How ActiveCampaign Hit $250M Revenue with LinkedIn, Earned Media, and Influencers

ActiveCampaign's last corporate-confirmed revenue figure is $165 million in ARR, announced with its $240 million Series C in April 2021. The real number is now much higher — the question is which claim you trust. CMO Shay Howe put it at $250 million ARR in a June 2024 Growth Sprints interview, and Kyle Poyar's Growth Unhinged newsletter reported the same figure, with more than 180,000 customers, that March. GetLatka's own database currently estimates $290.5 million for 2024. The company itself won't confirm any of it: when senior growth marketing manager Casey Hill sat down with Nathan Latka in July 2024, he declined to comment on current revenue, and Latka told listeners on air that he had been unable to verify the $250 million figure himself.

What Hill would talk about, in detail, is how the growth program works. He joined ActiveCampaign in July 2023 to lead demand generation, and told Latka his three channels are LinkedIn, earned media, and influencers. That's the playbook this piece covers — after the revenue question gets a straight answer.

What is ActiveCampaign's revenue? $165M confirmed, $250M claimed, $290.5M estimated

The backstory to the interview is itself a sourcing lesson. Latka had published an estimate of what the mainstream email marketing tools earn. Hill jumped into the comments to push back, pointing to an interview where ActiveCampaign's CMO had cited $250 million in ARR. On tape, Latka laid out where that left things: "The last confirmed sort of revenue metric that ActiveCampaign sort of corporate has put out was that the firm broke $165,000,000 in ARR in 2021" — and Hill, he noted, couldn't comment on the current number.

Where the records disagree: GetLatka's ActiveCampaign profile logs the $100M milestone at August 2020, but the company's press release announcing it is dated May 13, 2020. The profile's 2022 and 2023 rows ($180.5M, $195.3M) are estimates, not company confirmations — as is the $290.5M headline figure. Between April 2021 and today, no revenue number has come from ActiveCampaign corporate.

So the honest summary: $165 million is the floor, confirmed by the company in April 2021. $250 million is the CMO's own number from mid-2024, echoed by a well-sourced industry newsletter, but never put out through corporate channels. Anything above that is estimation.

Who Casey Hill is — and what he did and didn't drive

One thing worth being precise about, because an earlier version of this story got it wrong: Hill is not ActiveCampaign's leadership and he didn't drive the 2020–2021 run-up. Founder Jason VandeBoom, who started the company in Chicago in 2003, was running it long before the $100M and $165M milestones. Hill joined in July 2023 — two years after the last confirmed figure — as senior growth marketing manager. In Latka's intro, his background runs through Quora's expert community, SaaS growth roles, and an early stint as a strategic adviser at BlackRock. What Hill owns is the demand-generation program since mid-2023. Here is how he described it in July 2024.

Channel one: LinkedIn from three angles

Team mobilization

ActiveCampaign runs an internal channel called Operation LinkedIn where employees share the posts they're writing — topical content on marketing automation, owned assets, and AI rather than product promotion. Hill gamified it with a "10K Club" for anyone whose post cleared 10,000 views in a week, and publishes the top-performing content internally so people can copy what works. The team's first goal was 150,000 combined views a week; by the time of the interview Hill said they were north of 300,000 weekly impressions.

Voice of the customer

The more interesting motion is getting customers to post. Early attempts — emailing high-NPS users and asking them to say something nice — only activated the die-hard advocates. The version that worked got about 60 customers posting in a single campaign, and Hill was specific about why: give them an exact day, give them an exact scope ("why did you switch from Mailchimp, Brevo, or ConvertKit"), and offer reciprocity instead of cash. ActiveCampaign deliberately pays nothing for these posts. Instead, 50 team members will engage with the customer's content, repost it from company accounts, or follow and boost the customer's own podcast.

Paid amplification

The paid layer mostly promotes the best organic content from the first two motions — LinkedIn lets you run thought leader ads on any member's post, employee or not. Hill wouldn't share budget figures but said the thought leader ads run around a $50 CPM, which he considers efficient for the brand awareness they generate.

Channel two: earned media — podcasts before owned assets

Hill's sequencing argument: starting your own podcast is slow, but guesting on 20 top-5% podcasts gets you hundreds of thousands of impressions quickly. His process starts on ListenNotes, searching topical clusters — email marketing, marketing automation, onboarding, plus ActiveCampaign's verticals like SaaS, ecommerce, and creators — and checking where competitors like Mailchimp and HubSpot executives have appeared.

The pitch itself has three parts: a hook that proves you watched the show (he recommends leaving a five-star review and attaching a screenshot), an authority section framed around why you help their audience rather than your credentials, and two or three specific topic proposals — "newsletters are broken, 99% drive almost no ROI, here's what the 1% do" rather than "I'd love to talk about email marketing."

"If you plan on only doing two or three podcasts, just don't even do it… You wanna do at least 20 to 30 podcasts in one month in a focused niche."

The volume threshold is the part most people skip. Hill's claim, from running this at two companies and advising others: intent comes from being heard in several places within a short window, and below roughly 20 appearances the signal never materializes.

On owned media, the numbers were refreshingly small. SaaS Steps, a newsletter Hill launched about a month before the interview profiling growth stages at companies like ActiveCampaign, Typeform, and Thinkific, got a spike from a cross-promotion to the company's full list of 800,000–900,000 contacts but stood at 2,000–3,000 organic subscribers. The company's podcast, Angles and Insights, had published exactly one episode — a debate between Zapier founder Wade Foster and SaaStr's Jason Lemkin — with 4,000+ downloads, plus the LinkedIn impressions around it.

Channel three: influencers paid on performance

ActiveCampaign's influencer program started with performance deals, and Hill walked through the math. Take the average first-year customer value — say $2,000 — and a target of 10 paid accounts. That's a $20,000 pool, split 50/50: $10,000 upfront, $10,000 when the influencer hits the account target, with deliverables (posts, videos, conference mentions) in the contract. The structure exists to solve influencer marketing's classic failure, which Latka summarized as buying customers "that churn in two days, and then you go, what did I just spend the money on?"

At the time of the interview, Hill said ActiveCampaign was paying between 30 and 50 influencers in a given month, a blend of micro and mid-tier creators — no six-figure-a-quarter macro deals. Named partners included Raj from Startup Hypeman and Ashley Stahl, who works the creator market. The current push is video, where Hill targets a $30–$60 CPM for short form and will pay $100–$200 CPM for long form, because long-form content keeps working in sales enablement after the campaign ends.

How the program is measured — and what the numbers actually show

Hill is measured on revenue impact and brand awareness, not MQLs or lead counts. The team uses HockeyStack for multi-touch attribution and marketing mix modeling, plus self-reported attribution ("heard about us on a podcast") from signups. One month's report attributed $27,000 in ARR to Hill's personal LinkedIn activity alone.

Keep that number in proportion. Against a nine-figure revenue base, $27,000 a month from one person's LinkedIn is a rounding error — it's evidence the attribution tooling can isolate a channel, not the engine of ActiveCampaign's growth. The scale claims are the aggregate ones: roughly 10 million impressions over the prior year (6 million LinkedIn, 3 million Reddit, the rest Quora) and, the figure that connects marketing to money, more than 50,000 free trials a month — a top-of-funnel volume Hill cited while admitting he doesn't see the total lead number feeding it.

That's the shape of the story the tape actually supports: a company that stopped publishing revenue numbers after $165 million, whose own CMO says $250 million, and whose growth team runs a disciplined, measurable three-channel program that is one input among many to that trajectory — not its single cause. For the current database view, see the ActiveCampaign profile.