Active Campaign Developer Documentation

To begin developing an automation in ActiveCampaign, start with a “trigger.” There are a number of methods you can set off an automation, consisting of: When a tag is included When a contact subscribes to a list When a contact sends a kind E-commerce and on-site options (readily available in the “Pro” strategy) 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 offered 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 skip to the goal’s location 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 Include and remove tags Add a note Lead scoring, SMS and site messages, and Facebook Customized Audience management are all “Pro” features – Active Campaign Developer Documentation.

Contrast with ConvertKit‘s Automations, which are more minimal. On ConvertKit, you can activate an automation when: The contact submits a kind The contact purchases A tag is contributed to the contact A custom-made field is upgraded with a particular worth From there, you can develop Conditions, to inspect whether the contact has a specific tag or custom field worth.

Active Campaign Developer Documentation

You can also produce Occasions, which are a bit like ActiveCampaign’s Objectives, but without the reporting. You can track an Event when: A tag is added or gotten rid of The contact makes a purchase A date takes place A customized field is upgraded with a specific value You don’t produce emails in ConvertKit’s Automations.

For more on how ActiveCampaign compares to ConvertKit, read my ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign contrast. The primary method I construct my list is through an email course. ActiveCampaign makes it simple for me to construct my email course precisely how I ‘d like to develop it. Many marketers construct very easy e-mail series for their “email courses.” A contact register, and after that that contact immediately starts getting lessons.

It was simple to construct with ActiveCampaign, but impossible when I was with MailChimp. I don’t do that technique. My email course is by hand synced with this countdown timer on my site. You have to sign up by Friday night, and a brand-new course starts each Monday early morning. When I initially tried this method, I was on MailChimp.

Active Campaign Developer Documentation

Here’s the automation I utilize to welcome brand-new students to my Design Pitfalls course. There’s a couple of things going on here: The automation sends out all contacts a “welcome e-mail (Active Campaign Developer Documentation).” The automation verifies that it’s not Friday. If it’s not Friday, the automation waits up until it is Friday. At 11am, it sends out a “pump up” e-mail to get the students ready for next week’s course, and encourage them to share it with buddies.

The contact will start getting lessons the following Monday morning. If it is Friday and after 7pm, the contact missed out on registration for next week’s class. They’ll get the pump up email the following Friday morning, and lessons the Monday after that. It was difficult for me to automate this with MailChimp.

When I run a webinar, I don’t desire to send the exact same email to everyone on my list. I want to send them the appropriate email for their level of engagement – Active Campaign Developer Documentation. Active Campaign Developer Documentation. Here’s the automation I utilize to promote an evergreen webinar: First it confirms that they have not currently acquired the product I pitch in the webinar.

Active Campaign Developer Documentation

Then it sends out a series of e-mails to get them interested in the webinar, and to motivate them to sign up. If they sign up, they right away hit the “Goal” toward the end of the webinar, and the automation ends. If they don’t register, they get added to an automation promoting a rebroadcast of the webinar. Active Campaign Developer Documentation.

This enables me to tailor my messaging, in other automations, based upon the contact’s engagement with the webinar. Here’s the WebinarJam combination panel: I can include tags based upon whether the contact signed up, went to, missed out on, or based upon for how long they remained in the webinar. These tags can then trigger automations within ActiveCampaign.

It costs me cash, and it makes it most likely that my emails go to spam or Gmail’s promos tab. Individuals who do not open my emails make it harder for other emails to get to the people who truly desire them! The “Pro” strategy of ActiveCampaign has actually lead scoring integrated in.

Active Campaign Developer Documentation

Here’s an automation I received 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 includes new tags for 7 days, thirty days, 60 days, etc Each time they open an email, a separate automation removes them from this automation, removes all of those tags, and begins this automation over again.

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

Some customers do not have tracking turned on, so their opens aren’t recorded. Others still wish to be subscribed however have actually been hectic. Here’s my reactivation series: I send one e-mail asking if they still desire 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 have actually already been eliminated from the automation using a separate automation) – Active Campaign Developer Documentation.

Active Campaign Developer Documentation

The automation then unsubscribes them. My e-mails also have a link to a type where they can enter their email address to let me understand that they don’t have tracking made it possible for. This form includes a tag that I utilize to filter those contacts out. Active Campaign Developer Documentation. I used to include this tag when they clicked a link, however when people don’t have tracking on, it makes those links not work so reliably! I just send an easy “do you still want my e-mails?” verification.

Active Campaign Developer Documentation

You can likewise see whether the conclusion rate has actually increased or reduced, how long it takes for contacts to reach that goal, and you can browse all contacts to see who did and didn’t reach the goal. ActiveCampaign’s Message Variables is my favorite function. It conserves me a lots of time and effort, and neither MailChimp nor ConvertKit (update: 9/2020 ConvertKit now has ” snippets”) has a similar feature.

Let’s say you have the given name of only some of your contacts, which holds true with my list. I generally don’t require a given name to register to my list, however in some cases I get a given name, such as when someone buys an item. Wouldn’t it be great to welcome your contacts by name, in the events when you have it? You can do this, but it’s cumbersome.

