- Hey there, Nicholas
from GrowthMarketer here. And in this short video
I'm gonna take you through a very quick tour of ActiveCampaign. I'll answer some important
questions about the platform, I'll show you the pricing structure, and then I'll take you behind the scenes to look into one of my accounts, and I'll show you some
of the major features. If you're excited to
learn about ActiveCampaign in a hurry let's get started. (air whooshing) Okay, so what is ActiveCampaign. Well, it's a marketing automation platform although they refer to themselves as a customer experience
automation platform, it's just an interesting way for them to find a different way
of branding the platform versus just saying it's another marketing automation platform. But at its core marketing automation is built around email marketing. However, you can do a lot more than just send emails
through the platform. So you can also send SMS messages. And then there's a whole
bunch of integrations with third party apps. So you can use webhooks, you
can use Zapier integrations, and you can use a whole
bunch of native integrations to connect to, and send and receive data from many different sources, and this is gonna create
an opportunity for you to, like they say, automate the entire customer
experience for your business. Now, ActiveCampaign has
been around for a while. They were founded in 2003, but they didn't really start taking off until like 2015, 2016. And that's when everything
started shifting in the entire industry
towards marketing automation. Because prior to that people
had been using email marketing as sort of a one to many messaging channel where you could send
out these email blasts using something like MailChimp or AWeber. But then around 2015, 2016, people really started
catching onto this idea of let's segment our lists, let's use automated sequences, let's personalize our messages
depending on who's opening, who's not opening, who someone is, what they're interested in, and a whole bunch of different factors to create a more personalized
customer experience, and that's what really led to
the growth of ActiveCampaign. And now they have over 150,000 customers. And if you look over at G2, which is a great site for
comparing marketing software, you could see that for
marketing automation they're actually up there with HubSpot as really one of two of
the leaders in this space, and it's a very crowded space. You can see Marketo over here, here's Pardot from Salesforce, there's Klaviyo or Klaviyo, there's MailChimp, there's GetResponse, there's Keap which was
formerly known as Infusionsoft. So these are the sort of
the leaders of the pack, and you can see ActiveCampaign
and HubSpot are up there. And in my opinion for the reasons
I'm gonna show you shortly ActiveCampaign really is the best marketing automation
platform on the market. I've been using the platform since 2015. I was in the original cohort of ActiveCampaign certified consultants when that program launched in 2016, and I've been a certified
consultant ever since then. So I've been able to
work with this platform for many years now, and it just keeps getting better. So with that being said let's
look at some of the features, and why you would use this platform. And also I'll be honest, and I'll tell you why you shouldn't use it in some very limited use cases. So the is made up of a bunch
of different core services. The main one being email. They also have a landing page
tool that launched recently, and it's actually very robust, and they're continuing to improve it. They also have some SMS
messaging capabilities although they are limited
I will tell you that. Then they have a lot I've
chat or a messaging feature which is called Conversations. And then there's a limited number of social media integrations, probably the most important is a Facebook Custom
Audiences integration, so you can add and remove
people automatically to Facebook Custom Audiences. And then they have some
web personalization if you want to personalize a webpage based on the information that
you have in a contact record in ActiveCampaign you can do that as well. So those are some of
the main features here. Of course email is where
everything is based around. To create a contact
record in ActiveCampaign you have to have an email address, so that's going to be sort of that record that everything else is built around. Now, another huge part of
ActiveCampaign is the CRM. They have a full CRM that's built in, and what's really cool about this is that, something that actually
led me to this platform versus some of the other tools out there is that you can use it as your CRM, and you can also use it as your marketing automation platform. So prior to that there was
a lot of tools out there like Pipedrive for instance
that's a great CRM, but they don't have the
email marketing capabilities. So in this case you can
integrate everything, and HubSpot also does
a good job in this area where you have your CRM, and you have your marketing
or your email automation tools all built in one place, and that's gonna help you
keep the data in one place, and it's gonna make it easier to send, and communicate with your customers, with your prospects, with your entire audience. Okay, let's look at pricing real quick. So you can get started for
as little as $9 a month which is what I love about this platform. There's other tools out there
that have a freemium model, but it's a little bit misleading because you get in there for free, and you realize that it's
actually extremely limited, and when you start to pay for the platform it gets really expensive for some of these other
competitors in this space. But what I like about ActiveCampaign is that you can start for $9 a month, you get 500 contacts on the Lite plan, which is actually a pretty robust plan if you just need the email marketing, and the marketing automation features, and then you can scale up as you grow. So for instance for me
I'm using the Plus plan, that's $49 a month if
you had 500 contacts. But you can see as you scroll up, like if you have let's say 5,000 contacts, you would either be
paying about $79 a month on the Lite plan, or 135 a month on the Plus plan. And this is yearly where you're gonna save a little bit more money by paying yearly. You also have the option of paying monthly which you can see it's a
little bit more money there. So what I always recommend doing is start with the Lite plan
if that's all you really need, if you're just looking
to evaluate the platform for the email marketing, and marketing automation features, and you don't really need the CRM 'cause that's the major difference between Lite and Plus, is Plus is gonna give you the CRM, and some of these other
features like SMS marketing, the Facebook custom audiences
tool that I talked about. But if you don't need
those features right away, and remember you could
always upgrade the later I would just start with Lite. I would recommend starting monthly just so you can sort of test it out, and you're not gonna be locked into paying for the full year, and just start with the number of contacts you need to import. So if you're starting from scratch obviously you could
start with 500 contacts, but this is gonna depend
on the size of the list that you're bringing to ActiveCampaign. Okay, so we cover some of the basics, we covered some of the pricing, let's jump into my test account, and I'll just show you around. Now is a very empty account, but I just wanted to show you
