Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices

To start constructing an automation in ActiveCampaign, begin with a “trigger.” There are a number of methods you can set off an automation, including: When a tag is added When a contact signs up for a list When a contact submits a type E-commerce and on-site choices (offered in the “Pro” plan) When the contact reaches a certain point in another automation.

From there, you can start constructing the actions in your automation. Some actions that are readily available in ActiveCampaign’s automations are: Send an e-mail Notify a staff member Wait conditions If/then conditionals Split traffic for screening Avoid to other parts of the automation Track objectives (The contact can avoid to the goal’s place in the automation.) Start or end another automation, or end the current automation Post a webhook Subscribe or unsubscribe the contact to/from lists Update contact details Add and get rid of tags Include a note Lead scoring, SMS and website messages, and Facebook Customized Audience management are all “Pro” functions – Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices.

Contrast with ConvertKit‘s Automations, which are more restricted. On ConvertKit, you can set off an automation when: The contact sends a type The contact makes a purchase A tag is contributed to the contact A custom field is updated with a specific value From there, you can create Conditions, to check whether the contact has a certain tag or custom field worth.

Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices

You can likewise create Occasions, which are a bit like ActiveCampaign’s Goals, however without the reporting. You can track an Occasion when: A tag is added or eliminated The contact buys A date takes place A custom field is updated with a particular worth You don’t develop emails in ConvertKit’s Automations.

For more on how ActiveCampaign compares to ConvertKit, read my ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign comparison. The main method I construct my list is through an email course. ActiveCampaign makes it simple for me to build my e-mail course exactly how I want to develop it. Lots of marketers build really basic email series for their “e-mail courses.” A contact register, and then that contact instantly starts getting lessons.

It was easy to construct with ActiveCampaign, however difficult when I was with MailChimp. I do not do that method. My email course is by hand synced with this countdown timer on my website. You need to register by Friday night, and a brand-new course begins each Monday morning. When I initially attempted this approach, I was on MailChimp.

Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices

Here’s the automation I utilize to invite new trainees to my Style Pitfalls course. There’s a couple of things going on here: The automation sends out all contacts a “welcome e-mail (Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices).” The automation verifies that it’s not Friday. If it’s not Friday, the automation waits till it is Friday. At 11am, it sends out a “pump up” e-mail to get the trainees prepared for next week’s course, and encourage them to share it with pals.

The contact will begin getting lessons the following Monday early morning. If it is Friday and after 7pm, the contact missed registration for next week’s class. They’ll get the pump up e-mail the following Friday morning, and lessons the Monday after that. It was impossible for me to automate this with MailChimp.

When I run a webinar, I don’t want to send out the very same email to everyone on my list. I desire to send them the proper email for their level of engagement – Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices. Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices. Here’s the automation I use to promote an evergreen webinar: First it validates that they haven’t currently purchased the item I pitch in the webinar.

Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices

Then it sends a series of e-mails to get them interested in the webinar, and to encourage them to sign up. If they register, they right away hit the “Objective” towards the end of the webinar, and the automation ends. If they do not sign up, they get added to an automation promoting a rebroadcast of the webinar. Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices.

This allows me to tailor my messaging, in other automations, based upon the contact’s engagement with the webinar. Here’s the WebinarJam integration panel: I can include tags based upon whether the contact registered, attended, missed, or based upon the length of time they remained in the webinar. These tags can then activate automations within ActiveCampaign.

It costs me money, and it makes it more likely that my emails go to spam or Gmail’s promos tab. People who don’t open my emails make it harder for other e-mails to get to the people who actually want them! The “Pro” strategy of ActiveCampaign has actually lead scoring developed in.

Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices

Here’s an automation I got from ActiveCampaign’s library of automations, which I use to inform which contacts aren’t engaging with my emails. When a contact subscribes, this automation includes a “0 days” tag. As time passes, it adds brand-new tags for 7 days, 30 days, 60 days, etc Each time they open an e-mail, a different automation removes them from this automation, eliminates all of those tags, and begins this automation over again.

This automation can be overwhelming in the beginning, and this is one of those cases where I want ActiveCampaign had a more out-of-the-box option. However, since you can do anything with ActiveCampaign, often you need to build things from scratch. ActiveCampaign has an option to delete non-active subscribers, which I do not advise.

Some subscribers don’t have actually tracking switched on, so their opens aren’t tape-recorded. Others still wish to be subscribed however have been hectic. Here’s my reactivation series: I send out one e-mail asking if they still wish to be subscribed, and briefly discussing why I keep my email list clean. In one week, I send them another e-mail (if they currently clicked on the verification link in the previous e-mail, they’ve already been removed from the automation using a separate automation) – Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices.

Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices

The automation then unsubscribes them. My e-mails likewise have a link to a form where they can enter their email address to let me understand that they don’t have tracking made it possible for. This type adds a tag that I use to filter those contacts out. Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices. I used to include this tag when they clicked on a link, however when individuals don’t have tracking on, it makes those links not work so dependably! I just send out a basic “do you still desire my emails?” confirmation.

Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices

You can likewise see whether the conclusion rate has actually increased or decreased, the length of time it considers contacts to reach that goal, and you can browse all contacts to see who did and didn’t reach the objective. ActiveCampaign’s Message Variables is my preferred feature. It conserves me a lots of effort and time, and neither MailChimp nor ConvertKit (upgrade: 9/2020 ConvertKit now has ” bits”) has an equivalent function.

