ActiveCampaign Tutorial for Beginners (Step-by-Step Email Marketing Tutorial)

in this video i'll show you step by step how to get started with the email marketing software active campaign and this is what i'll be covering how to get a 14-day free trial and set up your account how to import your contacts to activecampaign how to create a form where people can sign up for your email list how to build an email automation sequence and how to send out newsletter emails to your email subscribers i leave timestamps to all the steps down below in the description so you can jump around or come back to certain parts later on this is a step-by-step tutorial that is designed so that you can set up your active campaign account alongside watching this tutorial so that at the end of watching this video you have set up your active campaign account and also your email marketing system within activecampaign now activecampaign offers a 14-day free trial that you can use to test out all the features before you decide on a paid plan so let's get started the first step is to go down to the description of this video and click on the first link that you find there that link will take you to the website of activecampaign where you can sign up for a free trial account so do that now and we'll move on from there so the first link in the description will take you to this page of activecampaign where we can sign up for a free account the signup process is really simple you just have to follow along with the instructions that they give us here so the first thing we need to do is type in our email address to start our account so i'm just going to type in one of my email addresses because i already have an account with activecampaign so i'm just going to use a new email so type in your email and click start your free trial okay so the next step is to type in our names so just type it in here and click next step then we need to type in our phone number so i'm just going to do that real quick and then click next step okay so now they want to have some information about our business this is just so they get to know their customers a little bit better so they can improve their product so just type in whatever applies to you i'm just going to give them the information that i am doing online training education and i only have one employee which is myself and then i have um almost 5 000 contacts so between 2 500 and 5 000 but again just type in or select whatever applies to you then click next step okay so now i want to know what kind of goals we'd like to achieve with our active campaign account this again is just for them so for me it's to create a more personalized and automated customer journey and and build and send more targeted and segmented emails then i'm going to click next step and here they want to have information about what tools we are currently using you can also skip this step if you don't want to spend any time choosing those tools so i'm just going to click skip step then we have to choose a password make sure it's a strong password and also one that you can remember then we click take me to my account and that's already it we have now sign up for a 14-day free trial with active campaign we didn't need to give them any credit card information they will be asking for that once your trial runs out after the 14 days you're gonna have to choose a paid plan if you decide to keep using activecampaign so as we've just started a new account with activecampaign they give us this getting started tab on the top left here where we'll see one of eight things that we should do to get started with our activecampaign account and actually most of the stuff that you see here we're going to cover in this tutorial so don't need to worry about that tab right here so we're going to create a list we're going to which is already created actually and we're going to import our contacts we're going to build an automation we're going to create a form we're going to create a campaign and what we're not going to do is the bottom three things so they set up a pipeline track your activity on your website and integrate apps apart from maybe integrating a landing page application to your activity paint account so that you can get your contacts in your active campaign account from your landing page but other than this you don't need to worry about the getting started tab here because most of it we're gonna cover in this tutorial and if at some point you want to come back to this tab just click on the getting started and you will see this checklist again so what we're going to start off with is just clicking on the top left here on the active active campaign logo which will take you to the active campaign dashboard that you see whenever you log in to your active campaign account and i'm not going to cover what everything here is because mostly it's self-explanatory and right now not a lot of is going on because and this is a new act campaign account and we don't already have a lot of activity in our account but what you see is just an update of how your marketing is going so how many contacts you have how many contacts you have gained and how your campaigns are doing and you also have like a live update when somebody subscribes to your email list and all that stuff you can do a lot of things here you can also adjust your dashboard however you want to but uh what we're going to focus on in this tutorial is more to set up your active campaign account and you'll see along the way once you start using activecampaign that this dashboard will start to um to live and you will see the information there and after like a couple of months you can just adjust your dashboard however you want to so on the left side here you see an overview of the menu of the different features that activecampaign has and along this tutorial i will cover some of them on the bottom here you have the settings and also your account settings if at some point you need to change anything what's also very cool is the support so if you go to the bottom right you're gonna see the help icon here so whenever you don't know how to do something which probably is going to happen when you set up your email marketing um then i would suggest or i would encourage you to actually go ahead and contact the support tell them what you want to do because this it's hard to find something that you can't do with activecampaign it's a very powerful software especially for email automation so make sure to just click on this help sign here click on contact us and then just type in your question in the description here and sometimes they will hop on a live chat with you and sometimes when there's nobody around they will get back to you by email pretty quickly and a lot of the time when you have something more complex that you want to do they also send you like in tutorial video inside of your account where they show you exactly how to do whatever you want to do so make sure you make use of the support here but that's basically how um how activecampaign is structured you have the menu on the left side here and that's what you're going to use to navigate through activecampaign so the first thing that we need to do is add a physical address to your active campaign account because activecampaign doesn't allow you to send out emails without a physical address at the bottom of every email because by law it's required that you have a physical address of your company at the bottom of your emails so to do that we're going to click on settings on the bottom left corner and then we're going to click on addresses on the top left then we need to add at least one address i'm going to click on add an address on the top right and i'm just going to invent something here but for you obviously it should be your real company address and everybody will see that at the bottom of their marketing emails that you will be sending out so i'm just going to invent something here i'm going to type in example company all right so once you fill that out click on add address and that's already done okay so now we're gonna go back to the dashboard by again clicking on the top left side on the active campaign logo that will take us back to our dashboard and we also see the menu on the left side so what we're going to do now is click on lists to see if you already have an email list set up and as you see the master contact