some of the different ways that the features are set up. So this is gonna be your main dashboard, this is where you're gonna see activity. So for instance you'll
see who's unsubscribing, who's clicking, who's opening your emails. All that type of thing will
be here on the right sidebar. And then in the middle you can actually move these things around. Personally I don't find this that helpful because really you're gonna come in here, and you're gonna know what you need to do, whether it is to modify a contact record, create an automation, update a deal, check your conversations,
do something with your list, do something in settings. So in my opinion you're not
gonna spend this much time on the homepage so I wouldn't say that this is one of the
most important features. Now on the sidebar here you're gonna see some of the more important
things or actions that you're going to be engaging with. Now here we are inside a contact record. This is a record I just added real quick, and so it doesn't have any activity to it, but you're going to see that there's a lot that you can add to it. There's a whole bunch of default fields, and then you can add
custom fields as well. And then tags are very, very important. When you get into ActiveCampaign, you're gonna quickly realize that to do what you need to do you really need to have a good strategy for how you wanna tag your contacts. Because unlike the old platforms where you mostly worked around lists, and you'd have a whole
bunch of different lists, now it's better to have fewer lists, and really let tags be
the way that you segment, and automate your sending of
emails and other messages. So tags are very, very important. I have a whole taxonomy that I recommend when dealing with tags, and so I will certainly
share that in a future video, so make sure you hit that subscribe button if you wanna get that
video when it comes out. But this is basically the contact record. Next up you have campaigns. These are those one-time
campaigns that you could send such as a newsletter, that's where you would set it up. And you have a built-in email
editor in ActiveCampaign. It's pretty robust. I wouldn't say it's the best email editor, but you also have the option of creating fully custom HTML emails if you wanna do that, or if you wanna hire someone to create a custom HTML email you
can do that as well. Then you have automations. Automations are super powerful. And this is one of the things that sets a marketing automation platform apart from just like a regular
email marketing platform. So with automations you can
pretty much automate anything. If someone opens an email I
can tag them a certain way, I can send them a follow-up message. If someone gets added to a list I can put them through a welcome series. If someone unsubscribes I
can tag them a certain way. There's so many different things, it's pretty much limitless. Then you have deals. And again, this is only
if you're going to be on one of those higher tier plans where you're going to be using this as sort of a pipeline to replace
something like Pipedrive, where you need to see different deals, and you need to see different stages so you know who is a prospect, who you've pitched or
presented an offer to. And then you can move them through, you basically just drag them through these different pipelines, and this is fully customizable. Next step is conversations. This is the new live
chat and messaging widget that you can add to your website. I actually use it on our agency websites. So if you wanna take a look at it this is what it looks like. It's fully customizable
but it's pretty good. I would say it's not the best live chat, and messaging platform out there, but it serves its purpose. Now keep in mind this does
come at an additional cost to whatever you're paying
for ActiveCampaign. Then you have lists, that's where you're going to
have your main email list. And again, I recommend keeping
your lists at a minimum. Try not to overdo it with lists. Like for most clients I
think you can get away with having a customer
list, a prospect list, and maybe a newsletter list. You really don't need much more than that. Then over here on the site tab this is where you're gonna
find access for pages. And this is available
on some of the plans, and it's a very full-featured, and robust landing page builder. Then finally in the reporting tab there's a whole bunch of different reports that you could run. I won't go into too much detail 'cause that could be a whole nother video, but just know that there's a
whole bunch of different ways you can chop up and organize the data from everything you're
doing to get a picture of what is working for
you with ActiveCampaign. So there you have it, that's a quick tour of the
ActiveCampaign dashboard. One of the things I wanna cover before we go is integrations. 'Cause one thing that I really
like about ActiveCampaign is, while they have a lot of features they don't try to do everything, and they actually do this intentionally. They would rather help you connect to the tools you're already using than try to mimic every
single tool out there. And so there are platforms out there that try to be an all-in-one, but they end up being a jack
of all trades, master of none. In this case ActiveCampaign
focuses on what it's good at which is email, and landing
pages, and messaging, and some of those other core features maybe the CRM we could
include that in there. But then for all these other features what they do is they have this amazing library of integrations. There's over 850 apps
that you can connect to, they also work with Zapier. And so you can connect
to these other tools that you're already using let's say Calendly for instance, or any other type of scheduling tool, and then that's gonna
work pretty seamlessly with ActiveCampaign once you set it up. So that's another thing I
really love about ActiveCampaign is the integrations. Now, like I said in the beginning there's a few use cases that I would say are not ideal for ActiveCampaign. One I think stands out
more than anything else is e-commerce. Now I know ActiveCampaign
is actively trying to bring on more e-commerce clients, but in my personal opinion I think that there are
better platforms out there if you are an e-commerce business where you have something
like a Shopify store. Klaviyo is pretty much the market leader when it comes to a marketing
automation platform for e-commerce. So for that use case e-commerce
in my personal opinion I think you're probably better off going with something like Klaviyo. But for everything else out there, if you're running any
type of service business, SAS business, or pretty much anything
other than that situation where you have just an
e-commerce business, I think ActiveCampaign
is an amazing platform, and it is getting a lot
better with e-commerce so my opinion there may
change in the future. So that's where I'm gonna
leave this video at. If you have any questions go ahead and put them in the comments. I'd be happy to answer
them as best as I can. And I hope you give the platform a try. Thanks so much for watching this video, make sure to hit that like
button if you found this helpful, and also subscribe to my channel so that you'll get more
marketing tips in the future. Take care. (air whooshing)
