ActiveCampaign Demo: ✉ Best Bang for your Email Marketing Automation Buck?

what's up what's up Nick elope were here from side hustle nation calm and today I want to give you an inside look at one of the most important and powerful tools that I use to run and grow my business and that's activecampaign so I've been an active campaign customer and active campaign user for a little over a year and I've really grown to like it and to rely on it to manage my email list which is 65 thousand subscribers strong at this point and honestly it's the most important asset in my business so there's a lot of trust that I placed into active campaign I definitely shopped a bunch of other email service providers before making the switch but ultimately settled on active campaign for three main reasons the first is really powerful email marketing and marketing automation active campaign does a lot of things but first and foremost my use case is as an email delivery service and that they do very well with some strong deliverability rates and some really cool automation features to engage subscribers and really to put certain elements of your business in your marketing on autopilot reason number two was sophisticated segmentation one of my biggest frustrations with my previous email service provider was the limited options for filtering and segmenting subscribers in active campaign you can slice and dice your list in just about every conceivable way and that means you can reach the right people with the right message at the right time and reason number three is affordable pricing so active campaign starts at just fifteen dollars a month which is about half of what similar services like convertkit charge and you can drop that down even lower with an annual plan my friend who introduced me to active campaigning called it Infusionsoft functionality at MailChimp prices and I think there's a lot of truth to that so whether you're just starting out or you already have thousands of subscribers I think active campaign may be the best bang for your marketing automation buck so let's dive in and take a look under the hood and see what's going on inside the interface when you log in this is your account dashboard and it kind of gives you a high-level overview of what's going on in your account it will give you your number of active subscribers kind of a trend line which looks relatively flat but that's just because it doesn't do them out far enough and you have a kind of a feed of the recent activity of these this many people subscribe this many people unsubscribe this many people click through you've got a dashboard view of the campaigns those are broadcast emails or newsletters that are going out the automations that you have in your top contacts the main metric that I track in here is kind of daily new subscribers and so you can achieve that under this contact report and you kind of see if it fluctuates you know 116 new contacts hundred 66 and it just you know average you can look and see okay if there were some spikes you know what marketing effort may have led to that you can kind of dive into those metrics or if like you know it went way down you're like what happened on this day and you trying to figure out what's going on in there so we go back to the dashboard you'll notice that the account or the the interface is set up with a handful of kind of primary areas there's contacts campaigns automations lists forms and reports so if you're brand new to active campaign where you'll probably start is here with forms forms are you know your signup forms your intake forms for how people are going to get onto your list right so I've got you know dozens of these forms that set up you can see well you know how many entries how many people have subscribed via each of those but if you're just getting started you probably start with new form so it'll ask you to name your form I'm going to call this test form and one thing to know I'm on the active campaign light plan which means certain features are not available to me but all the functionality that I need is is available on the light plan so some of these you know floating bar floating boxes you can achieve with other software tools or if you want to do it all inside active campaign you can do that here as well if that makes sense for you so you name your form you pick a style in my case I only have one option what action do you want to have happen when somebody submits that form in my case I want to subscribe that person to my newsletter and there's other actions that you can add as well but you can actually do that on the next grit next screen so here's your test form you know you can change this subscribe for email updates that's not a that's not the best call to action in the world so I would probably sexy that up a little bit if you Mouse out of here you could say full name okay I don't really need to collect full name but I'll call this first name and you can also change the the styles of these of these buttons and fields as well if you want to play around with different color codes and all that probably more importantly you can change the look and feel of it but more importantly is okay what do you want to do after somebody submits this form so you have the option to show generic thank you thank you for signing up or you can direct people to a particular URL on your site like a thank you page that has you know an upsell or maybe it has a survey for people to respond or maybe it has a next call-to-action like follow me on social media or sign up for this webinar so that's a really cool feature as well and then you decide okay what other actions if somebody subscribes to this list what else do I know about that maybe the lead magnet is related to blogging or something so I could tag I could select action you know add a tag blogging if somebody you know is signs up for this so that's something that I can do in forms and then you'll hit integrate and this will give you the embed code for how you want to actually put this on your website alright let's exit out of here and we'll go into what happens next after somebody signs up a one important note is if you decide you want to add a tag you want to have some action later you don't have to worry about that if you forget to do it at the time of the form submission because what you can do is click on this entries button and it'll show you everybody who's signed up from that form and so you can click view all form contacts and then from here it's really easy to a bulk edit and say okay if all these people signed up for this form this form is related to topic XYZ I can add a tag I can add them to an automation I can remove certain tags I could add them to a sub list all sorts of cool stuff from there but let's dive in to the automations feature because this is something that's really cool inside of activecampaign the first thing you know if this is blank for you on a new account you might look at a new automation and it'll one thing that's cool is they have a bunch of like off-the-shelf ones that you can kind of customize to your needs so I'm using some of these engagement tagging ones where you know if somebody opens an email they'll get tagged as engaged if somebody doesn't open email for a long period of time they'll get tagged as inactive and you could start to sit and reinvent campaigns I think those are really powerful but for the sake of this demo let's let's start one from scratch so the first thing that you do is okay how is somebody going to enter this automation are they going to subscribe to a list let's say they have a tag added to them they open a forum there are a bunch of different ways that somebody could enter an automation the most common one is probably somebody subscribes to your list so let's let's play around with that one so if someone subscribes to any list it's going to run once and then you can create certain segments you can you can do that later as well let's say