list is already set up for us in our new active campaign account so you don't actually need to create a new list you can use that list if you want to change the name of it just click on the the arrow on the on the right side here and then click on edit and then you can change the name to whatever you want to and also your list description or your list url but it doesn't really matter i think so i'm just going to leave it like it is and i'm going to close it down and you actually only need one list most of the time because you can segment your contacts by adding different tags which i'm going to show you how to do in this tutorial so this is the list where all of our email contacts will be saved on once they get on a list by importing them or by if they actually sign up on our form or on our landing page all right so now that we have set up our activecampaign account we're ready to get our contacts onto our email list and depending on your specific situation you might want to skip some parts of the tutorial that are going to come up next again you'll find timestamps to all the steps down below in the description of this video so just skip ahead to the next part if something doesn't apply to you so first i'm going to show you how to import your existing contacts to your active campaign account so if you already have an email list and you're switching from another provider i'm going to show you how to import your existing list then i'm going to show you how to create a form that you can then put on your website where people can enter their information and sign up to your email list so if you're giving away lead magnet on your website just put that form under your website or in your website so that people can give you their information and you can send them whatever you're giving away and some of you might not have a website so what you're probably going to use is a landing page to get people onto your email list and as activecampaign doesn't have a landing page builder you're going to want to use a third-party software to build that landing page and then integrate that landing page with your active campaign account and i'm going to show you how to integrate your landing page builder to your active campaign account so that when somebody signs up on your landing page that you created with click funnels or cartra or some other provider and then they automatically get onto your email list inside of your active campaign account so again just watch the part that is relevant for you and skip ahead by clicking on the timestamps down below in the description if something doesn't apply to you so this part is for the people that already have an email list and they want to import that email list into your get response account so we're already on the list section here if you if you're not here just um click on on list on the left side here and then you get to your overview where you see your lists like i've already noticed we already have a master contact list in our account and to import our existing contacts what we're going to do is click on import contacts on the right side here and then we have some different options to import our contacts so we can either just click on the copy paste your contacts here and what's that okay agree thank you very much okay so we can click on the copy and paste your contacts which is a field where you can manually import your contacts but most of you are not going to want to use that tool because you have a large email list of maybe a thousand or even more people and so you want to export your email list as a csv file so go to your other email marketing provider and and if you don't know how to do this just go to ask their support how to how to export your email list and then you will export it as a csv file as you see here and then we can import that csv file to our activecampaign account so once you have that csv file just click on import from file and then we're gonna look for that file i have prepared an example file here and then you click on open and that will import uh our existing email list into our active campaign account and then we have some different fields to map so if we check how that document looks in our in our csv file you see that it has different columns so here let me just make that a little bit bigger you see that it has an id it has a campaign name it has the name of the person with the email it has the email itself it has a lot of different information that we can import here and you have to tell activecampaign what information you actually want to import and in my case right now all i'm interested in is basically their name and their email address because that's all i'm going to use for my email marketing but maybe you want to use some other um you want to import some other information as well like maybe you have their ip address or their location that you want to import as well and you want to make sure that what's here on the left side actually makes sense um on the column on the right side so for example the name column um is for me i want to tell activecampaign that whatever is under name this is the first and the last name because when i get people's contact i always just ask for the name and whatever they can type in their first name or their full name doesn't really matter so when i send in a customized email with the name i just type i just use the first and last name tag so i'm just going to choose first and last name and then email it already recognizes that the email is the email address obviously and then you want to scroll down and what we have here it already assigned the birth date to the subscribe date which doesn't make sense so you want to make sure that you either change that to birthday but i think that's not available here so you can either create a new field and say okay that's the birth date or i don't care about their birth date so i'm just going to click on do not import this field because i i don't ask for the birthday anyway so i don't really have that information anyway and then i'm going to scroll down and you see last update it says last name which is wrong as well so i'm just going to click on do not import this field as well so once you've done that you're going to scroll all the way down and then you have to select the list that you want to import those contacts to so as we've seen we already we only have one list so we're going to choose the master contact list for our email list and then if you want you can also add some tags so um let's say now it's july 2020 um maybe you you just type in july 2020 that's the import of july 2020 or if that's like a specific list like let's say like that's your customer list um then you can say customer and then a specific product so that you know who those contacts are so let's say you want to send out an email about a specific topic that's only for your customers then you can can filter your addresses by this tag so if that makes sense for you just add a tag here i'm just going to leave it because i only have it's just an example so i'm just going to not going to add not going to add any tags here um and then as we don't have any any context already it doesn't make sense to update existing contacts because we don't have any so i'm just going to leave that as it is and then i'm going to click on import now so that might take a little while depending on how large your email list actually is and then once it's finished we're going to check if those people are actually on our email list now so now it says that it is completed so we're going to go to the left side again click on lists and then we see our master contact list and we see now that we have seven active contacts which is our own email address and the six that we have just imported all right so that's how we import our email list into our active campaign account okay so what i'm going to show you how to do now is how to create a sign up form that you can then put on your website where people can enter their name email address phone number whatever you want to ask for and then it will import that contact to your email list with an active campaign again this is for people that actually have a website and they can put a form onto their website and not for people who want to use a landing page if you want to use a landing page and you don't want to use a website then i suggest you use another software