ActiveCampaign is a great application, but it is for the experienced hands. I do indeed think that I’m tech-savvy, I always try to do the same things by myself, but ActiveCampaign’s automation tool is powerful enough that I was glad to let a consultant complete workflows for my marketing agency. The need for this kind of service is so big that ActiveCampaign pros list over 100 consultants on their site.
This makes users have this deep appetite to be able to have a better way of handling their email marketing strategy. There’s another one named tinyEmail that is aimed at e-commerce community and helps to start email marketing without any previous experience. However, this company launched in 2021 and until recently was known as the Shopify app from which it grew. Little by little, the developers intend to build tinyEmail as a real alternative to the feature-packed ActiveCampaign.
I experimented with activeCampaign and tinyEmail to assess the best of them. In this post I will take you through the capabilities of each tool hoping that you’ll know which one suits your person.
ActiveCampaign vs.tinyEmail at a glance
Here’s a quick overview to help you understand which tool fits your needs:Here’s a quick overview to help you understand which tool fits your needs:
- microEmail suits the purpose best for beginner and small eCommerce shops. Perhaps you’ve tried other email marketing software but it was too complex for you, tinyEmail has been made just for you. It is super-fast to get started with, but since its features are still little, it may take some time to fully explore its potential.
- ActiveCampaign is the one that works best for the bigger eCommerce stores and intermediate-to-advanced users. These advanced tools give you the opportunity to automate, personalize, and manage your business effectively. However, it is very pricey and may be difficult to learn it, though, your potentials seem endless.
| Name | ActiveCampaign | tinyEmail |
| eCommerce | Closely connected to the eCommerce platforms; an ability for predictive sending with additional features that are specifically suitable for the cross-selling and upselling; sales CRM as well. | Offers most of the small eCommerce business’s features and works conveniently with Shopify while larger brands will experience limitations. |
| Ease of use | There’s a steep learning curve: the system comes with a wide range of features that may seem complicated. | Created with non-technical users in mind, it is easy to start with and Once you understand a feature, everything else is a breeze. |
| Automation | Automation capabilities that are endless including the creation of custom-automation and a huge number of pre-built workflows. | Very restricted; in it, only the essential e-commerce features such as abandoned carts or welcome emails will be found. |
| Segmentation | Advanced segmentation features that allow you to cluster subscribers into several categories based not only on the attributes but also on the habits. | Feature for segmentation is quite nice; it is possible to send emails by using pre-built segments for unused subscribers within few clicks. |
| Analytics | Whether you’re interested in custom analytics or a library of ready-to-use reports, ActiveCampaign has everything you need. | Finely looking graphics that will satisfy most users; however, They are far from the advanced analytics or custom reports on offer by ActiveCampaign. |
| Pricing | Expensive; its premium plans are over $300/month but the $39/month basic subscription still brings quality for the price. | Extremely affordable; free plan and a solid $15/month starting plan; Shopify users get the platform free of charge. |
| Integrations | 100 apps directly; it integrates with thousands of other applications through app. | 30 prebuilt integrations. We also integrate with thousands of other apps via software. |
tinyEmail is a user-friendly tool
ActiveCampaign’s learning curve can be seen quite clearly. Almost any technologically-minded customer can be found in the Customer Stories section of the website, and if you ask those customers, they will talk about the strengths of ActiveCampaign CRM and automation.Regular small businesses?Not so much. The reviews go by the idea that—while it is indeed ultimately worth the time to learn ActiveCampaign—it is very “complex and overwhelming”, and you need to employ a team of specialists to fully exploit it.
So—tinyEmail to the rescue? When talking about the factor of user friendliness. The tool’s functionality is one of a kind with minimum learning curve. Even more notable is how quickly you can get started: from sign up it’s way faster and easier to send your emails with tinyEmail than any other email tool that I go through.
What makes tinyEmail different is its Brand Kit option that takes your logo and brand colors from the primary domain name. It then syncs these items across your account. Everything else aligns with your brand, from emails, templates, social links, and other items.
