one of the better CRMs around for sales and marketing automation. If your company is primarily focused on sales activities, ActiveCampaign might not be the best CRM for you. That said, for the many organizations out there with dual sales and marketing initiatives, ActiveCampaign is worth considering.
ActiveCampaign CRM Features:
Quite honestly, there’s a lot to love about ActiveCampaign. While we’ll dig into the pros and cons a bit later, for now let’s look at some of the reasons that businesses choose ActiveCampaign as their sales CRM:
- Sales automation – Save time and energy and complement your team’s sales skills by using sales process automation to create and update leads and assign tasks and leads to your sales team.
- Lead scoring – Score leads based on specific criteria and use the lead score to trigger automated sales emails and internal tasks and reminders.
- Chrome and Outlook extensions – Access and update CRM data without leaving your email inbox.
- 1:1 sales emails – Create a personalized sales experience with more than 250 templates through automated one-to-one sales emails.
- Sales engagement automation – Use customer data from sales and marketing touch points to send customized sales messages and follow-ups with a human touch.
Again, while ActiveCampaign CRM won’t be a great fit for every sales team structure, businesses focused on combined sales and marketing initiatives will appreciate the seamless integration of sales and marketing tools.
With integrations including Salesforce and Gmail, ActiveCampaign’s desktop and mobile apps offer tools and functionality that will support your team throughout the sales pipeline, from creating leads and segmentation to email campaigns and conversions.
ActiveCampaign CRM Strengths & Weaknesses
Every CRM software has strengths and weaknesses, and ActiveCampaign is no exception. Knowing the potential pros and cons of any sales solution you’re looking to purchase is an essential part of the research process.
Strengths of ActiveCampaign CRM:
Extremely scalable and efficient
A big reason for this is the vast array of ActiveCampaign automation options. Even the lower tiers offer robust sales and marketing automation tools, and the price to upgrade to Professional or Enterprise is quite reasonable compared to competitors.
Affordable for companies with lots of contacts
While this is more of a concern for marketing-heavy companies, contact management gets extremely expensive for many CRM platforms as you scale to 5k, 10k, 50k, or more contacts. With ActiveCampaign, the price remains reasonable even with higher contact counts.
Great for sales and marketing campaigns
ActiveCampaign CRM is a good all-around fit for companies with diverse needs across sales and marketing, and the seamless integration between the two makes it ideal for those following the HIRO pipeline model.
Weaknesses of ActiveCampaign CRM:
User interface (UI) is geared more toward marketing than sales
Because ActiveCampaign started as a simple email marketing tool and grew to include a CRM and sales tools, the UI is more marketing-centric. This won’t be a problem for everyone, but if you’re used to using traditional sales CRMs as part of your sales methodology, be aware that this will be a different user experience.
Limited sales features
If the majority of your CRM buying criteria revolves around sales, you won’t find much to get excited about. ActiveCampaign has limited features for sales calling, quotes, proposals, and more.
Bottom line:
While ActiveCampaign CRM’s won’t be a great fit for sales-heavy organizations, companies with combined sales and marketing efforts will appreciate the quantity and quality of sales and marketing tools and automations at an affordable price point.