Given that email marketing greatly boosts sales, it is but natural for businesses and online marketers to focus efforts on launching email marketing campaigns and marketing automation. It took me awhile to realize that I needed help with email marketing automation and for a moment my business sustained losses.
Needless to say, I tried several platforms available in the market. As a business owner, I did not want to focus on doing the legwork and tried MailChimp, Marketo, and OfficeAutopilot. They all offered automation, and my company started gaining profit, but I needed more.
I wanted something that generated real results.
One of my marketing pals told me about ActiveCampaign. I did not pay him any attention at the time. Some months later he was bragging about how his company has grown. He was sending me graphs and screenshots. I realized he was right with the marketing automation platform that he was using. Following his advice, I started using ActiveCampaign.
I wouldn’t be writing this article if my chosen platform was wrong.
WHAT IS ACTIVECAMPAIGN?
It is an all in one email marketing automation tool and CRM platform that lets you gather lead information and eventually send emails automatically for your email campaigns with ease and in style.
This platform is not just about email marketing. It is a platform that gives you the opportunity to grow your business and manage your leads and clients. With relevant information based customization of automation and campaigns, you are sending the right messages at the right time to the right customers.
WHAT DOES ACTIVECAMPAIGN OFFER?
Email marketing
What I like about the ActiveCampaign is that it is mobile friendly and has free templates and image hosting. When designing my material, the drag and drop interface makes it easier to bring out my creativity.
Through it is an automated email marketing campaign, you can send individual emails, newsletters, campaign follow ups and much more.
Contact Building
Having a strong contact list is essential to your marketing campaigns. ActiveCampaign pushes the limits in contact list consolidation. While other platforms allow you to upload your contacts in a limited format, ActiveCampaign pretty much accepts almost all formats.
Furthermore, you can even grab and upload your contacts from a separate CRM. You can transfer your contacts from Zoho, Highrise, Salesforce and many other platforms to the ActiveCAmpaign system in just mere minutes.
Name it, ActiveCampaign has a transfer tool for it.
CRM
The CRM that ActiveCampaign comes with is so useful you can view the history of a contact from both ends of your marketing and sales channels on a single screen.
Data Segmentation
With data segmentation, you can use customer demographics for targeted campaigns. This tool allows you to segment your contacts by demographic items such as contact data, website activity, social media data, online interactions, and much more.
With segmented contacts, I can create sequences of actions and emails based on contacts’ behaviors, interests, and actions on the site.
Marketing Automaton
These platforms allow me to view insights which let me create lifetime value models for my customers. In turn, I am able to profile my customers and use targeted or segmented marketing messages to increase my conversions.
Sending out the right information at the right time. This is very important. And with the rich profile that I have from my target buyers, my campaigns are right on target.
Through the marketing automation that ActiveCampaign provides, I can send welcome emails, special greeting emails, sales followups, and emails for trigger campaigns. All of this is possible with the wealth of information I have in the CRM.
ActiveCampaign offers intelligent automation and lets you have countless options on how you can run your campaign.
WHAT ELSE DOES IT OFFER?
Caters to all Campaign Types
Whether you are already launching your campaign or you want to test out your design and create the best email, ActiveCampaign works with you. In the campaign setup tool, you can make use of email templates that let you start with email designs rather than start with blank pages. Turning a blank page into something fancy is a tasking process. The next step is to write your content, insert images and send a test email to yourself. Though this seems complicated, you do not have to worry because the drag and drop function lets you control everything with ease.
ActiveCampaign gives you all the tools you need to launch effective email campaigns.
Custom Forms
We all know contact building is essential for every website or business online. As an all in one platform, ActiveCampaign also provides an easy to use tool that can help you customize your sign-up forms. Again the drag and drop function has made sign-up form creation easy.
Just like the campaign creation tool, you can create an effective signup tool in just minutes. Add forms to your website and even your Facebook page to greatly increase your contact list.
Campaign Management Features that Make Your Life Easy
Sending the right message at the right time for a vast contact list manually is an insurmountable task. Automating it is one thing, automating the right way is another. Not all platforms offer tools that allow you to target customers with messages and personalized content at the right moment.
With and effective CRM integration and ActiveCampaign’s autoresponder and triggered campaign tools, certain behaviors act as triggers for sending out emails.
Another great automation that these tools offer is date-based campaigns. You can send out 4th of July and Cyber-Monday coupons for all you like. You can even send birthday coupons for your members which give your website a personal touch.
Split Testing
The A/B or split testing tool lets you test out emails and track which works best for certain campaigns. It is up to you to test out various parts, titles, content and many more elements in the email to come up with the most effective one.
Basically, your overall email marketing campaign is right in the palm of your hands with ActiveCampaign.
Resources and Support
With useful video tutorials and easy to understand user guides, you have a walkthrough of virtually all you need to know about email marketing. It will also help you with the tools that you need for whatever campaign you are running.
There is an email contact form for your other inquiries and live webinars for personalized instruction. If you have simpler questions, you can check out the FAQ page.
WHO IS IT FOR?
Email marketing by far is one of the most effective ways of directly affecting your contacts and actually getting more sales in the process.
Think of it this way; there are 3.2 Billion email accounts at present. Tapping into 1% of that is 30 million. One percent of 3 million is 30,000. This means making an impact to 0.01% is still a good rate to get customers. This is why email marketing and marketing automation is essential for online marketers, SMBs, enterprises, and other online website owners that want to improve sales and ensure company growth.
MAIN BENEFITS
With email marketing and marketing automation, you have fewer things to think of and have more time focusing on your business. However, you cannot rely on just any tool to do the job for you.
I recommend ActiveCampaign because of the way it gathers data and information and how it lets you use it. With its contact building tool, you can practically consolidate all of the contacts that you have into one massive CRM without experiencing any technical glitches.
Being able to send emails right on time at the right moment to the right person means your campaigns are accurate and rich in information. With the user or profile information that you have, data segmentation really helps you run campaigns efficiently and effectively.
Furthermore, with split testing, you can practically come up with the best email format.
PRICING
Using the right tool sometimes mean paying extra costs. With ActiveCampaign, costs remain affordable while rewards go off the charts. Their Lite plan starts you off with $17 per month, moving up according to your number of users, and features, going up to $149 per month for their Enterprise plan.
