Hi guys Lewis here from dirty hacker and In this video I’m gonna give you a quick Overview of active campaign which is a Popular email marketing tool and one That we actually use here Appledore Attacker So we having a pretty good understanding Of how this thing works and I’m gonna Dive in and explain the different areas Of it now starting with the the Segmentation active campaign gives you The best of both worlds with lists and Tags and I really like this approach Because you can choose how you want to Manage and segment your subscribers and You can actually add these add tags Manually so if I head to my contacts I Can check any any of these and click the Edit button and then I can do bulk Actions here so for example I can add a Tag give it a tag name and apply those Changes and but to really take advantage Of active campaign you’ll want to tap Into the automated tagging and you can Do this using automation workflows where You set up different conditions to tag People based on the actions that they Take like whether it’s your emails or on Your site and I’ll take you into the Automations in a moment but I want to Stress how powerful this is because the More you know about the subscribers the More targeted you can be with your email Marketing and active campaign has some
Great tools to help you do that so I’m Go go into the automation now and Honestly this is where active campaigns Steamrolls the competition because Similar to drip and get response this Uses visual workflow automations This is an example of a workflow Automation and you know it’s not crazy By any means but this is a typical car Abandoned automation so it basically Says check if the person is in the Buyers list if not follow up with this Email and it will it will wait three Days and it will try that again and send Another email it say if they don’t move Over now you can do all sorts of things With this and get unbelievably granular With the types of automation that you Run if you if you’re creative enough to Make that happen the building blocks are Essentially called actions so if I click To add something in here this is these Are the actions so I can add splits Goals I can end the automation I can Send the subscriber to a different Automation and when you combine all this With site tracking and intelligent Tagging you can automate virtually any Area of your business It is pretty slow and clunky a lot of The time for example adding new emails Takes you out of the Builder and it just Ends up being really really slow and you Have to go through this process for even
Very basic automations and something Like brick and convertkit and solves This problem with it with a slightly Different interface that you can opt for So I have an example here this is Convert kits I trigger an action Interface they do currently have a Visual animations builder but they also Have this as an alternative way of Setting up automations and I really like This because it’s just a lot faster when You’re not setting up something and That’s super-complicated Overall if you can see past the Inefficiencies of active campaign you You will absolutely fall in love with What this thing can do let’s move on to A/b testing because there are two ways To run split tests so this is the Traditional approach and it allows you To do the usual subject line testing and All that good stuff but you can also Test the email content so if I click Next here and I’m gonna scroll down and You’ll see that it tells you to select Your split test type this top one is the Usual Email subject and or from information But the second option here allows you to Test actual email content which allows You to test as many variables as you Want to see which performs X then this Is something that a lot of email Marketing tools are surprisingly lacking
And what’s really great about this as Well is if they don’t next you go Straight to the email editor and you can Add extra variations by clicking the Plus icon and as you can see it Duplicate your design as well so it’s Really easy to make those small changes To see where the most in conversion Lives now if I click next there’s Something else I want to show you here The best part about this is if I scroll Down you can configure the split test Options to determine how the winner is Chosen and you can do it by a best click Rate best open rate and amount of time And you can even specify the exact Ratios where the rest will be sent based On that winning variation and finally The biggest thing about active campaign When it comes to a/b testing is that you Can test entire workflow automations Against each other all you need to do is Add a split action at the start of the Automation and you can determine how Contacts are split and you can use any Number of active campaign conditions to Determine a winner so this alone is just Crazy powerful and overall the a/b Testing functionality is really robust And they’re just so many ways that you Can leverage this for your business all Right let’s talk about forms and this Will be a weird transition because Honestly the form builder sucks at least
On the lower plans because you you can Only build branded inline form so if I Click to add an in-form here you’ll see That I don’t get access to these other Options and keep in mind that Authority Hacker has a list of around 60,000 Subscribers and apart from these extra Form options we’ve had zero incentive to Upgrade so from my perspective is Basically the world’s worst upsell and Let me take you into the form builder Anyway just to show you what this looks Like so it’s pretty simple as you can See and you change these values without Too much trouble In the sidebar here and one thing that Is an issue with this is the design so If I go to the style tab I do get some Options here to change the basic style Of it but what’s really annoying is that Most of it I think is bound to the Custom CSS box here so you can click the Inspector and select something that you Want to change and it adds in the CSS For you or at least part of this yes s You still need to have some Understanding of how CSS works before You can really take advantage of this And you know if you don’t then you’re Pretty much stuck on what’s here and I Don’t think it’s I don’t means a lot and Not only that you also stuck with the Active campaign branding at the bottom Here you cannot remove this branding so
