This matters because authenticated sending directly improves inbox placement. Activating DKIM authentication adds another layer of legitimacy to every message, and that change alone has delivered an additional 15% improvement in deliverability for some users.

Importing Contacts and Organizing Lists

ActiveCampaign prohibits the use of purchased email lists. Import only contacts who have genuinely opted in. Double opt-in means contacts receive an email to confirm their list subscription, and ActiveCampaign makes double opt-in easy so your lists see better engagement metric results and your sending reputation stays strong.

From there, use tags and custom fields to organize contacts by source, interest, behavior, or purchase history. Segments in ActiveCampaign combine contact fields including demographics and custom fields, behavioral data such as email engagement and website visits, tags, automation status, and deal data including pipeline stage and deal value.

Your First Campaign

The main campaign types include Standard (one-time emails), Automated (trigger-based sequences), Auto Responder (sends after subscription), Split Testing, RSS-triggered, and Date-Based campaigns. For most teams getting started, the best first move is building a welcome sequence. Building your welcome series automation first gives the highest impact since every new contact goes through it, and it is relatively simple to build while teaching you the automation builder's core patterns. Once mastered, complex automations build on the same concepts.

The Automation Builder: Where the ROI Lives

The reason ActiveCampaign makes most marketing teams' shortlists comes down to its marketing automation offering. If you are looking to save time building automated email and SMS workflows, you will be hard-pressed to find an easier-to-use and more powerful tool.

You can create personalized journeys with split and conditional actions that automatically route contacts based on their behavior, preferences, and engagement, so every customer gets exactly what they need when they need it.

Practical automation workflows to build early:

• Welcome sequence for new subscribers (see Welcome Email Sequence Best Practices: 7 Proven Strategies)
• Abandoned cart recovery for ecommerce stores
• Lead nurture sequence for B2B contacts entering your pipeline
• Re-engagement campaign for inactive subscribers before removing them
• Post-purchase follow-up to drive repeat sales

In 2025 alone, ActiveCampaign customers used 2.5 million automations, sent 109 billion total emails, and ran 10.4 million campaigns across the platform.

In May 2025, ActiveCampaign launched Active Intelligence, a suite of AI tools that changes how automations are built. You can now describe your goal in plain language and AI handles the setup, building entire marketing campaigns from simple, everyday-language prompts. Predictive Sending analyzes how your contacts interact with your emails and determines the optimal time to send.

Segmentation and Personalization: The Engine Behind Better Metrics

Sending the same message to your entire list is the fastest way to erode deliverability and revenue. Segmented email campaigns produce a 760% increase in revenue, which is why ActiveCampaign's segmentation capabilities are central to its value proposition.

The segment builder is one functionality that truly sets ActiveCampaign apart from other platforms. In other platforms, the segment builder lives in one place. In ActiveCampaign, the segment builder is a floating feature that allows you to create segments on the fly from several different places within the platform.

Conditional content inside the email builder lets you use tags and contact data to show or hide specific content blocks within your email, personalizing the experience for each recipient without building separate campaigns.

For deeper strategy, the article Email List Segmentation Strategies That Boost ROI by 760% covers the full playbook, including behavioral and lifecycle-based approaches that work well inside ActiveCampaign's system.

Similarly, pairing your segmentation with strong personalization pays off: ActiveCampaign's AI-Suggested Segments help you discover high-impact audiences you might not have considered, and the platform automatically personalizes content including images and offers based on individual customer data. For subject line personalization specifically, see Email Subject Line Best Practices That Boost Open Rates by 27%.

Deliverability: Why It Separates ActiveCampaign from Competitors

You can build the best campaigns in the world and still fail if they land in spam. Deliverability is the unglamorous differentiator that determines whether your email marketing actually works.

According to an independent deliverability study by EmailToolTester, ActiveCampaign's deliverability rate stands at 94.2% against an industry average of 83.1% as of January 2025.

ActiveCampaign offers one of the most complete deliverability feature sets among email marketing platforms. From enforced domain authentication to automation-based list hygiene, the platform gives senders strong foundational tools to help keep their emails out of the spam folder. While no platform can guarantee 100% inbox placement, ActiveCampaign makes it easier to follow best practices and stay in control of your sender reputation.

