Active Campaign Email Platform - Taking Email Up A Notch
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This week I discuss Active Campaign , https://bit.ly/3bQ6DhQ , an email platform that has just about everything covered with a few extras that take things up a notch.
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Besides some nice popup options for email capture, work flows, and email templates there are some other nice features.
Two features I really like are lead scoring and dynamic content.
If you have someone engaging at a high level with your business you can set automated scoring and know how engaged a lead is before reaching out.
Check out Active Campaign
***Transcript***
Speaker 1: (00:02)
This is digital marketing tool talk, never miss out or fall behind on the latest digital tools for social media, SEO content reviews and the entire digital marketing space. I'm your host, Brandon Hughes. Welcome back everyone. I hope you're all being safe out there. Keep washing your hands, practicing your social distancing. What a crazy time we live in. I will tell you that as long as you have internet access, it's a great time to do research, create email flows, automations, and have all these things set in place so that when we do get back out into the real world or back into our normal routines, some of these things are just ready to go and you can really move forward quickly and efficiently. Last week we talked about an amazing platform Klaviyo, which in my opinion is the eCommerce email platform King. They can, if they can't do it, nobody can.
Speaker 1: (01:13)
This week I'm talking about another platform that also integrates with a lot of e-commerce blogs and so on. Their strength is they seem to be above average in just about every area, whether that's popups, the look of your emails, CRM type, functionality flows, automations, segmentation, ease of use. They're not the most price friendly, but if you just need to be touching on all of these areas in your email campaigns, then active campaign might be the tool for you. Let's take a look. All right, let's get into it. Let's get straight to what's most important no matter what anyone says. And that's pricing. So again, um, I really like active campaigns, layout on their pricing. It's easy to use, easy to understand. If you go to their website, they have a nice sliding rule depending on number of contacts that you have and the functionality that you want to use.
Speaker 1: (02:27)
They have a light plus and a couple of other big heavy hitting plans. So on the light plan, if you have 500 contacts, it's about $15 a month. So that's a good price point for those who are starting out, I know 500 contacts sometimes can take a while. It includes unlimited cell sending. This is key. I just hate when they back end us since and limit that, so unlimited selling. They've got the subscription forms, they have the marketing automation in there and I think you can do up to three users. So though the light plan, if you're just getting started, it's not free. However, I think it's a good value for you if you really want to take a start to take advantage of active campaign. Then like similar like other platforms, yes, you need to move up to the plus or their next level plan, whatever it is.
Speaker 1: (03:21)
So active campaign, their next level up is the plus plan. That's $70 a month for 500 contacts. If you're going to, if you're at about 2,500 contacts, that's about 125 so they're not cheap. They, but they have a lot of value. Again, I've mentioned this a couple of times as I've done these email, different email platforms in this series. If you're going to squabble over five $10 a month, then you're probably looking in the wrong direction. If these certain features that you need, they are worth an extra $10 a month, so don't let that deter you. Now if you're looking at two plans and they both have the features that you want, absolutely. Take a look at the pricing. Let's talk about the plus plan because I think it has some pretty unique features. You can do some custom audiences on there. They have lead and contact scoring, which is something that I haven't discussed with any of the other platforms and I'm going to come back to that later.
Speaker 1: (04:27)
It's a really cool feature. All the integrations as usual, SMS marketing, which if you remember from before, that's text marketing. They also do dynamic content and a couple of other things. So a figure that on your costs, no free, they have a limited trial offers, but no a forever free plan. So you're going to be paying. But like I mentioned earlier, active campaign, these guys have a lot of meats on their programs. So you, before you shy away, just from looking at the price, I would highly encourage you to look first and see what they're giving for that price, what kind of value. I definitely think there's a lot of value in there. So let's talk about their forms. I like their forms. They have some great, uh, different layout type of forms, whether they're pop up or they're inline, you want to put them in an article.
Speaker 1: (05:26)
I highly encourage all of you, if you're writing a really intensive blog post or a tutorial or an explainer to remember, just don't rely on a pop up or at the bottom of your page inline signup form. You can put that within the middle of your content, especially if you're talking about something that's related or relatable. Um, if you have something really good that you're putting out, definitely, definitely consider that for sure. So besides, you know, the pop up forms, a floating bar, floating box in line form, they have it, it's very nice that you can really get in and put your custom colors in there. I think that's um, nice as well. Also, uh, custom fields, uh, throughout, throughout the different forms, adding them very easy. The integrations that they have with WordPress, Shopify, big commerce, all the big ones makes it very, very easy to do.
Speaker 1: (06:27)
The next thing on active campaign that I want to talk about is what makes each person want to buy. This is a section that they have on their website. It's awesome. So let's say you're putting out some sort of content or a form and you have different images. Let's go there. They're using a cat and a dog here. So let's go with a pet store. If you're a pet store and you're putting something out, wouldn't it be great to follow up with the people who are interested in dogs with dog related content and the people with cats, with cat related content. Those are some of the things that you can do with the dynamic content. So if somebody has shown that their interest in you know, dogs or cats, you can tag that field. So the relevant content and images are presented to people who are interested in certain things regardless of where they've entered into your email campaign platform, website tracking, uh, this is something else and, and some of these features that I mentioning kind of go beyond just email marketing.
