Today, I attended Active Campaign's Study Hall, where our group attended an in-person workshop to learn advanced marketing automation techniques catered specifically to the business problems that our small business clients have.
What did we learn?
How to transition from email marketing to marketing automation. This session broke down the best practices when building automations - everything from how to approach the to understanding and reaching your goals. We also learned about some of the most impactful automations that the Active Campaign team has seen.
Collecting consent and learning how to prepare for the American version of the GDPR (it's coming!)
How to build a sales process in Active Campaign by diving into the CRM (including the Deals feature which allows you to have a dashboard view of how much money is in the pipeline). We also learned how to improve any process in any business using Pipelines, Stages and my favorite (because I'm a math geek) -- Scoring.
How to improve email deliverability (Hint: Opens are good → clicks are better → replies are best.) By connecting the two platforms, you can target your ActiveCampaign contacts on Facebook; if they click on your ad, you’ll see that data in Facebook. If they follow through and visit your site, or make a purchase, you can track that information in ActiveCampaign with the help of our site tracking and attribution features.
All about adding integrations to the mix. Integrations can truly take your automations to the next level.
Once you've set up your automations - how do you know if they're working? We also learned how to help our clients understand what success looks like so we can iterate their automations and meet their goals by measuring the performance of their digital marketing
How the new integration with Facebook allows us to leverage contact information from our Active Campaign account to advertise more effectively to potential and existing clients on Facebook - with the integration in place, we can now use Active Campaign automation to add and remove contacts from Facebook Custom Audiences
How to create trigger-based, intelligence-driven automations (this is especially important for our clients who are interested in abandoned card marketing, Facebook re-targeting and more)
We also got a super special sneak peek into Active Campaign's product roadmap -- lots of exciting features to come!
Our Virtual Assistant team members are devoted to continuing education -- we spend time pouring over case studies and diving deep into guides, but there's nothing that can replace the hands-on experience of working with an expert, face-to-face.