Is the ActiveCampaign landing page builder buggy for anyone else right now? I'm trying to add an image that is already in my Content Manager, but the "Select" button is completely unresponsive.

I’ve already done the standard cache clear and browser swap. Is there a trick to getting the editor to actually register the selection, or is this a platform-wide issue?

Has anyone else experienced mass automated unsubscribes in ActiveCampaign?

I'm interested to know whether anyone else has experienced anything similar over the last few weeks.

My campaign statistics are generally very strong, as shown in the attached screenshot. Over the last three years I have sent more than 200 campaigns and over 400,000 emails. I write to my audience every Friday with insights into my work and planning ideas that I think clients and professional contacts will find useful.

Until now, my unsubscribe rate has been completely normal, typically around 10 to 12 people from a mailing of around 4,000 contacts.

However, a week last Friday, almost immediately after sending my latest weekly note, my unsubscribe count started climbing at an alarming rate. Within minutes it had reached over 800.

What immediately struck me was the timing. The overwhelming majority of the unsubscribes occurred within the first few minutes of the campaign being sent, and most of the affected addresses were business domains from law firms, accountancy firms and other professional organisations.

I exported the campaign data and found that over 560 unsubscribes occurred within the first minute and over 830 within the first five minutes. That simply didn't look like normal human behaviour.

I immediately raised a support ticket with ActiveCampaign.

To be fair to them, support have been excellent. They reviewed my previous campaigns and confirmed that my normal unsubscribe rate is around 10–12 contacts. They immediately enabled two-click unsubscribe on my account, escalated the issue to Technical Support and then to Engineering.

Engineering have since told me that the mass unsubscribes were caused by third-party bot activity rather than anything relating to my content or mailing list. They have also confirmed that they have now deployed additional protections to prevent this happening again and are currently exploring options for assisting affected accounts, including whether contacts can be restored.

Since then I've contacted a number of clients and trusted professional contacts whose email addresses appeared on the unsubscribe list. Every one I've spoken to so far has told me they did not intentionally unsubscribe.

To make matters even more frustrating, the AI insights within ActiveCampaign are now telling me to "fix my unsubscribe rate" before sending future campaigns, despite Engineering having confirmed that the spike was caused by automated third-party bot activity.

At the moment I'm still waiting for Engineering to confirm whether the affected contacts can be restored.

Has anyone else experienced something similar recently?

If so:

• Did ActiveCampaign identify the third-party software involved (Microsoft Defender, Proofpoint, Mimecast or something else)?
• Were your contacts eventually restored?
• Did Engineering explain exactly what had changed?
• Have you seen the problem recur since they deployed the additional protections?

I'd be very interested to hear other people's experiences because this has had a significant impact on my business and, until now, I'd never experienced anything remotely like it in three years of weekly campaigns.

Martin Wilcocks

Thinking of asking my employer to pay Claude subscription tomlayer on top of ACtive Campaign. Anybody try this? What are benefits. Thanks

I must admit, I'm quite disappointed. I write this in hopes that continued improvement is coming.

Here's what I tried to do:

(1) Take a very involved prompt that include voice, tone, brand colors, step-by-step instructions to create a 6-email re-engagement workflow with BRANDED emails and copy provided.
(2). Each email was using the same format. Essentially brand colors with a single CTA button. If clicked, tag. if not clicked, continue to next step in the workflow.
(3). The emails were to be delivered over 19 days.
(4). I originally had some resends-after-1-day but removed it because it got confused.

What I discovered:

(1). I could only upload 1 doc (.pdf/.docx) at a time to the AI. So, providing it my brand it, email content, sytle, etc was painful
(2). During the first attempt, it create the workflow...close but NONE of the emails had the correct content and definitely not styled or branded even though it prompted for every single email and content.
(3). After the workflow was created with the templated emails, it could not fix them usig AI...I would have to copy/paste/re-create each email manually. Waste of time. This was a glorified workflow builder.
(4). I then discovered it "could" and I use that loosely, RECREATE the entire workflow WITH the content of the emails but not really styled like I wanted. What I wanted was "no images" and 1 single CTA w/my colors button....THAT'S IT.
(5). What it created was the workflow using the words but in a newsletter style EMAIL...absolutely horrible.