Audience-building is as straightforward with the Automatic Audiences feature, which brings your audience data from various sources like WordPress, Shopify, from CSV uploaded file.
Then with brand and audience set up, you’ll find the dashboard already open — just click on the Create campaign button to begin the design.
On the other hand, the tool appears to be cumbersome if one considers its big functionality that litterarily weigh ActiveCampaign down when it comes to usability. For example, to create a campaign, you need to first choose the type of campaign you want: Basic, Split Testing, Autopost, RSS Triggered, Automatic Responder, or Date Based. Next decision will be your choice to make. The function of the generate link monitoring will be enabled?How about open/read tracking? This is an area of no concern for veterans of email marketing, but for greenhorns, it may quickly turn to a task of frustration and mess.
Legacy email automation company tinyEmail offers an extensive variety of 300+ email templates—more than many of its competitors, like ActiveCampaign or others. Although the templates are well-made, their quality tends to be mixed. If you follow the Staff Picks templates, you’ll be much more likely to wind up with a nice interface design.
Active campaign has got roughly as many templates as tinyemail has however most of them appear to be old dated. (Side note to the email marketing CEOs of the world: it has been five years since you wrote your 2015 email templates, so it’s time to kick them out.
Building emails in tinyEmail is straightforward: the drag-and-drop builder is feature-rich, the image library is integrated with stock images, and there are eCommerce-focused functionally like product cards. Even though, the UI—which looks a bit messy with widgets and settings—isn’t as “person-friendly” as relative features of tinyemail. In total, the ease of use of ActiveCampaign’s email design tool is similar to that of the ActiveCampaign tool. (This can be set up in a very simple manner even without programming skills using MailerLite).
tinyEmail is perfect for small eCommerce shops, and the ActiveCampaign is huge for the big enterprises.
For small eCommerce shops, tinyEmail has a few key advantages:For small eCommerce shops, tinyEmail has a few key advantages:
- It’s easy to learn.
- It’s free to install on Shopify and works in conjunction with Shopify customer data.
- It is eCommerce-specific with such features as e-mail templates for promotions, one click automation, automatic segmentations, and AMP modules.
AMP is the most interesting feature, and it is also one that ActiveCampaign does not support. Here’s how it works: in place of the plain emails, you can design them to contain the components that update automatically. This brings new sets of opportunities that are even more cool to the eCommerce stores. For example, a tinyEmail widget is essentially a one-click installation that syncs directly to Shopify and then automatically reflects the sale price. Formerly, you could also update your call to action, automatically in the promotional emails, after the sale was over.The only downside? Still, Gmail and Yahoo Mail are the only popular clients of mainstream email that support the AMP technology.
Many eCommerce brands will find themselves running up against the limits of what tinyEmail can do, especially related to automation: in the tinyEmail software, there are just a few automation templates that work the same way too and you are not allowed to design your own automation workflow templates .
Meanwhile, Activecampaign has 59 automations related to eCommerce. These encompass everything from cross-sell automation for the users of Magento to those of the Shopify post-purchase accessory upsell.
ActiveCampaign has three key eCommerce advantages for power users:ActiveCampaign has three key eCommerce advantages for power users:
- Automation: Apart from the multiplicity of pre-existing automation templates, you can design your own automation workflows by yourself. ActiveCampaign has the predictive sending, which is an AI-powered feature that makes emails land in the recipients’ inboxes right when they are about to take action.
- Channels: TinyEmail, on the other hand, works only with emails (though it’s adding SMS). ActiveCampaign however lets you go beyond simple marketing via emails and into things like landing pages, SMS marketing, website pop-up messages and Facebook ad integrations.
- CRM: It cannot be denied that ActiveCampaign is definitely the winner, and in some ways, it is the only option if your sales process is high-touch and salespeople are doing the outreach to customers.
TinyEmail being the best free option for Shopify users, ActiveCampaign also makes its own Shopify integration available—state that the Pro plan (70$ per month) is necessary to use it.
