Experience Report on Email Marketing: Learnings from Almost Five Years

1. The move
2. How we started
3. Strong Block Building User Interface
4. Very good debugging
5. Feature with Power: Webhooks
6. Scoring: Keep a particularly close eye on active contacts
7. 60 days without opening an email, the last purchase was six months ago?
8. Deals - a mini sales tool in ActiveCampaign
9. ActiveCamPAIN - what was not so great about the tool?
10. Worse opening and delivery rates?
11. Conclusion

Our guest author Christoph Mühle from the OMR Education team now draws a conclusion about the last five years of email marketing in this article after his feedback on the Zapier Integration and the move to Shopify .

For this purpose, he reviews the shared time with ActiveCampaign and reports on the start with the tool, his learnings, and successes and obstacles over the past years. The occasion for this is the freshly completed move to HubSpot Marketing Hub. Anyone who is unaware of the advantages of email marketing should perhaps read this article beforehand.

The move

A few weeks ago, our OMR Education team implemented the change to our email marketing tool ActiveCampaign, which had been planned for six months. The journey went to Hubspot.

Since ActiveCampaign has provided me with a really steep learning curve, here is a small summary for you: What are the pros and cons of this tool? Who is it worth for at all?

Of course, ActiveCampaign is not the only tool in this direction. At OMR Reviews you will find an overview of all other Marketing Automation and Email Marketing Tools. So even if you already use another one and are happy with it, you might find a few suggestions here to spice up your email marketing.

How we started

Many moons ago, in the spring of 2018, I triggered the then switch from Mailchimp to ActiveCampaign and ultimately carried out the move.

Coming from MailChimp and accustomed to straightforward workflows - at that time the current editor did not exist yet - ActiveCampaign was and is the absolute hammer. There are several reasons for this.

Strong Block Building User Interface

With ActiveCampaign, you can design workflows intuitively and easily. With "if / else" blocks, for example, workflows can be branched and subscribers can be sent to different positions within the workflow using "Go-Tos". With "Goals" you can also specify that some subscribers start at a different point in the workflow.

Source: ActiveCampaign

Practical: The visually attractive design of ActiveCampaign's editor makes it very easy to understand what conditions it takes to arrive at any point in the workflow. From the different blocks you can thus build pretty powerful and individual workflows, in which you can respond very precisely to your subscribers.

Quickly more complex "Christmas trees," uh workflows, like this one are created:

Only the upper part of the workflow is shown here. Source: ActiveCampaign

Very good debugging

Before you add your users to a workflow, everything has to be tested, of course. Conveniently, this is very easy by adding yourself to the workflow. Now you can move through the workflow step by step and test everything in detail to avoid errors later.

Source: ActiveCampaign

Feature with Power: Webhooks

With the webhook function you can send contacts to the automation tool Zapier. There, the whole world is open to you, meaning all possible workflows can be triggered.

An example: Through an API call at Shopify, you can easily create an individual coupon code, which is then sent to the subscriber. This way everyone automatically gets personal discounts.

Scoring: Keep a particularly close eye on active contacts

Furthermore, scoring rules can be defined in ActiveCampaign to evaluate and rank contacts. For example, you give five points for an opened email, ten for a link click and fifty for a (first) purchase. The score is then valid for a certain period of time.

If a certain point value is exceeded ("Threshold"), you can trigger another (Sales-) automation. This ensures that your Sales emails reach the contacts with the highest engagement. This guarantees better opening rates and (hopefully) also better sales.

Source: ActiveCampaign

60 days without opening an email, the last purchase was six months ago?

The same game can be driven with factors like the opening date. When a contact opens an e-mail, you enter the current time in a custom field. Another automation regularly checks if a date has been entered in this field that is older than (let's say) two weeks. If this condition is met, another automation is triggered that sends a reminder email.

Source: ActiveCampaign

Deals - a mini sales tool in ActiveCampaign

Unfortunately we didn't use this feature at all - but only because our sales unit already worked with Pipedrive. Otherwise, this function surely has a lot of potential, especially because it is more or less a complete Pipedrive-like sales solution in your email marketing tool. With Deals, Stages - Won, Lost, Open.

So there’s a lot of potential for teams that want to achieve a close integration of sales and email marketing automation. For example, when a contact reaches a certain point value (score), you can open a deal and from then on your sales team takes over communication.

Here you see a deal pipe I created consisting of three "Stages. Your sales team would then move the deal from stage to stage as the lead moves further down your sales funnel.

Source: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCamPAIN - what was not so great about the tool?

Despite all the advantages, we also noticed things that bothered us when working with ActiveCampaign. Not so cool was, for example, that no direct double opt-in flows could be triggered from external lead sources (Facebook, LinkedIn, own forms on the website ...).

Sure, in the end, there is a workaround that works just as well - but for such a central (and important) topic, there should be no need for a workaround that you have to come up with yourself.

Also, the ActiveCampaign's own forms were often too rigid for our purposes. Optically and functionally, they couldn't be used.

Worse opening and delivery rates?

Another point is the supposedly worse opening and delivery rates through ActiveCampaign. This is a super difficult topic, because our distribution has grown significantly over the past years. Typically, the audience gets broader. This is not an unusual development. A growing distribution usually results in smaller engagement. Broader topics, less engagement. If you're wondering how you can increase the opening rate of your newsletter or gain new newsletter subscribers, we've got something for you.

However, our general gut feeling was also that lower delivery and thus lower opening rates would be associated with the tool. It is rumored that this is due to the poorer deliverability of emails sent over the ActiveCampaign server.

In general, it is rumored in the scene that ActiveCampaign would never achieve the same good delivery rates as Mailchimp.

Conclusion

All in all, I would recommend the tool to every marketer. With workflows, you can illustrate more complex logics and accompany your newsletter subscribers individually through the digital sales funnel. By using ActiveCampaign you will sooner or later also come into contact with other tools like Zapier & Co. - Tools that are becoming more and more essential for your marketing workflows.

I hope you enjoyed the little recap of the past years with ActiveCampaign! For us, it's now about getting to know HubSpot and making our experience with this tool.

Finally, a little tip: In the OMR Education Academy on the topic of email marketing, learn in ten weeks from our experts the most important things about list building, data management and segmentation, tracking and mastering legal challenges.