Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) deserve the same powerful marketing technology as the world's largest brands.
That's why ActiveCampaign is proud to announce its recognition as the SMB Marketing Automation Platform of the Year in the 2026 MarTech Breakthrough Awards. The award highlights organizations shaping the future of marketing technology, and this recognition reflects ActiveCampaign's commitment to giving SMBs enterprise-grade marketing capabilities through intelligent, autonomous marketing.
Helping SMBs market like enterprise brands
Today’s marketers have no shortage of data, yet acting on it remains one of the industry’s biggest challenges. Insights often live in one place while execution happens somewhere else, leaving teams to manually interpret reports, decide what to do next, and build campaigns from scratch. For SMBs, that gap can be especially difficult to overcome.
ActiveCampaign closes that gap through Active Intelligence, its autonomous marketing engine that continuously analyzes campaign performance, surfaces opportunities, and enables teams to take the next best action. Rather than simply generating content or answering questions, Active Intelligence proactively optimizes campaigns, automates workflows, and surfaces opportunities for stronger customer engagement in real time.
By bringing intelligence and execution together in a single platform, organizations can access enterprise-grade marketing capabilities without the complexity or resources typically required.
Innovation backed by customer impact
The MarTech Breakthrough Awards recognize organizations that create tangible value for marketers, and that impact is reflected in how customers use ActiveCampaign every day.
For example, Chicago-based racket sports retailer Toss and Spin uses Active Intelligence to optimize email and SMS marketing through recommendations on audience targeting, campaign timing, and messaging.
The results include:
- An 80% autonomous resolution rate for inbound SMS questions using keyword-triggered automations.
- A 20% increase in email open rates through AI-guided campaign optimization.
- More than 500 abandoned carts were recovered in six months through targeted follow-up campaigns.
- A fivefold increase in customer spend by converting one-time buyers into members.
Active Intelligence gets better and better the more you use it. The more data, the more you do with it, the smarter it can measure things off of.
Building the future of autonomous marketing
Earlier this year, the company expanded Active Intelligence with proactive recommendations that identify opportunities before marketers ask, suggest new campaign ideas, recommend performance improvements, and help maintain brand consistency across future marketing efforts.
At the same time, ActiveCampaign continues to invest in an open AI ecosystem, from becoming the first marketing automation platform to launch an autonomous connector for Anthropic's Claude to introducing a Google Ads connector that brings AI-guided campaign creation and reporting into Active Intelligence. The company also introduced Model Context Protocol capabilities that allow marketers to securely incorporate their own campaign data into emerging AI workflows.
Together, these innovations help businesses spend less time interpreting data and more time creating great customer experiences.
Recognition that reflects customer success
This recognition reflects the impact ActiveCampaign is delivering for customers by bringing intelligence and execution together through autonomous marketing. As we continue building the future of AI-powered marketing automation, our focus remains the same: giving every organization the tools to grow through smarter decisions, stronger customer relationships, and marketing that gets better with every interaction.
And learn more about Active Intelligence and how we're helping businesses turn insights into action.