Even if you’re paying hundreds of Dollars a month for this plan it will Look to visitors like you’re using a Free tour which obviously is a lot of Good thing so overall unless you’re Paying for the the higher plan just Forget about using active campaigns for Forms it’s just not worth it all right Let’s move on to email templates active Campaign only has around 30 pre-designed Email templates but honestly is not a Scratch on tools like MailChimp with the Number and quality of templates that They offer I mean as for the actual Designs you can see here they’re pretty Average with only a couple that I came To be using myself and you can start From scratch and that’s actually what I’ve got here this looks a lot like a Form builder but honestly it’s a lot Better in many ways not everyone is a Fan of this I have to say it has a lot More options way more design flexibility And a good number of building blocks Which you can see here the cool thing You can do with this though is add Conditions so I can drop these in I can Add an image I can add a button and then What I can do which is really cool is Make one of these blocks conditional so Let’s say I want this second text blocks Block to show only to specific Subscribers I can click the COG icon Make conditional and I can set up my
Condition so a good way to use this is With tags so to say that if a user has a Specific tag I want them to see this Block so you can send one email and it Will display differently depending on The subscriber and the actions that They’ve taken with you and your brand One issue that people find with this Email builder is pasting in text Particularly from things like Google Docs it can sometimes mess up the Formatting now I have to say that it has Been doing that a lot less for me lately Ah I thought it was worth mentioning Because it does happen Time and when it does it’s a bit of a Pain having to select everything change The font change the font size and Occasionally change the color as well to Get everything matching up again another Problem it is with uploading images so If I click this to open the image Manager what you’ll see is I get these White thumbnails and this is a recurring Thing every time you add a new image it Has to reload the thumbnail and you know If you’re looking for something quickly It’s a real pain especially when the Names of your files your images are not Consistent It also doesn’t order them in in a way That you would expect it’s alphabetical I would prefer if the newer images were Put at the top so it’s just easily easy
To insert so it’s just little annoyances Like that that really take away from the Email builder in general well overall I Think it’s more than good enough to Achieve what you need from it ok for Integrations activecampaign actually Integrates with around a hundred and 50 Applications and this is you know it’s a Respectable number and comparison to Other email marketing tools and there’s Some good documentation on each of these Individual integration so I can click One of these and it will open some Information about it tell me how exactly The integration works this is not Something that you get with every tool So it’s a really really nice touch also It’s supported by Xavier so really Unless your current setup relies on some Obscure applications and services you Should have no problems when it comes to Integrations as for tracking and Reporting before you send a campaign You’ll you’ll see a summary tab that Looks like this and you’ll be able to Turn on and off the different options Like open and read tracking link Tracking the fly tracking all of that Good stuff so it’s really easy to Control this on the campaign level and Sometimes you know you’re going to want To turn them off and sometimes you want To have them all along it really depends So being able to have this control is
Really nice as you can see there are a Number of reports on the left here and Clicking into any of these gives you a Detailed breakdown so this is the open And Region four I can see the unique Opens how many people didn’t open and I Can scroll through the individual Contacts who this was relevant to you do Also have other options here to create New campaigns for example I can click The resend options button here and I can Send to contacts who have not read or Opened this campaign and this is Obviously a feature that everyone should Be taken advantage of it’s really really Powerful finally you can see reports for Automation so if I click down here this Gives you things like completion rate And average completion time as well as The usual open and click important again This is not perfect it has its faults as You can see it’s taking an age to load Here which is a recurring theme with Acting campaign so this is the abandoned Car report so it gives me some stats Here I mean overall the tracking and Reporting is really really good and you Can expect plenty of insights from both Your automations and your campaign Reports okay let’s look at the support Options and like most tools you’ll Likely start with in knowledge base Active campaigns documentation is Actually quite thorough and will find
Videos and webinars on pretty much every Aspect of this tool the email response Is also good and I find a response comes Back within 24 hours most of the time You also get phone and live chat support I often have trouble getting through to Live chat because of my time zone but That’s not really active campaigns fault This is this tends to be a problem for Me well it does work though the chat rep Is always helpful and knowledgeable so There’s really no complaints there and Finally there are a couple of Facebook Groups one official and one unofficial And this tends to be my preferred method Of support if live chat isn’t available So it’s always good to see overall Though awesome support from active Campaign so that’s pretty much Everything the full review of active Campaign is available on the authority Hacker blog and I highly recommend you Check it out because I do dive into this A lot deeper on the full article so I Hope this was helpful and I will see you In next video