For any online and ecommerce business, investing in a good email marketing tool is a great way to enhance brand awareness, increase lead generation, and ultimately, boosts sales and revenue. There’s no doubt that Activeampaign is amongst the best email marketing tools in the market. However, sometimes, your business may need to opt for an alternative. Whether it’s to seek extra features that suit your business needs or to opt for a more affordable option.
Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to learn more about the ActiveCampaign alternatives. Whilst ActiveCampaign soars in terms of email marketing, sales automation, and especially, CRM, you can still find better alternatives that will bring value to your business. So below, we’ve shared a detailed outlook of the b better ActiveCampign for your business in 2021. Happy browsing!
ActiveCampaign Features
Before we jump into the ActiveCampaign alternatives, it is worth learning what exactly this tool offers. Equipping yourself with this information allows you to source for the appropriate alternative tool for your business.
The ActiveCampaign tool is built to offer advanced email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation, and CRM features. An excellent automation platform, ActiveCmpaign optimizes its features based on three key business models – i.e. for ecommerce, digital businesses, or B2B companies. Amongst the key and unique features that come with AtiveCampaign include features meant to help you reach out and engage more customers.
These include automation maps, automation goals, subscription forms, extensive site tracking, and Facebook customization. Additionally, the tool also helps to nurture your relationships with customers and give you insights into what exactly they need. Some of the key features include deep segmentation, dynamic content, intense A/B testing, and event tracking.
Additionally, ActiveCampaign comes with other unique tools such as its advanced qualitative and quantitative reporting, migration services, and even its Gmail extensions. When it comes to the native integrations, ActiveCampaign offers a generous native integration with over 320+ apps. The integration covers everything from countess CRM, CMS, ecommerce, analytics, and social media sites. These include Salesforce, WordPress, Shopify, Google Analytics, and Shopify.
Price-wise, ActiveCampaign offers a selection of four key options. These include the lite, plus, professional, and enterprise plans. Each plan costs differently based on the features offered. The lite plan costs a minimum of $9, the plus plan costs a minimum of $49 per month, the professional plan costs a minimum f $129 whilst the enterprise plan costs a minimum of $229 – each cost is per month with a minimum of 500 subscribers.
Whilst each plan has the same number of subscribers, the features offer greatly differ. For example, the Enterprise offers superior marketing, sales, and service features. Even their support varies, offering dedicated phone support. The lite plan on the other end offers all these features but at a more basic side.
Additionally, what makes ActiveCampaign special is that the features deliver features that are individually curated for digital business, B2Bs, and ecommerce businesses. Based on the plan chosen, ActiveCampaign offers comprehensive customer support. You can opt for the community forum, live chat support, email support, or even real time phone support.
Best ActiveCampaign Alternatives
Below, we’ve outlined the 6 key ActiveCampaign alternatives:
Sendinblue
Sendinblue markets itself as an all-in-one digital marketing tool. However, whilst ActiveCampaign focuses on marketing, automation, sales, and CRM – Sendinblue focuses on transactional emails, SMS, landing pages, Facebook ads, and very few CRM features. Sendinblue particularly works fantastically when it comes to transactional emailing and trigger-based campaigns.
In fact, the transactional email design section allows you to even curate messages and SMs for password resets. It is even built with a workflow builder that is designed to optimize these processes. You can make the most of trigger-based campaigns even from clicks and website visits.
Pricewise, Sendinblue is quite competitive – offering a free plan with up to 300 emails per day and unlimited contacts. If you opt for the paid plans, the pricing doesn’t change significantly when compared to ActiveCampaign. You can send up to 10,000 emails for only 25 per month and up to 60,000 emails for only $69.50 per month.
As a transactional campaign focused tool, it is perfectly designed for small to medium-sized businesses. However, if you want the advantage of multiple user access, Sendinblue may not be the best option. When it comes to customer support, the platform is quite useful. You can opt for the site help from, knowledge base, or live chat – all of which are helpful and reliable.
Constant Contact
Amongst the oldest marketing platforms in the market, Constant Contact is tailored for small businesses that run many events. Using this marketing tool, your can build and manage campaigns around tickets, registrations, and event invitations. However, the limitation to these features is that you need to upgrade to the Email Plus plan to access them – otherwise, you will need to integrate with an event management app.
Whilst Constant contact does an excellent job for events management, it doesn’t offer the best automation – if not adequate automation features. You will only find the basics you can access with other cheaper or less specialized tools. Some of the features you will be able to enjoy include trigger-based campaigns, site tracking, and abandoned cart campaigns. Price-wise, Constant Contact is more expensive than average.
Sure, the tool offers unique event management features however, it still appears to be expensive for a small business looking to capitalize on both event management and automation. The lowest plan which covers 500 subscribers costs $20 per month whilst with up to 10,000 subscribers, you will pay $95 per month.
Mailerlite
Just like its name suggests, Mailerlite is a tool tailored for beginners and everything new – individuals and businesses who are just starting and don’t need a complicated tool. Nonetheless, Mailerlite does more than just sending out campaigns and newsletters. The email marketing tool is designed with adequate features to help you get your business off the ground.