to create that landing page and then i'm going to show you after this one and how to integrate that landing page with activecampaign but for now let's go ahead and create a form that you can put on a website again if you don't want to do that then just skip ahead to the next part of the tutorial all right so to create a form we go to the left side here and we're gonna look for the form icon which is the second one on the bottom it says form so i'm gonna click on forms and then we can click this away here and then on the bottom sorry on the top right you can click create form and then you have some different form options here what i'm going to show you how to do is create a simple inline form you can give that form a name let's say for example you want to give away a lead magnet let's say you give away um let's say a youtube checklist that's something that i'm giving away on my youtube channel so i'm going to use that as an example so i'm going to use i'm going to name that form youtube checklist so that i know that this is the form that i've put in on my website where i give away the youtube checklist and then again we do an inline form and the action when somebody enters their details into that form will be that it will be that that contact will be subscribed to our master contact list which is our only email list something else that i want to do here is actually add a tag to everyone that signs up you with that form so i'm going to click on add an action here on the bottom and i'm going to select add a tag and then i'm going to type in lead magnet a colon youtube checklist so that way i know that when a contact has that tag then i know that this person went onto my email list because they downloaded or they requested my youtube checklist so i know that when i have content i want to send out about youtube specifically i can just filter my contacts with that tag and then i don't bother anyone that isn't actually interested in that specific content okay so i'm gonna click create and that will take us to the builder and where we can build our form and i'm gonna show you exactly how to do that so you already have like an example form right here this is kind of the canvas where you can build everything or you can ch where you can change everything and you can use that as a basis and then i'm kind of design it however you want to but the first thing that we're going to do now is go to the right side here and click on options and then let's see what they give us here so on submit which means that if somebody submits their contact information what should happen so what happens now is that they will go to a default thank you page which looks like this so they will just get to the page thanks for signing up and that's it basically and what i would actually recommend you do is to change that to a specific url so you can change the show thank you to open url and then you can type in any url that you want to show up when somebody gives you their contact information so this would be something let's say i give away a youtube checklist and then i send them directly to like a landing page or to a page on my website where there's like a video of me giving some more tips about youtube or like a story about me so that i can start building that relationship and it doesn't just say thank you um for signing up so that's something you can think about or you can use this simple thank you thank you here and you can also write something like um check your inbox for the youtube checklist so that they know what they need to do now but again the prettier option would be to actually design a new website or actually send them to like one of your youtube videos or whatever you think is appropriate here okay so um i'm just gonna type in google so there's something in here google okay now um the next thing um is the form action we already said we want those people to get on our master contact list so this is fine right here i'm gonna leave it like that what we're gonna do is actually click on the opt-in options on the right side which is the the little gear icon here on the right side opt-in options and what i do is i turn off the opt-in confirmation and what that does is when somebody gives you their contact information and you have this opt-in confirmation in then they will be sent an email where the they need to again confirm that they actually want to be on your email list and this is what this email will look like so and they will have to click on that button inside of that email so that you can actually start sending them emails through your automations um i like to i usually turn that off and i include in my first email that i'm gonna send them anyway they can unsubscribe at any point by just clicking on the link at the bottom of any email that i sent them and um there are some advantages if you have it turned on like you you filter out all the fake email addresses if you might get a lot of those and you also only get the people that really want to be on your email list and you might get a little bit less complaints um however um i think it works pretty well for me if i just turn that off i think i get more leads i don't miss any leads by um by having that turned on and if somebody wants to opt out of my email list they can just click the link on the bottom of your email so i turn that off but it's totally up to you whatever you want to do so i'm going to click save here then i'm going to go back to the right side and that's actually everything that we have to change here the tag we already added the tag here lead magnet youtube checklist so that's already in there that's fine so we can actually start to design our form and you can design the form however you want to however it makes sense for you i'm just going to show you a little bit i'm going to play around with it a little bit so that you can see how how to change anything here so on the right side you have the options style and field if you want to change a field or you want to add some fields you can just drag any field that makes sense for you into the left side here so if you want to ask for a phone number just drag in the phone block here into your form i'm just going to create a simple name email form and i'm going to try to make it as minimalistic as possible because i want to have the design on my website and i want to have that form relatively minimalistic so the first thing i want to do here is actually get rid of this branding on the bottom here and the way i do that is by going to style and then scrolling down you might not be able to see that because of my face here so if you scroll down here you see the ac branding and you want to turn that off in order to get rid of this active campaign branding here now the next thing i'm going to do is actually delete and the title and also delete the text here and i'm going to change this field i don't want to have the title full name so what i can do is just delete this one then it will get rid of it and i'm just want to type in i just want to type in name all right and then for the uh what i also want to do is make that required so i want to make sure they if somebody doesn't type in a name then it kind of says gives them information that they need to enter a name otherwise they can't sign up so what you need to do here is again click on the field and then make sure to click and to check that box here required so that people know they need to enter a name and the email obviously is always required because that's how they can sign up okay so the same thing i'm going to do with email i'm going to delete the header here and just change that to email email all right now what i want to do is kind of center that text here and make everything a little bit bigger um that's something that is not very easy to do within this builder here i don't know why they make it so hard but you have to type in a little bit of html code so the way you need to do that is again by going to style and then scroll down and then you have the custom css and what you need to do here is click on the inspector maybe you don't see it again because of my face i'm sorry so i'm gonna drag it over okay so again on the right side you click on style then go down click on inspector and then click on whatever you want to change here so i'm going to click on this field where it says name and then i'm going to type in text um align