The main feature of ActiveCampaign: it gives you the power to send emails to build relationships with your contacts.
With the Campaign feature, you can send personalized emails to as many contacts as you want, from smaller segments to entire lists.
Campaigns: One-off emails (e.g. newsletters, product updates, flash sales)
Automations: Evergreen marketing efforts that send out based on specific conditions or actions by contacts (e.g. nurture sequence, post-purchase sequence, webinar registration). You need to build automations and turn on to start your evergreen actions
Keep the objective of your campaign in mind - what do you want to achieve?
Keep it simple at first and focus on consistency (2x/week or more)
If you find yourself sending out the same email campaigns manually, this likely means the use case would be better solved with Automations
When you’re more experienced, get the most out of ActiveCampaign’s segmentation features.