How to save on your ActiveCampaign subscription

You probably know that ActiveCampaign has a ton of features - but do you know if you’re getting the best bang for your subscription?

I’ve helped my clients with ActiveCampaign for years. I’ve also helped some of those clients sort out billing that was way too expensive for them - here’s what I’ve learnt:

(by the way, if you want to discuss a detailed audit of your ActiveCampaign subscription with a certified expert, grab a time to chat with me)

Unsubscribe spam and unengaged contacts

ActiveCampaign increases your subscription pricing in tiers based on how many active contacts you have. To be an active contact, a subscriber has to be subscribed to at least one list.

To see how many active contacts your account has, and the threshold before you reach the next tier and are charged more, click your profile in the bottom-left and then hover over “Contact limit”:

You can reduce the number of active contacts in your account by unsubscribing contacts from your lists.

This will:

• give you more room before you have to pay the next tier of your subscription

• AND/OR

• reduce your subscription cost by going down a tier

But, which contacts can/should you unsubscribe?

Spam contacts

The easy first option is spam contacts - unsubscribing them will not only reduce your active contacts, but also help your deliverability (i.e. how much email providers trust you).

Tools like ZeroBounce and EmailListVerify can help you identify spam contacts to unsubscribe from your lists, and some platforms even integrate with ActiveCampaign to verify your lists directly. You can also look for weird patterns and spikes in your contacts that might indicate a spam attack on your mailing list.

Inactive contacts

The second option is unsubscribing contacts who haven’t interacted with any of your emails in a loooong time. Typically, I recommend unsubscribing any contact who hasn’t opened or clicked an email (or performed any other meaningful engagement) within the last 1-2 years.

This option can be tough because clients feel like they’ve worked hard to get subscribers, and worry “what if!” - what if that person who hasn’t opened any emails from you in 2 years suddenly does, and goes straight to your website and buys your most expensive product??

I can only suggest that this is highly unlikely, and leave it in your hands to balance which is more valuable:

• saving money from contacts who don’t look at any of your emails

• or

• keeping every single subscriber on the very low chance that one day they will buy something from you

“Cling-on” contacts

Since you can have multiple lists in ActiveCampaign, it’s possible that someone could unsubscribe from your main list (e.g. your “Newsletter“ list), yet still remain subscribed to some other list that you don’t actually use. If this happens, you’ll keep paying for them, yet you won’t be sending them any emails.

This one’s a bit trickier to sort out, and requires taking a good look at your list subscription workflows. But a pretty simple place to start is: which of your subscribers has been added but is not subscribed to your main list(s), AND is also subscribed to another list?

How to unsubscribe contacts in bulk

Using any combination of the options above, you’ll probably have a set of contacts that you want to turn from “Active” to “Inactive”, to save you money. So, how do you go about that?

You can use my segment builder guide to narrow down your spam contacts, or your long-term unengaged contacts. Once you’ve done that, simply click “Search” to get a list of the contacts you’d like to unsubscribe, then:

1. Click “Edit all”

2. Click “Unsubscribe” from a list and choose the list from the dropdown

3. Repeat for all of your lists

4. Click “Apply”

Note: If you have a lot of lists, you can set up an unsubscribe automation with the action “Unsubscribe from all lists”. Then, simply use the “Edit all” button to add all of the contacts to this automation, rather than having to add all of the lists individually.

The results

Using a mixture of identifying spam, unengaged and cling-on contacts, I nearly halved one client’s active contact number, saving them >$500 every month on their subscription.

Downgrade subscription tier

I’ve had a few clients who initially bought a specific tier of ActiveCampaign because they were sold on the extra features that tier offered. But here’s the thing - for many businesses, the “Plus” ActiveCampaign is fine for their needs*.

If you have less than ~5k subscribers, the most valuable things you can do with email marketing are:

1. send regular emails to your audience

2. set up an automated welcome series for new subscribers

3. connect your online store and set up an automated abandon cart and post-purchase emails

4. get your email address properly authenticated

All of these can be done on ActiveCampaign’s “Plus” subscription tier.

All the extra features that ActiveCampaign touts, like “Predictive sending”, “Attribution tracking”, “Contact scoring”, are (in my opinion) just not worth the effort at smaller list sizes, unless you sell a high-ticket product and have an engaged list.

If you have more than ~5k subscribers, there are certainly some features that are worth the added cost of a higher subscription tier. However they’re not simple upgrades - most of my clients on these tiers don’t take advantage of these features because they need specific knowledge and expertise to implement effectively.

That’s why I recommend finding an ActiveCampaign-certified expert (like myself) to support you in finding the right pricing for your budget and needs.

*Note: ActiveCampaign is continuously changing their pricing structures and subscriptions, so this advice may not be as helpful at the time of reading.

The results

My clients have saved 40% on their subscription prices by downgrading to tiers that still had everything they needed to run a successful email marketing strategy.

Switch to annual billing

As with many subscriptions, ActiveCampaign offers cheaper pricing when you pay annually. I find that most of my clients who pay monthly have chosen to do so for specific reasons, so I’m just throwing it in here in case it’s useful.