colon center semicolon and then it takes that text and puts it in the center the same thing i'm going to do with email so i'm going to again click on inspector then i'm gonna choose the email field here and i'm gonna copy this code here paste it down here and then again the email will be in the middle then for the submit button i want to make it i want to make the width as wide as this form here so what i'm going to do is again click on inspector choose the submit sign submit button here and then um i'm gonna type in width um hundred percent and that should make it 100 white um now i want to just uh change the font size of let's say the submit button so i click on this i go to the right side again go to style and then where it says submit make sure you have the semicolon in here and then you can click enter and then text font size i think it is colon and let's say 18 pixels let's see if that worked yeah so now the submit sign is a little bit bigger and that's just how you can play around with it i know that's kind of a pain to change it like that but if you want to change like the colors you can just um go to style go to text and change the color text or the background you can make that you can make that green if you want to and play around with it a little bit until it looks fine until it fits well into your website and if you do want to have some text on your form and then you can just go to the fields and drag in the header into your form and then you can change the text on the right side here you can say something like and where can i send my youtube checklist and then maybe also change the text of the button send send it now and you know you get how it works okay so let's say we're happy now with our form and ready to put it on our website so what we need to do is go to the top right here and click on integrate and now you have some different options how to integrate it to your website what you can also do is just um if you want to send people a link to your form and you can just go to to link here and then just copy that link and send it to them but probably you're not going to use that because it just it looks like this and it's not really well designed and it's just our form so if you want to put it on your website you're going to click on the embed tab here and you can either do a full embed or a simple embed i think the difference is that if you do a full embed then if you change something in activecampaign in your form then it won't change on your website so i would recommend you actually use the simple embed and use that html code to actually put that on your website i'm not going to cover how to put it on your website there are plenty of tutorials about how to do that and i assume that if you have a website you already know how to embed an html code into your website and once you have it embedded and somebody signs up with that form then that person will be put on your email list and if you do that i would suggest that you do a an exam or do a test you just type in an email and a name and then check if it's actually on your email list and that's actually it that's how to create forms we can just click save and exit and now on the forms we have our youtube checklist form so now i'm going to show you how to integrate your landing page provider with your active campaign account so that if somebody signs up with their name and email address on your landing page then they will end up on your contact list on your email list with in active campaign and i don't know what landing page builder you have i personally use click funnels so i'm going to show you how to do it with click funnels but you can probably do it the same way with your own landing page builder and the way i'm going to show you how but if you want to have a step-by-step guide on how to do it with your specific landing page builder i would suggest you just type in youtube integrate let's say card draw with active campaign tutorial something like that and i'm sure something will come up and if not just contact the support of activecampaign and you will find a way i'm sure so the way we do that is by going to settings on the bottom left here and then we click on developer click on developer and that's where we see our api access so you have to give your landing page builder api access to activecampaign so now what we need to do is copy this url here the api url copy this one and then go to your landing page builder so for me this would be click funnels this is my click funnels account so i'm going to go to account settings on the top right and then i'm going to scroll down and on the left side here i have integrations and there i can go to add new integration and then i can choose activecampaign i'm just going to type in active here and then it already comes up here then choose activecampaign and then we have to give it a name so i'm just going to name it activecampaign2 because i already have an integration with activecampaign and then i'm going to paste the api url in this field where it says api url paste it in here and then i'm also going to copy the api key copy this one then go back to your landing page builder and then paste that here and then all i have to do is click add integration and now you see it is added i have now active campaign 2 and active campaign so i'm going to delete this later again but that's just to show you how this works so now i created a simple example landing page here in click funnels and now on the landing page builder i have to tell and where that contact should go to when somebody signs up on that landing page and on clickfunnels the way it works is you have to go to settings on the top here and then you click on integrations then on the right side they will pop up like a bar here where you can select integration so i can select get response i also have get response integrated but i'm going to choose active campaign and then the action will be to add to a list so i'm going to click add to list and then we will click funnels now sees all the lists inside of my active campaign account so i'm going to choose the master contact list and now you see it's connected so when i click save now then every contact that will sign up here obviously this is not a finished landing page but if it would be finished then everybody that signs up here will be put on my uh email on my master contact list within activecampaign so again that's an easy way to integrate um your landing page builder with activecampaign um it's just give your landing page builder api access to activecampaign and again the act campaign probably has some tutorials how to do it with your specific landing page builder and i'm sure you'll find something online where you see exactly how it works step by step okay so now we have set up our form or have integrated our landing page builder that people can use to sign up for our email list to sign up for our email newsletter and what we want to do now is actually create an email automation sequence that triggers every time somebody signs up for our email list so what most people do is they give something away for free in order for to get people to sign up for their email list and most people give away like a digital product like a pdf document of a checklist an ebook or a video course something like that and that gets people to sign up for their email newsletter so what we want to build now is an automated sequence so that some when somebody signs up it will automatically send them an email giving them all the information they need giving them the lead manual that they asked for and then i'm also going to show you how to build that thing further so that you can have follow-up emails like every other day or so for however long you want to and keep marketing to them or keep i'm telling them about your product your company or yourself whatever your business is about so i'm going to focus more on how to build that automation sequence within activecampaign and not so much on the content of your emails because that's really specific and individual to yours to your company and to your business so i'm just going to show you how to build the automation within activecampaign so that you have a basis that you can build off of for your specific business okay so to start building our automation we're going to go to the left side here on this little gear icon with the arrow around about