ActiveCampaign vs Dynamics 365 For Marketing

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Our analysts compared ActiveCampaign vs Dynamics 365 For Marketing 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.

Dynamics 365 For Marketing Software Tool

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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Dynamics 365 For Marketing empowers businesses to automate repetitive marketing tasks, personalize customer journeys, and gain insights into campaign performance. This cloud-based solution caters to mid-sized and enterprise organizations, particularly those already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. Key benefits include streamlined email marketing, lead nurturing through automated workflows, and real-time customer analytics. Popular features encompass landing page creation, social media management, and marketing automation journeys. User experiences highlight ease of integration with existing Microsoft tools, robust reporting capabilities, and a user-friendly interface. However, some users mention initial setup complexity and limitations in email design flexibility. Pricing starts at a mid-range monthly cost per user, with additional tiers offering increased functionality and storage. Consider evaluating your organization's marketing needs and desired level of customization before making a decision.

Pros
  • Seamless integration
  • Intuitive interface
  • Robust reporting
  • Personalized journeys
  • Real-time analytics
Cons
  • Initial setup complexity
  • Limited email design
  • Learning curve
  • Potential cost
  • Customization constraints
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$1,000/User, Monthly
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Product Assistance

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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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  • Enhanced Efficiency: Automate time-consuming tasks like email marketing, lead nurturing, social media posting, and customer segmentation, freeing up your team for strategic initiatives.
  • Personalized Customer Journeys: Create tailored experiences across multiple channels based on customer behavior, preferences, and demographics, leading to increased engagement and conversions.
  • Data-Driven Insights: Gain actionable insights into campaign performance, customer interactions, and lead quality through comprehensive dashboards and reporting, enabling data-informed decisions.
  • Seamless Integration: Connect seamlessly with other Microsoft Dynamics 365 apps, such as Sales and Customer Service, for a unified view of customer data and shared insights across teams.
  • Improved Lead Nurturing: Develop targeted nurture campaigns that automatically deliver relevant content and offers to prospects based on their interests and actions, fostering stronger relationships and moving leads through the funnel efficiently.
  • Enhanced Customer Engagement: Deliver personalized messages and experiences that resonate with customers across multiple touchpoints, fostering loyalty and repeat business.
  • Optimized Campaign Performance: Track campaign results in real-time, identify what's working and what's not, and make adjustments quickly to maximize ROI.
  • Increased Sales Productivity: Equip sales teams with qualified leads, contextual insights, and personalized content to improve their effectiveness and close more deals.
  • Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Deliver exceptional customer experiences through personalized interactions, timely responses, and relevant content, leading to increased satisfaction and retention.
  • Boosted Marketing ROI: Make informed decisions based on data-driven insights, optimize resource allocation, and drive measurable results from your marketing efforts.
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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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  • Customer Journey Management: Create a strong buyer pipeline by running webinars and meetings seamlessly. Use prospects’ preferences and behavior to personalize their experience. 
  • Campaigns: Create assets quickly using design tools, templates and reusable content blocks, attracting the right prospects using telemarketing, events, emails and more. 
  • Sales and Marketing: Create a single view of prospects by unifying data across leads, opportunities and contacts. Identify and target the most promising opportunities using insights, influence customers using relevant content, reduce costs, and increase conversion chances by tracking important leads. Ensure smooth collaboration using shared tools and calendar. 
  • Email Tools: Compare and choose the right messages using A/B testing, improve open rates using spam scores and an automated scheduler, and define target audiences. 
  • Analytics: Increase campaign effectiveness using marketing analyzers and dashboards, and understand customer needs in detail through response information. 
  • Adaptable Platform: Simplify deployment processes using a no-code visual editor, integrate data from third-party apps, and inform target segments by using segmented APIs and customer journeys. 
  • Compliance: Built-in features help comply with privacy regulations. Add channels to extend campaign reach, as well as request, capture and store consent. 
  • Third-Party Integrations: Integrates with certain pre-built solutions such as HootSuite, Dynamics 365 Connector, TeleSign, Infobip SMS and Viber, Simple Marketing Hub, and Sprinklr Modern Care. 
  • Dynamics 365 Product Integrations: Integrations with related Microsoft apps enable things like commerce, provide a customer data platform, support customer service tasks, aid smooth sales navigation, and offer customer insights. 
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Product Ranking

