If you’re even slightly interested in marketing automation, you’ve probably heard of ActiveCampaign. It’s fast becoming one of the most popular automation platforms available, due to its excellent features for automating email (and other things) to various levels of complexity.
However, as good as any platform or service may seem, that’s meaningless if it doesn’t actually help your business.
Which leads many people to ask ‘Is it right for me?’ when considering ActiveCampaign as a place to start automating parts of their business.
In this article, we aim to answer this question by telling you about one of ActiveCampaign’s greatest benefits: integration. Whilst it is a great platform on its own, ActiveCampaign integrates with more than 300 other platforms that can really help you optimise your business productivity.
So, for a little bit of inspiration, we’ll first look at 7 of the best platforms to integrate with ActiveCampaign and how you can use them.
We’ll then look at some detailed case studies from our own clients, to show some real life examples of how ActiveCampaign’s flexibility allows it to work seamlessly alongside and enhance their business practices in completely different ways.
So, let’s get on with it, shall we?
What can ActiveCampaign Integrate with?
Shopify
A popular commerce platform that is primarily used to build an online store and connect with customers globally.
Integrating ActiveCampaign with Shopify (or any other ecommerce platform you may be using) is a great way to create a strong customer journey. Through ActiveCampaign, you can automate lead generation and follow up messages based on how your customer interacts with your shop.
Don’t underestimate the importance of reaching out to your customers. Automated messaging can be used to reach new leads, prevent cart abandonment, cross-sell and retain your customers long after they’ve purchased from you. These techniques increase your chances of creating lifetime buyers.
If you want to start seriously scaling your ecommerce business, a good ActiveCampaign strategy is really worth investing in.
The gold nugget to remember is this: you can segment your customer base and create automated messaging sequences that target people based on their specific interests or behaviour.
Want to see how pursuing this practice can generate 16% growth in monthly recurring revenue? Continue reading on to our LYMA case study to see how we achieved just that for their business.
Additionally, if you’d like to learn more about what ActiveCampaign can do for your Shopify store, check out their explanation too.
WordPress
It’s no secret WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) out there. If you have a small to medium-sized business, chances are your website is built using it. And if your site is fairly new, setting up a strong automation process with ActiveCampaign can be a great foundation for a bright future.
However, if your website isn’t ecommerce, you may think that automated messaging isn’t right for you.
And to an extent this might be true, depending on what you actually do.
But if you do a little digging, you might find that strategically placed automation can help you elevate your website in ways that your competitors have overlooked.
For example, if you have a visitor on your website, how do you keep track of them after they leave if they don’t enter any personal details? Without automation, you could be letting leads slip through the cracks without a trace.
So how do we prevent this from happening?
Generally if you create a page on your website, there is usually a call to action that you want visitors to follow.
Like any good CMS, WordPress offers the opportunity to create great lead magnets for your website, such as blogs, quizzes and download buttons. Popular tricks for non-ecommerce businesses include free downloadable content, or signing up for a general mailing list.
You can even optimise your website’s blog in this way, by encouraging leads to sign up for notifications every time a new blog is uploaded to your site.
Integrating ActiveCampaign with features such as these that likely already exist on your website can help maximise their value.
For example, it allows you to build up a database of users that you know are interested in your site, but also helps you segment them through ‘tagging’; a feature that allows you to label your leads based on where they came from on your site.
And as your customer base grows, you can use your ActiveCampaign database to build out separate automated journeys, based on their individual interactions with your site. This will increase the personalisation of your messages to them, as the automation they’re in will be informed by what they’ve been interested in on your site previously.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can elevate the content of your emails with ActiveCampaign automations, check out last month’s blog on how to create more personalised emails for your list of lead data.
WooCommerce
If you are using WordPress for an ecommerce business, you’re likely to be using its WooCommerce plugin. You can integrate ActiveCampaign with WooCommerce for similar purposes explained in the previous two sections.
However in addition to these points, you can connect your contacts between both applications to create accurate segmentation and track how each customer has engaged with your site to retain them, or persuade them to convert.
If your brand has a strong image, there is no limit to the way your automated emails can look to the user.