it and it says automations so i'm going to click on automations and i already have one in here but we're going to build one from scratch so to build one from scratch we're going to go to the top right here and click on create an automation and then you have some different example automations that you could use as a as a basis but i'm going to show you how to build one from scratch so we're going to choose start from scratch here then click continue and that will open up our canvas to build our automation and automatically opens a window where we need to define the start point of our automation so what will trigger that automation and for us um it will trigger uh the if somebody subscribes to our email list it will be triggered so we're going to choose the first one here subscribes to a list i'm going to click that click continue and then we have to decide what list we want to trigger that automation from and we only have one list right now so we could choose master contact list if you have many lists then choose the right list that you want to to use this for or any list if for every list you want to have the same automation then just choose any lists but for now we're going to choose master contact list run only once and i'm not going to segment the contacts entering this automation we're going to click start okay so um then we're going to close this up real quick and this is what our canvas looks like so it's like a visual automation sequence that you can build here it's very um you can you can really see how it looks because it's all visually which is a big help to kind of keep the overview of your automations so here we have the first block it says content subscribes to master contact list now what i usually do is i tag the people entering a specific automation so i have many automations for different topics so now in this video i have made an example with giving away a youtube checklist for people that want to grow their youtube channel so what i want to make this automation about is youtube so people are interested in youtube so what i'm doing is that everybody that gets on this automation i will give them a tag that they are interested in youtube so that when at some point i want to send out an email for people that are interested in youtube then i can just filter by that tag and then only the people that are interested in this in this topic will get that email i already have tagged them by the by the lead magnet that they have downloaded so i usually tag them by lead magnet and also by interest so the first thing that we'll do when somebody gets on that list we'll do the tag so we'll click on the plus sign here and then we can add an action and there are different things a lot of things here with an active campaign that you can do and what we want to do now is we want to go to contacts and then we're going to look for add a tag i'm going to choose add a tag and then i will define a new tag that i will add to those people i'm just going to name it interest because that's an interest tag and then i'm going to say youtube so that i know that those people are interested in youtube okay so gonna click save and then we have our first block um after somebody signs up for our master contact list then the second thing like i said um people that will subscribe to that list will want to have that checklist so we're going to create an email now giving them the checklist that they asked for and also welcoming them to our email list so we're going to click on the plus sign to move further in our automation and then we're going to click on sending options and then we have the option to send them an email to send them an sms like a text message if they have given us their phone number you can do that as well with an active campaign but for now we're gonna stick to email so i'm gonna choose send an email then i don't have any emails saved yet in my new active campaign account so we're going to create a new email um that we're going to send out to our new subscribers so send an email we're going to click on create an email okay so what's the name of that email then again choose a name that makes sense for your specific situation i'm just going to use um welcome email colon youtube so that i know that this is the first email that they'll be getting and it's also for the people that are interested in youtube okay welcome email youtube create that's uh the name is only for you to see that's not something that they will see it's just so that you remember what that email is about okay so again here you have some different templates that you can use and that kind of look like newsletters like promotional emails and you can try to use them the problem with them mostly is that they are likely to go to the spam folder instead of the inbox because they have a lot of graphics in them and that's mostly emails that com big companies send out to people um and they will go to spam a lot so what i tend to do is just do simple text emails that kind of look personal and looks like just a regular person would email them so what i do is i just build them from scratch so i'm going to click on build from scratch on the top left corner here then you get some different template options that you can choose and what i would suggest to do is just choose the newsletter option on the left side here and if you want to choose if you choose the text only option you can only really use text and you can't even insert links so mostly probably most of you will need to insert a link to your lead magnet so you're probably going to want to use the newsletter option here on the left side so we're going to choose the newsletter click ok and then we can define our sender details now this right here is what people will see in the from section so from who they got those this email and i usually just do my first name or my full name here and then most now this is the email that will be seen by the people um from who from whom they got that email so when this right here will be the email that you have signed up with for activecampaign and if that's like a gmail idra gmail address or a hotmail or aol or whatever then you want to change that to your branded email address so i assume you already have a domain name and a branded email address that you can use here and i would highly suggest you actually use one because it looks more professional for your business and um so with activecampaign it's pretty special that you don't even have to confirm your branded email address with activecampaign you can just type in anything here so i could just type in simon at google.com and i will it would be displayed as simon google.com but that makes it very easy to use active campaign so i for example use i'm using the the domain uh learnpassiveincome.com so i'm going to use this one simon learn passiveincome.com and then it will be displayed as simon learn passiveincome.com and to the people that get that email it will actually be something like simonettelearnpassiveincome.com by the active campaign server but really doesn't matter so just type in the email address that you want to use here and also if you want to change the email address that the emails the replies will go to if somebody replies to your email we will also go to this email address and if you want to change that then click on this little arrow sign here and then change the email address here but i'm going to use the same one here and that's that's fine now the email subject obviously you know what the email subject is it's just the first thing that people see the title of the email and obviously you want to choose something that makes them that that um tells them if it's like the first email then people are actually actively going into their inbox looking for your email so make it something like welcome here's your free here's your youtube checklist just so they know okay that's just what i have requested so that's the right email okay then i'm gonna click continue and now we get into the email builder of activecampaign and there's like a example email that you can build off of and i'm just going to show you real quick how to to use this stuff it's just basically the same thing as when you use the form builder you can just drag different things from the right side into your canvas here so if you want to have a new textbook just drag it in and just and then you can start