HubSpot versus ActiveCampaign

Scaling your business requires a platform that can handle this growth. In addition, the platform needs the power and flexibility to deliver an excellent customer experience. In this blog we compare ActiveCampaign with HubSpot when it comes to building an excellent customer experience that is scalable.

There are many platforms that promise they can help organisations deliver a perfect customer experience. However, many of these solutions do not offer the complete solution required to do this. As a result, it becomes cumbersome to tie together the diversity of systems, and therefore impractical to manage these systems simply. ActiveCampaign and HubSpot both make it easy to gain control over your customer experiences by managing marketing, sales and service from one central place, without the complexity of multiple systems.

What exactly do ActiveCampaign and HubSpot do?

HubSpot is a CRM platform with products that focus on marketing, sales and service, plus managing content and providing customer service. The system is built as a single system and divided into different Hubs that connect seamlessly with each other. By using a single database, you can use the data to optimise the customer experience regardless of which Hub you have. This makes it simple to scale your system as your business grows.

ActiveCampaign is a so called Customer Experience automation platform. It helps organisations make contact with customers. It ensures optimal customer experiences through automations within marketing, sales and support processes. ActiveCampaign offers one product with additional functions around sales and service.

Why would you apply marketing automation?

Marketing automation is a tool for marketers to reach their audience more effectively and with less friction. Developments within marketing are moving at a rapid pace, and this has resulted in the fact that not only large organisations are investing in this technology, but organisations of all shapes and sizes actually want to apply some form of marketing automation. This has led to a large number of solutions and, as a result, confusion in the market. Marketing automation solutions vary in price from free to hundreds of thousands of euros per year. Making a choice between these systems is of course not something you can clarify within five minutes. If they are all the same platforms, why would you pay more for the same solution? There are of course genuine qualitative differences between the platforms, but this cannot be captured in a simple overview.

What are the benefits of smooth automations?

Creating a smooth customer experience depends on smooth internal processes. Silos within systems, departments and all users cause friction. This slows down the speed at which you can take action. It also reduces the efficiency of all employees. When you can save 5 to 10 minutes per employee per day, it opens up many new possibilities, reduces stress, or gives your team the focus to pick up the nice to have developments. The way the HubSpot platform is built ensures that you can achieve operational efficiency at every stage. Data within HubSpot is easily shared between marketing, sales and service, because everyone works from the same data source. Users can solve more themselves, since they do not immediately need help from a specialist or another department. Leaders of specific teams or departments can view reports and analytics without analysts or management needing to be involved. Resources are also freed up to focus on more strategic tasks instead of the effort needed to keep the system running.

You can learn from reporting

Powerful marketing automation is really only the beginning when it comes to creating an optimal customer experience. To achieve real success, you need insights to determine what does, and especially what does not, work. This allows you to adjust your strategy to achieve your goals.

Within the CRM platform of HubSpot, all data comes together in one central place. This way, every department has all the data available to carry out their work, create analyses and set goals. They therefore do not have to wait for data analysts or spend hours working in Excel overviews.

ActiveCampaign also has a number of out of the box reports and a tool to build custom reports. However, you do need to look carefully at how you combine and analyse all the data. ActiveCampaign has no built in functionality to measure website traffic or do sales forecasting. Here you will have to fall back on other options.

Sales forecasting can help sales managers gain insight into team performance. This allows them to set sharper targets and steer their team accordingly. But predicting sales can only be accurate when your data is in order and available to your sales team.

The HubSpot CRM platform makes it easy for representatives to enter data into the system and automatically gather insights. In return, you get valuable information that gives you more control over making decisions and setting goals.

The flexibility and scalability of the systems

Many organisations use data they gather outside HubSpot to make decisions. This is because the data does not directly fit within HubSpot's standard lines, such as contacts, companies, deals or tickets. So called custom objects give you the flexibility to import, store and report on this data. You can give the custom object a name, define the associated properties and create any associations with other objects. Custom objects are genuinely no different from the standard objects present within HubSpot. As a result, users within your HubSpot environment can get started with them straight away, just as they are used to. They do not need to follow extra steps or training, but can carry straight on with what they were doing.

ActiveCampaign has no options for custom objects. On top of that, ActiveCampaign does not support technology to use custom objects from other sources via an integration. As your business grows and needs more custom objects, you will therefore always remain limited to the standard objects.

So how does email marketing work?

Most marketers will readily confirm this, but the best way to make contact and generate interaction is through email marketing. Email marketing has an enormously high ROI (Return On Investment). On average, you get 38 euros back for every euro you invest. That is an ROI of 3800%! In addition, email marketing is fairly easy to deploy with the tools you have available.

ActiveCampaign is primarily intended to help marketers with email marketing. The tool allows you to create forms, use dynamic content, do email segmentation and set up split tests. With these resources you can reach your potential audiences and nurture these contacts. Thanks to the simple drag and drop editor, you can set up campaigns within minutes. You have a choice of various templates, or you can start completely blank and design your own newsletter. It is important to remember that the editor is not a WYSIWYG HTML editor. The lack of a so called What You See Is What You Get HTML editor means you may need a bit more technical effort to achieve your desired design. The platform is purely aimed at marketers who want to use email marketing. Do not expect options here to schedule social media posts or launch advertising.

