ActiveCampaign vs Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

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Our analysts compared ActiveCampaign vs Marketing Cloud Account Engagement based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Marketing Automation Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Product Basics

ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing services, with robust capabilities ranging from automation and reporting to lead scoring and contact segmentation. It’s ideal for businesses of any size, as it offers a flexible, device-agnostic deployment model. It also functions as a marketing-oriented CRM with different integrations and exporting options to assist sales.

It provides machine learning that can be used on data including phone calls, emails and sales. Machine learning enables predicting win probability and using predictive sending. Customers can also take advantage of a consultant directory with certified consultants from different countries.
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Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) aligns marketing and sales to meet KPI goals. A variety of tools help users measure and optimize efforts to produce better results. It offers powerful features like lead management, automated email marketing, analytics generated by AI to help augment the user experience, landing page generation, lead generation and more.

As part of the Salesforce ecosystem, it can seamlessly connect with other offerings to enhance data flow and more easily extend capabilities.
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$9 Monthly
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$1,250 Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
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Windows
Mac
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Cloud
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Mobile
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On-Premise
Mobile

Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
Email
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Forum
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24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

  • Take Back Your Time: Save time from otherwise arduous tasks with a robust suite of features including email automation, contact exportation and automatic campaign driving. 
  • Save Money: Reduce costs with an application that has a full suite of tools and features, helping cover all technological bases for less. 
  • Qualify Leads: Automated email delivery, blog scheduling and social media monitoring features help turn reluctant or uninformed leads into brand advocates. 
  • Assist Sales: Built to nurture leads to close, the system makes the sales team’s job much easier. 
  • Message Targets at Pivotal Stages: Schedule messages to target leads at crucial stages in the buyer’s journey. Offers numerous ways to contact and engage users. 
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  • Generate Leads: Ensure pipelines which are fully stocked with leads using automation, smart forms, landing pages and more. 
  • Customizable Dashboards: Access a bird’s-eye view of the marketing workflow and reports with custom views and shareable insights. 
  • Enable Re-Engagement: Re-engage dormant leads by sending automated emails based on triggers such as time, interactions and other custom parameters. 
  • Improve Analysis: Associate webinars and live events with revenue and analyze customer interactions across channels. Leverage Google AdWords to track prospects for paid search. 
  • Streamline Lead Management: Find the right leads and deliver targeted messaging for seamless digital marketing. 
  • Align Sales and Marketing: Unify the efforts of marketing and sales teams using engaging campaigns, CRM integration and real-time alerts. 
  • ROI Reporting: Track, evaluate and measure campaign performance to tweak variables on the fly and meet KPIs. 
  • Lifecycle Reporting: Analyze a sales funnel, identify stuck opportunities and adapt marketing efforts according to requirements. 
  • Improve Marketing Performance: Discover insights quickly with campaign health metrics and then make adjustments in real time. 
  • Visualize Campaigns: Visual tools make it easy to see where intervention might be needed or how customers travel through the sales funnel. 
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  • Dynamic Content: Keep content fresh and personalized by automatically changing email content depending on where a lead is in the buyer’s journey. 
  • Email Marketing: A robust and fully-featured suite offers broadcasting, triggered and targeted emails, funnels, and robust integrations with popular social media and e-commerce platforms. Also offers: 
    • Drag-and-Drop Builder: Create and automate campaigns with ease. 
    • Scheduled Emails: Enables scheduling emails for specific dates and times. 