#2

among all
Marketing Automation Software

#30

among all
Marketing Automation Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

86
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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

ActiveCampaign
Dynamics 365 For Marketing
+ 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 0 25 50 75 100
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Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

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User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 6420 reviews
Great User Sentiment 3929 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.

86%
of users recommend this product

Dynamics 365 For Marketing has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 86% when considering 3929 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

4.6 (5328)
4.0 (3)
n/a
4.3 (3872)
4.6 (800)
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4.4 (24)
4.5 (292)
3.3 (30)

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

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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: Seamless integration with other Microsoft Dynamics 365 apps, creating a unified customer view and streamlined workflows.
Personalization: Robust segmentation capabilities and user-friendly journey builder for creating personalized experiences across email, web, social, and more.
Reporting: Comprehensive dashboards and customizable reports with real-time insights into campaign performance and customer engagement.
Automation: Streamlined automation of tasks like email sends, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and social media posting, saving time and effort.
Ease of Use: Intuitive interface and drag-and-drop functionality make it relatively easy to learn and use for users of varying technical abilities.
Customer Support: Access to extensive resources, training materials, and responsive support from Microsoft.
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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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Setup Complexity: Initial configuration and setup can be time-consuming and may require technical expertise, especially for complex implementations.
Learning Curve: The extensive features and functionality can take time to master, requiring a learning curve for new users.
Email Design Limitations: Some users find the email design capabilities to be somewhat restrictive compared to other marketing automation platforms.
Customization Constraints: While customizable, certain aspects of the platform may not be as flexible as some users would like, potentially limiting specific use cases.
Potential Cost: Pricing can be considered mid-range to expensive, depending on the number of contacts and features required, potentially making it less accessible to smaller businesses.
Integration Challenges: While integration with other Microsoft Dynamics 365 apps is seamless, integration with external systems may require additional effort or third-party connectors.
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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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Dynamics 365 for Marketing garners mixed reviews from users in the last year, showcasing its strengths in integration and personalization but also revealing areas for improvement. Proponents laud its seamless integration with other Microsoft Dynamics 365 apps, creating a unified customer view and streamlined workflows. "It's like having all my marketing tools under one roof," one user shared. This tight integration is particularly valuable for B2B and complex B2C organizations already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. Users also appreciate the robust segmentation and journey builder capabilities, enabling personalized experiences across email, web, and social media. "I can tailor campaigns to specific customer segments, which has boosted engagement and conversions significantly," commented another user. This focus on personalization stands out compared to some competitors, giving Dynamics 365 an edge in customer-centric marketing. However, some users find the initial setup and configuration to be complex, requiring technical expertise for larger implementations. Additionally, the platform's extensive features come with a learning curve, potentially overwhelming new users. Compared to more user-friendly competitors, this can be a significant drawback for less tech-savvy teams. Limitations in email design flexibility also emerge as a pain point for some reviewers, who miss the creative freedom offered by certain competitors. While Dynamics 365 provides adequate design tools, it may not cater to highly customized templates or advanced visual effects. Pricing can also be a hurdle, with the mid-range to expensive tiers potentially putting it out of reach for smaller businesses. Users seeking a cost-effective alternative may find better options elsewhere. Overall, Dynamics 365 for Marketing shines in its seamless integration and focus on customer-centric personalization, making it a strong contender for B2B and complex B2C organizations within the Microsoft ecosystem. However, potential users should be aware of the initial setup complexity, learning curve, and email design limitations, and weigh these against its strengths before making a decision.

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