HubSpot was a pioneer of the inbound methodology. From that starting point, HubSpot has built the best tools within their platform to help marketers distribute personalised content to potential audiences. HubSpot has the same functionality as ActiveCampaign when it comes to email marketing. And that is not all. The drag and drop editor is easy to use and there is a varied range of templates you can personalise so the look fits your organisation. Other options available to you include smart send times, A/B testing, segmentation via lists and personalisation tokens. These tokens fill themselves with the available data you have collected in your (free) HubSpot CRM. You can simply analyse your email marketing performance in the reports available within HubSpot to gather in depth insights. This lets you view specific data such as open rates and click rates, but you can also see which links generated the most clicks compared to other links, without needing Google Analytics for this.

The real power of HubSpot's email tool lies in its combination with the CRM and marketing automation. With HubSpot, it is possible to set up smart email campaigns that bring a personal customer experience to every customer. These smart campaigns are based on the information collected within the CRM system. As you keep gathering more data about your prospects and or customers, the options for applying personal marketing will keep expanding as well. This all in one approach is the reason HubSpot sets itself apart from ActiveCampaign. You do not need multiple tools to analyse your email campaigns.

Can you handle social media and advertising within the platform?

Marketers often turn to social media and advertising to, among other things, build brand awareness, keep contacts engaged and generate leads. That is why it is important to have a marketing platform that lets you see the performance of your shared content without having to switch between multiple systems to get a good overall picture.

ActiveCampaign has no native social tool within the platform. As a result, it is not possible to post directly from the platform or view the performance of your social media channels. When you use Facebook lead ads, it is possible, via an integration, to get this data directly within ActiveCampaign. You can add or remove contacts from your list based on email and advertising campaigns.

HubSpot does have social media and advertising tools available. This means you can not only manage your email, but also have direct control over managing social media and advertising. When your contacts interact with a specific post or specific advertisement, this automatically provides a huge number of additional targeting options, as opposed to manually comparing social media accounts and CRM data.

Within the Social tools, it is possible to link your accounts (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter). Once you have taken that first step, it is a breeze to immediately start scheduling posts on each of these channels. You can then instantly view your performance for each channel within the reports. In addition to the channels mentioned that can be linked to HubSpot, it is also possible to link your YouTube account. This gives you insight into how your audience interacts with your video content. Beyond these options, a social monitoring tool is also available. This allows you to analyse specific trends or words that are important to your brand. You can respond directly to these posts via HubSpot.

Sales and CRM capabilities

Marketing and sales without a CRM is like a car without wheels. One cannot function without the other. Using a CRM enables you to follow your contacts throughout the entire sales process so you can provide the right follow up. The ability to store all contact information in one location is also ideal for teams that work closely together.

The CRM capabilities within ActiveCampaign make it easy to centralise your contact data. With this, you can carry out actions such as sending a notification to your sales team, updating deals, creating tasks and automatically nurturing leads. You can also segment your contacts based on the data you gather, such as interactions with your campaigns, social data or website traffic. When you are within a customer profile, you can see the contact history there.

HubSpot's strength stems from the underlying framework of a CRM platform, regardless of which Hub you use. The advanced CRM system gives you full control over how you want to manage them. Within the system, you can create an unlimited number of properties. These properties can, for example, be used to create segmented lists that you can deploy for your marketing campaigns. Within the contact record, you can find all interactions per contact, such as emails, calls, sales conversations or tickets. In addition, you can also find personal details there, such as contact information and which specific pages they have visited. All interactions can be used to segment your contacts and subsequently reach your customers. If you have regional offices or various teams working within your organisation, you can also choose to use team permissions. This lets you set who has visibility into your contacts. Besides all the functionality, the CRM interface is user friendly, so that non IT users can also get started with it easily and quickly.

Grow your business with HubSpot

­As you can see, HubSpot is more than just an email and marketing automation tool. With live chat, CMS, SEO tools and much more, HubSpot is everything you need to properly execute your marketing strategy. In addition, the platform is flexible, so it grows with your organisation as needed. Besides the marketing options, your sales and service teams will also be very pleased with HubSpot. By connecting these three departments more closely, collaboration improves, which has a positive effect on customer experiences.

Switching from ActiveCampaign to HubSpot

Considering switching from ActiveCampaign to HubSpot? Addmark is a HubSpot Platinum Partner and we can help you with this. Our team has experience carrying out the migration for you, with as little disruption as possible to your daily operations.

We look beyond simply copying and pasting data. It is about setting up the process within HubSpot optimally from the start, so you can easily scale in the years ahead.

Want to know more?

Still not sure which system is best for your organisation? Schedule an introductory call with Carel to help you on your way.