    • Email Autoresponders: Enables sending welcome emails, starting a welcome series or delivering lead magnets automatically. 
  • Segmentation: Target specific groups within the contacts list to be more personal in emails and engage people with the right information. 
  • CRM: Notify the sales team, update deals, create tasks and nurture leads automatically. Scores leads, passes off highly-qualified targets to sales and integrates with popular email providers. 
  • Advanced Reporting: Offers custom reporting features, including custom KPIs, sales reporting, tag counting and robust segmentation. Gives insights into email performance. Split testing can also be used to get email opens, clicks and buys. 
  • Fast Training: Schedule one-on-one appointments with the company’s customer service team to help teams get up to speed with training. A series of robust webinars and user docs are available. 
  • Migration Services: Receive assistance migrating from another marketing automation product. Services include contact list and tag import, form recreation, workflow recreation, and email template recreation. 
  • Powerful Integrations: Integrates with PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Facebook, Google Analytics and more than 250 other apps including payment processors, membership websites and e-commerce stores. 
  • Audience Segmentation: Allows personalized messages by adding tags to segments. Tags can be based on purchase history, geographic location, time since last purchased, personal interests and more. 
  • Geo-Tracking: Automatically capture a contact’s location for geo-targeted email marketing campaigns. 
  • Site Tracking: Pulls data in from other websites to assist in tracking the customer’s activity. 
  • Social Sharing: Gives insights into performance on social platforms and enables greater audience engagement. 
  • Split Testing: Try different email subject lines, body copy and more to increase and optimize campaign conversion rates. Add up to five variations for a single campaign. 
  • SMS Marketing: Automate SMS marketing to send notifications and campaigns such as appointment reminders, flash sale notifications and more. 
  • Conversation Features: Provides: 
    •  Live chat to facilitate capturing leads and creating contacts from the website. Includes customizable auto reply, custom branding, contact creation and triggered automations. 
    •  A unified inbox to connect conversations with customers. 
  • Predictive Sending: Automate emails using machine learning algorithms. It ranks the hours in a day based on a contact’s open time and uses these recommendations to schedule an optimal send time. 
  • Contact and Lead Scoring: Sends notifications when leads are getting hot, with automatically triggered email notifications and task assignments based on lead score changes. Helps follow up with deals that are most likely to close. 
  • Win Probabilities: Calculates the conversion chance for a specific lead, giving foresight into lead behavior. 
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  • Campaign Visualizer: Tracks marketing and sales efforts as customers move through the sales funnel and provides a high-level overview of a campaign. 
  • Dynamic Content: Improve lead generation and customer experiences with dynamic and useful content specifically tailored to a target audience’s needs, wants and interests. 
  • Landing Page Builder: Standard, easy-to-use and customizable templates enable better customer service and increase lead counts. 
  • Smart Forms: Collect information at every interaction and enrich data pools with a simple drag-and-drop form builder. 
  • Organic and Paid Search Tools: Integrate with Google AdWords to determine ROI and then analyze keywords to improve performance. 
  • Social Posting: Track prospects and leads in social platforms. Schedule posts at optimal times for the greatest impact. 
  • Email Builder: The email builder is simple to use, yet powerful, and can be attached to any number of automated tools and tracking measures. 
  • Einstein: Gain insights on campaigns to optimize marketing assets and find new audiences using machine learning. 
  • Email Reporting: Track metrics like clicks, opens and more. Provides SPAM analysis and preview services to extend email reporting. 
  • Auto Segmentation: Deliver a personalized experience with dynamic content by leveraging automatic contact segmentation. 
  • Activity Tracking: Track prospect activities and maintain an activity history from a CRM, Gmail or smartphones. 
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Product Ranking

#2

among all
Marketing Automation Software

#3

among all
Marketing Automation Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

86
78
57
100
93
85
83
100
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Lead Management
Lead Nurturing
Email Campaign Management
Platform Capabilities
Campaign Management
AI-Based Capabilities
Compliance and Data Security
Lead Management
Email Campaign Management
Dashboard and Reporting

