Active Campaign Jump Links

To begin building an automation in ActiveCampaign, start with a “trigger.” There are a variety of methods you can activate an automation, including: When a tag is added When a contact subscribes to a list When a contact submits a type E-commerce and on-site options (offered in the “Pro” strategy) When the contact reaches a specific point in another automation.

From there, you can start building the actions in your automation. Some actions that are offered in ActiveCampaign’s automations are: Send out an e-mail Notify a group 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 present automation Post a webhook Subscribe or unsubscribe the contact to/from lists Update contact information Add and eliminate tags Add a note Lead scoring, SMS and site messages, and Facebook Customized Audience management are all “Pro” functions – Active Campaign Jump Links.

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

Active Campaign Jump Links

You can also produce 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 happens A custom field is updated with a specific worth You don’t create e-mails in ConvertKit’s Automations.

For more on how ActiveCampaign compares to ConvertKit, read my ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign comparison. The main way I construct my list is through an email course. ActiveCampaign makes it simple for me to develop my e-mail course exactly how I ‘d like to construct it. Many marketers build extremely simple email series for their “email courses.” A contact signs up, and then that contact right away begins getting lessons.

It was easy to develop with ActiveCampaign, but difficult when I was with MailChimp. I do not do that approach. My e-mail course is manually synced with this countdown timer on my site. You need to sign up by Friday night, and a brand-new course begins each Monday morning. When I first tried this method, I was on MailChimp.

Active Campaign Jump Links

Here’s the automation I use to welcome new trainees to my Style Pitfalls course. There’s a couple of things going on here: The automation sends out all contacts a “welcome email (Active Campaign Jump Links).” The automation validates that it’s not Friday. If it’s not Friday, the automation waits until it is Friday. At 11am, it sends a “pump up” email to get the trainees ready for next week’s course, and motivate them to share it with friends.

The contact will begin getting lessons the following Monday 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 morning, and lessons the Monday after that. It was difficult for me to automate this with MailChimp.

When I run a webinar, I do not wish to send the exact same email to every person on my list. I wish to send them the proper email for their level of engagement – Active Campaign Jump Links. Active Campaign Jump Links. Here’s the automation I use to promote an evergreen webinar: First it validates that they haven’t already acquired the product I pitch in the webinar.

Active Campaign Jump Links

Then it sends out a series of e-mails to get them thinking about the webinar, and to encourage them to register. If they register, they immediately hit the “Goal” towards the end of the webinar, and the automation ends. If they don’t register, they get contributed to an automation promoting a rebroadcast of the webinar. Active Campaign Jump Links.

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 signed up, went to, missed out on, or based upon how long they remained in the webinar. These tags can then activate automations within ActiveCampaign.

It costs me cash, and it makes it more likely that my e-mails 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 individuals who actually want them! The “Pro” strategy of ActiveCampaign has actually lead scoring integrated in.

Active Campaign Jump Links

Here’s an automation I received from ActiveCampaign’s library of automations, which I use to tell which contacts aren’t engaging with my emails. When a contact subscribes, this automation adds a “0 days” tag. As time passes, it adds 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, removes all of those tags, and starts this automation over once again.

This automation can be frustrating initially, and this is among those cases where I wish ActiveCampaign had a more out-of-the-box solution. But, due to the fact that you can do anything with ActiveCampaign, sometimes you have to build things from scratch. ActiveCampaign has a choice to delete non-active subscribers, which I don’t advise.

Some subscribers do not have tracking turned on, so their opens aren’t tape-recorded. Others still want to be subscribed however have been busy. Here’s my reactivation sequence: I send one e-mail asking if they still wish to be subscribed, and briefly explaining why I keep my email list tidy. In one week, I send them another e-mail (if they currently clicked on the verification link in the previous e-mail, they’ve currently been removed from the automation using a separate automation) – Active Campaign Jump Links.

Active Campaign Jump Links

The automation then unsubscribes them. My e-mails likewise have a link to a form where they can enter their e-mail address to let me know that they do not have tracking enabled. This type includes a tag that I use to filter those contacts out. Active Campaign Jump Links. I utilized to include this tag when they clicked on a link, however when people do not have tracking on, it makes those links not work so reliably! I just send out a simple “do you still want my e-mails?” confirmation.

