Why did I decide to use ActiveCampaign?
When I wanted to use email marketing to nurture my audience and deliver them lead magnets, I researched a lot.
One name kept coming up again and again. Everybody raved about its features and capabilities.
So, no guesses here, it was ActiveCampaign.
Suggested by many, I started using ActiveCampaign as my first email marketing tool.
Later on, I went on to test other tools because I’m a curious techy person, I have used ConvertKit, Drip, Flodesk and Mailerlite.
But every time I used any other tool, I kept thinking about ActiveCampaign and its power.
That brings us here. This post is not to bash Flodesk. It’s indeed a great tool,
But I wanted to share where does ActiveCampaign trump over Flodesk.
Let’s get started.
Ease of use
ActiveCampaign is a feature-rich toolset. Let’s look at some of its features.
Create campaigns
Tag email ids
Create lists
Create auto-responders
Import contacts
Drag and drop email editor
Ready to use templates
Actionable reports and insights
Integration with popular tools
This feature set is a part of the basic plan, if you opt for a higher price plan then you get features like
SMS marketing
CRM
Building landing pages
Lead scoring and much more
Why am I talking about features in ease of use?
Well, the point is even though ActiveCampaign provides features that are comparable to an enterprise email marketing tool, it’s not complicated to use.
The dashboard is so easy to navigate.
From the screenshot, you can see that the menu on the left side is self-explanatory.
Creating automation is considered to be a difficult task in email marketing. But as you can see from the screenshot below, creating automation is an intuitive and easy task.
You can easily add triggers, set up conditions, check for goals and do much more with it.
Now when we consider Flodesk, there is a limitation on how complex the automation can get. There are only a few conditions you can check.
In ActiveCampaign, you can check for the following conditions
Contact Details
Name
Email
Subscription date
Subscription time
Tag
Phone
Few more things
Actions
Clicked a link
Didn’t click a link
Opened an email
Didn’t open an email
Is in list
Is not on the list
Has achieved goal
Has not achieved the goal
And 15+ such actions
Geography
Country
State
City
Zip
Area code
Site and events data
Has visited a page
Hasn’t visited a page
Visiting device
Total number of visits to a page and the site
Date and time
Current date
Current time
Current month
Current year
Current day of the week
As you can see these are very comprehensive.
Whereas, the conditions available in Flodesk are
Subscriber is in segment(s)
Subscriber opened workflow email
Subscriber has clicked a link
A custom field matches
Now, the conditions we can check in Flodesk are sufficient for many use cases. Particularly you want to check these many conditions only. But, if you want to create complex workflows, the conditions checking in ActiveCampaign is remarkably good.
Scalability
I’m of the opinion that, one should select a tool that will scale with your needs.
Imagine you have started using Flodesk. But now you want to conduct a webinar and you want to set up emails that will go on certain dates.
For example, your webinar is on 26th Feb. And someone subscribes to the webinar on 24th Feb. Then they should be getting an email saying 1 day to go on 25th Feb.
In the case of Flodesh what would have happened? Since it doesn’t provide checking the date, there’s no way you can check whether today is 25th Feb or what.
So, it will send all the emails in the automation irrespective of the date.
That’s where ActiveCampaign will help you because it can check the current date.
This is one use case. There are many such cases, the limited nature of Flodesk automation will restrict you.
And that’s the reason scalability should be considered while selecting the tool.
As your business grows, your requirements will increase and the tool should be able to keep up with your needs.
With ActiveCampaign, there is such a big feature set available, you’re set for the future.
There’s hardly anything that ActiveCampaign doesn’t have.
Built for everyone
Whether you’re a coach, a consultant, an e-commerce company, or a big enterprise; ActiveCampaign has got you covered.
I spoke about features in the first point of ease-of-use. You can check up the screenshot below, to check out the different features it provides.
The availability of these features makes ActiveCampaign useful for every use case. When you consider Flodesk; it provides features that are suitable for individual content creators, solopreneurs etc.
If you want e-commerce related features, then Flodesk cannot be used.
Email designs
Actually speaking, templates are a strong suit of Flodesk. These are beautifully designed templates and make you look at them twice.
But there is one issue. Such kinds of templates are good if you’re in the creative industry like graphics designing, video creator etc.
An enterprise dealing in software products may feel the Flodesk templates are not in line with their business.
Bold fonts, strong graphics used in Flodesk templates can put off some people.
Whereas ActiveCampaign provides designs that are varied in nature. Take any industry and they have templates for them.
You can use their drag and drop builder or plain text editor to build your own templates.
But again, I would like to reiterate that Flodesk templates are damn good, it’s just that they are suitable for certain industries.
Multiple support options
When you’re starting with a new tool, you do need support, however easy it is to use a tool.
ActiveCampaign provides live chat and email support on its basic plan. And with higher plans, you get many more options of support like phone support.
Flodesk support provides only email support. And there’s no other way to get any support.
Both companies provide very good support. However, with more options ActiveCampaign trumps Flodesk.
The additional support is just good to have.
So, which one should you choose?
If you want a tool that scales with your business and provides you with more features at the same cost, then ActiveCampaign is the way to go.
You can start using ActiveCampaign at just $9 a month (500 contacts) if you prepay annually or $15 if you want to pay month by month.
Flodesk costs $38 per month irrespective of how many contacts you have. This is quite unique pricing model not provided by any other tool.
Choose Flodesk, if your requirements are not going to change soon and you want to keep the costs the same irrespective of the contact you have.
My vote will go to ActiveCampaign; it’s a mature software with powerful features.