typing basically and you can also align your email on the left side here which is what i usually do because it looks more like a regular email if it's like in the middle then it's kind of not as when somebody just writes you a regular email um so i'm just going to delete the picture here and i'm also going to delete the spaces on the top here like this and also the text block okay so um what i usually use is i'm gonna use the font size 14 so it's a little bit bigger and then you can start writing your email so i'm just gonna write something real quick so we have an example um like normally obviously you want to spend some more time on creating your emails but this is more so that you understand how to use the active campaign so i'm just going to you write something real quick all right so i've just written something real quick i'm thanking them for signing up for my email newsletter um here's the checklist you requested then this we're gonna make a link so they can click on it and then download that youtube checklist and the way i do it usually is i just upload that pdf document to my dropbox and then i'm going to create a dropbox link to that checklist to that pdf document and then i'm going to link it to my email so if you want to link something in your email just highlight the hyperlink that should become a hyperlink then click on this link icon here and then just paste your your link to your document in here so you can put it on google drive on dropbox whatever you want to i'm just going to type in an example here so that you see that it will become a hyperlink um i'm going to click on ok what i could also do here is actually add a tag and so that when somebody clicks um that link uh it will be the tag will be added so i could send something like this downloaded youtube checklist so that whenever somebody downloads that when somebody clicks on it it will give them the tag download youtube checklist but that's up to you if you want to do that okay so now you see that it will it has become a hybrid link [Music] okay so um something else you can do here is actually add your social links so on the right side here let me drag that over okay here so on this right side here you have some different things you can just drag in and the social links are just links to your facebook to your instagram or whatever so you can drag that in here let's do it under our text right here and then we can just enter the links to our social media account so let's say i want to do facebook twitter youtube instagram that's it so i'm gonna turn off all the other ones and then i'm gonna click next okay so then on this block you're gonna see the links to your social accounts and um what i also would suggest to do is you save those blocks that you're gonna use often your form because you're going to have the same font you're going to have the same font size and everything in every email you can save those blocks so that you don't have to create them new every time so the way we do that is by clicking on the gear icon here on the right side and then when we're going to click on save to content library we're going to can give that a name text template one i'm gonna save that and also the social links i'm gonna save that as well save the content library social links one and then whenever i wanna use them again i can go to the right side here and click on and drag the social links over so it's a lot quicker when you create new emails i also have like one that i've created before here photo of myself so i can drag that down here if i want to so i have inserted a photo of myself if i want to include that in my emails just as an example here so just play around with the email editor it's very easy to use you can pretty much change everything um like any other email editor basically okay so now when we are finished with our email we can then go ahead and click on next and then it will open up some more options for us so again we can change the subject if you want to here then we also have the option to change the pre-header text that's like a preview of the content of the email that people see in their email provider and you have the possibility to change that if you want to if you wanna make them a little bit more curious what the email is about so they actually click on the email then you can change it here but i mostly just leave it as it is and then the from email we already changed that reply email is fine as well message name that's just for me and then obviously you have to give the address at the bottom of every email along with the one click unsubscribe button that you can't really change that has to be there at every in every email then um i would suggest you just leave this option on so that you actually can track how many people open your email and how many people click on your emails because that way you can see what emails will work well and what emails will not work so well if you have a low open rate you want to change the title like your subject a little bit and if you don't get a lot of link clicks then maybe you need to make the link more prominent or get them entice them a little bit to actually click the link so make sure those are turned on so that you actually get that information and you can do reply tracking or google analytics if you want i just usually keep that off and what i also would suggest to do is do a test email just send a test email to your gmail account or whatever you're using so that you see that the email looks good that it will actually go to the inbox and you can then make some changes if it doesn't look like you want it to look you can also do some previews here how it will look like on a desktop version so that looks fine to me so let's close it up and then what um what activecampaign provides you with is that spam checker so they will scan your email from some trigger words like if you use like discount or free or just all those promotional words that people use in spam emails if you have too many of them then it will say that this email will probably go in the spam folder so you might want to go back to your email and change some things up so that you actually pass that spam test that's a very handy option to have here okay so now when we're finished we're gonna click on finish on the top right and that way we have created our first email so now um we are still here where we need to select the email that we want to uh put here so now we change we select the welcome email youtube and click save okay so now our automation is built a little bit further so the first thing that happens is we give them a tag and then we send out the first email where we give them what they requested now the second thing i want to do is actually let the automation check if they actually opened the email or if they clicked on any links so that i can and based on that information i'm gonna work further in my automation so what i wanna do is if somebody doesn't open that email then i wanna give them like a second chance to to see that email so if they within two days are not opening that email i want to send them the same email again giving them a lead magnet but with a different title so maybe um that first title just didn't work the first subject line didn't work so i'm gonna i'm gonna send them a second one and that's what i'm gonna build here in that automation i'm gonna show you how to do that now so after that we're gonna click on plus sign and i'm gonna click on conditions and workflow then we're going to use that wait block and we're going to click on wait until specific conditions are met and that's where activatepaint is really powerful you have a lot of possibilities what you can choose here so what i want to choose is the actions and then i'm going to choose has opened and i'm going to choose the email that i've created here so welcome email youtube is the one that we've created just now and as some email providers to actually block um software's like active campaign from tracking if somebody opens the email i'm also going to use um has clicked the link so and the link click should always be tracked um i don't i think a lot of providers they can't block the link tracking so i'm always using either has opened or has clicked the link so make sure you change this from and to or and then click on actions again has clicked on the link and then choose the right email which is the