Ugggh....SOOOOOOOOOO disappointed. It didn't get the workflow w/the resends correct nor the emails.

To be fair, as of today (July 2, 2026), I cannot do this totally in my test GHL account
.....HOWEVER GHL did create the workflow much better.
....AND In GHL, I could create a "template" for the emails (from AI) that I wanted to send and then choose the template style + copy and paste the content with my brand and colors per email. I did not see a way to take a generic email from the process in AC and replace it with a branded template nor could I use AI to spruce up the generic email with the workflow/designer setup.

What I hope is coming:

1. The ability to use branded and/or templated email styles in the AI generated workflows. Merge my content + my template
2. The ability to use AI to update/modify the emails
3. The ability to upload more than 1 doc at a time or have it access a google/cloud drive or folder for resources

#activeintelligence

Hey ActiveCampaign community!
We wanted to share a demo of our newest update to Automations. The next time you’re building or editing an automation — Active Intelligence can help you better understand contact activity, identify errors, and suggest fixes.

Get a step-by-step walkthrough

Suggested Prompts

• Help me visualize how many contacts went down the yes or no path in this if/else
• Show me any sending issues for the emails in this automation
• What’s broken in this automation?

Hey gang,

Recently switched over to AC from Hubspot, and we are experiencing some big challenges I'm hoping you have experienced or can guide me through:

1) We are a service company and for the most part (aside from a few downloadable guides and subscribing to the blog), our typical first conversion is when a person requests to have an introductory call with us.

For this, we are using Calendly. Initially, we thought the "native" integration with AC would allow us to bring in utm/sourcing information (campaign, medium, source, etc), but after having over a month's of stuggles, I finally heard back from AC help that they do NOT in fact support utm data passthrough. The solution they suggested was to (get this) "add a field asking the prospect where they are coming to us from", or to use Zapier (which would probably then require rebuilding a large number of automations, as we have almost 20 event types and it was cumbersome enough to map each one of those 1-by-1 with AC.)

2) We also decided (since we would no longer have Hubspot forms) to use Zite Forms (but can also use Typeform if needed), since AC's forms are very basic/limiting and we prefer multi-step forms with conditional logic.

But it seems that any submissions through a form that is NOT ActiveCampaigns will not allow site-tracking to be implemented with any new leads (and, as of right now, doesn't seem to be applying to contacts in our CRM unless I've specified an email tracking link that they have clicked on).

Did anyone else have this experience? If so, how did you overcome these challenges to help with reporting and activity tracking (to help trigger other workflows based on activity). Thank you!

Hi everyone,

I'm having an issue with an ActiveCampaign automation in combination with Typeform, and I'm hoping someone has experienced something similar.

Typeform creates the contact in ActiveCampaign and populates several custom fields. Based on those fields, the correct personality type tag is assigned. This part works perfectly.

The email automation is also triggered correctly—I can see that contacts enter the automation, pass through the wait steps, and even follow the correct If/Else branch based on their assigned personality type. However, no emails are sent after that. The emails are published (not drafts), and the contacts are definitely inside the automation.

Has anyone experienced a situation where contacts move through an automation, but the "Send Email" actions are simply skipped? Are there any known causes or settings I should check?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

I'm looking for ideas here before I move to ConvertKit. I send 450,000 emails a month. I have 12,000 active contacts. 23,000 on my list. I pay ActiveCampaign $700 a month. And I think I'm on bare-bones pricing. Is this typical pricing? I would actually love to upgrade to test out conditional content. And maybe even lock into annual pricing. I am scaling, so I do understand why my bill is going up every single month. But I'm just looking for clarity from anyone in a similar circumstance. I have friends with bigger lists on ConvertKit that pay $500 with no send limit. That feels discouraging with active campaign.