Specific deliverability tools built into the platform:

• The platform automatically suppresses emails to contacts who bounce, unsubscribe, or mark emails as spam, and there is a built-in spam check tool to flag risky content before you send.
• ActiveCampaign makes list cleanup easy by automatically reviewing and removing inactive addresses so lists are always up to date.
• Dedicated IPs are available for higher-volume accounts, and guidance is provided for warming up your sending reputation.

93% of customers surveyed said ActiveCampaign's deliverability is better than that of competitors.

Pricing: What You Pay and What You Get

ActiveCampaign offers Starter at $15/month, Plus at $49/month, Pro at $79/month, and Enterprise at $145+/month for 1,000 contacts on annual billing. A 14-day free trial is available, limited to 100 subscribers and 100 emails.

Here is what each tier meaningfully unlocks:

To access advanced automation triggers and branches, a landing page builder, generative AI, retargeting ads, and revenue reporting, you will need to upgrade to the Plus plan. The Pro plan offers advanced segmentation based on custom fields and deal stages, while the Enterprise plan adds AI-powered and predictive segmentation.

One pricing change worth knowing: in November 2025, ActiveCampaign introduced a change where new users are charged based on the total number of contacts in their account, including inactive contacts such as unsubscribes, bounces, and unconfirmed contacts. If you migrate from another platform, clean your list before importing to control costs.

ActiveCampaign offers a 20% annual discount and an additional 20% off all plans for nonprofits.

Measuring ROI: The Metrics That Matter

Across all campaigns in 2025, ActiveCampaign customers averaged a 40.4% open rate and a 6.7% click rate platform-wide. Compare those numbers to your own baseline to identify where the gap is widest.

In 2024, 50% of consumers said they purchased directly from an email, more than from social media posts or ads. Email remains the highest-converting owned channel when properly managed.

The metrics to track consistently in ActiveCampaign:

• Open rate (aim for 30%+ as a starting baseline)
• Click-through rate (benchmark: 6.21% average across all campaigns in 2025)
• Conversion rate per automation and campaign type
• Revenue per email (available with ecommerce integrations)
• List growth rate minus unsubscribe rate (net subscriber health)
• Bounce rate (keep hard bounces below 2%)

After implementing ActiveCampaign, 86% of customers report they can focus on more strategic marketing tasks, freeing them up to develop autonomous marketing strategies while AI handles routine tasks.

For teams working with an email marketing automation agency, ActiveCampaign's reporting infrastructure and 1,000+ integrations make it straightforward to hand off campaign management without losing visibility into performance data.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is ActiveCampaign good for small businesses?

Yes. ActiveCampaign is a solid choice for small and medium-sized businesses looking for a marketing technology solution they can grow with over time. You can start with email marketing and scale into CRM, advanced reporting, AI, lead scoring, and SMS marketing as your business grows. The Starter plan at $15/month provides enough to run real campaigns on a small list.

How does ActiveCampaign's deliverability compare to other platforms?

According to an independent deliverability study by EmailToolTester, ActiveCampaign holds a 94.2% deliverability rate against an 83.1% industry average as of January 2025. In a separate 60-day deliverability test, ActiveCampaign hit 94.2% inbox placement on Gmail, 91.8% on Outlook, and 93.5% on Yahoo.

What automation features does ActiveCampaign include?

ActiveCampaign's automation builder offers 135+ triggers, conditional logic that rivals dedicated marketing automation platforms, and a built-in CRM. You can create personalized journeys with split and conditional actions that automatically route contacts based on their behavior, preferences, and engagement. Pre-built automation recipes number in the hundreds and cover welcome sequences, cart abandonment, lead nurturing, and re-engagement.

Does ActiveCampaign include a CRM?

ActiveCampaign has its own CRM, enabling you to trigger emails based on where a deal is in your pipeline, set up appointments, and tailor product recommendations based on deal or contact behavior. The CRM is adequate for small sales teams under 15 reps but lacks the depth of Salesforce, HubSpot Sales Hub, or Pipedrive in terms of custom objects, pipeline customization, and forecasting. If CRM needs are complex, the best approach is to use ActiveCampaign for marketing automation and integrate it with a dedicated CRM.