Just like WooCommerce, you can use custom HTML in ActiveCampaign’s email builder to ensure their look and feel matches your brand exactly.
This can take a little time and know-how, but can make for great consistency for customers to recognise, reinforcing who you are to your audience and help make your email marketing more engaging and effective.
Salesforce
This is a popular area of interest when it comes to ActiveCampaign integration. If you already have a Salesforce account, you can almost seamlessly integrate the two platforms together, with the ability to sync leads and contacts together for a bigger and more refined customer database.
One of the biggest advantages of this partnership is the value ActiveCampaign can provide in automating follow up emails from initial Salesforce outreach messages to your contacts.
Whilst nobody likes a pushy salesperson, you can maximise the chance of your prospect responding to your message with an automated follow-up sequence.
ActiveCampaign can also help you check the quality of the emails you send to your Salesforce contacts. Using their spam checker, you can optimize your emails for success by maximising their chance of reaching the inbox safely, and avoiding the spam folder.
Facebook Custom Audiences
ActiveCampaign isn’t limited to sending emails. It’s a great tool to enhance your social media marketing too.
You can integrate Facebook with ActiveCampaign to create targeted social marketing and follow up without having to do it manually – saving you lots of time.
Combining these two platforms can be even more powerful than email marketing if you know your audience well enough. Facebook holds a lot of detailed information on its users, which is invaluable for reaching niche audiences and blocking out irrelevant contacts, much more than an email address could ever tell you.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can set up the two platforms from a technical standpoint, it’s explained really well by ActiveCampaign here.
Twilio
What are you more likely to read? An email or a text message?
According to Adobe, SMS messaging has a 98% open rate, with 90% being read within the first 3 seconds. Compared to email generally having a 20-30% open rate if you’re lucky.
So if you have the data and the message is suitable, why not use it?
Whilst ActiveCampaign offers its own SMS features, integrating a platform like Twilio with ActiveCampaign, allows you to really make the most of automated direct messaging.
You can send texts to new leads, and trigger specific messages at certain times, or when a contact takes a specific action in your customer journey.
Zapier
If the previous integrations aren’t enough for you, Zapier is here to create even more potential connections between ActiveCampaign and your desired platform (you greedy thing).
With over 3000 apps to choose from, Zapier makes automation with ActiveCampaign even easier. Helping ease the burden of time-consuming manual tasks by automating them in the background, giving you more time to work on the important stuff.
You can integrate contacts from various apps with ActiveCampaign, and vice versa. This can make ActiveCampaign a great hub for automated messaging and customer management at the heart of your business, with different outreach platforms feeding back into one place.
However, it is important to maintain great organisation and awareness of your data if you plan to use it for multiple applications or campaigns. Make sure to label your data well, optimise tags so you know exactly where that contact has come from, and monitor your automation sequences regularly to make sure everything is working as it should be.
That can be a lot of work, but will be invaluable if done right. It can take a lot of precious time to implement large projects in ActiveCampaign. If you want to spend more time on other things but still want the benefits automation has to offer, take a look at how Airbase can help free up your time again.
ActiveCampaign case studies
Hearing about the different platforms that can integrate with ActiveCampaign is all well and good, but sometimes it’s difficult to then decide what your next steps should be.
So maybe some real-life examples would be helpful?
What follows is a selection of real client stories showing how Airbase has integrated ActiveCampaign with other platforms to get some great results.
Hopefully this will help you see how these processes have been planned, managed and implemented to really work.
LYMA
What they wanted:
Starting off with one of our biggest clients, LYMA first came to us to help deliver a world-class journey for their customers as part of a long-term retention strategy.
What we did:
We worked alongside LYMA to map out a benefits-based customer journey and identify key phrases of that journey to help shape customer communication and drive engagement.
This was primarily done on ActiveCampaign due to its ability to host complex and large-scale automation maps, as well as the ability to tag and segment customers into separate automation journeys based on their interests and behaviour.
However, LYMA would not have been able to reap all the benefits of ActiveCampaign without custom integration between ActiveCampaign and LYMA’s own website.
We connected key pages on their website with ActiveCampaign to create new contacts and add tags to existing ones.
This allowed us to build targeted and personalised automations based on the data ActiveCampaign gathers from the website.