I’m also filtering for generic terms added by other systems, such as a dash, or “Visitor.” If they have a first name, I say “Hey,” and then their given name. If they don’t, I simply say “Hey there,” (Active Campaign Developer Documentation). By constructing a Message Variable in ActiveCampaign, I can quickly alter my greeting according to whether or not I have the contact’s first name.

Active Campaign Developer Documentation

I created a variable that’s just %greeting-hey%. If I have the contact’s name, it appears in the email. If I do not have the contact’s name, it defaults to “Hey,”. Where Message Variables really save me a great deal of time is by enabling me use the same automation over and over once again for my webinars, and I can quickly change out all of the details.

Here are variables for a webinar I run called “Bust Through Creative Blocks.” You can see I have a lot of various variables here, such as the date and time of the webinar, the rate of the item, offer terms, voucher code, and more. Each time I run a new webinar, I can change each of these variables to match any schedule changes or offer changes.

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

Active Campaign Developer Documentation

I have actually discovered that very tough to do with ActiveCampaign. For awhile, I was modifying emails in ActiveCampaign’s hybrid editor, which is quite cumbersome. For a long period of time, I used ActiveCampaign’s hybrid HTML and WYSIWYG editor, which was activated by a basic design template I created. The interface for the HTML editor appears like it was pulled from some totally free open-source project. Active Campaign Developer Documentation.

Nevertheless, adding images is a bit of a task. You need to pick them from a file web browser. There’s no drag and drop choice. ActiveCampaign’s HTML e-mail editor requires that you compose totally in HTML. The option to this, if you wish to have control over the HTML, is to modify pure HTML, with a preview on the side.

Including images to ActiveCampaign’s abundant text editor is a clunky experience. You require separate text boxes for above and below the image. Lately I have actually started using ActiveCampaign’s rich text editor. They have some nice templates, however I still wish to send out the plainest email possible. They do have some plain-looking emails, however they have some degree of minimal formatting, which you can’t get rid of – Active Campaign Developer Documentation.

Active Campaign Developer Documentation

But, with some changes, I can make my e-mail pretty fundamental. I can make it automatically use up the entire window, and I can modify the typography to be somewhat larger, and have a little more prominent. The most discouraging part of ActiveCampaign’s rich full-screen editor is including images. Envision you’ve just typed out a fantastic email. Active Campaign Developer Documentation.

You can’t just include an image to a block of text. Instead, you have to create 2 blocks of text: one for before the image, and one for after the image. If you’ve made any format changes, you’ll have to watch on those to stay constant. That’s something to handle when you want to add one image, but when you want to include a number of, it becomes a huge chore.

They even have a fundamental mage editor where you can crop the image – Active Campaign Developer Documentation. MailChimp’s editor is the best I’ve seen in all of the email marketing platforms I have actually attempted. You have access to the underlying code, so you can produce a genuinely plain e-mail, offered you make a standard template first.

Active Campaign Developer Documentation

MailChimp’s integrated image editor is incredibly effective. You can resize, crop, and include custom text to your images. I miss MailChimp’s email-editing experience (Active Campaign Developer Documentation). It would conserve me a little time to have that very same experience on ActiveCampaign. However the highly-customizable automations I can develop on ActiveCampaign more than offset that potential time cost savings.

ConvertKit’s email modifying experience is extremely plain, however simple to navigate. Their templates are limited, which is fine with me, however their e-mail modifying experience is a little much easier because you can create inline images, and you can produce an absolutely plain e-mail, and even modify the underlying HTML. If you wish to make some quick edits to some emails in an automation, with ActiveCampaign, it’s troublesome.

I’ll click on an email, and it takes me to the editor for that e-mail. Keep in mind 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 emails, I would intuitively be inclined open the same automation in different tabs, then open the particular e-mails from each of those tabs.

Active Campaign Developer Documentation

In the Automations section, there’s a “Manage Messages” location. From here, you can see all of the messages in each of your automations. You can edit each one, or you can Command + Click to open each in a new tab to more quickly modify your entire sequence. Active Campaign Developer Documentation. Contrast that with ConvertKit’s Series.

Again, it would save me a great deal of time to have ConvertKit’s automation e-mail editing experience on ActiveCampaign – Active Campaign Developer Documentation. However picking an email marketing platform is like picking a spouse. ActiveCampaign offsets it with their Message Variables, more robust automations, and advanced segmentation. Mentioning division, another reason I changed from MailChimp to ActiveCampaign was that MailChimp has restricted division options.

You can combine attributes with an AND/OR operator, and you can blend and match those groups of traits with another AND/OR operator. With MailChimp, you can just segment by AND/OR, however MailChimp’s Pro plan enables more sophisticated segmenting, for an additional $199 a month. In my look for the ideal e-mail marketing platform, I saw many others, some of which I have actually currently pointed out.

Active Campaign Developer Documentation

ConvertKit. If I weren’t on ActiveCampaign, I would most likely be utilizing ConvertKit. Their automations are a lot easier to develop, though they aren’t as versatile as ActiveCampaign’s, and their segmentations options aren’t as sophisticated either. They likewise do not have goal tracking, or Message Variables. MailChimp. You currently understand that I changed from MailChimp to ActiveCampaign.