This matters because authenticated sending directly improves inbox placement. Activating DKIM authentication adds another layer of legitimacy to every message, and that change alone has delivered an additional 15% improvement in deliverability for some users.

Importing Contacts and Organizing Lists

ActiveCampaign prohibits the use of purchased email lists. Import only contacts who have genuinely opted in. Double opt-in means contacts receive an email to confirm their list subscription, and ActiveCampaign makes double opt-in easy so your lists see better engagement metric results and your sending reputation stays strong.

From there, use tags and custom fields to organize contacts by source, interest, behavior, or purchase history. Segments in ActiveCampaign combine contact fields including demographics and custom fields, behavioral data such as email engagement and website visits, tags, automation status, and deal data including pipeline stage and deal value.

Your First Campaign

The main campaign types include Standard (one-time emails), Automated (trigger-based sequences), Auto Responder (sends after subscription), Split Testing, RSS-triggered, and Date-Based campaigns. For most teams getting started, the best first move is building a welcome sequence. Building your welcome series automation first gives the highest impact since every new contact goes through it, and it is relatively simple to build while teaching you the automation builder's core patterns. Once mastered, complex automations build on the same concepts.

The Automation Builder: Where the ROI Lives

The reason ActiveCampaign makes most marketing teams' shortlists comes down to its marketing automation offering. If you are looking to save time building automated email and SMS workflows, you will be hard-pressed to find an easier-to-use and more powerful tool.

You can create personalized journeys with split and conditional actions that automatically route contacts based on their behavior, preferences, and engagement, so every customer gets exactly what they need when they need it.

Practical automation workflows to build early:

• Welcome sequence for new subscribers (see Welcome Email Sequence Best Practices: 7 Proven Strategies)
• Abandoned cart recovery for ecommerce stores
• Lead nurture sequence for B2B contacts entering your pipeline
• Re-engagement campaign for inactive subscribers before removing them
• Post-purchase follow-up to drive repeat sales

In 2025 alone, ActiveCampaign customers used 2.5 million automations, sent 109 billion total emails, and ran 10.4 million campaigns across the platform.

In May 2025, ActiveCampaign launched Active Intelligence, a suite of AI tools that changes how automations are built. You can now describe your goal in plain language and AI handles the setup, building entire marketing campaigns from simple, everyday-language prompts. Predictive Sending analyzes how your contacts interact with your emails and determines the optimal time to send.

Segmentation and Personalization: The Engine Behind Better Metrics

Sending the same message to your entire list is the fastest way to erode deliverability and revenue. Segmented email campaigns produce a 760% increase in revenue, which is why ActiveCampaign's segmentation capabilities are central to its value proposition.

The segment builder is one functionality that truly sets ActiveCampaign apart from other platforms. In other platforms, the segment builder lives in one place. In ActiveCampaign, the segment builder is a floating feature that allows you to create segments on the fly from several different places within the platform.

Conditional content inside the email builder lets you use tags and contact data to show or hide specific content blocks within your email, personalizing the experience for each recipient without building separate campaigns.

For deeper strategy, the article Email List Segmentation Strategies That Boost ROI by 760% covers the full playbook, including behavioral and lifecycle-based approaches that work well inside ActiveCampaign's system.

Similarly, pairing your segmentation with strong personalization pays off: ActiveCampaign's AI-Suggested Segments help you discover high-impact audiences you might not have considered, and the platform automatically personalizes content including images and offers based on individual customer data. For subject line personalization specifically, see Email Subject Line Best Practices That Boost Open Rates by 27%.

Deliverability: Why It Separates ActiveCampaign from Competitors

You can build the best campaigns in the world and still fail if they land in spam. Deliverability is the unglamorous differentiator that determines whether your email marketing actually works.

According to an independent deliverability study by EmailToolTester, ActiveCampaign's deliverability rate stands at 94.2% against an industry average of 83.1% as of January 2025.

ActiveCampaign offers one of the most complete deliverability feature sets among email marketing platforms. From enforced domain authentication to automation-based list hygiene, the platform gives senders strong foundational tools to help keep their emails out of the spam folder. While no platform can guarantee 100% inbox placement, ActiveCampaign makes it easier to follow best practices and stay in control of your sender reputation.

