ActiveTrail is an online email marketing software packed with robust features, which can increase the reach of your brand and strengthen your marketing presence.
What does ActiveTrail do?
ActiveTrail boasts features such as email automation, online surveys and analytics.
It has a very easy-to-use interface that utilizes drag-and-drop functionality, SMS messaging and a robust landing page creator.
ActiveTrail is an attractive option for small companies. Not only is it very affordable, it keeps simplicity at the forefront of the user experience design.
Features of ActiveTrail
ActiveTrail provides a host of solutions enabling you to communicate effectively with current and prospective customers.
In addition to email and SMS marketing campaigns, ActiveTrail users can utilize autoresponder software, detailed reports and analytics, A/B testing, dynamic sign-up forms, integrations with other applications, real time tracking, landing pages, Email Marketing, and a remarketing tool called ActiveCommerce.
Marketing Automation
ActiveTrail offers a substantial number of solutions for marketing automation, ensuring you engage with customers on a personal level, while also freeing yourself from repetitive actions.
ActiveTrail includes nine templates to account for the most common triggers you might want to send an email for, such as a contact unsubscribing, a contact celebrating their birthday, a contact or clicking on a link.
Each template is fully customizable, and you can create your own automation entirely from scratch.
Every automation process has a beginning and end, but in between, select as many or as little actions as required. You can do just about anything; for example, create an automation to send subscribers an email on their birthdays, then after a timed delay of your choosing, another email could be sent which reminds contacts to buy products they have in their basket.
Editing
ActiveTrail sets itself apart with easy-to-use robust editing tools. Start by picking from one of the well-designed pre-made templates categorized by context and purpose, such as new tech product, restaurant promotion or vacation advertisement.
At this stage, half of the work has already been done for you. All you need to do is edit the text and images to suit your business.
Users can add pre-defined ‘blocks’ which are essentially micro-templates such as blocks of text, images, sign-up forms, and even buttons and widgets for Facebook and Paypal. Embedding these micro-templates is simply a case of dragging and dropping them into your creations. Save blocks as a template for later use.
Surveys
With ActiveTrail’s survey solutions you can learn a great deal about your end-users and their demographics, ultimately taking some of the guesswork out and giving you the confidence to serve their needs better.
Designing and publishing a survey is an easy and straightforward process. Select the question types and fill in the details. ActiveTrail takes care of everything else. You can integrate your surveys into your automation workflows.
Choose between open ended, single, multi-select and personal info questions. In addition, select personal information, a matrix of choice and Net Promoter Score (NPS) which gives you a general indicator of customer satisfaction.
SMS campaigns
With ActiveTrail, you can send text messages to contacts, giving you another avenue for communicating subscribers. This is particularly important with the ubiquity of mobile phone usage.
Contacting users via text is a cheap and simple process, and similar to setting up an email marketing campaign. There is added functionality to schedule the when you want to send the SMS campaign, ensuring it reaches your clients at the most optimal time.
Integrations
ActiveTrail has an exhaustive list of integrations that greatly enhances the utility of the service. Here are some of the most common integrations:
- WordPress – Add an ActiveTrail registration form to your blog, which automatically adds users to the ActiveTrail recipient list, ultimately increasing the size and efficiency of your email marketing efforts.
- SalesForce – Synchronize your customer list, giving you easy access to your Salesforce contacts within ActiveTrail.
- Google Analytics – Ascertain data that will otherwise be difficult to find, such as the number of contacts opening your emails, their demographics or the percentage of contacts making a purchase.
- Facebook Lead Ads – Email contacts that have completed a Facebook registration form. In addition, incorporate social network blocks into your landing pages.
Other integrations include Cashcow, Optimove, Personalics, Excel and most CRM platforms.
Advanced Features
Several advanced functions makes your life easier when importing data.
One of the most useful is the ‘Update existing contacts’ checkbox which mitigates the risk of creating duplicate contacts, but it easily lets you update existing contact information without having to find and edit individual contacts.
Another excellent resource for contact import management is the import history section, which gives you an overview of all imported contacts. From here, ascertain how many contacts were added, updated, deleted, and even how many errors there were during the importation process.
Errors rows and incorrect formatting are flagged up giving you the opportunity to quickly fix the issue.
Benefits of ActiveTrail
No technical knowledge needed
Users don’t need practical knowledge of HTML, CSS or graphic design in order to use ActiveTrail, though it’s always an advantage, as always.
However, even the least tech-savvy user can use the software easily, ensuring you won’t have to hire additional staff or spend time training your existing workforce.
Bunch of useful templates
The service comes with email templates for emails and newsletters that are easily customisable with drag and drop functionality.
This gives you the opportunity to create professional looking email, newsletter and SMS campaigns in just a few clicks.
Excellent customer support
ActiveTrail has a dedicated customer support team available at all times, to offer help should you need it, which is very helpful for smaller businesses.
Straightforward interface
The interface is straightforward and clutter free which makes navigation a breeze. The dashboard features four large widgets for email, contacts, landing pages and reports, all of which are clearly segmented.
The editing interface is remarkably user-friendly as it comprises of an intuitive visual pipeline which designed with brevity in mind.
You are never more than 2-3 clicks away from adding another step to your automation process, and you never have to trawl through pages of options looking for the appropriate action, making it suitable for those new to marketing automation.
Everything about the interface is logically placed and arranged, ultimately meaning you create complex and dynamic automations without any training.
The free-form interactive whiteboard allows you to drag-and-drop actions onto at your leisure. The non-restrictive design enables you to plan your automation in such a way so you understand it.
Pricing
ActiveTrail offers a transparent pricing tier where every single functionality is available across every single tier. Users don’t have to worry about not accessing key features for choosing a cheaper price plan.
The pricing is based on the number of contacts the business wants to contact, starting at $7 for up to 500 contacts.
The email and SMS packages have their own independent pricing models. These are one off payments where users get a set amount of emails or SMS to send for a set price, which is useful for businesses looking to do a single email or SMS blast. For emails, the starting price point is $25 for 1000 emails. For SMS, the starting price point is $41 for for 500 SMS’.
Conclusion
ActiveTrail is a full-featured,versatile cloud-based email marketing service excellent for small, medium and large businesses.
This software solution knocks down the hurdles inherent with marketing. Create professional-looking email and SMS campaigns, cheaply, with just a few clicks. In addition, make use of more advanced solutions, such as surveys, landing pages, A/B testing and analytics.
Overall, ActiveTrail helps foster emotional bonds with existing and prospective customers, which is important for business looking to build their customer base and expand the reach of their brand. With low costs and high usability, ActiveTrail is a great choice for marketing campaigns.
