ActiveCampaign vs. ConvertKit vs. GetResponse: Which One Is Better For You?
- Bakal
- Dec 15, 2023
- 8 min read
Updated: Mar 23, 2024
Email remains a powerful tool for connecting with your audience. Whether you're a small business owner, an entrepreneur, or a seasoned marketer, selecting the right email marketing platform is crucial for achieving your goals.
There are many email marketing tools, and deciding one of them can be challenging.
Right here, we will compare three popular platforms—ActiveCampaign vs ConvertKit vs GetResponse
ActiveCampaign vs. ConvertKit vs. GetResponse: Brief overview
ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is one of the leading email marketing tools. It is an automation platform that lifts the burden of sending thousands of emails manually per day. It offers a set of features, including email marketing, landing page builder, automation, sales automation, A/B testing and customer relationship management (CRM). It has also drag and a drop email template which makes it easy to build emails with a blink of an eye. It also offers analytics tools which will let you know your subscribers growth.
Key features
Email Marketing: ActiveCampaign provides a user-friendly interface for creating appealing emails. With its drag-and-drop editor, you can design emails without no coding skills. The platform supports personalization, segmentation, and A/B testing, as we had mentioned earlier, allowing you to optimize your campaigns for better engagement with minimum fuss.
Automation: One of ActiveCampaign's standout features is its powerful automation capabilities. You can create intricate automation workflows based on user behavior, triggering specific actions or emails. This functionality is particularly useful for nurturing leads and creating personalized customer journeys. These emails are triggered by user behavior, it means when someone lands on one of your pages, a certain email is being sent to help that user by giving useful instructions or offers.
Sales Automation: ActiveCampaign integrates seamlessly with sales processes, allowing you to automate tasks, track interactions, and score leads. This helps streamline your sales funnel and improve the efficiency of your sales team. The whole sales process is automated which saves sales teams’ time, energy and resources.
CRM: The built-in CRM system in ActiveCampaign enables you to manage customer relationships effectively. You can track interactions with your customers, view contact history, and gain valuable insights to tailor your marketing strategies. Having the ability to see and check your customers' history and interactions lets you know your customer's intent and behavior and this, in turn, helps your marketing decision making process.
ConvertKit
ConvertKit is one of the most used email marketing tools among content creators, bloggers, and online entrepreneurs. It offers a straightforward approach to email marketing with features designed to help you build and nurture your audience. At Convertkit, you can segment your subscribers within a single list, saving you from purchasing another plan if you have two different websites. That looks cool!! Isn’t it?
Key features
Subscriber-centric Approach: convertKit is subscriber-centric rather than list-centric as they mentioned on this page. ConvertKit is built with the idea of “treating subscribers as individuals". As we had mentioned above, it provides easy-to-use tools for creating opt-in forms, landing pages, and segmenting subscribers based on their preferences and actions.
Sequences and Automations: ConvertKit simplifies automation with its Sequences feature, allowing you to create drip campaigns effortlessly. While not as intricate as ActiveCampaign's automation, it's effective for those who prefer a more straightforward approach to automating email workflows.
Tagging System: The platform utilizes a tagging system. This approach makes it easy to organize and segment your subscribers. It also helps you send targeted and relevant content to specific groups within your audience.
Integrations: Integration is connecting one software application another through APIs ( Aplication programming Interface ) and their ability to share data. This is usually very helpful if you are using different software that does related tasks. It is very important to check and test whether the tools you are using can integrate each other. Luckily, ConvertKit passes that test with flying colors. It integrates well with a variety of third-party tools and platforms, making it flexible and adaptable to your existing tech stack.
GetResponse
GetResponse is another all-in-one marketing platform. It is among the best in the business and offers email marketing, automation, landing pages, and webinars. It caters to businesses of all sizes, offering a range of features to enhance your marketing efforts. It overlaps with some other email marketing but that’s ok.
key features
Email Marketing: GetResponse gives you a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor to design your emails landing pages, automations, outresponder etc. It also offers A/B testing, list segmentation, and personalization to optimize your email campaigns. The A/B testing is really great tool. It gives you the opportunity to test your messages and see, and decide which message performs better than the other.
Automation: The automation features in GetResponse allow you to create complex workflows based on user behavior. You can trigger actions, such as sending certain emails when a user does specific task like signing up or clicks something.
It also gives you the options of moving contacts between lists, to create personalized and dynamic campaigns.
Landing Pages: It has a landing page builder, which enables you to create good but not excellent pages without the need of investing additional tools.
With 100+ landing page templates, you have the option to find a good-looking template and then optimize it based on your specific needs. This gives a great option for those looking to streamline their marketing efforts within a single platform.
Webinars: A unique feature of GetResponse is its built-in webinar functionality. This can be a valuable asset for businesses looking to engage with their audience through live or automated webinars.
ActiveCampaignvs ConvertKit vs GetResponse: Usability
ActiveCampaign may have a steeper learning curve due to its extensive features.ConvertKit is user-friendly and caters to those who prefer simplicity while GetResponse strikes a balance, offering a range of features without compromising ease of use. ConvertKit's simplicity means it has less options.
More options can cause the need of more experience. many people say Converkit is simpler, but I found that both ActiveCampaign and GetResponse are also simple to use. You just need a bit of time to learn their addional features.
