Our February 2015 app of the month is the marketing automation software Active Campaign. There are several very good marketing automation tools available online, which allow you to set predetermined actions based on how prospects and customers engage with your marketing. However, with a feature list that is longer than any of its competitors at this price point, great customer service and robust software integration, Active Campaign is our favourite marketing automation application available online today.
What is Active Campaign?
Active Campaign is an all-in-one marketing application with automated email marketing and sales CRM functionality. The software can be used intelligently to automatically nurture prospects and leads through your business’ sales pipeline. This screenshot from their website covers what areas Active Campaign can help you with.
How to use Active Campaign for lead generation
When marketing and sales work together in a coordinated and integrated way, the ability to nurture prospects into sales-ready leads increases dramatically. What’s so useful about Active Campaign is that it is an all-in-one application for marketing and sales, allowing you to send emails, set up marketing automation and record sales data on a contact-by-contact basis. No time is wasted checking separate CRM and email platforms to understand what is going on with your prospects and customers.
Simply map out your business’ lead nurturing process and use Active Campaign to automate as much of that process as possible. Active Campaign allows you to set up auto response emails, based on users subscribing to mailing lists. You can set up drip feed lists that send out a series of emails based on how a contact interacts with your website. You can even notify your sales team of a potential prospect once they have opened a certain amount of emails. All this can be predetermined; all you have to do is set it up once and Active Campaign will automatically update things moving forward.
Why Active Campaign?
There are a few alternatives available that offer even more automation features above what Active Campaign provides. Hubspot, Marketo, and Eloqua are all great applications that can help with marketing automation, however their pricing is significantly higher than Active Campaign. Hubspot entry level pricing, for instance, is £140/month whereas Active Campaign starts at £32/month.
We’ll be the first to tell you that Hubspot’s software does offer more features than Active Campaign, but for many business professionals several of those features are not required, and can make marketing more complicated than it needs to be. If you’re a small to medium sized organisation, Active Campaign offers everything you need to intelligently market to your prospects and customers. You can find out exactly what their software allows you to do on their website.
Conclusion
At Branching Out Europe we’ve tested dozens of marketing automation and CRM systems. In our experience and at these price points, Active Campaign provides one of the best solutions to easily manage both of these business processes. The time and effort it will save you means that Active Campaign will easily pay for itself in a matter of months.
If you’d like more advice on how to generate leads, then download our free eBook that helps you use LinkedIn for lead generation.
