Now we come across the most advanced email service provider that is most probably the ActiveCampaign I've had a chance to make use of. It includes a lot of secure features together with the ability to do email automation. This is what you might think you do not need yet, however, once you strive through it, you might come to a conclusion that you are nothing without it.
ActiveCampaign account
When you will first login to your account, there will be a lot of things that should be take in. I am mentioning a few of them below.
Dashboard: The dashboard is made prepared through diverse widgets which are responsible of providing a birds-eye view of all your email marketing campaigns. You can draw the different widgets around as well as add or remove them as preferred in order to make a fully modified view.
Importing contacts: You can also import your contacts in from a broad range of diverse services with a click of a button. I myself like the way the contacts are accessible in ActiveCampaign. If an email on your list has a gravatar linked with it, then you can perceive your subscriber's image which is a finicky touch.
Web form editor: ActiveCampaign also includes a basic web form editor. Whereas, it also drag and drop email builder. The web form editor is a bit limited, as you can simply do some fundamental styling to it.
What campaign express to ActiveCampaign?
A campaign is a term that is used by ActiveCampaign for any particular email you send out. A campaign can be one of eight different types which include your average email blast, it can be time-based, automation based, split test, date-based and much more.
Automation capabilities: Now the point comes that where ActiveCampaign in fact shines is with its automation capabilities. It has a truly simple to use interface that will be applied for producing some fairly sophistic email automation workflows. For example, let’s say you have a membership site that entails both free as well as paid accounts. When any person new signs up to your site, they are added to your email list. So this is nothing special. On the other hand when one of these members pays for a premium account, you can automatically generate an event that will start the automation. What you will do next?
You can then mark or tag this user as a premium user and throw them an email that will include the offer of a premium member bonus gift. In view of the fact that a paid membership renews yearly, you can attach a wait action of 11 months and then send a reminder email to the user in order to renew their membership.
So we can consider this just one easy example of what you can achieve with ActiveCampaign's email automation features.
Comparison of ActiveCampaign with ConvertKit’s automation features:
ActiveCampaign automation features are quite a bit more powerful and sophisticated as compared to ConvertKit's automation features. It includes restricted branching and waits delays so you are able to create some actually interesting workflows.
What are the Pros of ActiveCampaign?
- You can create email automation workflows effortlessly.
- It supports tagging features strongly plus other useful segmentation options are also accessible.
- It also leads to good split testing capabilities.
- If a subscriber appears on multiple lists then ActiveCampaign need not to be charged multiple times.
What are the cons that can be faced in ActiveCampaign?
- The web form builder held’s limited.
- It stands potentially restraining with respect to affiliate links.
Best choice for email marketers
Finally, I am going to review ActiveCampaign, which is offering some even more automation capabilities than the ConverKit and GetResponse. It’s also more reasonable than Infusionsoft and it has to turn out to be the autoresponder of choice for some very smart marketers that I value.
Get an overview of ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is not merely your standard email service provider whereas it’s a whole email marketing automation as well as CRM platform. We can say that it's all in one marketing platform that helps to grow your business as well as save your time with a seamless experience.
The three main prospects of ActiveCampaign are:
Email Marketing: Send newsletters, design beautiful email campaigns, and keep in touch with your contacts and customers.
Marketing Automation: Automate your marketing channels utilizing personal along with behavioral data about your contacts.
Sales and CRM: Get more leads and close deals more rapidly with our refreshing new take based on customer relations.
Where ActiveCampaign stand out?
ActiveCampaign really stands in its impressive automation features. It means that ActiveCampaign includes a powerful visual automation editor that permits you to assemble some amazing email workflows that hardly any other email service providers can go with.
Concept of tagging: ActiveCampaign has the perceptions of tags as email segmenting is super important because the more focused your emails are, the more approachable your subscribers will be.
Superlative elements of ActiveCampaign
One of the most flexible visual automation builders
Foremost, it supports a broad variety of triggers in order to start your automation. ActiveCampaign also gives you a wide variety of actions like sending SMS, post to a web hook and other advanced actions as well. My one discontent I had is that if you want to add subscribers automatically to a custom audience, then you must have to upgrade to a Plus account.
Share Your Automations
When you approach the automations page, you need to click the dropdown arrow next to the automation, you will come up with a ‘Share’ menu item. After selecting this, you will acquire a unique share URL that you can present to someone else and it will import it into their account.
A Great Affiliate Program
ActiveCampaign has a couple of reasons that make it stand out from other similar affiliate programs.
Firstly, the actuality that you can share automations grants you a great selling point. It permits you to endow with incredible value and create a win-win for you and your referrals.
Secondly, I love promoting ActiveCampaign as an affiliate because it has these more expensive plans that cater to bigger businesses. This means that you can earn some really big commissions from just a few referrals.
Had a chance to resend Your Campaigns
One cooler feature of ActiveCampaign that I like is the capability to resend your campaigns. Let’s assume you run a campaign that really worked well. After 3 months, in view of the fact that you sent it out, you might have added another thousand new subscribers to your list. Now here comes the ActiveCampaign excellency in which it will give you an option to resend this campaign again, for those new contacts who have joined since your original broadcast.