For example, if a customer purchases a 30-day supply of the LYMA Supplement, that information is passed to ActiveCampaign, and the customer will be added to the ‘30 Day Supplement’ automation, as opposed to one for newsletter signups or a ‘90 day supplement’ purchase.
The contact will then begin receiving a sequence of personalised emails from LYMA that work to engage and retain them for repurchase, and support them on their journey with the supplement.
The benefits:
The beauty of it all is that it’s done automatically – without LYMA having to send any of the emails themselves.
This has led to whopping 76% average email engagement rate for LYMA, showing how powerful automation can be in securing a good relationship with your customers.
Want a piece of the action? Contact us today to see how we can help you.
Cardea Capital Advisors
What they wanted:
Automation can help with so many different types of businesses, not just ecommerce like LYMA, as our next client, Cardea proves.
Cardea Capital Advisors is an independent asset and wealth manager for financial advisors.
Cardea came to us with plans to generate more leads through promoting their services and their new online calculator tool for advisors.
What we did:
We built a series of automated sequences in ActiveCampaign to send out to their list of leads over time.
We optimised the quality of these emails through integration with others platforms like Unbounce and Calendly to optimise tracking contacts and keeping their information up to date.
The emails use custom links to personalise the landing page when a contact clicks through. This not only shows the user that you know them, but also saves them time and encourages further interaction.
The online calculator (built in OutGrow and hosted on an Unbounce page) is also integrated with ActiveCampaign.
Once someone submits their details, these are then sent back to the ActiveCampaign database as a new contact, or to update an existing one. This information determines what automation they join to continue being nurtured the right way.
The benefits:
Cardea is a rapidly growing and ambitious company that needed ongoing and automated processes to keep up with their fast pace.
By using Airbase, Cardea were able to contact large volumes of leads in a targeted and personalised way, and increase the amount of consultation bookings by 9% without having to lift a finger.
Training Sensei
What they wanted:
Our final client example is Training Sensei, a company that offers an 15-day e-learning course for individuals or teams of colleagues that want to improve their professional development.
They came to us with the primary goal of saving time for their small team.
Before adding automation to their business, they were doing everything manually which was soaking up a great deal of time and resources, particularly with the onboarding process.
Training Sensei recognised that automation was the right solution to their problem, to free up their schedule and allow them to focus on growing the business long-term.
What we did:
We took the time to get to know the onboarding process on their website and built it out using ActiveCampaign’s automation builder tool.
Automating this process allowed us to implement extra features to improve the process, such as tagging and separating contacts that were coming in.
This was particularly helpful for Training Sensei as it allowed them to easily identify which leads were team leaders (i.e people who had registered a team of people to take the course) and which were individuals signing up for their own personal benefit.
Differentiating between these two types of leads meant that we could build separate automation sequences for them, making the emails feel more personal to their situation, and give them unique benefits and calls-to-action to interact with the course.
The team sign-up process was especially complex, but by combining Zapier with ActiveCampaign’s automated webhook feature we were able to deliver the required outcome.
New team leaders receive an email with a personalised link for them to share with colleagues so they can sign up too.
As each colleague signs up, their details are sent to Zapier, which attaches custom data to the contact, linking them to their team leader. This information is then sent back to ActiveCampaign to add the new contact back to the main automated process.
(Phew that sounds complicated! Totally worth it though.)
We also integrated WooCommerce with ActiveCampaign to trigger automatic payment notifications and other follow-up messages.
The benefits:
By automating their key processes, we were able to give Training Sensei their time back.
They now have a strong onboarding process consisting of around 25 emails that help categorize and maintain their growing customer base.
Most importantly, they now have the free time to work on growing the business, as the staff aren’t tied up in manual processes.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are tonnes of ways you can integrate ActiveCampaign with other marketing tools and programmes to help deliver unique value for your business. That’s what makes the software so great.
However, as you might have gathered from reading our case studies, it can be quite complicated to implement. Especially if you don’t have much experience, or value your time elsewhere.
If you feel like you need a little help like our clients did, you can discover our ActiveCampaign service here or book a consultation with us, to see how we can help add automation to your business to benefit you and your customers for years to come.
