Active Campaign For Nonprofits

To begin developing an automation in ActiveCampaign, start with a “trigger.” There are a number of ways you can set off an automation, consisting of: When a tag is included When a contact signs up for a list When a contact submits a kind E-commerce and on-site choices (available in the “Pro” plan) When the contact reaches a particular point in another automation.

From there, you can start constructing the actions in your automation. Some actions that are available in ActiveCampaign’s automations are: Send an email Inform a group member Wait conditions If/then conditionals Split traffic for testing Skip 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 Include and eliminate tags Add a note Lead scoring, SMS and site messages, and Facebook Custom Audience management are all “Pro” features – Active Campaign For Nonprofits.

Contrast with ConvertKit‘s Automations, which are more restricted. On ConvertKit, you can set off an automation when: The contact submits a type The contact purchases A tag is contributed to the contact A custom-made field is updated with a particular worth From there, you can develop Conditions, to check whether the contact has a certain tag or custom-made field worth.

Active Campaign For Nonprofits

You can also produce Events, which are a bit like ActiveCampaign’s Objectives, but without the reporting. You can track an Occasion when: A tag is included or removed The contact buys A date occurs A custom-made field is upgraded with a particular value You do not develop e-mails in ConvertKit’s Automations.

For more on how ActiveCampaign compares to ConvertKit, read my ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign comparison. The main way I build my list is through an email course. ActiveCampaign makes it easy for me to build my email course exactly how I wish to construct it. Numerous online marketers build extremely basic email sequences for their “email courses.” A contact signs up, and after that that contact instantly begins getting lessons.

It was easy to construct with ActiveCampaign, but impossible when I was with MailChimp. I don’t do that approach. My e-mail course is by hand synced with this countdown timer on my website. You have to sign up by Friday night, and a new course starts each Monday early morning. When I initially tried this methodology, I was on MailChimp.

Active Campaign For Nonprofits

Here’s the automation I use to invite brand-new trainees to my Design Pitfalls course. There’s a few things going on here: The automation sends all contacts a “welcome email (Active Campaign For Nonprofits).” The automation confirms that it’s not Friday. If it’s not Friday, the automation waits until it is Friday. At 11am, it sends out a “pump up” e-mail to get the trainees prepared for next week’s course, and motivate them to share it with pals.

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

When I run a webinar, I do not wish to send the same email to every person on my list. I want to send them the proper email for their level of engagement – Active Campaign For Nonprofits. Active Campaign For Nonprofits. Here’s the automation I use to promote an evergreen webinar: First it verifies that they haven’t currently purchased the item I pitch in the webinar.

Active Campaign For Nonprofits

Then it sends a series of emails to get them interested in the webinar, and to encourage them to sign up. If they sign up, they right away hit the “Objective” toward 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 For Nonprofits.

This allows 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 the length of time they stayed in the webinar. These tags can then activate automations within ActiveCampaign.

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

Active Campaign For Nonprofits

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 new tags for 7 days, one month, 60 days, etc Each time they open an email, a different automation removes them from this automation, removes all of those tags, and starts this automation over once again.

This automation can be frustrating at first, and this is one of those cases where I want ActiveCampaign had a more out-of-the-box solution. However, because you can do anything with ActiveCampaign, sometimes you have to construct things from scratch. ActiveCampaign has an alternative to delete inactive subscribers, which I do not recommend.

Some customers do not have actually tracking turned on, so their opens aren’t recorded. Others still desire to be subscribed however have been busy. Here’s my reactivation sequence: 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 email (if they already clicked the confirmation link in the previous e-mail, they’ve currently been removed from the automation using a different automation) – Active Campaign For Nonprofits.

Active Campaign For Nonprofits

The automation then unsubscribes them. My e-mails also have a link to a kind where they can enter their e-mail address to let me understand that they do not have tracking enabled. This kind adds a tag that I use to filter those contacts out. Active Campaign For Nonprofits. I used to include this tag when they clicked on a link, but when people don’t have tracking on, it makes those links not work so dependably! I just send out a basic “do you still want my emails?” confirmation.

Active Campaign For Nonprofits

You can also see whether the conclusion rate has increased or decreased, how long it considers contacts to reach that objective, and you can search all contacts to see who did and didn’t reach the objective. ActiveCampaign’s Message Variables is my favorite feature. It saves me a lots of time and effort, and neither MailChimp nor ConvertKit (update: 9/2020 ConvertKit now has ” snippets”) has a comparable feature.

Let’s say you have the given name of only a few of your contacts, which holds true with my list. I typically do not need a first name to sign up to my list, but often I get a given name, such as when somebody purchases a product. Would not it be great to welcome your contacts by name, in the events when you have it? You can do this, however it’s cumbersome.