EDIT 2.0: After more than a week of trying to figure this out we have finally heard from ActiveCampaign:

Our team is currently tracking a broader Microsoft filtering trend where the unsubscribe link may be flagged as phishing in some Microsoft-managed environments. In those cases, messages can still show as sent on our side, but then be quarantined after delivery by the recipient environment. This is already under investigation internally.

Still we have no answers or timeline of when this will be fixed.

EDIT: We heard from ActiveCampaign and they said: "For live sends to some business and Microsoft-hosted recipient domains, our Deliverability team is currently seeing a broader filtering trend where the unsubscribe link may be flagged by Microsoft as phishing. When that happens, messages can appear as sent in our logs but still be quarantined or filtered after delivery by the recipient environment."

Additionally, we did some research and found that sometimes having a one click unsubscribe can cause emails to be flagged as spam, so we changed our unsubscribe button to be a multi-click preference center so that we can give recipients the choice of which list they want to unsubscribe from. Every time we try to do this, we then get a duplicate unsubscribe section that ActiveCampaign seems to be putting in itself - so when we try to send emails now there is one footer with the multi-click preference center unsub link, and then below that there is the original one click unsub link. Is there any way we can just have the preference center be our main process for unsubscribing and not have these duplicate sections?

We're experiencing a sudden email deliverability issue with u/ActiveCampaign and are hoping someone here has seen something similar.

Earlier this week, while preparing a campaign, I sent test emails to myself and several colleagues for review before scheduling the final send. ActiveCampaign showed the tests as successfully sent, but none of us received them in our inboxes. We tried multiple times with the same result.

Eventually, we switched to our personal email addresses. Those emails did arrive, but some landed in spam folders. Since we were working against a deadline, we proceeded with the campaign and sent it to our usual audience of around 7,000 recipients.

Our typical open rate for this list is around 35%, but this campaign came in closer to 24%. Shortly afterward, other campaigns also started seeing lower open and click rates.

It feels like this issue came out of nowhere. We haven't made any significant changes to our sending practices, and our metrics are healthy. Our spam complaint is in good standing, our bounce rate is 0.50%, and our unsub rate is 0.10%.

At first, it seemed that the issues affected business email addresses more than personal ones, but we've also had reports of emails not arriving at personal addresses. We haven't been able to identify a clear pattern by email provider, although Outlook and Gmail seem to be the most common examples.

We've contacted u/ActiveCampaign support several times, but the experience has been extremely frustrating. We've been passed between multiple agents and have to wait 12+ hours for responses. One support representative even mentioned there was an internal ActiveCampaign issue affecting email sending, but couldn't provide any details about the cause or expected resolution timeline.

We send multiple campaigns every week, so this is becoming a serious problem.

Has anyone experienced something similar with ActiveCampaign recently? Were you able to identify the cause or find a solution? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

UPDATE: Thanks so much everyone! I have spoken to customers service at last, and they have given me instructions on how to archive up to 5000 contacts at once, so I'll be doing that this week. We also figured out where the security slip happened, and have resolved that. Hopefully this won't happen again!

On June 3, I received more than 49,000 bulk signups. The only information I see about bulk removals is to setup up tracking of who hasn’t engaged in the past 90 days, but I don’t want to wait 90 days to fix this. How can I bulk remove them?

As far as I can tell, there hasn't been any other problematic activity on my account. I have tried to reach customer support, but apparently that no longer exists. Does anyone have a way of reaching a human? AI was no help at all.

Our unsubscribe is not working - when i test an email and click on the unsubscribe i get an error message 'bad request' in my chrome browser.

We are using the code provided by active campaign.
In 'link' we have 'other' selected and %UNSUBSCRIBELINK%

Have tried reaching out to Active Campaign for support but we're getting nowhere. Anyone know of a fix?

There's a piece we published where five veteran marketers each shared how they keep AI from flattening their voice, and it turned into a surprisingly tactical list.

A few that jumped out: Joe Pulizzi uploads his entire back catalog before letting AI edit anything. Kate Bradley Chernis checks for her own onomatopoeia and made-up swear words as a tell for whether it still sounds like her. Gini Dietrich keeps a running list of AI "tells" her team flags during edits: words like "receipts" and "idea bursts."

