Active Campaign: the guide to doing Email Marketing

Do you want do email marketing to promote your WordPress site, your products or your services? Are you ready to implement more advanced email marketing strategies than the ‘simple’ weekly newsletter?

You would like to start sending campaigns to your users highly targeted emails?

Here are the main features of Active Campaign and how you can integrate it on your WordPress site.

What is Active Campaign

Active Campaign is a tool for creating email marketing campaigns.

As we will see below, it has several advanced features for the creation, management and optimization of contact lists, email campaigns and automatic series.

Compared to other competing tools, Active Campaign has several features that in my opinion make it more powerful and flexible.

Flexibility in managing contacts

First, using Active Campaign you will be able to create different contact lists.

Other than that, using Active Campaign you can add ‘tags’ and custom fields to individual user profiles.

Custom fields might correspond to information provided by the users themselves when filling out the form to subscribe to your newsletter.

Tags can be added manually or automatically, based on the actions performed by users (for example, opening a newsletter, etc.).

I’ll give you an example on the use of tags:

1. a newsletter is sent to the entire contact list.
2. A “newsletter-open” tag is added to the profile of all users who have opened the newsletter.
3. It is now possible to send a follow-up email only to users who have the “newsletter-open” tag.

As you may have already guessed, the lists of users to send single or automatic email series can be segmented using a lot of filters: as we have seen, tags, custom fields, but also registration date, click on a specific email, etc.

Automation

The most interesting features of Active Campaign in my opinion concern how the automations work – that is, the automatic series of emails that are sent to users based on certain conditions.

Conditions in this case is the key word!

Compared to other tools, Active Campaign offers many more options for creating super-targeted automations based on custom conditions.

I’ll give you another example to better illustrate this aspect:

1. Let’s assume that a user is subscribed to your global list. As we saw earlier, we can add a “newsletter-open” tag when opening a specific email.
2. Now, we can make sure that when this tag is added, the user is automatically entered into an automation.
3. We can set up the automation so that there is a 2 day wait before the next step …
4. After two days, we want an automatic email to be sent based on the interests indicated by the user during registration. For example: if the user has indicated that he is interested in online courses, the promotional email relating to the online courses will be sent automatically. If, on the other hand, the user is interested in classroom courses, the email relating to classroom courses in his city will be sent.
5. Once this step is complete, the automation ends. But it doesn’t end here! The user can be added to other automations; he will therefore continue to receive highly targeted emails based on his interests and interactions with previous campaigns.

This is all very interesting, right?

The beauty is that, once the automations have been created, Active Campaign will work entirely automatically.

The above are just two pretty simple examples. There are many other options and features that you can calmly explore by registering for the14-day free trial period.

Note! Precisely because it has so many features, Active Campaign might seem like a somewhat complicated tool to use at first. However, I advise you to don’t be discouraged. We have studied it for a couple of days and now we can use it without any problem.

How to integrate Active Campaign with WordPress

Integrating Active Campaign with WordPress couldn’t be simpler.

There are two options:

• there’s a real plugin, which you can install on your site and use to configure the subscription forms to your lists.
• Alternatively (this is the method we have chosen to use for SOS WP) you can create the form, and then paste the iframe code provided by Active Campaign into the pages where you want to display the registration form.

That’s all!

You can create a different form for each list. So on your site you can have different forms, with different fields, etc.

Conclusion

As you may have guessed, Active Campaign is truly a very powerful tool, which has tons of options. In this guide I wanted to introduce you to the main features that we regularly use for SOS WP as well. As I have already mentioned, you can then sign up for a free trial period and explore the platform at your leisure, and see if it meets your needs.

I hope I have introduced you to a useful and interesting tool. If you have any questions about how to use Active Campaign, or how to do email marketing to promote your WordPress site, as always, I invite you to leave a comment below the post.