Active Campaign Jump Links

You can likewise see whether the conclusion rate has increased or decreased, for how long it considers 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 feature. It saves me a load 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 is the case with my list. I generally don’t require a given name to sign up to my list, but sometimes I get a first name, such as when somebody purchases a product. Wouldn’t it be nice to welcome your contacts by name, in the events when you have it? You can do this, but it’s troublesome.

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

Active Campaign Jump Links

I developed a variable that’s just %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 actually conserve me a great deal of time is by enabling me utilize the same automation over and over again for my webinars, and I can quickly alter out all of the information.

Here vary 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 rate of the product, deal terms, voucher code, and more. Each time I run a brand-new webinar, I can change each of these variables to match any schedule modifications or offer changes.

And here it remains in an e-mail. This message variable allows me to quickly change out a countdown timer. I did mention earlier that a person of the cons of ActiveCampaign is their e-mail modifying experience. I switched from MailChimp, and MailChimp happens to have the finest e-mail editing experience. I actually like to send out simple e-mails.

Active Campaign Jump Links

I’ve discovered that extremely 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 time, I used ActiveCampaign’s hybrid HTML and WYSIWYG editor, which was triggered by a fundamental design template I created. The interface for the HTML editor appears like it was pulled from some totally free open-source job. Active Campaign Jump Links.

Nevertheless, adding images is a little bit of a task. You need to choose them from a file web browser. There’s no drag and drop option. ActiveCampaign’s HTML email editor requires that you make up completely in HTML. The alternative 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 rich text editor is a cumbersome experience. You need separate text boxes for above and below the image. Lately I have actually begun using ActiveCampaign’s abundant text editor. They have some nice design templates, however I still desire to send out the plainest e-mail possible. They do have some plain-looking emails, however they have some degree of very little formatting, which you can’t eliminate – Active Campaign Jump Links.

Active Campaign Jump Links

But, with some modifications, I can make my e-mail pretty fundamental. I can make it immediately use up the whole window, and I can modify the typography to be a little larger, and have a bit more leading. The most frustrating part of ActiveCampaign’s abundant text editor is including images. Imagine you’ve simply typed out a fantastic email. Active Campaign Jump Links.

You can’t simply include an image to a block of text. Rather, you need to produce 2 blocks of text: one for prior to the image, and one for after the image. If you have actually made any formatting changes, you’ll have to keep an eye on those to remain constant. That’s something to handle when you desire to include one image, but when you wish to add a number of, it becomes a big task.

They even have a basic mage editor where you can crop the image – Active Campaign Jump Links. MailChimp’s editor is the very best I have actually seen in all of the e-mail marketing platforms I have actually tried. You have access to the underlying code, so you can create a really plain e-mail, offered you make a standard template first.

Active Campaign Jump Links

MailChimp’s built-in image editor is exceptionally powerful. You can resize, crop, and add custom text to your images. I miss MailChimp’s email-editing experience (Active Campaign Jump Links). It would conserve me a little time to have that very same experience on ActiveCampaign. But the highly-customizable automations I can build on ActiveCampaign more than offset that prospective time cost savings.

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

I’ll click an email, and it takes me to the editor for that email. Keep in mind that I can’t even Command + Click to open it in another tab. Whether they meant to or not, ActiveCampaign has disabled Command + Click from the automation editor. If I wished to switch backward and forward between various e-mails, I would intuitively be inclined open the same automation in different tabs, then open the particular emails from each of those tabs.

Active Campaign Jump Links

In the Automations area, 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 brand-new tab to more quickly edit your entire series. Active Campaign Jump Links. Contrast that with ConvertKit’s Series.

Once again, it would conserve me a great deal of time to have ConvertKit’s automation e-mail editing experience on ActiveCampaign – Active Campaign Jump Links. But picking an e-mail marketing platform is like choosing a partner. ActiveCampaign offsets it with their Message Variables, more robust automations, and advanced division. Speaking of division, another reason I switched from MailChimp to ActiveCampaign was that MailChimp has limited division options.

You can combine characteristics 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, nevertheless MailChimp’s Pro plan allows more sophisticated segmenting, for an additional $199 a month. In my search for the perfect e-mail marketing platform, I saw lots of others, a few of which I’ve currently pointed out.

Active Campaign Jump Links

ConvertKit. If I weren’t on ActiveCampaign, I would probably be using ConvertKit. Their automations are much simpler to build, though they aren’t as versatile as ActiveCampaign’s, and their segmentations choices aren’t as advanced either. They also don’t have goal tracking, or Message Variables. MailChimp. You already understand that I switched from MailChimp to ActiveCampaign.