Speaker 1: (07:42)
Now you're getting into an actual CRM type of things. So website tracking is nice. I, I, everything that I've read about it is, it's an integration with WordPress. I, I mostly, as you guys know, work with Shopify, so I'll look into that, see if it, if it does it as well, but you can see where people, what they're doing on the site and then use that data to either SegMate segment them, drop them into a certain automation and to track what's going on with that. Okay. One of the cool features that I mentioned with convert kit in a couple of episodes back was they have a really nice layout so you can see your automations visually and really conceptualize the journey that people are going to take when they're engaging with your, with your email. Um, you know, automations active campaign does the same. So they have a map page where you can look at links, how people are flowing, you can edit, automate, edit your automations on the fly by just moving things around.
Speaker 1: (08:53)
It's really a great feature. I am surprised some of the other platforms don't have that because it's just so if you have a long automation, you need to be able to see the journey that people are taking. So active campaign and convert kit, really doing it well, and I think they're kind of leading that segment as well. A customer attribution, where are your customers coming from and what journey are they're taking? So maybe the, they're searching on Google, then they come to your website, you retarget them on Facebook and they revisit again and then they finally convert. If you can look at that path that customers are taking, that's a great way to optimize your flow and to look at it. This is something that you can find in Google analytics. It's definitely not a beginner tool within there. It's definitely more advanced, but active campaign has that so you can track your customers and see the journey that they're making.
Speaker 1: (09:56)
Now why is that important? Well, if you're bringing everyone in to a certain point and then you have a huge dropoff, let's say that's a follow up email in an automated series or some sort of web content that you're directing them, then you know you can go back in there and really look at that and maybe start doing some AB testing, optimize it, get some better copywriting. If you know where your dropoff points are, that's a valuable information and active campaign, uh, really helps you kind of do that. So going back to the flows with the automation flows, you know you have these boxes and it shows where the customer's coming in and w okay, they're gonna now going to be sent an email and then we're going to wait so many days and then we're sending a message and then we're sending an SMS is it gets more and more complicated.
Speaker 1: (10:47)
These working with these workflows is important. So you can just click and drag those and move those around. It's really cool. It's really interesting. This, um, thing that they have within active campaign is also allows you to connect to your Gmail account. Now I hope most of you are using Gmail. It's definitely the easiest one. There are some tools out there in Gmail that you can use that will show you when someone opens your email. Active campaign has that. So you'll know, Hey, I sent the Scott proposal hasn't opened it yet. So you can make a decision from there. If you send someone a proposal and they just opened it, that's a hotly, that's definitely a time you want to be calling them, following up, knowing that they just looked at the proposal, it's fresh in their mind, they have con, uh, questions, you can answer them right away.
Speaker 1: (11:43)
So really cool in the sales and CRM CRM type section there, uh, the, the contacts that you have, you can add new accounts, new contacts right in the account. That integration between your email platform and g-mail is, I think a huge time saver because that's where you're doing your email and that's where your email is going out. So that's definitely something you want to use here. Here's something that they, they have where you can actually create a number system to those leads. So if you have a customer, or let's say you have somebody who is on your list and they click through to a blog post six months ago and they've never interacted again, that's a cold, lukewarm lead. Who knows? Do you have somebody maybe is visited, visited your pricing page, maybe they've submitted a form, asked a question, engage with the chat bot. Active campaign allows you to assign points to those people and as the points co go higher, you can identify them as hotter leads.
Speaker 1: (12:55)
So if a hot lead is 50 points, you may want to reach out to that person with a personal phone call or maybe you want to drop them into some sort of other automation. There's just a, it's a great way to really decide where you're going to spend your time when you're working with leads. If somebody has been really engaging on all these areas, then that's definitely somebody you want to spend time with. Reach out and try and engage. Active campaign also has a great mobile app. Some of these other platforms and mobile apps are terrible. You don't normally craft emails on your phone, but it's great to look at things to look at. Stats maybe shift around some automations, especially if you're running a hot campaign. You want to know quickly what's working and what's not and get some feedback on that. So having the mobile app is great.
Speaker 1: (13:50)
They also integrate with Salesforce. For those of you that use a cell force as well. In some of the higher levels, they start talking about machine learning where the process, uh, the machine starts to pick up on uh, things that are happening within your campaigns. I'm not going to go into that today. Um, that's definitely a more advanced thing. But active campaign for sure has a lot of advanced features, some really cool integrations and the ability to do things at another level when compared with some of these other email platforms. Next week I'm going to talk about another platform and it will be the last in this email series and that platform is mailer light. I don't use it, but I've had several people bring it up and mention it to me. So I want to look into it, share that one with you. And then after that I'll do an episode.
Speaker 1: (14:49)
Why wrap it all together? We talked briefly about all the platforms and the strengths that they have and hopefully help you decide which one will work best for you. I hope all of you are safe and I'll talk to you next week. If you like what you heard today, please rate, review and subscribe to this podcast. If you have a digital marketing tool that you like or you use, or even one that you've created, let me know in the comments or send me an email at Brandon [inaudible] marketing.com I'll see you on the new school. Flip side.
