Why We Recommend Active Campaign for NZ Businesses

We recommend Active Campaign for NZ businesses to be used as a marketing automation platform, a CRM and the backbone to help businesses improve their systems and processes. It’s become an ingrained part of our own business, and the businesses we serve with strategy, consultancy and marketing implementation.

Last year Identify made the decision to become New Zealand’s first accredited Active Campaign consultants, after working with the platform for a year. (Both for ourselves, and our clients)

The decision was based around us wanting to make sure we were suitably upskilled and equipped to deliver exceptional service for businesses wanting extra support, and marketing management

There are a plethora of marketing automation platforms, and we did a huge amount of research around which one we wanted to use, both for ourselves and for our clients.

Our target market have always been small to small-medium-sized businesses who often don’t have their own marketing manager. For these businesses, the costs can quickly mount up if you select a platform that only experts can use well.

We wanted to find something that we could add support to set up, and then run for those who wanted it, but could also confidently recommend to those business owners who wanted to do some to all of the marketing themselves

Some of the below reasons we love to recommend Active Campaign for NZ businesses may not be relevant to Active Campaign alone, but together they make a great argument for considering it for your small to medium business

 

Pricing

The price is very competitive for small to medium businesses, with a high level of functionality. It starts from as little as $9 USD a month. (this covers the Email Automation side. ) From $55 USD a month, you can have deep data integration, a sales CRM, lead scoring and SMS marketing.

In terms of scaling, for people with larger lists, it’s a price saver when compared to Hubspot, Infusionsoft and others. It costs far less for a monthly subscription, and even if you get an agency like us to “run the machine” for you, the cost of doing that is is often considerably less, due to the ease in setting up campaigns and nurture programmes.

 

It Improves Business Systems

For us at Identify, part of the attraction was to be able to automate some of our business systems in terms of notifying team members of changes, updates and stages in the sales process. We have used it to simplify our systems. For all of this we started with a pen, a whiteboard and a whole lot of discussion. It’s one of the golden rules of effective implementation – start with lots of conversation before you jump on it to make everything work. You only want to set up what you need.

 

Automations are Super Easy to Set Up

It’s a drag and drop process, or you can use one of the many automations out of the box. I will confess to not having a mind built for building automations, and my team has pretty much banned me from personally setting up anything that required more than two steps… but people with a logical, systematic brain love it. For people like me…. Well there are teams like mine 🙂

 

You Just Need One List

Lots of our clients have come to us from Mailchimp – where they’ve got lists for every occasion. Active campaign makes it easy to reduce it down to one list, separating people by TAGS – what we’ve found from doing this, is we’ve discovered people who are all over the brand – and we’d have missed their amalgamated activity if we’d had them on more than one list.

Active Campaign Helps You Map User Behaviour

You are able to score your contacts on what behaviours you want them to be doing. It might be opening an email in a nurture sequence, visiting the website (see below), or clicking on a link. Segment these to help track your contacts. We have a VIP list of highly engaged clients and contacts, that we can tell love our brand and what we do. We recommend this for our clients – as it helps establish your true fans (The varied collection of people in there always surprises me!)

 

It Announces Web Visitors

For those with the sales side going, one of my favourite functions is the ability to be alerted when a contact visits your website. You can be alerted when things are “hotting up”, plus you can also see which pages they visit. We often find a client will visit us a few times, and then email us the next day. If you’ve got more than one website for your business, you can measure one or the other, or both.  (This is with site tracking code)

You Can Trigger Automated Marketing Based on Activity

We love nurture sequences, but we also love the opportunity to talk with a client at a particular point in their customer journey You can trigger emails based on website visits, and link clicks, responding to a contact’s behaviour.

 

You Can Clean Inactive Contacts From Your List

One of my favourite automations unsubscribes contacts from email lists if they’ve not opened or interacted with an email after a certain number of days. It gives us an opportunity to improve open rates by only targeting engaged people, plus it helps me as the salesperson, identify trends in the types of people “dropping off” Sometimes they can be valuable prospects I felt were engaged – and it can lead me to resetting the relationship with a face to face meeting, or a phone call.

 

Active Campaign Loves WordPress

WordPress and Active Campaign go together beautifully. It also works very well with Shopify, and a few other e-commerce sites.  It can work with any number of sites, but as a web development agency who primarily develops in WordPress, it’s a pleasure to be able to build websites with working automations based around leadpages, forms and invitations to begin a nurture process. (note: As marketers we do not support the use of proprietal based websites as it severely limits your control as a business owner. 

 

There are no limits to the number of emails per month

If you are sending nurture sequences, the number of emails can add up! Plus we use Active Campaign to send repetitive emails to clients, that previously we sent through our own email platform (Gmail)

 

It integrates Really Well with Gmail

With a cool Active Campaign chrome extension, you can have Active Campaign on your gmail. It adds a new contact to your list automatically, it shows you history of all existing contacts, and you can easily add a note or action from your Gmail.

Plus, all your gmail emails are loaded up against the client in Active Campaign.  

 

It integrates with buckets of awesome apps and platforms

We chose to recommend Active Campaign for other businesses partly because we’re personally not great fans of all in one solutions for every business. What happens when a platform offers everything, all inclusive, is there are often bits and pieces that don’t work very well – and there isn’t an option to use another solution with it. With Active Campaign, you’re able to integrate other email platforms, CRMs, marketing solutions, accounting and any number of other tools. Some of these are a deep data integration (it works beautifully with Shopify and Woo Commerce  for example) or once you can set up with Zapier.

 

An IOS App for Active Campaign is here

Being able to update your CRM on the fly is essential for anyone in sales (though I’m going to be honest and say a better solution is to get your VA to do it instead – who likes admin? Not me :D) But being able to add a contact, and a note after a meeting, on your phone is far easier than updating next time you’re near your desk.

Interested in Using Active Campaign for your business?

I’d love to chat to you about it – whether you need our help with introducing it into your business or not, I’d love to help you make an informed decision on whether it’s the right fit for you.

Want to book in a time to talk it through?

CLICK HERE

(And yes, doing so sets off a BUNCH of automations on this end! )

DOWNLOAD OUR FREE E BOOK ON ACTIVE CAMPAIGN FOR E COMMERCE HERE