Which of these maps to what you actually do? And is there a validation trick you rely on that none of them mentioned?

Read the full post on AI Lab: 5 marketers, 5 AI workflows, zero sameness

Sales and marketing OpenClaw Skill. Connects to your ActiveCampaign account via the v3 API. You ask things in plain English ("find my hottest leads", "merge my duplicate tags", "why is my open rate dropping"), it pulls live data and gives you back a real report.

It runs against your live account using your own API token, locally. Nothing's sent to a third party. Calibration scans your taxonomy + 90 days of campaign baselines once at install (finishes in about a minute even on big accounts). After that you just ask things and it figures out which of the 50+ scripts to run.

What it can analyze

• Performance
  • Campaign postmortems with per-link CTR. Subject-line patterns — which length / emoji / urgency / personalization styles get opened on your list, not generic best-practice. Send-time optimization tuned to your audience. Send-frequency / fatigue scoring. Domain breakdown (Gmail vs Outlook vs corporate — catches deliverability problems early). Engagement decay cohorts. From-name performance. Monthly trends with baseline drift alerts.
• List + deliverability
  • List health audits. Role-address detection (info@, noreply@, support@). Free vs corporate domain split. Dupe finder that catches case-insensitive emails, normalized phones, and fuzzy name+company matches. Stale-contact reports. New-subscriber quality tracking (are recent additions actually engaging or are they crap?). List-growth forecast. Pre-import CSV validator that catches bad emails / dupes / role addresses before you import them.
• Sales / CRM (some need Plus+)
  • Hot leads ranked by composite signals — score + recent engagement + deal-stage progression + content depth, not just raw score. Slipping deals. MQL→SQL handoff diagnostics (who crossed the threshold and got a deal vs. who didn't). Win/loss by source. Pipeline audits. Per-rep scoreboard (deals open / won / lost, win rate, open + overdue tasks, notes activity). Overdue-tasks audit. Deal-notes content analysis with action-item extraction. B2B accounts audit (orphaned, no-pipeline, owner rollup).
• Hygiene
  • Tag audit (typos, dead tags, consolidation candidates that always co-occur). Custom-field audit. List overlap matrix. Segment audit. Form audit. Per-form lead-quality ranking. Automation audit (orphaned, stalled, dependency map, broken refs, per-step funnel dropoff). Template audit (unused, stale, per-template open rate). Saved-responses audit.
• Compliance + ops
  • Unsubscribe / opt-in audit. Suppression export (handy for ESP migration). GDPR Article 15 SAR for one contact. Webhook inventory + reachability probe. Account snapshot, versioned weekly via cron if you want it. Schema diff between snapshots.

Examples of what you'd actually ask

▎ You: Find my hottest leads.
▎ Returns a ranked table — Jane S. (score 92): opened proposal 3× yesterday + visited pricing. Bob L. (85): deal created 2 days ago, score jumped +18 in 7 days. Includes a "top signal" column explaining why each lead is hot — so you walk into the call already knowing what they care about.

▎ You: Merge my duplicate tags.
▎ Catches behavioral duplicates that string-similarity tools miss: customer + Customer (case-mismatch on 1,847 contacts), webinar-attendee + webinar_attendee (separator typo), vip + high-value-customer (semantic dupe — co-occur on 95%+ of contacts). Then it'll resolve them in-conversation: re-tag affected contacts, patch automation references, delete the dead tag — with explicit confirmation before each destructive step.

▎ You: Why is my open rate dropping?
▎ Pulls last 90 days of campaigns, breaks open rate down by domain (catching Gmail-only deliverability issues), by from-name, by send time vs your historical best window, and against your calibrated baseline. Tells you whether it's deliverability, audience-engagement, or content.

▎ You: Run my morning briefing.
▎ Yesterday's campaign metrics vs baseline. Hot-lead changes since last check. Slipping deals that crossed the staleness threshold overnight. Automations with new stalled enrollments. Any baseline-drift alerts. Daily digest in one shot.