somebody subscribes to any list and then it's gonna ask okay well what happens next and so since I primarily use active campaign as an email provider let's say send email okay you don't have any emails to send let's create an email to get started so it kind of walks you through this process is step by step but you can name an email so it will call this welcome message and then it'll bring up the screen where you can either use one of these like pre-built templates that active campaign has or you can build build your own email from scratch so for the sake of this one you can kind of you know do what you want with this you know text only however you want to do your email email subject line you know welcome to side hustle nation something like that right and and you can go on about your about your day there what I want to go back and show you is kind of how I have the automations set up in inactive campaign so let's go back out of here and you can see one of the coolest things for me it was to send subscribers down the most relevant path for them based on what I know how could I be more relevant more helpful based on what I know about them so if somebody opted in for in our example blogging for instance I can send them a series of emails some service providers call this you know autoresponders or call this courses I can send them a series of emails specifically related to blogging and I think that is really really powerful so you know for example I can send them and it's gonna be hard to fit on one screen but you know I could send them hey have they already opted in for something else that's what already already onboard it means in my case I don't want to send them down a second path or they may have already received those emails but they're gonna get messages like hey here are the first five emails that you ought to have here are some ways to get more traffic to your site here are some of my favorite free plug plugins it's all stuff related to you know if somebody wants to build a blogging business it should be super relevant to them and the other cool thing that you can do inside of automations is actually under the reports tab if you look at the automation reports you can see how people are engaging with the automations that you have both on a high level and at a really granular level on a message by message basis so here under automation reports it'll show you how many people are going through each of these automations or have been through each of these automations and i'll tell you the percentage of people that have interacted with that so in the case of the blogging 170 percent of people have opened one of those messages which is it's pretty powerful it's probably higher than what I was seeing with my old kind of one-size-fits-all autoresponder so and then if you open up the specific automation it'll show you each of the messages in there and how they're doing in terms and rate and and click-through rate so very powerful stuff inside the automation reports the other main thing that I do with active campaign is send out a newsletter and so that's going to be under your campaigns tab so if we bounce over to campaigns you'll have kind of an overview of you know the most recent campaigns that that you sent and you know how any of you click on you know the individual reports you can see ok how many people open that you can you know do some sorting and stuff on here too but if you're just starting out again you probably look at the new campaign feature you'll name your campaign you can pick which sub segment of your list to send that to so if you have certain segments set up I'll show you in a minute how to get those you can send to certain segments of that list if you don't wanna blast everybody and then it'll go to ok how do you want to design this email and again it'll give you the template choices or you can kind of build your own from scratch so here are some of our template choices or again you can you know start start fresh and do your own thing under the campaign reports and kind of see how people are interacting with your different campaigns let's back out here and go to the campaigns so this will give you the dashboard overview of how people are interacting with your campaigns how many they were sent to how many people opened it so I tend to send in two batches which I don't know if you wouldn't want to mess around with that or not you know the most engaged subscribers get the message first that's why you see a high open rate and then one that's tagged non engaged so people that haven't opened the message recently gets sent to second and typically has a much lower open rate if we go to the contacts tab I'll show you how some of these filters work and some of the segmentations work so what's cool in here is a couple things first you can customize the columns that that you want to see in you know on this dashboard screen you can sort by date created if you want to look at just the most recent people added and if you click on any of these specific people you can see a couple things so let's see if we pick on her you can see what form they signed up through so this person signed up for one called May and just had to pick the one that's the hardest to pronounce May enough Nadja tough nah Jeff Abadi and it's cool I think it's cool that it's pulling in an avatar if it if it finds that person using the same email address elsewhere online and in this case they pulled in a Twitter profile sometimes you'll see Facebook and LinkedIn here as well which i think is cool if you're using active campaign you know as a sales tool or as a more CRM than I am but let's go and let me show you some of the filters and and one of the filters that I use most frequently is the geo-targeting so you can let's see if I hit geography and I use the area code one a lot for you know hosting certain meetups so say I want to have a meet-up in Seattle and I want to search for everybody in the 206 area code so it'll spin for a minute and it'll create that sub list and if I want to save this as a segment I can do that here okay so I can call this segment Seattle something like that the other segments that you can do you mean you can slice and dice just about any way possible so oftentimes I will do okay they haven't opened this message and they didn't click on this link I want to resend a message to make sure that people saw it that's kind of some of the stuff that I do in there and you can make edits to certain subscribers if you want to as well like if they you know didn't punch in their first name but it looks like John Smith dead gmail.com you can guess that the name is John whatever that you want to do there so that is kind of my overview of activecampaign if you're ready to take active campaign for a test drive of your own you can do so with a 14-day free trial through my affiliate link side hustle nation.com slash active campaign and of course for the sake of disclosure if you do end up signing up for a paid plan after that trial I will get a commission on the purchase side hustle nation.com slash active campaign and of course that's at no extra cost to you if you have any questions comments concerns definitely let me know in the comments below this video and I'll do my best to get you an answer on that until next time thank you so much for tuning in and I'll see you in the next video hustle on

Channel: Nick Loper

Views: 24,707

Keywords: marketing automation, email marketing, mailchimp, get response, convertkit, aweber, email list, sales funnel, activecampaign review, activecampaign vs convertkit, activecampaign vs aweber, best email marketing platform, email marketing automation, activecampaign automations, activecampaign pricing, activecampaign features, activecampaign free trial, active campaign review, active campaign demo, how to use active campaign, activecampaign demo, best email autoresponder

Id: KPdGdF9qxu0

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 22 2018