Let’s state you have the given name of just a few of your contacts, which holds true with my list. I generally do not need a first name to register to my list, but sometimes I get a very first name, such as when someone buys an item. Wouldn’t it be nice to greet your contacts by name, in the cases when you have it? You can do this, but it’s troublesome.

I’m also filtering for generic terms included by other systems, such as a dash, or “Guest.” If they have a given name, I say “Hey,” and after that their given name. If they don’t, I just state “Hey there,” (Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices). By developing a Message Variable in ActiveCampaign, I can easily alter my greeting according to whether or not I have the contact’s very first name.

Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices

I created a variable that’s simply %greeting-hey%. If I have the contact’s name, it reveals up in the e-mail. If I don’t have the contact’s name, it defaults to “Hey,”. Where Message Variables truly conserve me a great deal of time is by enabling me utilize the very same automation over and over again for my webinars, and I can rapidly alter out all of the information.

Here are variables for a webinar I run called “Bust Through Creative Blocks.” You can see I have a bunch of various variables here, such as the date and time of the webinar, the cost of the product, deal terms, discount coupon code, and more. Each time I run a brand-new webinar, I can change each of these variables to match any schedule modifications or deal changes.

And here it is in an email. This message variable allows me to quickly change out a countdown timer. I did discuss earlier that one of the cons of ActiveCampaign is their e-mail editing experience. I switched from MailChimp, and MailChimp occurs to have the very best e-mail modifying experience. I truly like to send out basic emails.

Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices

I’ve found that very difficult to do with ActiveCampaign. For some time, I was modifying e-mails in ActiveCampaign’s hybrid editor, which is quite clunky. For a long period of time, I used ActiveCampaign’s hybrid HTML and WYSIWYG editor, which was set off by a standard design template I created. The user interface for the HTML editor appears like it was pulled from some free open-source project. Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices.

Nevertheless, including images is a little a chore. You need to select them from a file internet browser. There’s no drag and drop option. ActiveCampaign’s HTML email editor requires that you compose totally in HTML. The alternative to this, if you want to have control over the HTML, is to edit pure HTML, with a preview on the side.

Including images to ActiveCampaign’s rich full-screen editor is a clunky experience. You need separate text boxes for above and below the image. Lately I have actually begun utilizing ActiveCampaign’s rich full-screen editor. They have some great templates, however I still wish to send the simplest e-mail possible. They do have some plain-looking emails, but they have some degree of minimal format, which you can’t eliminate – Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices.

Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices

But, with some adjustments, I can make my e-mail pretty fundamental. I can make it instantly use up the entire window, and I can tweak the typography to be slightly bigger, and have a little bit more leading. The most discouraging part of ActiveCampaign’s rich full-screen editor is including images. Imagine you have actually just typed out a fantastic e-mail. Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices.

You can’t just include an image to a block of text. Rather, you need to develop two blocks of text: one for before the image, and one for after the image. If you have actually made any formatting modifications, you’ll have to watch on those to remain consistent. That’s something to handle when you want to include one image, however when you desire to add several, it ends up being a huge chore.

They even have a standard mage editor where you can crop the image – Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices. MailChimp’s editor is the best I’ve seen in all of the email marketing platforms I’ve tried. You have access to the underlying code, so you can produce a really plain email, offered you make a fundamental template initially.

Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices

MailChimp’s integrated image editor is very effective. You can resize, crop, and add customized text to your images. I miss MailChimp’s email-editing experience (Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices). It would save me a little time to have that very same experience on ActiveCampaign. However the highly-customizable automations I can build on ActiveCampaign more than make up for that prospective time savings.

ConvertKit’s e-mail modifying experience is extremely plain, but easy to navigate. Their templates are restricted, which is great with me, but their email editing experience is slightly much easier in that you can develop inline images, and you can create a totally plain email, and even edit the underlying HTML. If you wish to make some fast edits to some e-mails in an automation, with ActiveCampaign, it’s cumbersome.

I’ll click on an e-mail, and it takes me to the editor for that e-mail. Note that I can’t even Command + Click to open it in another tab. Whether they implied to or not, ActiveCampaign has disabled Command + Click from the automation editor. If I wished to change back and forth in between different e-mails, I would intuitively be inclined open the same automation in various tabs, then open the respective e-mails from each of those tabs.

Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices

In the Automations area, there’s a “Handle Messages” location. From here, you can see all of the messages in each of your automations. You can modify each one, or you can Command + Click to open each in a brand-new tab to more easily modify your entire series. Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices. Contrast that with ConvertKit’s Sequences.

Again, it would save me a great deal of time to have ConvertKit’s automation email modifying experience on ActiveCampaign – Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices. However picking an e-mail marketing platform is like picking a spouse. ActiveCampaign offsets it with their Message Variables, more robust automations, and advanced segmentation. Mentioning division, another factor I switched from MailChimp to ActiveCampaign was that MailChimp has limited segmentation choices.

You can integrate qualities with an AND/OR operator, and you can mix and match those groups of traits with another AND/OR operator. With MailChimp, you can just sector by AND/OR, however MailChimp’s Pro strategy allows more sophisticated segmenting, for an extra $199 a month. In my search for the best email marketing platform, I saw numerous others, some of which I have actually currently pointed out.

Active Campaign Best Tagging Practices

ConvertKit. If I weren’t on ActiveCampaign, I would probably be utilizing ConvertKit. Their automations are much simpler to develop, though they aren’t as versatile as ActiveCampaign’s, and their divisions options aren’t as sophisticated either. They also do not have goal tracking, or Message Variables. MailChimp. You already understand that I switched from MailChimp to ActiveCampaign.