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Welcome.

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Coffee Powered Systems equipping women with actionable steps to overcome overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I’m your host, Miranda Merten.

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Hey, friend. Welcome back to Coffee Powered Systems. And today is Tip Tuesday where I give you the skinny on an app or a tool that could be useful for your personal productivity. And today I am talking about my favorite email marketing platform, which is ActiveCampaign from the website. Don’t just email drive growth with customer experience automation. If you’ve been following me for a long time, you know that I have been using ActiveCampaign for a very long time. I never canceled them, but I have tried a few other platforms, but I always keep coming back to Active Campaign. Now I believe that when I first started, I had something like Mad Mimi. And then after I decided that I wanted to move on from that, I hunted around and checked out some of the many platforms that were out there. Some of them were way beyond what I needed at the time, like Infusionsoft and some of those big marketing platforms. I landed on Active Campaign and it just seemed super simple to use. The pricing was right. The price was a little bit slightly cheaper back then. When I first got it. The price has increased a little bit, but it’s still pretty affordable.

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So today I’m going to tell you a little bit about why I keep coming back to Active Campaign. I’ve tried MailChimp, FloDesk, ConvertKit, but for some reason I just really like it. I like the interface and it’s just really easy to use. It has a lot of the features that you need, pretty much any feature that you will need, either beginning or if you are growing or if you are a big business already. Active Campaign is going to suit the needs of, I would say 95% of the people. I can’t say 100 because obviously I’m not a big Corporation and there might be some needs that are missed for someone else. But I think for most people, ActiveCampaign is all of the features that you would need. They even have features that you don’t know you need. There are still tons of things in there that I do not use that I could probably benefit from using. So I might need to go into their Active Campaign University articles and play around and see what else I can use to really amp up my business. Because they do work for you. Their customer service is fantastic.

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Their support articles are great. They really are working to make sure that they do keep improving and leveling up and giving you enough features so that your business can grow and thrive and they integrate with just about everything. I have not used something that I can’t integrate with Active Campaign and it’s on Zapier. So as long as the other tool is on Zapier, even if they don’t have a direct integration, you can integrate with Active campaign. Now, I mentioned that they do have training videos. They have an Active campaign University. So once you first get in there, you don’t need a whole lot of training. It’s very intuitive. It works like any major email platform. You’ve got your Tags and segmentations and lists. You can create automations. And once you get in there and figure out how the automations work, because every platform works slightly different once you figure out how to use it, it’s very easy. But they do have a lot of blog articles and tutorials that you can go in and view. They have webinar series that you can watch as well. I watched their onboarding webinar series, which I believe is still three videos long, and they show you how to do the setting things up and the automation and onboarding.

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And I learned some things in there that I had no idea you could do. Like when you could tag your clients with the click of a link in an email and then say, you serve two separate people, you serve teachers, and then you serve service based businesses. You can actually tag them. And when you send out emails, you insert that merge tag and you can say, because I know you’re a teacher or because I know you’re a service based business, and then it really caters to that person and it makes them feel like you are paying attention. So that’s a really cool feature. Among other things, they’ve got some things that I don’t use. I just don’t need it right now. I don’t have this option for my website, but they do have a new feature called Conversations, which is basically like chat help, so you can add their Chat help conversations on your website. It’s like a widget, and you can chat with your customers live or they can use the send the message thing. So I believe that’s at a nominal additional price that you can add on to your plan. But using something like that takes away the need to use a whole other separate chat tool, or takes away the need to integrate your other tool with your email marketing.

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It already works with it. It already comes with it. So you might as well take advantage of those things. Look for the things that you actually need to use in your business and then utilize what is already within your system. And that goes for anything, not just Active Campaign. If you’ve already got an email marketing platform that you love, dig into it, see what features you’re using and what features you’re not using, what you can add to. Because I was really surprised as to things that they have that I’m like. I should probably be using that feature or things that you’re outsourcing to a third party, another tool your platform already uses or has. So you definitely want to look at what you’re using on a day to day basis and see if they have other features that you could maybe just combine or use natively. Something else I found while I was perusing through my account. They actually have split testing, which I knew this was a thing where you can split test emails. So say you have two different email subject lines. You’re kind of going between. You can do the full email, do the subject line, and then choose to split test after you’re done and you put in a new subject line to see which open rates are better.

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Not only can you test the subject line, you can also test the content. You can test the from name. You can test whether just using your name or using your business name is getting more opens or calls to action, which ones are increasing your click rate if you’re putting different calls to actions within your email. And what I thought was cool is that you can actually compare up to five emails at a time with this. And you can also split test campaigns. Now, this one is actually really cool and I think I will go back to my welcome campaign and see if I can switch some things up within that campaign and then run that test for a few weeks and see which emails are getting better open rates, and then take the higher open rate emails and then make those into one campaign automation. Because in the welcome email, that’s when you’re getting the most opens and the very first email obviously gets your highest opens. And if you’ve got a longer sequence, if you’ve got three, five, seven emails down that sequence, you’ll notice that your open rates and your click rates drop off as you go down to the lower numbers.

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So that is a fantastic idea that I just had that I think I will go through my welcome email and check it out because I’m getting about 50% to 30% open rates in the welcome sequence and I do want to keep those a little bit higher. They got some good stories in there. I want people to open them. So I want to see where they’re dropping off. They change the subject lines, change some of the calls to action. Those are some things to look at. Now, the pricing, they have a free trial and they start at $9 a month for the annual or if you’re doing month to month billing, it’s $15 a month and that starts at $500. So if you’re starting out just starting your business, that’s going to be the bottom tier, the lowest you can get, and then it goes up about 500 contacts at a time. Now, beyond just your standard email marketing things that you would expect, you can also do landing pages in Active campaign. They do have forms and pages. If you don’t have a website, you can create a landing page within ActiveCampaign and it works well because you also create those forms within active campaign and you can just create the whole thing in there get the URL, they host it for you and if I could go back and redo some things I would definitely reevaluate how I started out thinking that I needed a full on website full on email service provider, the full on this when we first started out we think we need all the bells and whistles but really you just need a page right?

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You just need a page in a form and the thing that you need to deliver to the people and some email that’s really all you need and using a system like this it’s got everything that you need to start out with and you can grow with it. So that’s why I love it so I’m going to drop my link for ActiveCampaign down in the show notes you can find it at MirandaMerten.Com/activecampaign and the show notes for this episode will be at /83. So there is just way too much things to go into with what is included in active campaign what you can do with it but I think I will do something else down the road on how to get started. Maybe doing some of these features and doing some walkthroughs that would be super fun but if you want to know more about it go ahead and check out the website that is all I have for you today. I will see you next time.

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Thanks for listening. Coffee powered Systems You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode down in the show notes or on the website at Miranda Merten.com if you enjoyed this episode episode and would love to continue mastering your workflows and processes, subscribe on your favorite podcast player and join me here next time.