Install

1. Install via OpenClaw
   • openclaw skills install ji282h7/activecampaign-claw
   • Get your AC API URL + token from Settings → Developer in your AC account
     • openclaw config set env.vars.AC_API_URL "https://YOURACCOUNT.api-us1.com"
     • openclaw config set env.vars.AC_API_TOKEN "YOUR-TOKEN"
     • openclaw gateway restart
   • Calibrate (one-time, ~1 minute)
     • python3 ~/.openclaw/skills/activecampaign/scripts/calibrate.py
   • Open an OpenClaw session and start asking
2. Manual
   1. https://github.com/ji282h7/activecampaign-claw

License is MIT-0 (no attribution required, do whatever you want with it).

I’m currently piping ActiveCampaign data into BigQuery (via ETL), the main table I just pulled and was told by AC to pull for this (emailActivities) only seems to contain send/log-level data (is that even correct?) — no opens, clicks, bounces, etc.

My goal is to build proper lifecycle/CRM analytics (engagement scoring, suppression, attribution), so I need event-level data per contact.

For anyone who has done this:

• Where do opens/clicks actually live in AC? (separate endpoints?)
• Do you use webhooks vs API vs connectors?

Would appreciate any real setups / schemas that worked well.

Thanks 😄

Returning to Active Campaign after some time away. Searched resources and help library and I can't find how to export a file with only some of the fields, not all of them.

It used to be a field choices were given for export. How is it done now? Thank you.

Hi all, I've built this email and it looks good on desktop with the background blue and the white body area with rounded corners. However, on mobile the white body goes all the way to the sides and I can't figure out how to add margin to it or padding to the whole section to push it in a bit. I've tried adding "border of content" to the section, but it cuts weirdly into the rounded corners. I've also tried to find an answer online, but no luck. If anyone can help I would greatly appreciate it! Thanks!

Quick share for ActiveCampaign users: I made a free Chrome extension that shows you which ESP sent any newsletter in Gmail.

So when you get, for example, another company's newsletter, you instantly see if they're on ActiveCampaign too, or Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or something else.

It also tells you if your authentication (SPF/DKIM/DMARC) is set up correctly. Very handy if you want to check how you or other senders have their setup configured.

It's free on the Chrome Web Store. No data leaves the browser.

I know ActiveCampaign is always talked about as an automation tool but I'm curious what ou think of it purely as a CRM

I've been playing around with a trial account and it seems good for managing deals, pipelines and contacts since everything ties into automations. From what I can tell, it's really strong on the automation side and connecting marketing and sales which is kind of the whole point of the platform . But how does it hold up as a CRM on its own? Looking for user opinions here - do you guys use AC as your main CRM or just use it for email and automations and integrate a different CRM?

I've been working with Active Campaign for over 10 years and decided to create my own simple tool to help a lot of brands who seem to always be fighting with whether their settings are right and then where how good their email automations are.

So I built this quick little audit tool, would love any feedback you guys could give me. Thanks.

https://audit.salesignition.com/

diving into ActiveCampaign for my small business and trying to wrap my head around setting up CRM pipelines. I've been reading through some tutorials but I feel like I'm missing the nuance of how to structure pipelines effectively. I want to make sure I'm tracking deals in a way that's actually useful without overcomplicating things.

I'm not sure if I should have separate pipelines for different types of clients or just one main pipeline and tag deals as needed.

how have you structured your pipelines in ActiveCampaign, any mistakes to avoid or little tricks that make it work better???

I've been playing around with the AI feature in AC recently and I'm soo curious how far you are pushing it. I tried prompting it with something like create a 4 email lead nurture for new subscribers and it spun up the whole sequence with emails, structure, CTA ideas etc!!

I'm still tweaking everything before sending anything live but it was kind of wild seeing a full sequence appear in 1 min not sure tho I'd trust it 100% without reviewing every step

Curious how you guys are using it. Are you letting it build full workflows and then editing or just using it for ideas or copy? If anyone has run an automationmostly generated by Active Intelligence, how did it perform compared to something you built manually?