The trick here is to resend your campaign by using a different subject line. Since they didn’t open your email in the first place, they never saw the content and you can keep it the same.
What I don’t like about ActiveCampaign
Affiliate marketing is not that easy to do with ActiveCampaign
You might have to think twice if you are planning to use ActiveCampaign on behalf of any affiliate marketing purposes. They comprises of a pretty strict policy about excessively promotional emails that straightforwardly link to affiliate products. So I would stay away with ActiveCampaign in general if you do any solo ads and/or plan in order to promote WarriorPlus, JVZoo and ClickBank type offers.
If you still want to promote affiliate offers indirectly, then use a story based approach to your emails, and promoting affiliate products in some way via bridge pages or blog posts. I’ve made this, and it works ok.
Learning all the features
ActiveCampaign is stuck packed full of features. So it will require a bit of a learning curve if you want to learn all these features. Luckily it does have a sound documented knowledge base, so as if you’re eager to browse through the documentation, it will assist you get up to speed faster.
An additional feature is its live chat feature that is also quite helpful, and I found their support technicians to be very well-informed with technical details in building automation.
Way to generate ActiveCampaign automation
Automations permit you to generate a workflow of actions that are triggered based on precise criteria. If your aim is to assemble a passive, automated business then automation are actually where it’s at.
According to HubSpot, marketers who execute marketing automation basically boost their sales by an average of 10%. Luckily ActiveCampaign makes creating workflow automation trouble-free. When you create automation, you are first asked how you desire to trigger the automation:
As you can notice, some of the more helpful triggers comprise of features like clicking a link in an email, a page on your site is visited, when an event is recorded, like someone purchasing your product and whenever a tag is added. Once you’ve added a trigger, ActiveCampaign gives you a variety of actions you can perform. For example,
- You can send an email or either an SMS
- Capable to add or eliminate a tag
- You can also generate a conditional if/then branch
- Can linger for x number of days
6 Email Marketing Automation Ideas
What kind of automation can you build?
I think you can build almost anything if truth be told. Some degree of limit lies in your own creativity. In order to go with the flow, you need to follow below six ideas for automation that you can put into practice using ActiveCampaign.
1. Product tagging:
Your contacts will visit definite product pages on your site; so you can give them a tag.
2. Generate a welcome sequence
Possibly you have been implementing content upgrades based on several pages of your site. Here comes the ideal thing that is to send a custom welcome sequence that rotates around the lead magnet your contact subscribed for.
3. Periodic list cleanup
The key towards email marketing lies in responsive subscribers. It is not the matter of the largest list. It’s to enclose the most responsive list. The purpose of the automation is to have a check on subscriber that either a subscriber has opened any emails in your sequence or not. This check also entails a specified number of days.
If the subscriber has not checked your mail, then the automation will send out a couple of emails just to ensure their responsiveness. If a contact is still silent, then you need to remove them from your list. Because weeding out of unresponsive subscribers stands essential for the high deliverability of all your emails.
4. Cart abandonment workflow
I can say that I want to sell a product on my site. Now what happens that a contact visits our checkout page and does not buy our product within one hour? Then the automation will send them an email asking if they have any queries regarding that product as well as give them a reminder to complete their purchase.
This whole procedure is called a cart abandonment workflow.
5. Email retargeting
You must have noticed whenever you stopover a particular website, that you often start seeing ads for that website on other site’s you visited? That’s identifies ad retargeting. You just have to do this a similar thing with emails.
6. Give status to your best and worst leads
Last but not the least, score 5 points to anyone who opens an email and will give 10 points if they click a link. Then an automation will be generated which will get started whenever anyone subscribes to one of your list. Afterwards, you need to have a check to see their lead score as the score with 50 points or more will be tagged as a VIP.
Basically this automation idea comes in the favor of Justin Brooke. It takes benefit of ActiveCampaign’s lead scoring feature, which is only accessible to plus members.
What is the cost of ActiveCampaign?
All the features that ActiveCampaign is offering, you would assume that it would be in the upper level price wise. But at least the Lite plan is relatively reasonable.
There are 4 plans with ActiveCampaign
- Lite
- Plus
- Professional
- Enterprise
The major difference is that Plus plan includes CRM along with Lead Scoring features. Whereas the Professional plan includes Site Messaging, Attribution and it supports 50 users. On the other hand, the Lite plan still provides you all the core email autoresponder and marketing automation features. And for most businesses, that’s more than enough.
Just to try things out, you can get started using the Basic plan with 500 contacts for just $15/mo. And here is how things break down as your number of contacts scales up.
As ActiveCampaign is not offering many discounts, you can take option of yearly plan in which you can save quite a bit more. ActiveCampaign does not charge you for unsubscribed contacts, and a single contact on multiple lists is merely counted as a single subscriber.
What’s my impression on ActiveCampaign?
So far I’ve been thoroughly impressed with ActiveCampaign. Well, you can do all the stuff at such an affordable price as well as you can strike on all the capabilities you’d want as an active email marketer.
So if you want to really take your email marketing to the next level, then the key point is to spend some time in mastering the power of their automations. It acquires a little creativity, but you can put into action any type of automation you can think of.