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In episode 61, I go through a few new feature updates to ActiveCampaign and what that might mean to the way you do business and build your marketing automation sequences.
ActiveCampaign recently rolled out some useful feature updates, that will make your marketing life a little easier in a number of ways. Listen in to this week's ‘Tactical 20 ‘ episode to find out more
We Chat About:
- Personalisation tags in Alerts
- New filtering criteria
- Date based comparisons in Automation
If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here.
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Barry: Hi, it's Barry Moore back with another tactical 20 podcast.
Announcer: Welcome to the active marketer podcast, where we talk about how to design, automate and scale your business to the next level, using sales and marketing automation. You can find out all the tips, tactics and techniques you need to get more customers and sell more stuff over at theactivemarketer.com. Now here's your host Barry Moore.
Barry : Hi, I'm your host Barry Moore and this is gonna be another tactical 20 podcast. The tactical 20 podcasts are all about giving you an actionable tip, technique or tactic that you can take away and implement in your business in less than 20 minutes.
In this week's tactical 20 episode I want to update you on three new features that will make your life a little bit easier if you're using active campaign. They keep rolling out the hits over there in Chicago and over the last few weeks they've released some stuff that, some cosmetic stuff, some that will dramatically make your life easier, especially when it comes to countdown sequences. You know, for a product launch or a webinar or something like that. I want to highlight three of those on this week's episode. First of all, they've added the ability to add personalization fields into alerts. If you're familiar with active campaign, you'll know that inside an automation, one of the steps you can choose is to send an alert.
Typically, this is done for internal staff, right. Someone buys a product, you might want to send an alert to yourself or to somebody else in the team. Or someone signs up for a lead magnet, you just might want to keep tabs on that and send yourself an alert. Before, the alerts were fairly limited, they just basically message and a list of the fields that they signed up with on the form. But now you can add personalization in there. Instead of just saying, “Hey someone's just downloaded your lead magnet.” You can now send an alert that says, “Hey, Barry has downloaded the lead magnet.” Or Tom, or Kate, or Angela has downloaded the lead magnet. You can put the person's name into the alert. Or any of the other fields they might be filling out. Their email address could be in there, their phone number. Whatever you've gathered on the form can then be available to you as a personalization field that you can put in to the alerts that can go out from your automations.
As well as the SMS messages as well, if you're using the SMS feature. That's a nice little cosmetic clean up. That just means that your alerts are a little bit more meaningful to you now, especially since you can put personalization tags, you know, the subject lines as well. Your subject line could contain the person's name or the amount of the purchase or whatever it happens to be, whatever those fields happen to be.
Another thing I wanted to highlight is they've made some subtle changes to some of the triggers for your if statements. Typically, if you wanted to know if someone was in an automation, before you sent them an email, or before you didn't send them an email, as the case may be. You may want it to say, “Hey, is Kate in automation xyz?” If she is in automation xyz, send her this email. Or if she is, well, skip sending her this email, because she's in the middle of an automation or something like that. It was a way to sniff and see if someone was in an automation or not. Then make your mind up on what steps you want to do after that. Instead of just saying in automation, now active campaign has elaborated on those conditions now.
You can say has that person entered an automation or have they not entered an automation? Has the automation ended or has it not ended? Are they currently in the automation or are they currently not in the automation? You might want to say, right, have they entered an onboarding sequence? If they have, then we'll just wait until the onboarding sequence is finished before we send them this other email, because we don't want to interrupt an onboarding sequence or we don't want to interrupt an indoctrination sequence or something like that. You can use these expanded criteria to really refine down to a more granular level your if statements, in regard to whether a contact is actually currently in an automation or an automation might be playing out. Or has an automation ended? You might say, has an automation ended? Once the automation has ended then we'll move them over to this other automation or we'll send them out this broadcast type message.
Six new triggers there, six new criteria there, I should say. Has entered automation, has not entered automation. Has ended automation, has not ended automation. Currently in automation or not currently in automation. You can use those to refine your automations and your logic within your automations as well. Then thirdly, the big one that's gonna make your life a little bit easier if you're using date based type campaigns, is now, active campaign, within the automations you can now specify date comparisons. What I mean by that is, say, for example, someone signs up on a particular day. You might write so, write so, you might give them a purchase date or a a subscription date or a birthday, anniversary date, whatever the case may be. You can then run comparisons as part of your if statements inside of an automation. You can say, if it is their birthday minus two, then we'll send them out this special offer. Or if it's webinar minus seven, then we'll send them a reminder or something like that.
You can compare what the current date is to what a date in a custom field might be. When they sign up for a webinar for example, you could put the webinar date in as a custom field and then all your if statements can then be a comparison against that custom field. Is it webinar date minus seven, is it webinar date minus one, for example. Or is this date greater than that date? So, really nice feature now, especially for countdown product launch sequences. You can put people and compare the dates and then send emails or branch the logic based on those date comparisons.
If you want to head over to the show notes. At theactivemarketer.com/61, six one. I will have a little video walk through, demonstrating a little bit of how those date comparisons work. If you want to see it in action, head over to theactivemarketer.com/61. Those are the three new things, personalization fields in your alert messages and SMS's. The new automation criteria for determining where someone is in another automation and then the biggie, which is the date based comparisons inside of your automations. Finally you can compare dates, count down, count up, whatever you need to do with date related fields, that you might have inside active campaign. I challenge you to go and find where you can put this new functionality to work in your automations. I'll be back next week with another full length episode.
All right, that's our tactical 20 podcast for this week. If you have any questions or any topics you'd like to see covered on future tactical 20 podcast, you can always send me an email at Barry [inaudible 00:08:12]@theactivemarketer.com and let us know what you'd like to see. Also, if you head over to the show notes for this episode and just leave a comment or leave a comment in any of the episode show notes. Tell us what you'd like to see and we'll make sure we cover it on an upcoming episode. Get out there and design, automate and scale your business to the next level using sales and marketing automation. See you next week everybody.
Announcer: Thanks for listening to the active marketer podcast. You can find the show notes and all the latest marketing automation news over at theactivemarketer.com
