Why I Left ActiveCampaign for Kajabi Email (and what I miss!)

activecampaign category: email marketing kajabi type: blog

If you are a Kajabi user who hasn’t yet implemented their email feature because you’re using another platform, here’s why I made the switch. These factors could help you decide if you need to continue on with your additional service, or if it makes sense to switch to Kajabi for email marketing.

 

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I dragged my heels leaving ActiveCampaign for Kajabi as I waited for more functionality to be implemented, but made the switch in 2018. Kajabi email is still not where I’d like it to be, but let me tell you, it’s so much better than when I first switched. 

 

Here are some of the reasons I switched to Kajabi, what keeps me staying, and also some of the little things I miss about ActiveCampaign.



Automations

Before I get into this, I want to clearly state that overall, the email automation capabilities in ActiveCampaign far outweigh what you can do in Kajabi. And you can totally pass subscriber info to ActiveCampaign from Kajabi or via Zapier. However, when I looked at the types of automations I wanted to create it was clear that there were some specific things that would be difficult to automate with ActiveCampaign, but that were built-in to Kajabi.

 

Separating transactional and marketing emails: this would be a bit of manual work to get set up in AC (2 lists would need to be created but in the end people could still unsubscribe from both), but with Kajabi it’s automatic - users can unsubscribe from marketing emails, but not from transactional emails, which means they won’t miss a receipt or important product update.

 

User activity triggers: because the automations are tied so closely to student activities, I can send emails based on things like: if they haven’t logged in to the platform in X days, if they started a checkout then abandoned the cart, if they completed a specific lesson or course, etc.




Price

My list had grown to the point where I was going to have to purchase more contacts in ActiveCampaign, which would have bumped the price up significantly. Since I was already paying for Kajabi and it could do emails, it made sense to cut out this extra expense.



Convenience

Before, I had to flip back and forth between programs, and I didn’t always have a complete picture of a subscribers behaviour (to get even closer I had to add in information from Google Analytics, so that meant three things to analyze).

 

Now I can see subscriber info, purchase history, what information they’re most interested in, etc. all in one place. And it’s one less login to keep track of!

 

Lead Magnets

ActiveCampaign didn’t do full landing pages, so I was starting to create those in Kajabi and embedding the opt-in form from ActiveCampaign.

 

The form builder in ActiveCampaign isn’t super easy to customize and it was difficult to match the look of the form to the rest of the landing page - it stuck out awkwardly as an ActiveCampaign form in the middle of a beautiful opt-in page. So I started using the forms directly in Kajabi which not only looked better visually, but also allowed me to automate some other things I couldn’t before.



What Keeps Me in Kajabi

There are lots of other platforms I could switch to, but in the end I’ve stuck with Kajabi because of some of the features they’ve implemented since I moved everything over:

  • Email builder/designer - since it uses the same functionality as the page builder I can create a very consistent look between landing pages, emails, website, and products. It also has countdown timers, which I used to have to use another separate tool for :)
  • Improved segmentation - they continue to add more segmenting and filtering options for their emails and automations.

 

What I Miss

 

Templates: ActiveCampaign lets you create and maintain templates - Kajabi doesn’t have this feature yet, so you have to set up a draft email as a template and then copy it when you want to send a new campaign.

 

Tracking/Analytics: Analytics are far superior in ActiveCampaign, and you can create customized reports.

 

Goal & time based automations: With ActiveCampaign I could create an automation that sent on specific dates/times, or if a certain condition was met the automation would skip indicated steps appropriately. I can’t do this with Kajabi, so in the end these get set up as pre-scheduled broadcasts instead of 1 large automated sequence.


Visual automation builder: Because ActiveCampaign provided visual mapping for automations, it was easy to keep track of. With Kajabi I need to include these details in my planning document so that I can see all of the steps in one place.

 

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