ActiveCampaign, a cloud-based marketing automation platform, helps organizations automate various aspects of their marketing, sales, and customer experience processes.

While you can benefit from ActiveCampaign’s standalone features and capabilities in a variety of ways, you can get even more value from the software by integrating it with your product or your internal applications. 

To do so, you’ll first need to procure your unique API key. We’ll break down the steps for doing exactly that below!

Step 1: Log in to your ActiveCampaign account

Go to the ActiveCampaign login page and login using your credentials. If you don’t have an account, you can type your email address in the top right corner and click “Try it for free” for a 14-day free trial. 

Related: How to integrate your marketing automation solution with other applications

Step 2: Navigate to settings

Once logged in, navigate to the "Settings" section. You can usually find this in the top right corner of the dashboard.

Step 3: Go to the Developer section

Within the "Settings" menu, look for the “Developer” section in the left-hand sidebar. 

Related: 3 steps for retrieving your API key in Insightly

Step 4: Find your API key 

Once you click “Developer,” your API key and URL will appear front and center. 

Other key considerations for building to ActiveCampaign’s API

Before integrating with ActiveCampaign’s API, it’s worth considering other items:

Pricing

ActiveCampaign has 4 pricing tiers for their marketing and sales segments, as well as bundles. We'll just focus on their marketing segment, but you can dig deeper into their pricing here. 

• Lite: Made for solopreneurs who need their marketing to run effortlessly. This plan is $29/month and comes with 1 user, 1,000 marketing contacts, and email and marketing automation
• Plus: For small teams and comes in at $49/month with 3 users, 1,000 contacts, plus lead scoring, landing pages, and a handful of additional perks 
• Professional: Their most popular tier and good for teams that want to experiment and optimize their marketing efforts. This tier comes in at $149/month with 5 users, and 2,500 marketing contacts, along with a handful of additional perks 
• Enterprise: For growing teams in larger orgs. This plan starts at $259/month and includes 10 users, 2,500 marketing contacts, and a handful of additional Enterprise-level solutions/services 

Rate Limits

ActiveCampaign comes with an API rate limit of 5 requests per second per account. However, they do offer a custom rate limit solution for those that need it. You can learn more in their docs. 

Related: How to stop getting rate limited by APIs

Errors to look out for

The most common errors the API uses are: 

• 402: The request can't go through because there's an account payment issue
• 403: The request could not be authenticated or the authenticated user is not authorized to access the requested resource
• 404: The requested resource doesn’t exist
• 422: The request couldn’t be processed, usually due to a missing or invalid parameter
• 429: The user has sent too many requests in a given amount of time
  

You can learn more about ActiveCampaign’s error codes here. 

Final thoughts

Many of your customers use other marketing automation tools, like Hubspot, Customer.io, and Klaviyo. 

You can offer integrations with any of the other CRM solutions your clients use by building to Merge’s Marketing Automation Unified API. 

To learn more about the API, and Merge’s platform more broadly, you can schedule a demo with one of our integration experts!