ActiveCampaign is the one with more powerful features.
While ActiveCampaign is on a different level of play from tinyEmail, and automation is the most apparent in terms of the discrepancies. ActiveCampaign allows you to build complex rule-based journeys and has a library of pre-built recipes.
Here’s an example: here is the customer win back campaign automation workflow that starts as soon as Customer cancels their purchase. Once it does that, it carries out a split test to see which message sequence is more successful.
In regard that tinyEmail has just started in 2021, it is reasonable for it doesn’t have various features which most of its competitors whose product has been developing since decades ago. Yet I praise their vision to make a workflow that ‘doesn’t fall in between the gaps and doesn’t take days to set up’. But, tinyEmail’s current automation options are depressingly spartan—only five templates are provided, three of them are applicable only to Shopify customers and there is no custom automation feature.
This should be time-consuming for many smaller eCommerce stores as tinyEmail does not have AI-powered automation. It’s important to note that the product roadmap is set to have multiple automation features in development. Therefore, it is worth keeping a close tab on tinyemail despite the fact that it may not fully meet your requirements as of now.
Segmentation prowess of ActiveCampaign enables you to segregate contacts using their attributes (such as where did they sign in) and using their behavior (like, how are they responding to your emails). Surprisingly, the segmentation function is buried quite deep—it’s under Search Contacts in the Advanced Search option—but you can filter by a huge set of variables.
From where I see it segmentation is the sweet spot of tinyEmail - simplicity and a neat feature range. It has a good range of pre-defined segments or rules of segments along with a surprisingly advanced custom segment builder which lets you based factors such as customer activity (like opening emails) and behaviors (like the last order date and order price).
Analytics is one of the areas in which ActiveCampaign are perfect. There are reports for everything: numbers related to marketing revenue, conversion attribution, sales pipeline activity, and email list growth trends. Having custom reports created and measuring your progress towards the objectives can also be done.
tinyEmail’s analytics are too sparse, the reports are not customizable. It is fun to try the simplicity of the available data visualization and to have the deliverability reporting function within just a few hours. As for tracking your sales and revenue, you can achieve that with tinyEmail’s various eCommerce integrations.
tinyEmail is cheaper than other apps (significantly cheaper if you use Shopify).
tinyEmail has a feature that consists of 500 subscribers, forms and pop ups, which are included in their free program. The Standard plan offers one $15/month subscription and premium templates for unlimited subscribers. The tinyEmail Pro, which has a monthly fee of $65, provides pre-set segments, a custom domain, and never-ending use of AI features. Shopify users will enjoy a free plan for which the Standard plan has a direct equivalent; this plan is accessible via the Shopify app store.
ActiveCampaign is priced higher because it is specialized for the market with highly complex flows. However, You will not get a free plan here, though you can register to a 14 day trial. The trial version is free of charge and then to access the entry-level plan you need to pay $39/month for 1,000 contacts per month. The Plus plan ($70/month for ActiveCampaign) provides you with landing pages and lead scoring options (and a Shopify integration), while for $187/month Professional plan you get even more powerful features like AI-powered predictive sending.
They both vary in the extent of integrations available.
ActiveCampaign offers 97 native integrations, including native integrations with all the top eCommerce platforms. A comparative advantage of tinyEmail is the package of 28 in-built integrations though it is closely tied up with the crucial eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and Volusion.
ActiveCampaign vs. tinyEmail: Why on earth doesn’t make sense to you?
And if you’ve read up to here and you’re still not yet very sure which tool you should choose, please, here are some suggestions to keep in mind.
tinyEmail is definitely worth trying for those who need an instant, “plug-and-play” email marketing solution for their eCommerce needs. Nor is it difficult to set up, as well as user friendly. Due to that, it is very popular with Shopify fans, for it is free of charge.
If you are an intermediate or advanced user who wants to do more than just simple email automation, consider ActiveCampaign. Perhaps, the setup needs some efforts but you’ll have the advantage to use state-of-the-art personalization, automation, and CRM tools.