ActiveCampaign excels in complex automation workflows.
ConvertKit provides straightforward sequences for easy automation. it has more beginner-freindly automation workflow. it is the easiest among the three.
GetResponse offers robust but complicated automation features, especially for email campaigns. Its outoresponder is easy to set up but its automation requires time to learn to create a good automation workflows..
Target Audience: who is better to use each one?
ActiveCampaign is suitable for businesses looking for a comprehensive marketing
automation solution.
ConvertKit is ideal for content creators, bloggers, and small online businesses who are still have less experience.
When you first open its automation interface, it looks clean like the picture shown below.
To create a new automation, click the new automation
when you click the new automation, you will have some options to choose. use the templates you are given or start from scatch.
In this example, I chose to start from scratch. when you choose to start from scartch, you have another two options, to browse templates or just start building your automation.
To create your own automation, just make sure you already konw the conditions, events and messages you want to send when someone triggers a certain conditions.
To continue adding events and conditions to your automation, just click the + or the plus icon.
final say: Convertkit's automation is easy to set up because everything is clear and there aren't too many features to mix them up.
GetResponse
This platform caters to businesses of all kinds. If you have the experience, its automation workflows may do wonders for your campaigns. If you don’t have much knowledge about it, its autoresponder will do magic things for you. So, we can say it provides support to businesses of all sizes with its diverse set of features.
To create your automation, first make sure to create lists. To create list, go to contacts, and select create mew comtacts. Name your contacts so that you will identify it later.
After creating your lists, it's time to create your automation . From the left-hand side feature, choose "automation" and click create workflow.
Next, name your automation workflow. You can start your automation process choosing the condiations you are provided. We the first one, "Subscribe " for this example.
The below window will appear next. This consists of two departmenst: conditions on the top right-hand side and actions on the bottom of the page, I highlighted both.
Bear in mind, we have already chosen our condition, so let's do some actions when the user subscribes our list.
From the bottom, just drag the actions that satisfies the conditions you set.
Connect the condition with the action by dragging the green arrow from the condition and dropping just above the black dot on the action.
If you connect your condition with your action successfully, the right-hand side information will become active. As you can see from the screenshot, you have to choose your automation name and the message. You have also the chance to run your automation multiple times or once. You have also the options to choose what times will your messages be sent.
It's really cool feature to play with.
ActiveCampaign
It has more complex automation workflows than Convertkit, but if you have ever used GetResponse's, you will have no problem with its features.
Just click create automation to create one and this will pop up.
When you hit create new automation, this window will appear. As you can see from the right-hand side drop-down, you have options there which depend on what kind of automation you are creating.
Let's choose to start from scratch and see what happens.
Despite its complexity, it has a very clear path leading to your automation. Triggers are very important part of email marketing. You have clear triggers here to choose from.
Supoose you whe choose " clicks a link in an email" what information are you sharing with your new visitor next or what actions do you want to happen next?
To add actions to your automation, just click the plus sign.
Next, choose from this list the type of message you are going to send.
final say: With its clarity, I think ActiveCampaign is better than ConvertKit's.
Pricing
ActiveCampaign
ActiceCampaign’s Pricing varies based on the features and the size of your subscriber list. starting at $29/mo, it looks the most expensive among the three.
Convertkit
ConvertKit's pricing is based on the number of subscribers, with no restrictions on features. Wow! It looks great option if you go for it. Its pro plan starts at $9/m. it looks affordable.
With the free plan, you have these features:
Unlimited landing pages
Unlimited forms
Unlimited broadcasts
Audience tagging and segmentation
Sell digital products & subscriptions
Community support
The creator plan has some extra features:
Unlimited landing pages
Unlimited forms
Unlimited broadcasts
Audience tagging and segmentation
Sell digital products & subscriptions
Live chat & email support
Free recommendations
Paid recommendations
Free migration from another tool
Automated email sequences
Visual automation builders
Third-party integrations
One additional team member
The third plan, Creator Pro, has got it all:
Unlimited landing pages
Unlimited forms
Unlimited broadcasts
Audience tagging and segmentation
Sell digital products & subscriptions
Priority live chat & email support
Free recommendations
Paid recommendations
Free migration from another tool
Automated email sequences
Visual automation builders
Third-party integrations
Unlimited team members
Newsletter referral system
Subscriber scoring
Advanced reporting
As you can see, the pricing increases with some key and extra features.
GetResponse pricing
GetResponse offers different plans with varying features, accommodating businesses at different stages. Its pricing starts at $ 15/6.month.
If you look at the pricing and their features, you can see that the first plan doesn't have a marketing automation which is really great feature, but it has got autoresponders which can arguably replace the first one. Among all, the marketing automation pleases many as it has some key features for midd-sized businesess.
Alternatives
If you are not happy any of these three, there far mor great options out there. The alternatives include Hubspot, Brevo, Mailchimp to name but a few.
Summery
Selecting the right email marketing platform depends on your specific needs and the nature of your business. ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and GetResponse each have their strengths, catering to different audiences and preferences.
Consider your budget, the complexity of your marketing strategies, and your desire for additional features like CRM or webinars.
You should also take advantage of the free trials to explore each platform's functionality and determine which one aligns best with your business goals.
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