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Do you still believe in email marketing?

A convinced yes.

Ray Tomlinson. Credits: guinnessworldrecords.com

Email is perhaps the longest-lived communication tool on the web, alongside the TCP/IP protocol, which still today, since 1973, supports the entire network. A small curiosity: the first email was sent in October 1971 by Ray Tomlinson. According to one estimate from Internet Live Stats, we send 227 billion every day. Every day.

This communication tool, however, today collides sharply with the contagious frenzy of social media: consumption in a few seconds, a swipe to move to the next piece of content, against text that needs to be read and may take a few minutes to be understood. And why not, that often needs a second read to be understood even better.

Content that requires an investment in reading against content to consume quickly, often only to be entertained.

What we are experiencing, however, is also a return of email (a bit like the number of times people say Bitcoin is dead) precisely because we are realizing that appreciating quality content takes effort and respect.

Substack is certainly making a major contribution to the email cause: many people are launching editorial projects that include periodic newsletters. Some of them are succeeding, building a real community willing to pay to read the emails sent, most of the time weekly.

In summary: today we believe an effective email marketing strategy can still exist, but that it can live and work only when tailored to the user: investing in creating content that can genuinely interest our recipient.

Why ActiveCampaign

We have tried them all: good old Mailchimp (let us be honest: why does it have such a complex offer to understand today?), Mail4chef, Mailup (still active for some of our clients today), all the way to this one. ActiveCampaign.

Today 150,000 customers rely on this tool in 170 countries.

The company is obviously American, founded in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom, with 1,000 employees and revenue of about 97 million dollars (Source: Wikipedia).

We consider this tool, for our clients' needs, the expression of the art of email marketing automation. If you hear us talk about this sector today, we will almost certainly suggest you try this software.

Key strengths

  • Flexible offering based on client needs The platform's current business model allows monthly subscriptions from €9 with immediate cancellation: costs increase as more users enter the database, adapting to client business growth. In this way, ActiveCampaign remains sustainable and reasonably compatible with marketing budgets allocated to this type of activity. We have clients who successfully use their account for about €125/month, but also clients with a large database and almost €12,000 in annual license costs.
  • Extreme usability of the automation engine It is perhaps the heart of the software and what AC engineers have worked on most: the software lets you design automations by composing a diagram that follows the logical flow of your email marketing automation strategy. You start from a trigger, an activator defined to bring users into the flow. Once inside, you can select from the dedicated menu all the tools and conditions to perform a marketing action: email, SMS, WhatsApp, one-to-one message, tag, conversion, exit from automation, to name a few.
  • Campaign sending The tool allows sending classic campaigns to the entire database, with segmentation. Recently, relative to when we write, a very well-made new email editor was released that, compared to competitors, allows better personalization of your email.
  • User tagging A nearly "standard" feature for software of this kind, but always worth considering: tagging clients lets you associate them with specific segments and makes it very easy to link users to specific automations, understanding whether they have already "passed through" a flow or not.
  • SMS and WhatsApp Third-party integrations allow sending SMS and WhatsApp messages too. We consider WhatsApp usage, especially for the Italian market, essential for some marketing needs. Today SMS is increasingly associated with phishing attempts, and we are fairly confident that the open rate of a WhatsApp message today is much higher than the good old Vodafone Christmas Card SMS.
  • Third-party integrations One of the integrations we work with most is Shopify: the two tools combined allow sending automations that include in the email the products actually "abandoned" in the user's cart (a beautiful feature) and synchronize purchases, making specific activators and triggers possible in automation.
  • Reporting ActiveCampaign's "magic report" is called "Marketing report": a simple chart showing conversions obtained from email sends (campaigns and/or automations) compared to actual e-commerce revenue. When you think about it, it is the easiest yet most complex question you can ask the software: "how much am I earning by using you and applying my marketing strategy with you?" Beyond this report, many other classic reports are available, including the one with the number of "goals" collected by an automation, if defined.

How we use it

At Syncronika, ActiveCampaign is used when we identify a genuine client need to take marketing strategy one step further.

Objectives can be:

  • e-commerce conversions
  • cross-selling and up-selling to acquired clients
  • lead management for acquired prospects.

Steps to set up an effective strategy

We always start from defining an objective and an initial budget allocation, to understand whether our client can support the license cost relative to their database and above all whether they can manage the information derived from using the platform: leads, conversions, marketing actions to perform outside the platform.

Once that step is passed, we define:

  • database fields available
  • consent management for marketing campaign sends (required by law, but above all a rule dictated by common sense)
  • automations, which we design together with the client (often using a more flexible brainstorming tool like Miro).

Once automations are approved, we create them on the platform, activate them, and start watching the screen in eager anticipation of the first users receiving the first emails and (we hope) interacting positively with the campaigns we designed.

Use case: Caffitaly

Thanks to Caffitaly, which was already using the tool before our collaboration began, we were able to study further what the platform offers in terms of:

  • automation complexity
  • Shopify integration.

With this client we manage more than 15 automations that "run" for us every day and communicate with the user based on their behavior. Over recent years, we have worked on refining in detail all the emails sent, curating content and correcting automations based on feedback and user behavior.

We cannot share too much or disclose confidential data, but the client and therefore we are very satisfied with the results achieved.

Thanks for reading this article all the way through. And if you are thinking of diving into the magical world of email marketing automation with ActiveCampaign, give us a shout.

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