ActiveCampaign Alternative

Overview

Marketers today need a place where they can manage multiple campaigns at once, and report and measure how the campaigns perform over time. It’s all too often marketers switch between different software or websites to make sure that campaigns are set up to communicate with multiple systems. Two companies make it easier for marketers to work with more tools on one platform: HubSpot and ActiveCampaign. This article breaks down the differences between both tools to make your evaluation easier.

ActiveCampaign’s drag-and-drop automation builder lets you set up automated workflows quickly. Examples of automated processes include: automating your email follow-up, finding your most engaged contacts by adding points to certain actions, and using integrations to send abandoned cart emails. ActiveCampaign includes site and event tracking so you can trigger automation tasks based on your contact’s actions, such as following up after a contact watches a video on your website. When you think your contact should be highlighted to your Sales team, you can use automation to tag the contact so that there’s clarity on the contact’s new status. Though the user interface might be difficult to use and clunky, it’s equipped to run your marketing automation requirements.

HubSpot gives you the ability to personalize your marketing via automation. The automation platform offers robust features beyond email follow-ups and event tracking. You can trigger workflows to initiate on triggers such as form submissions, specific page views, list membership, completed other workflow, and more. HubSpot’s automation platform works with the CRM and across Marketing, Sales, and Service Hubs so that you can automate deal changes and service ticket statuses after marketing emails, if you desire to do so. You can also update contact properties and send internal notifications or assign tasks to team members if you think a Sales reach-out is necessary. If you desire a complex and customized process, HubSpot also offers customization through API integrations and technical webhooks.

Let’s say you’re running a promotional campaign. Using HubSpot, you can quickly create a landing page and include a form on that landing page. Then, you can create and send emails to a list of contacts with a call-to-action in the email, directing people to your new landing page. To make sure you optimize for open rates, you can A/B test your emails to get the best subject line. After that, you’ll be able to drill down into reports across the emails, landing page, and form submissions in order to optimize any part of your contact’s journey. You can then use HubSpot automation workflows to enroll contacts who have filled out the form on the landing page so that they can receive your offer and after a few days, send follow up emails to guide them towards purchase -- automatically. That's just the start; Imagine the possibilities.

ActiveCampaign does not offer options for marketers looking to create or edit content on their website. For example, you’ll have to rely on 3rd party apps and integrations to create landing pages or website pages. You won’t be able to easily get comprehensive reporting of how your email marketing affects landing page conversion rates. ActiveCampaign allows you to create forms for conversion such as inline, floating box, pop-up, and floating bar in a simple form builder.

HubSpot has the tools you need to get found online and optimize for conversion with powerful landing pages, blogging, CMS, and forms solutions. You can create quick and beautiful landing pages using a drag-and-drop editor or you can work off pre-built templates. Then, you can create and include a form on the landing page to capture any contact information. If you use the HubSpot CMS to build your website, you’ll see how easy it is to maintain an optimized website for your blogging and campaign needs. If you’re using a different CMS like WordPress, simply add the HubSpot tracking code to your site, and you can automatically bring website analytics data into HubSpot. HubSpot also understands that the goal of a form submission isn’t always to convert a new lead for the first time. Progressive profiling let’s you change what a visitor to your site sees if they’re already a contact in your database -- ensuring that every form fill yields valuable information for your business.

ActiveCampaign does not offer a native social tool. So you can’t post or report on your social posts via ActiveCampaign. If you want to create contacts in ActiveCampaign based on Facebook Lead Ads, you can use an integration to bridge the two systems. You can add or remove contacts from your list based on email and ad campaigns.

HubSpot’s social media and ads tools give marketers the ability to manage their social accounts and ads all in one place. This means understanding which of your contacts have engaged with specific posts or clicked on an ad. You can imagine the targeting abilities that this opens to marketers who don’t have the time to cross reference social accounts and their CRM. Start by connecting all your social accounts (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter) to HubSpot. Schedule out posts across each network, and quickly report on your success on each channel. You can also connect your YouTube account to HubSpot to see how your audience is engaging with your video content. With the social monitoring tool, you'll be able to keep track of specific trends and keyword phrases that are important to you and your brand, and reply directly to comments on your social posts within HubSpot.

ActiveCampaign integrates with more than 200 apps. For example, ActiveCampaign integrates with online software such as analytics, accounting, CMS, service, sales and lead generation applications. With ActiveCampaign, you’ll need to rely heavily on Zapier to ensure integrations are pushed through, and there are only 4 natively build integrations.

HubSpot integrates with more than 300 apps and continues to grow as HubSpot is focused on becoming an open platform. In 2018, the 5 most popular integrated apps in the HubSpot platform ecosystem were Zapier, Mailchimp, Slack, Wordpress, and SurveyMonkey. So if you’re a marketer who needs to integrate certain applications, HubSpot get’s your pain -- which is why we want to give you the ability to integrate your apps easily. You can use integrated apps in HubSpot to do actions like Shopify abandoned cart follow ups, SalesForce lead syncing, and much more.

Source: 5 Reasons to Get Excited About the HubSpot Platform in 2019