I’m likewise filtering for generic terms included by other systems, such as a dash, or “Guest.” If they have a given name, I say “Hey,” and then their first name. If they don’t, I simply say “Hey there,” (Active Campaign For Nonprofits). By building a Message Variable in ActiveCampaign, I can easily change my welcoming according to whether I have the contact’s first name.

Active Campaign For Nonprofits

I developed a variable that’s simply %greeting-hey%. If I have the contact’s name, it appears in the email. If I don’t have the contact’s name, it defaults to “Hey,”. Where Message Variables really save me a great deal of time is by allowing me use the same automation over and over once again for my webinars, and I can rapidly change out all of the information.

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

And here it remains in an email. This message variable allows me to easily change out a countdown timer. I did mention earlier that one of the cons of ActiveCampaign is their e-mail editing experience. I changed from MailChimp, and MailChimp takes place to have the finest email modifying experience. I really like to send basic emails.

Active Campaign For Nonprofits

I’ve found that extremely tough to do with ActiveCampaign. For awhile, I was editing emails in ActiveCampaign’s hybrid editor, which is quite cumbersome. For a very long time, I used ActiveCampaign’s hybrid HTML and WYSIWYG editor, which was set off by a standard template I created. The user interface for the HTML editor appears like it was pulled from some free open-source project. Active Campaign For Nonprofits.

Nevertheless, adding images is a little a task. You need to choose them from a file browser. There’s no drag and drop option. ActiveCampaign’s HTML e-mail editor needs that you make up entirely in HTML. The option to this, if you desire to have control over the HTML, is to modify pure HTML, with a preview on the side.

Including images to ActiveCampaign’s abundant full-screen editor is a cumbersome experience. You need different text boxes for above and listed below the image. Lately I have started utilizing ActiveCampaign’s rich text editor. They have some good templates, but I still wish to send out the simplest email possible. They do have some plain-looking e-mails, but they have some degree of very little format, which you can’t get rid of – Active Campaign For Nonprofits.

Active Campaign For Nonprofits

But, with some changes, I can make my email quite basic. I can make it immediately use up the whole window, and I can modify the typography to be somewhat larger, and have a bit more prominent. The most frustrating part of ActiveCampaign’s rich full-screen editor is adding images. Envision you’ve simply typed out a great e-mail. Active Campaign For Nonprofits.

You can’t just include an image to a block of text. Rather, you have to produce 2 blocks of text: one for before the image, and one for after the image. If you have actually made any formatting modifications, you’ll need to watch on those to stay consistent. That’s something to deal with when you wish to add one image, however when you desire to include a number of, it becomes a huge chore.

They even have a standard mage editor where you can crop the image – Active Campaign For Nonprofits. MailChimp’s editor is the finest I have actually seen in all of the e-mail marketing platforms I’ve attempted. You have access to the underlying code, so you can create a truly plain email, supplied you make a fundamental template first.

Active Campaign For Nonprofits

MailChimp’s integrated image editor is incredibly powerful. You can resize, crop, and include customized text to your images. I miss out on MailChimp’s email-editing experience (Active Campaign For Nonprofits). It would save me a little time to have that exact same experience on ActiveCampaign. But the highly-customizable automations I can build on ActiveCampaign more than make up for that prospective time savings.

ConvertKit’s e-mail editing experience is extremely plain, but simple to navigate. Their templates are limited, which is great with me, but their e-mail modifying experience is a little simpler because you can produce inline images, and you can develop an absolutely plain email, and even edit the underlying HTML. If you wish to make some quick edits to some e-mails in an automation, with ActiveCampaign, it’s troublesome.

I’ll click an e-mail, 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 handicapped Command + Click from the automation editor. If I wished to switch backward and forward between different e-mails, I would intuitively be inclined open the same automation in various tabs, then open the respective emails from each of those tabs.

Active Campaign For Nonprofits

In the Automations section, there’s a “Handle 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 edit your entire series. Active Campaign For Nonprofits. Contrast that with ConvertKit’s Sequences.

Once again, it would conserve me a lot of time to have ConvertKit’s automation email modifying experience on ActiveCampaign – Active Campaign For Nonprofits. But choosing an e-mail marketing platform is like picking a partner. ActiveCampaign makes up for it with their Message Variables, more robust automations, and advanced segmentation. Mentioning segmentation, another reason I changed from MailChimp to ActiveCampaign was that MailChimp has restricted segmentation alternatives.

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

Active Campaign For Nonprofits

ConvertKit. If I weren’t on ActiveCampaign, I would probably be using ConvertKit. Their automations are a lot easier to develop, though they aren’t as flexible as ActiveCampaign’s, and their segmentations alternatives aren’t as advanced either. They also don’t have goal tracking, or Message Variables. MailChimp. You currently understand that I changed from MailChimp to ActiveCampaign.