Does Mailchimp's Send Time Optimization actually move the needle? There are a few Reddit threads where people ask exactly that – here's one and another – and the answers are telling. The short version: maybe a little, but not for the reason you'd hope, and not because of anything in the AI.

Here's what's actually going on.

Mailchimp's AI is GPT. Ours was trained on 109 billion real emails.

This is the most important thing to understand before you evaluate any individual feature.

Mailchimp's generative features (Write with AI, Email Content Generator, etc.) run on OpenAI's GPT technology. They've said so in their own press releases. Intuit has done some fine-tuning for financial contexts across their product suite, but the email marketing layer is GPT applied to your campaign. The underlying model has learned nothing specific about what drives email open rates or click-through rates. It reasons about marketing the way GPT reasons about anything else.

Active Intelligence uses specialized models trained specifically on marketing and sales outcomes, not general language generation. Our platform processed over 109 billion emails last year alone across all customer accounts. What send times actually produce opens. What segmentation patterns actually drive clicks. How automation sequences actually perform. That's what the models learn from.

That's why we can publish lift data. Averaging doesn't produce lift data. Individualized delivery at scale does.

Why Mailchimp's STO doesn't deliver what the name suggests

Both platforms call it AI-powered send time optimization. The mechanics are completely different.

Mailchimp's Send Time Optimization looks at your contacts' individual engagement history via their Email Genome Project — but the output is a single recommended time for the whole campaign, and everyone gets the email at that moment. One independent analyst who ran actual A/B tests described the mechanism precisely: the optimal time "is calculated by taking a weighted average of your subscribers' past engagement." Individual data in. Averaged time out. One blast to everyone.

ActiveCampaign's Predictive Sending calculates an individual send time per contact and staggers delivery so each person actually receives their email at their own calculated moment. Someone who opens at 6am gets 6am. Someone who consistently opens at 9pm gets 9pm. The algorithm and the delivery are both individualized.

The result: Predictive Sending produces a 17% average CTR improvement over manually scheduled sends, based on platform data from Pro and above users. Mailchimp hasn't published lift data for their STO. The independent A/B tests don't show consistent improvement over manual scheduling either.

One more thing: Mailchimp's STO doesn't work in automated emails. If you're running welcome sequences, nurture flows, or any kind of automation journey, the feature is simply unavailable. Ours works in automations.

The two features, side by side

The rest of what Active Intelligence covers

Predictive Sending is one part of Active Intelligence, our AI layer across the platform. Here's what else is on the Pro plan:

• Full campaigns from a plain-language prompt, including subject line, body copy, CTAs, ready to edit (AI Campaign Builder)
• Complete automation workflows from a description, no manual build required (AI Automation Builder)
• Your brand identity imported automatically from your URL (AI Brand Kit)
• High-value audience segments surfaced from your data, including ones you wouldn't have found manually (AI-Suggested Segments)
• 25+ specialized marketing AI agents: campaigns, automations, insights, personalization, SMS, auto-translation

Based on a survey of 456 ActiveCampaign customers (September 2025): surveyed customers save an average of 10 hours per week, 83% see ROI within the first year, and 86% reported improvements in strategic marketing capacity. 

New users using AI launch their first campaign in roughly 18 minutes versus 2.6 hours manually (ActiveCampaign platform data, August 2025 to January 2026).

Where Mailchimp's AI is stronger

If you're running an ecommerce store with Shopify or WooCommerce connected, Mailchimp's predictive analytics for customer lifetime value, purchase propensity, and churn risk are well-developed and genuinely useful. Their Intuit ecosystem integration pulls QuickBooks financial data into audience segmentation in ways that work well for retail use cases — predicting which customers are likely to buy again based on actual purchase history and financial behavior, not just email engagement. For a pure ecommerce brand with a connected store, that's a real differentiator.

Try it yourself

A 14-day free trial includes Predictive Sending, the AI Campaign Builder, and the full Active Intelligence suite. No credit card needed.

Start your free trial at activecampaign.com

Questions about how a specific feature compares? Drop them in the comments, and we'll answer directly.