ActiveCampaign App Ecosystem

Extending the capabilities of ActiveCampaign

The Setup

About ActiveCampaign: ActiveCampaign is an industry leader in customer experience automation (CXA) with a particular focus on small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). ActiveCampaign empowers its users to do more with their marketing by automating crucial but repetitive tasks, freeing marketers to focus on utilizing their creativity and ambition in their marketing efforts.

The Setting: ActiveCampaign is building out a new and advanced App Ecosystem. The App Ecosystem will extend the capabilities of the AC platform, and allow marketers to use the tools and processes with which they are already comfortable, and that work best for them.

Problem Space: ActiveCampaign wants to build a thriving App Ecosystem that provides the tools our marketers need to do their best work.

Personas: Marketers and third-party developers

Project Duration: 3 months

Defining the Problem

For years, ActiveCampaign has provided its marketer-users with the ability to link various tools using third-party “integrators” - such as Zapier. This allows users to move data between platforms, but has several major drawbacks:

  • Zapier and other integrators are “dumb pipes.” AC cannot monitor the flow of data between platforms. AC has no visibility into how data is moving or otherwise being used.

  • These “dumb pipes” make it extremely difficult to effectively utilize third-party data within ActiveCampaign.

  • By building out a robust, flexible, and native app structure we can solve the dumb pipes problem and allow our users to store dynamic third-party data, automate on this data, and even maintain custom objects within AC from third-party sources.

“How can we extend the capabilities of ActiveCampaign, and make apps that work for all of our marketers?”

Helpful Vocabulary

There are a few terms that are frequently used when discussing the App Ecosystem. Some of these may be unfamiliar to AC at large:

  • App: Seems pretty obvious, but can be surprisingly confusing. An app is, at its core, anything that allows an AC user to send data into or out of AC, and also allows a user to somehow manipulate that data.

  • (Strategic) Integration: Very similar to an app, but with one key difference - integrations are configured within the third-party platform, and not within AC. These are normally large, very complex platforms (e.g. Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, etc.)

  • Marketer: This is what we call the standard user of ActiveCampaign.

  • Third-party developer (3PD): A developer who doesn’t work for AC, but builds an app or integration using the AC App Studio.

  • The Layer: The Layer is the technology that allows AC to communicate with other applications, and to translate 3P data into usable data within AC. Closely related to Valerie (our validation tool).

The Current State of the App Ecosystem

Since its inception roughly three years ago, the ActiveCampaign app ecosystem has grown by leaps and bounds.

At the beginning of 2019 we had functionally no native app connections, and App Studio was just a drawing on a whiteboard (or maybe it was a giant post-it note). Now, at the start of 2022, there are over 50 developers actively building and maintaining apps on ActiveCampaign using App Studio.

There are also over 100,000 customers with active app connections. Our most popular native app, Google Sheets, recently surpassed 10,000 active connections. If a customer has at least one native app connected, they are around 10% less likely to churn and overall have a higher opinion of ActiveCampaign than those without apps connected.

The growth of the app ecosystem has been exponential, and we’re excited to see what the future holds.

Project Overview

This project requires a two-pronged approach working together in unison.

One prong will be a suite of developer specific tools that will allow third-party developers to quickly and easily build, test, and publish apps on the ActiveCampaign platform with minimal assistance from ActiveCampaign. By providing a flexible, robust, and componentized way to build apps, we can help the App Ecosystem grow exponentially without always directly building apps ourselves.

The other prong will be a simple and efficient way to connect and configure apps for marketers. Apps are worth nothing if they aren’t useful and usable. We need to ensure that incoming and outgoing data is dynamic and easily understood. App data must be usable in automations for both triggers and actions. App data must also be usable in custom objects.

The Project Briefs

This two-pronged approach broke down into two distinct projects, with several associated sub-projects. The first part of the AC App Ecosystem on which we focused was the developer toolkit that came to be known as App Studio. The App Studio provides all the tools a third-party developer needs to build, test, release, and manage an app on the AC platform.

The second overarching project was the marketer-focused App Experience. This includes UX and UI for connecting and managing app connections, mapping data flow, utilizing apps within automations, and viewing app data as custom objects.

You can find a deep dive into each of these projects below:

App Studio

The app developer’s toolkit.

App Experience

Connect, manage, and configure apps within ActiveCampaign.

You can find more info on the app ecosystem and it's business impact here: