What Should You Look for When an Expert Sets Up Your Active Campaign for Your Retail Business

It’s super easy to join up to any automation platform and get started. However there is a difference between starting, and setting it up so that it becomes the super effective tool you hoped it would be to grow your business.

If you’re looking for an expert to set up your Active Campaign to help your retail (or e-commerce) business grow, we’d love to help. If you are getting frustrated with Active Campaign, and worried that it’s not quite delivering what you thought it would, it’s possible the person you got to set it up didn’t maximise the effectiveness for you.

We’re sorry to say that’s more common than we’d like! So whoever is doing it for you, here are some things that you need to make sure happens during your Active Campaign set up to ensure marketing automation is going to get you more sales, and build a stronger relationship with your clients.

Let’s Start The Bare Minimum: Questions They Need to Ask

Before they even jump into set up your Active Campaign links to e commerce or retail business, you need to make sure they are asking you some really important questions:

Who is your customer? And are they your dream target market?

Are they asking you things about your target persona’s lifestyle? Their gender, age, location and what their interests are? Do they want to know who are the best sources of revenue for you? Are they asking you question about what sort of messaging they may like, or what messaging has worked with them before?

2. What are your short, medium and long term goals in terms of your business?

Knowing . What are your goals, where are you heading, what elements of your business do you want to grow, what things do you want to grow the most, what are the things that have the highest profit base in your business?

3. Where do you sit in the market?

You also want to be talking about your positioning and where you price yourself compared to your competitors. Are you a premium, middle of the range or budget business? What kind of people are you targeting and with what frequency? Is it a seasonal product, a one off, a consumable: how often are people going to buy it.

If they don’t spend time asking about all of these factors, you need to go and find some who does. Having this information sets up a base to understand the rest of your business. That’s one of the reasons that at Identify, we always start with a strategy. If we don’t know enough about those things, yup – we can do a pretty sweet job for you but we can’t create that beautiful, targeted creation around making sure that what we are helping you do is going to feed into the audience you want to grow.

You should also expect questions about what type of website platform you have, how much access you have to it yourself, where your customer data is stored and how you access it, and what are the other systems/ platforms in your business and what they do for you. This helps build a full picture to maximise the use of marketing automation both now, and in the future.

Once all the basic fact finding is done, you want to ensure they’ve set up the following:

Site Tracking

Record Your Orders

This involves putting a bit of code into your website, that can track whether contacts return to your website, and track engagement. Some people will not buy every time they come to your website. In fact, most people won’t. They will come and browse and have a look but you can then send contacts who are highly engaged with your brand, even if they aren’t your best customers, little special deals as you are measuring engagement.

You want to make sure all of your orders are being recorded in Active Campaign. Shopify and WooCommerce have beautiful deep data integrations. Most other e commerce platforms have some sort of integration that can be done with AC, it just means that sometimes you need more technical solutions (using zapier or another solution) But you need to have those orders recorded in AC as it helps work out your data over what groups of people are ordering particular products. For a client recently we did one where we could measure who had spent $1000, $2500, and $5000 as she could then start doing VIP deals, really honouring and nurturing those people who have proven to want to spend more money with her.

Segmentation

You want to see segmentation. Segmentation by customer or product. You want to be able to see segments as you don’t want to be sending an email to everyone in your mailing list every time. It’s better for email deliverability and to have increased results, if you just send an email to people identified as ‘like only yellow things’ or ‘only like things with cars on them’ or whatever it is that helps to define that segmentation. You can do that by customer or by product. You can start to really break down and target specific groups of customers.

Cleaning Your Data

You also want to look at cleaning your data. No one should just plonk all your data straight into Active Campaign without looking through it and cleaning it out. It’s quite common on WooCommerce in particular to have a lot of spam data, which you don’t want in there and needs to be removed. It also involves cleaning up and getting rid of the people who are no longer engaged. The more we do that, it does look like you have a smaller list, but you have a list of people more likely to open your emails. The more your emails are opened, the better for you, and the better it is for your deliverability later on.

Creating Templates and Automations

We’d expect to see at least 2-3 templates designed for you to use for both campaigns and automations. They are not designed in the automation, but in the actual template creation place so that you can pick up and use those for your campaigns. Make sure there are conversations on what the layout needs to be so you can set it up and do it yourself. There should be some simple automations in there to help pre and post-sale relationship building. There may be little nurture sequences, thank you automations, or review reminders. There should also be a few business specific automations designed to make your relationship building look and feel natural, and improve in over time. And of course there should be a subscription form to your mailing list with a little offer or something like that going on as an automation when they sign up, to grow that list and pick up those who aren’t quite ready to take action today.

Those are some basic things that should always be on Active Campaign if you have a retail business. If you don’t have all of these things, we’d love to talk to you about how you can improve your Active Campaign experience, and get it working for your business better. It’s an incredible platform for e commerce and retail, but like anything it’s how you use it that makes it truly zing.