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

ActiveCampaign
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement
+ Add Product + Add Product
AI-Based Capabilities Campaign Management Compliance And Data Security Dashboard And Reporting Email Campaign Management Lead Generation Lead Management Lead Nurturing Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Social Media Campaign Management Text Campaign Management 57 93 83 81 95 75 100 100 62 95 88 76 100 85 100 92 94 90 100 67 40 72 50 50 0 25 50 75 100
57%
0%
43%
100%
0%
0%
93%
0%
7%
87%
0%
13%
83%
0%
17%
100%
0%
0%
82%
0%
18%
91%
0%
9%
95%
0%
5%
90%
0%
10%
57%
0%
43%
86%
7%
7%
100%
0%
0%
100%
0%
0%
100%
0%
0%
67%
0%
33%
60%
0%
40%
40%
0%
60%
91%
0%
9%
73%
0%
27%
75%
0%
25%
50%
0%
50%
71%
0%
29%
14%
0%
86%

Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

81%
0%
19%
31%
0%
69%

User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 6420 reviews
Good User Sentiment 3522 reviews
92%
of users recommend this product

ActiveCampaign has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 92% when considering 6420 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

79%
of users recommend this product

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement has a 'good' User Satisfaction Rating of 79% when considering 3522 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

4.6 (5328)
3.9 (1740)
n/a
4.12 (587)
4.6 (800)
4.1 (532)
n/a
4.0 (26)
4.5 (292)
3.8 (637)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated ActiveCampaign and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Lead Management. ActiveCampaign stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award
Lead Management Award

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for AI-Based Capabilities, Compliance and Data Security and Lead Management.

AI-Based Capabilities Award
Compliance and Data Security Award
Lead Management Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

User-Friendly: Everyone referencing this aspect states the software is easy to use.
Automation: It helps run customer and lead campaigns, triggered automatically based on set specifications, note 98% of reviewers referring to this feature.
Customer Support: The support team is easy to reach and very responsive, according to 93% of reviewers talking about this aspect.
Functionalities: Every user mentioning features states the system offers robust capabilities including client onboarding, lead funnels, newsletters, contact tracking and more.
Email Campaigns: In the view of 85% of reviews about this feature, it’s easy to send weekly emails, replicate earlier emails and develop templates for other uses.
Integration: Connecting with Zapier and other platforms makes it easy to transfer leads, according to 88% of reviewers referencing integration.
Help Resource: Everyone mentioning training reports there are helpful tutorials and webinars.
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Integration: More than 90% of users who mention integration noted the benefit of being able to connect Marketing Cloud Account Engagement with the wider Salesforce ecosystem.
Email Marketing: Users can seamlessly set up emails, create content, measure performance and report results, according to all reviews about email marketing.
Lead Generation: It offers robust tools for lead generation and nurturing, as reported by 85% of user feedback on these features.
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Learning Curve: According to 77% of reviewers talking about training, it’s tough and time consuming to learn the platform.
Glitches: Every user mentioning this aspect notes it can be glitchy at times and quite slow to load during peak business hours.
Interface: The interface is slow and not very intuitive, according to 62% of reviewers referencing this aspect.
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Cost: The product costs more than the functionality it offers, according to all the users who mention this aspect.
Complexity: It’s difficult to understand and involves a lot of clicks, as observed by 95% of users mentioning this aspect.
Reporting: The lack of vigorous reporting tools is a matter of concern, according to 85% of user feedback on the topic.
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ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing services to businesses of any size. It’s easy to use and offers a wide range of features, along with robust automation and campaigning capabilities. The system integrates with all major platforms. Most users also find the customer support team as well as the training materials to be helpful. However, it takes time to learn the intricate features thoroughly. Reviews also state the system suffers from glitches and the interface could be more user-friendly. Businesses that need a system that caters to CRM as well as marketing needs, and that have the ability to leverage its complex functionality effectively, should consider this as a solid choice.

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Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is liked among users for the seamless integration it offers with Salesforce, leading to stronger marketing capabilities. It also offers various functionalities to make email marketing more powerful and is relied upon for lead generation. However, the cost of the product might be too much for smaller companies, especially given the lack of reporting options. The complexities of the platform also make it difficult to get used to according to the majority of reviews. Overall, the product is a good pick for larger enterprises seeking robust marketing automation, particularly those already using Salesforce that can leverage the tight integration for enhanced marketing.

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