welcome email youtube and then any link and that's already it we're gonna click on save and like i said i wanna do that for two days so we're gonna set the time limit for up to two days okay so it gives them now time it gives them two days to actually open that email up and if they haven't opened that email up they will get the same email again with a different subject after two days so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to check if they have open so i'm going to use again i'm going to click on conditions and workflow and then i'm going to use an if else block click on if else and then again select the condition it's the same thing as before actions has opened choose the right email then again i'm using the has clicked again just to make sure that it works actions has clicked on the link welcome email youtube has clicked on any link okay so click add and then you see you will have two different paths that people can go now the people that actually have clicked um or opened within two days we'll go to the yes column here and the ones that happen will go to the no column and like i said the ones that go to the no column i will send them another email so the way i do that is by clicking on the plus sign here and then go to sending options send an email and like i said i want to send the same email again but with a different subject so this that's the right email welcome email youtube but so i can change the subject up i have to go to the arrow here and then click on copy and edit okay so now you see it's a copy so i can actually change things inside of that email without changing things on the first email that i've sent out so i'm just gonna go here on the i'm just gonna go to the to the gear icon on the top right here and i'm gonna change the subject up so um i'm i'm gonna write something like here's what you requested and then something like um like brackets download maybe that will get them to click or maybe they haven't seen the first email and that will get them a new email in the inbox and they will see it again this just mostly like 10 percent or something will open a second email but it will not open the first email so you can actually re-re-activate some of those subscribers click on close because the the content is exactly the same i'm gonna click on next on the top here i'm gonna leave all that as it is gonna click on finish and that's it so now after two days when they haven't clicked anything they will get the same email again with a different subject okay so now what i want to do is i want to check again if they have opened any of those first two emails um or after that and clicked any link of those first two emails so again i'm gonna click on the plus sign here um gonna say wait so they get another two days now wait for us until specific conditions are met click ok and then again i have to define the conditions here so now i have uh i want to check two emails so have the have they opened any of the first two emails so click on actions has opened and then it's the first one welcome email youtube or actions has clicked on a link welcome email youtube where is this this one and then again i want to do the same thing for the second email okay so actions has opened then welcome email youtube copy and then also the same thing with the link actions has clicked on a link welcome email youtube copy any link okay so again the way the reason why we do um opened and link is because some email providers are blocking the information if they have opened it so maybe it tells active campaign that the the email hasn't been opened but it actually has been open so we're going to use the link tracking as well to kind of combat that okay so now we're going to click on save this will be a little bit of a larger block here and again i'm going to give them two days to open that second email two days save okay okay so from here there are two ways you can go so you can either just throw everybody out from your list that haven't opened opening any of your first two emails within those four days or you can just keep them in your automation and what i usually do is i just keep them in my automation because i do a clean off my list all like a couple of months anyway so i'm not too worried about having inactive contacts on my list and um you want to do either of those two because if you have too many inactive contacts on your list your open rate will drop to a very low percentage and that will tell email providers like gmail and aol that your emails are probably spam because many people don't open that email so they will not show the email to the people that are active anymore so that hurts your open rate so make sure you either do that sequence and throw out the inactive ones and or just every two months or three months just clean your list by uh by just throwing out all the inactive contacts that haven't been opening any of your emails for the last couple of months okay so what i'm going to do with those no matter what happens is i'm going to send them down the next couple of emails that i'm going to send them so i'm going to click on the plus sign here then i'm gonna choose um sending options where is it go to so i'm gonna go to another action click on this one and then i'm gonna drag this up here so we haven't created anything on the left side here for the people that actually have opened the first email so we're gonna continue on the workflow by sending them more emails so what people usually do is they send the first email giving them the lead magnet saying hello and then they have some follow-up emails um give them some more information some more value maybe sending them some more information about their company and then eventually they will pitch a product to them so let's say if i had a youtube course right now i could give them my youtube checklist and then i could give them some more tips in my in my emails let's say seven or five to seven more emails where i give some free content sent them to my youtube videos and then eventually let them know that i do have a paid youtube course that they could purchase if they wanted to i don't have one right now but that's probably what i would do if i would have a youtube course so what we do here is um my plan is to send one email per day and so i'm going to click on the plus here then i'm going to go to sending options send another email and then we're going to create a new email so you already know how to create a new email just click on create a new email here and then create your email so let's say um i have created that new email now and i'm gonna choose choose it so let's say um let's say it's this one obviously that's an email that we already used here but just for the sake of this tutorial to make this a little bit more uh quicker here and we're just going to use this email click save and um then um i have the new email that will be sent actually i forgot something now so now and that email would be automatically sent as soon as somebody opens that email and that's not what i want to do i actually want to wait uh one day until they get that second email so what i want to do is before they get the second email i want them to wait at least a day so i'm going to go back here to the plus right here and then i'm going go to conditions and workflow click on wait then wait for a specific period of time then i'm going to click on one day and then what what's also very what's also very powerful an active campaign is that you can actually say okay i only want to send them emails on weekdays and not on weekends or i only want to send them emails at let's say at 10 pm because that's a very good time to send emails so that more people see it and we also want to use that option so they will wait at least a day and then they will also wait until it's 10 a.m and a weekday so that my open rates will be higher as well so i'm going to click on the plus sign here between weight and the email that i'm sending and then i'm going to click on on weight again and then on wait until specific conditions are met so we're going to select the condition date and time and then i want to have the current day of the week contacts time zone is and then i'm going to choose weekday because most people on the weekends they are not reading emails and i want them to actually read my emails so i'm going to try to send them to them only on weekdays and i'm