4.2 Setting up ActiveCampaign for your Business

Welcome back. 

Now that you kinda know your way around Active Campaign, we’re going to focus on showing you how to set things up. The idea is to build Lancify Abroad’s entire email marketing campaign from scratch.  

Here’s what we’ve done to make things a little more exciting. Remember we spoke about how folks will enter your email marketing ecosystem from your website or landing page? We went ahead and created a landing page for Lancify Abroad that we’ll connect to Active Campaign.

Check it out. 

Not too bad, right? The cool part is that this is an actual live-page. We’ve integrated real forms here that are connected to Active Campaign. This means that if you go and sign up for a newsletter or give your email to request a free counselling, you will actually get an automated email. 

In fact, that's a great place to start. Why don't you go ahead and sign up for a session with a student counsellor. You just have to click this button, enter your information and click on the CTA. Actually, why don’t we do that. Just pause this video while you go sign up for that session and wait for the email to hit your inbox. 

Okay, welcome back. You just interacted with Lancify Abroad, a brand we built together over the last few chapters. Pretty cool right?

Now how can you set up something like that? Well, you know what they say, the best way to learn swimming is to jump right in. Actually, that’s probably terrible advice. Please don’t try that if you don’t actually know how to swim.

Okay, let’s show you how it’s done.

The first step is to gather the emails coming in from this form straight into Active Campaign. In order for Active Campaign to actually send out this email when someone signs up on this form, the information that comes in from the form needs to be passed to Active Campaign.

Also, let’s just call it AC. I’m getting tired of saying the whole thing.

Now, in order for AC to gather the information coming from this form, we need to create a list. So let's go right ahead and do that. If you want to make a list, you go to lists on the left right here and click on Add a list. Let's call this list BOOK A Session. And hit add! You now have a list.

The next step is to connect your form to the list. Actually that isn't something you need to really bother with, just find out whoever is building the website for your client or project and ask them to do it. 

But just in case you are curious, the easiest way to connect forms to a list is by using a tool called Zapier. Basically what Zapier does is it takes information from the form on your website and then sends it to the email tool right into your list. It's super easy and you could easily figure it out on your own as well, right? 

This form is now connected to Your “Book a Session” list on AC. So let's go ahead and fill out that form. John Doe.. age.. email.. Whatever whatever and we’re done!! Here comes the actual email building part. Every time someone signs up on the form and is added to this list, we want an email going out welcoming them. It's the same email you got when you just signed up. Let’s look at how we do that.

You go to campaigns right here on the left, and click on create a campaign. Type out a campaign name - let's call this Counselling Sessions Welcome. And then you want to click on Auto Responder right here. The word Autoresponder basically means an automatic response, which is what we are doing - an automatic response email every time someone signs up. Okay, what’s next?

The next thing it will ask you is which list to want to use.Basically what AC is asking you is which of these lists contains the contacts you want the autoresponder email sent to. Our list is right here, so check that and move to the next part. For this autoresponder we are actually going to build our very own template, so click on Build from Scratch.

AC gives you a few options on the type of email you want to build.If you remember, the welcome email we want to set-up is mostly text, so we will stay away from these templates.
We’ll go for the newsletter format because it allows you to have an image and we want to be able to at least put a logo on the email. 

Unless your logo looks something like this or this or this. In which case, don’t put your logo there. Shut the company down. Sell everything. Move to Costa Rica and become a farmer. 

The next screen you see will ask you for the sender details and the email subject line. The sender detail is basically the name and e-mail of the person representing the company. In this case it will be Jack from Lancify Abroad. So let's enter that.

Next is the subject line. Probably the most important piece of content since it determines whether they ultimately open your e-mail or not. In this case, they’ve signed up for a counselling session so let’s keep it direct . Our subject line will be “Let's connect you to a student counsellor.”

Here is where you will build the actual email. This right here is the email builder tool. Let's walk you through it. If you go on the right and hit Insert, you'll see all the different kinds of elements you can put into your email. How this works is you drag the kind of element you want to the email builder and edit it as you please.

Take for example, if you want to add a button here, you simply drag the button onto the email and place it wherever you would like. You now have your button but it's just says click here and doesn't really lead anywhere. So you click on the button and change the text of the button right there. You can change the color, font, size of the button by tweaking it here on the left. 
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There you go.. once you have meddled around a bit you'll get the hang of this and be able to build emails exactly the way you want. One important thing to note when adding a button is that it's meant to lead somewhere, so go ahead and put the url you want the button to take the user to right here where it says link.

And that's how you use this email builder. It's quite straightforward to be honest. Let's get to building that actual welcome email. This is the email we want to create -

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Hi John,

Welcome to Lancify Abroad!

We appreciate you trusting us with your time and your goal to study abroad. Every year, over 5000 students trust us with their career dreams. We are keen on seeing the vision you have for your career.

You've requested for a session with a student counsellor, so let's set that right up. Go ahead and click on the button below to pick your date and time, and a counsellor will reach out to you at that time. You can even send in some of your questions ahead of time by responding to this very email.

Button - Book your slot

Regards,

Jack

Student Coordinator

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Let's first remove this image and put in our logo. To put in our logo, we drag the image element from the right to where we want it. If you double click on the centre, it shows you the images you already have or let's you add a new image from your computer. We've got the Lancify Abroad Image ready right here.

You can go resize the image, if you’d like.

Now to change your text, just copy paste the email content you wrote into this text block right here. Format it the way you want your email to look. Here, I’m just going to space out the paragraphs a little. There is this button that needs to go right in the centre of the email, so let's go ahead and add that.

Jack actually signs off after the button has been entered so we will add another text block just for his name. There we go.

Let's edit this to make it look a bit better.

With this email, we have a button that needs to help students book their slots and so you will need to ask your web guy to give you that link. Let's add a link here - www.lancifyabroad.com/bookyourslot

Now, doesn't that look great!

If you want to see how your email will look, go to the gear icon on the right and enter your email into this test campaign space. Send that test and you will get the email you just built.

Here it comes.

Back to AC, now that the email is ready, hit next to get this campaign summary screen. This helps you get a quick view of the campaign and then finally hit Save and exit. And that’s it! The email autoresponder is set-up. Let's give this an actual try.

And that's how you set-up a basic autoresponder. Infact, you've just learned not just setting up a welcome autoresponder but also how to build the email, connect it to a list and test out the email.

Infact, you should now be able to set-up all the other basic emails like the event, support and push emails.

If you want to set-up the event emails, you just have to go back to campaigns, create a campaign and create a date based campaign.

Support emails can be set-up exactly the way we set-up the welcome email. You build a list just for support and then go and set-up an autoresponder campaign the same way you set-up the welcome email.

For the 'Push' emails that we talked about, you have to use the standard email feature and it's basically the same format.

And there you go! You now know how to set-up up the basic emails for any client or project. Infact, we have all these email set-up so if you go and fill the different forms on the website, you'll get the relevant email.

Nice and easy.