In fact, it is favored by many freelancers and startups. Some of its key features include landing page editor, segmentation, automated workflows, and contact tagging. It is also designed with a generous video marketing feature, WordPress integration, and RSS campaigns. Even for the non-tech savvy, you will be able to take full advantage of the platform’s creative, intuitive, and easy-to-use landing page editor.
However, the price that comes with simplicity includes reporting. If you depend heavily on reporting to track your business performance, Mailerlite may not be the best option. Sure, it offers basic analytics such as open and click rates as well as ecommerce store activity and purchase tracking. Yet, the tool is quite limited for social media tracking.
For example, if you run social media campaigns, you will almost entirely enjoy zero tacking on social media tools. Mailerlite offers a free plan for those who have less than 1,000 subscribers. But, similarly even paid plans are quite affordable. The lowest paid plan costs only $10 per month for 1,000 subscribers.
Alternatively, for $15 per month, you will cover up to 2,500 subscribers with unlimited emails. For 15,000 subscribers on the other end, you will only pay $75 per month. Customer support is reliable and efficient – available in the form of email, live chat, and knowledge base. Phone support is not available to Mailerlite users.
Klaviyo
The Klaviyo platform is designed for different business and of different sizes. It offers a multitude of features which include email automation and SMS marketing. The site even provides superior social media advertising campaigns to accentuate your targeting efforts. In fact, the tool is particularly optimized for SMS text marketing, phone push notifications, and social media functionality.
Furthermore, Klaviyo is specially tailored to grow your ecommerce business – offering multiple integrations with ecommerce sites such as Shopify, Magento, BigCOmmerce, Woocommerce, and PrestaShop. So, if your business depends on such features, Klaviyo is a tool worth considering. Amongst the most affordable sites, Klaviyo makes the cut.
For one, small businesses with a tight budget can make full use of its forever free plan – covering up to 250 contacts. The free plan allows you to enjoy free SMS and emailing for free. From 250 contacts and above, you will upgrade to a paid plan. Nevertheless, you will still be able to enjoy the platform’s affordability. Plus, you can even choose to isolate your payment for each – you pay for the email contacts you have separate from the SMS messages you send!
For example, with more than 250 contacts, you will pay $20 per month and $2.51 for 251 messages sent – thus, totaling 22.51. If you don’t use the SMS services, you don’t have to pay $2.51 – the same applies if it happens the other way round. The platform offers standard email, help desk, and knowledge base support.
Drip
Drip is built with superior CRM and automotive features despite being amongst the youngest tools in the market. Whilst Drip has superior CRM features, it still is quite distinctive to ActiveCampiagn. The ActiveCampaign CERm features are designed to integrate sales and marketing automation. The Drip CRM features on the other end are designed for ecommerce processes – it is no wonder the platform offers incredible ecommerce integrations.
When it comes to more detailed workflow processes such as list management and marketing automation, Drip does an even better job at making the processes easier and intuitive without affecting the advanced feature selections it offers. When it comes to integration – especially ecommerce – Drip was purposely built for it. It doesn’t only offer countless ecommerce integration options – it also features deeper data synergy and workflows to improve your overall ecommerce marketing processes.
Ust like ActiveCampaign, Drip is a comprehensive platform with advanced and superior features. Thus, it comes with no surprise that it costs a little higher than your average email marketing tool. The lowest pan yu will pay for costs $49 per month and supports up to 2,500 contacts. In fact, whilst higher plans closely compare to each other the lowest Drip plan is not anywhere near ActiveCampaig’s lite plan.
Similarly, Drip offers excellent customer support. You can opt for the resource-rich knowledge base, community forum on Facebook, one-on-one paid training, webinars, or workshops. Alternatively, you can go for the traditional live chat and email support. Unlike ActieCampaigns business hour capped live support, Drip offers 24/7 live chat support.
GetResponse
GetRespnse is more of a mid-range email marketing support designed to cater to ecommerce businesses and other entities – even NGOs. In fact, the platform has specially curated discounted prices for NGOs. It is particularly designed to pull in customer leads and engagement – that’s why it even works great for NGOs – who of course want engagement.
It is built with sophisticated automation, page editor, and even analytics features for a balanced process throughout – whether r you are building or tracking the effectiveness of your campaigns. The platform even features a newly introduced conversion funnel feature for targeted campaigns to ensure your entity really reaches out to the intended contact with the right content.
As mentioned above, GetResponse is perfect for ecommerce businesses – offering features and integrations with apps such as Shopify and Magento. It also offers features such as site tracking and trigger baed campaigns with dynamic content – to really cater to your ecommerce business. The new conversion funnel feature even complements sales funnel workflows for your ecommerce business.
Unlike many other sites, GetResponse doesn’t offer a free plan. The most you will get is a 7-day free trial to gauge whether or not it works fpr your business. The lowest plan you will pay for with GetRespone will cost you $25 per month and cover 2,500 subscribers. At 25,000 subscribers, you will pay $145 per month. One can truly refer to this marketing tool as a mid-range one.
Final Verdict
Hilst ActiveCampaign offers a comprehensive online marketing tool performance, the ActiveCampaign alternatives also add value to your business. The key is to know which tool offers what features and how your business can benefit from them – only then will you be able to make full use of the alternatives – without having to dig deep into your pockets.