Specific deliverability tools built into the platform:

• The platform automatically suppresses emails to contacts who bounce, unsubscribe, or mark emails as spam, and there is a built-in spam check tool to flag risky content before you send.
• ActiveCampaign makes list cleanup easy by automatically reviewing and removing inactive addresses so lists are always up to date.
• Dedicated IPs are available for higher-volume accounts, and guidance is provided for warming up your sending reputation.

93% of customers surveyed said ActiveCampaign's deliverability is better than that of competitors.

Pricing: What You Pay and What You Get

ActiveCampaign offers Starter at $15/month, Plus at $49/month, Pro at $79/month, and Enterprise at $145+/month for 1,000 contacts on annual billing. A 14-day free trial is available, limited to 100 subscribers and 100 emails.

Here is what each tier meaningfully unlocks:

To access advanced automation triggers and branches, a landing page builder, generative AI, retargeting ads, and revenue reporting, you will need to upgrade to the Plus plan. The Pro plan offers advanced segmentation based on custom fields and deal stages, while the Enterprise plan adds AI-powered and predictive segmentation.

One pricing change worth knowing: in November 2025, ActiveCampaign introduced a change where new users are charged based on the total number of contacts in their account, including inactive contacts such as unsubscribes, bounces, and unconfirmed contacts. If you migrate from another platform, clean your list before importing to control costs.

ActiveCampaign offers a 20% annual discount and an additional 20% off all plans for nonprofits.

Measuring ROI: The Metrics That Matter

Across all campaigns in 2025, ActiveCampaign customers averaged a 40.4% open rate and a 6.7% click rate platform-wide. Compare those numbers to your own baseline to identify where the gap is widest.

In 2024, 50% of consumers said they purchased directly from an email, more than from social media posts or ads. Email remains the highest-converting owned channel when properly managed.

The metrics to track consistently in ActiveCampaign:

• Open rate (aim for 30%+ as a starting baseline)
• Click-through rate (benchmark: 6.21% average across all campaigns in 2025)
• Conversion rate per automation and campaign type
• Revenue per email (available with ecommerce integrations)
• List growth rate minus unsubscribe rate (net subscriber health)
• Bounce rate (keep hard bounces below 2%)

After implementing ActiveCampaign, 86% of customers report they can focus on more strategic marketing tasks, freeing them up to develop autonomous marketing strategies while AI handles routine tasks.

For teams working with an email marketing automation agency, ActiveCampaign's reporting infrastructure and 1,000+ integrations make it straightforward to hand off campaign management without losing visibility into performance data.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is ActiveCampaign good for small businesses?

Yes. ActiveCampaign is a solid choice for small and medium-sized businesses looking for a marketing technology solution they can grow with over time. You can start with email marketing and scale into CRM, advanced reporting, AI, lead scoring, and SMS marketing as your business grows. The Starter plan at $15/month provides enough to run real campaigns on a small list.

How does ActiveCampaign's deliverability compare to other platforms?

According to an independent deliverability study by EmailToolTester, ActiveCampaign holds a 94.2% deliverability rate against an 83.1% industry average as of January 2025. In a separate 60-day deliverability test, ActiveCampaign hit 94.2% inbox placement on Gmail, 91.8% on Outlook, and 93.5% on Yahoo.

What automation features does ActiveCampaign include?

ActiveCampaign's automation builder offers 135+ triggers, conditional logic that rivals dedicated marketing automation platforms, and a built-in CRM. You can create personalized journeys with split and conditional actions that automatically route contacts based on their behavior, preferences, and engagement. Pre-built automation recipes number in the hundreds and cover welcome sequences, cart abandonment, lead nurturing, and re-engagement.

Does ActiveCampaign include a CRM?

ActiveCampaign has its own CRM, enabling you to trigger emails based on where a deal is in your pipeline, set up appointments, and tailor product recommendations based on deal or contact behavior. The CRM is adequate for small sales teams under 15 reps but lacks the depth of Salesforce, HubSpot Sales Hub, or Pipedrive in terms of custom objects, pipeline customization, and forecasting. If CRM needs are complex, the best approach is to use ActiveCampaign for marketing automation and integrate it with a dedicated CRM.