4.1 Introduction to ActiveCampaign

Use this link to make your account on ActiveCampaign: http://bit.ly/lancify-activecampaign
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Alright! Welcome to chapter 4. Let’s do a quick recap. 

We’ve taken 3 chapters and probably a few weeks of your life to teach you the ins and outs of email marketing. But all that is just theory unless you know how to pull it off. 

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The next step is to implement your plan. And that’s what we’re going to focus on in this chapter. How do you use an e-mail tool to run and manage effective email campaigns?
Now, this could get a bit technical but we’ll try to make this as simple as possible. 

To get started, let's begin by introducing you to your new happy place- Active Campaign! This is where you will be spending most of your life as an email marketer.  But before we jump right into it, let's talk a little bit about why we need Active Campaign.

At this point, you would’ve realised that Gmail isn't going to cut it for email marketing. Trying to use your GMAIL for an email marketing campaign is almost like trying to drive across the country in a Tata Nano. You can't personalise different emails to different people based on whether they respond to your email, you can't track what action they took with your e-mail and you can’t really automate that much either. 

Well, that's exactly where Active Campaign comes in. It’s a tool that is designed to give you all the superpowers that you need to run email marketing campaigns. Why Active Campaign over any other tool? Well, after testing out a lot of these tools we found that Active Campaign is dynamic, easy-to-use, and most importantly, doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. While we’ll be going through Active Campaign in detail, if you do find yourself having to work with another tool. Don’t worry, the fundamentals still stay the same. 

Alright let’s get into this. 

So we went ahead and got a shiny new account on Active Campaign, so we can walk you through building an email marketing campaign for Lancify Abroad from scratch. We’re going to go straight in but you may need to create an account.

Use this link to make your account on ActiveCampaign: http://bit.ly/lancify-activecampaign

Let's walk you through our favourite email marketing tool, Active Campaign. Familiarise yourself with the basics of the platform - dashboards, contacts, campaigns, lists and much more.

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Let’s fast forward all that boring signing up work, and arrive at this screen! Now, this is your dashboard. This is your home ground, alright? 

The goal of the dashboard is to give you a bird's eye view of everything that is happening in your account. Here you have the number of users in your account - this is the number of total users who have given their email to you.

Right here you have the contact trend - this is just a cool way to show you how your email database is growing. You see the campaigns and automations that you are currently running- which we’ll leave for later. 

And then you have some other stuff like pipelines, top contacts, and my tasks - which we’ll ignore for now. They’re just not that important for your learning and well it’s not in our budget either. Now on the right you have this really cool activity monitor. It gives you updates on what's happening in your account. You can see it tells you how many email opens you got, how many clicks, replies and some other stuff. It even tracks who is mentioning you on social media. We told you Active Campaign is pretty cool! 

Now, you may think Active Campaign is paying us to say nice things about them. And we really hope they would as well, but unfortunately they are not. But I assure you, they are not. 

Now let's take a look at the left here. This panel right here is how you navigate around on Active Campaign. The first thing you see are contacts. If you remember, we talked about contacts in our first chapter. Basically how each person who gives you their email id and other information gets stored as a contact on Active Campaign.

That happens here. If you click on it, you get the entire contact list that is on your database.
For now, we have just one contact, John Doe, chilling here all by himself. But let's click on the contact and take a look at what each contact card looks like. Inside each contact's card, you have the person's name and email right on the top. If the contact gives you their phone number, that would show up here as well. Now below this, you have all the other details of the person that you might have collected. All the different kinds of information you gather from the user when they are filling a form on your website gets populated here. You also get to see which lists and automation the user is part of.

Now on the right, you have this activity monitor that tells you what has happened with this contact recently. It will tell you what emails the user has been sent lately, which emails the person has opened, and clicked on. That’s a contact.

Now, let’s go back to the dashboard.

Next up is campaigns. Now campaigns are generally where we set-up those basic emails that we talked about in chapter 2. They include welcome and support emails as well as those one-off birthday or event emails.

We then have automation. This is the really cool part of Active Campaign that lets you build these workflows and automate things you didn't know were possible.

But for now, let's just identify this section as the place where you set up drip and personalized emails. We aren't walking you through campaigns and automation just yet since we’ll take you through those sections in-depth while building the campaigns themselves.

You can ignore deals and conversations, which we won't be covering in our course. 

Now onto lists. If you remember what we talked about in Ch 1, whenever a contact is added to Active Campaign, they fall into these lists that you create. Lists help you segment your email users effectively so that you can cater to them individually. You want to have separate lists for your newsletter subscribers and your customer enquiries because the two kinds of users need separate things. Let's take a look in here, this is where all your lists show up. For now, we just created the first list but as we build Lancify Abroad's email marketing, we will create more lists to cater to different kinds of users.

And if you click on a list, you'll see the contacts on that list.

Back to the dashboard again, the next thing we want to look at are forms. These are literally the forms through which you collect information on your website. Active Campaign lets you build forms right here and have them inserted onto the website. However, most website builders already have their own forms which we can connect directly to a list, so we won't be using the forms here.

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And finally, you have reports. These reports will tell you how different campaigns are performing, which emails are getting opened, and which ones clicked. We will explore more on reports once we have a few campaigns live.

And, that’s your introduction to Active Campaign. From the next episode, we’re going to pull up our sleeves and get down to building the campaigns we strategized together.