going to send another condition here to actually send it at 10 a.m so here i'm going to use the end select the condition date and time current time context time zone is 10 a.m all right click click save now time limit save okay so now what's going to happen is people get onto our contact list they're gonna get the tag youtube the welcome email will be sent out it will check if if the people open the email if not they will get the second email and with the different title uh which is actually the first same as the first one and then the people that click on on any of those emails or or open them they will go down the further automation where they wait today and then if it's a weekday and 10 am they will get the next email and again here on the second column here i can now drag go to another action to that left column here so even if they if they do open the second welcome email or don't they will still go down the further automation on the left side and here's what where i would just keep doing the same thing over and over again so i would just um after that email wait another day wait until it's a weekday and 10 a.m again send them another email and then keep building that up until i have my full automation sequence so to make it a little bit quicker you can just drag your blocks that you're gonna use again down here to the next plus and then i'm going to click on copy single action and stay at their current position and then you have to just the same block down here i'm going to use that for this as well copy single action stay at the current position so now after that email it waits again a day and for a week then 10 a.m so i can send another email sending options send an email and just choose obviously want to create a new email here and then it's a it sends the second email if you want you can also wait uh two days so you could change this one to two days here if you don't want to send so many emails you want to drag that out over a period of a month and you want to ascend every two or three days you can also do that here that's really up to you and what kind of customers you actually have and that's the basics on how to um how to build an automation sequence within active campaign this is a very small percentage of what you can do here what i've just showed you that's mostly how i start my automation sequences i just send them a second um welcome email for the people that haven't opened and then i just go through um through with uh just waiting a day sending them another email and that's like the basics and when i want to do something special then um you can do everything with in here you can send them um you can send them also text messages and all that kind of stuff again make sure if you if you don't know uh how to do something just contact support and they will actually create a short tutorial for you how to do exactly what you want to do inside of your account so um again that's just an example you don't have to build it the same way i did that's just um to give you a feel on how to use that that automation builder um i think it's very awesome you can do a lot of things with it so um i like it a lot all right so what i'm going to show you how to do now is how to send like an individual one-time email to your email subscribers which is like called a newsletter so let's say you have a blog and you will have a new blog post and you want to share that with your audience or you have a course launch or a new youtube video and you just want to let your people know about that thing then we're not going to use an automation here we're going to use the campaign tool within activecampaign so we're going to go to the left side and click on campaigns and then we're going to create a new campaign so click create a campaign we're going to give that campaign a name so let's say i have a new blog post and i want to share that so i'm just going to name it blog post blog post july and depending on how complex that campaign will be you want to choose one of those options here so i'm just going to use the standard one because it's just a one-time email that i want to send either right now or in a couple of days you can also do like an automated sequence which is a little bit more complex but for now we're going to stick by the standard one-time campaign then we're going to click on next choose the list that you want to send that campaign to click next and then again we see some different templates that we could use but again i'm going to start from scratch and again choose the newsletter option as a template here as a subject um let's say what i've been up to recently obviously you want to make a little bit of more uh title that makes people a little bit more curious than this but just as an example i'm going to use this one here click continue and then again we see the same template that we've seen before in our automation tool and what we can do now is we can actually use those save blocks that we have created before in our welcome email so if you go to saved on the right side here you have those saved blocks so let's say i want to have the same format of text i'm going to drag the text example in here and i also want to have a picture of myself at the bottom i'm going to drag that in here and also my social links at the bottom also drag that in here check if everything's okay looks fine click save and then i'm going to delete everything that i don't need so delete this here and i'm going to delete the picture and also that at the bottom again that at the bottom um that unsubscribe link you can change that one that has to be there and it will there will also be your address there and also i want to align it to the left side i always do it like that and obviously you want to change the text here to whatever is relevant to your your email there so let's say i have a new blog post just as an example and then obviously send them the link to the blog post so again link highlight it click on link and then insert your blog post link in here and then this will become a hyperlink where people can click on and get to your blog post all right then let's say we're finished so we're going to click on next here it's the same thing again like in the automation tool you have the subject that you can revisit once again the pre-edit text if you want to change that the email from and to the list that you're sending this to your address and again the tracking options then the schedule so you could either send the email right away or you can schedule it so if you want to schedule it let's say i want to send that tomorrow um tomorrow at 10 10 a.m i'm just gonna change that at 10 and then i have to select this one to on and then it will be sent at 10 am the next day i can again send a test email which is also always something i recommend and i'll also do a preview here and spam check passed which is always good and then i'm basically ready click finish and now my campaign has been scheduled and tomorrow at 10 am this email will go out to everybody that is on my email list so i hope this video helped you getting started with activecampaign and if it did i really appreciate if it go down and give this video a thumbs up because it really helps out my channel also leave me a comment down below if you have any questions at all and i'll make sure to get back to you as soon as possible if you want to see more tutorials for me about email marketing about affiliate marketing or online marketing in general just make sure to subscribe to the channel and also hit the notification bell next to the subscribe button so that you don't miss any new videos that i put out with that being said thank you very much for watching and i look forward to seeing you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Metics Media

Views: 55,207

Keywords: activecampaign tutorial, activecampaign, active campaign, activecampaign tutorial for beginners, activecampaign tutorial 2020, activecampaign demo, activecampaign api, activecampaign automations, activecampaign vs getresponse, activecampaign vs mailchimp, active campaign for beginners, active campaign automations, how to use activecampaign, activecampaign vs convertkit, activecampaign email marketing, activecampaign autoresponder, activecampagin ge, activecampaign tutorial 2021

Id: tc1kru1iwIw

Length: 74min 47sec (4487 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020