ActiveCampaign Automation Examples

Active Campaign automation examples.

In this video, I’m going to show you some examples of Active Campaign automation. And a couple points I want to make in general, use one or no goals per automation. And please keep it simple use multiple automation is to accomplish one thing if necessary. Now with all that said, I’m going to break my own rules. So let’s dive right in.
Okay, in this first automation here, this is what I call a drip automation. We’re doing something over time, we’re tripping that out over time, and this case somebody had signed up for a product. And they’re going to get I don’t know, weekly, monthly email delivered to them over time and this is how it looks basically put them in and I always like throw a five minute wait in if it’s not mission-critical to send out an email. Then we start applying tags. Now this tag here says week one, so we just want to identify that they’ve been through Week One by adding a tag there. And another tag I like to take advantage one is what I call Do Not Disturb. And the reason I created that tag is because when we send out a regular campaign we want to exclude people that have the Do Not Disturb tag. In other words, they’re busy leave them alone.

And after that there was a 12 hour wait couple people’s you get the first email sent out wait another 12 hours. And notice what we’re doing we’re removing the Do Not Disturb tag and then waiting two days before we do the next action, which is send an email. So what we’re trying to do is inside this Do Not Disturb window is don’t send any other campaign emails that you might so that’s the purpose of this Do Not Disturb adding and then removing. Waiting a couple days put it back on, same thing 12 hours and the second email wait 12 hours removed, the Do Not Disturb, etc.

Notice we keep doing that over and over. But then ah here’s the goal. And in this automation, we’re using multiple goals. So this automation says Do they have the customer Tas month one tag? Well guess what? We actually apply it just prior. So of course they meet that goal and get pulled here. That might seem kind of silly. Why would you do that if you just apply the tag that will pull them down here, they were going there anyways, the way it’s set up. The reason is if somebody was to cancel their subscription to this, but then come back at a later date and start again, we don’t want them to start at the beginning. We want them to start where they left off, so they get put back into this automation. And if they already had this tag, they would get pulled down to here.

There’s multiple tags along the way so they will get pulled down to the appropriate place, and then start receiving the emails from that point. There it is. There’s month one part two goal month two, or sorry, a month to month three should be coming up, etc. And then all the way down to the bottom. And I think we’re just kind of putting some placeholders in here. This is like year four worth of emails. And then the very bottom lot of times I like to put a tag that’s either they become a customer or they’re no longer a customer in general, it’s become a customer. So if you’re sending out emails to a person who’s a prospect, and then they become a customer set a goal is if they have a customer tag, remove them, or in this case, if they quit, we pulled them out because they had a customer cancelled tag apply. So that’s one automation.

Here’s another set of automation and this is where it I think it’s good to break up automation into smaller ones that you’re going to use collectively. Look at the naming. A lot of them have start with first date, and then some kind of action first date, subscribe first date, open first date, click first date, unsubscribe. And then we’ve got last dateclick. And these are as boring as they get is they just do one thing. And that’s it, they basically update a custom field when a contact does an action. So if I look at first date, subscribe. And if you look, if you just eyeball it here, these almost all look identical with the exception of this, this has that little purple web hook. So I’ll get to that one in a minute. But let’s take a look at the first date, subscribe. So what this does is it anytime somebody subscribes to a list, we update a custom field called first date subscribe to the current time. And then I just put a weight there just to have an idea of how many people are going through there on a daily basis. And the one thing that’s important here is it only runs once because I only want that date to occur just once. Same thing for click, same team for open and then unsubscribed a little bit It’s basically the first time they unsubscribe, except what’s going on here is when somebody unsubscribe from a list the first time again, we update the first date unsubscribe to the current time. And then we do a web hook to a basically a custom script that we collect. And I’ll show you what information we capture there. And again, one day way to get an idea if I want how many people are on subscribing. And then the one other one I will show you is the last date click. So this is anytime someone clicks a link and I’m going to show you it’s anytime any link any email multiple times versus run once so anytime somebody clicks a link, we put them here we update their last date click field the current time and then again, the one day wait just to get an eyeball on how many people are going through this automation on a daily basis.

Now I’ll tell you why I do that last one especially this is a good one. If I if I know when the last time somebody click I basically know when they were last active, the most active people. And if there’s ever a time I kind of want to rejuvenate my sending reputation, what I’ll do is, I’ll pull in the people that have clicked most recently. So for instance, I might the last 5000 people that have clicked. And to do that, I would go and look for anybody that has a last day click custom field date, that’s within certain amount of days, one day, two days, three days, four days, versus somebody that’s last click 30 days ago. So I know my most active people are the ones that click most recently, and if I want to send to them to them the most engaged, that’s how I can identify him. Okay, here’s another set of automation and these three are related to inactivity.

This is email hygiene. And what this is here, this is the active automation. There’s an inactive version of this and in this case, the trigger is anytime they read an email or anytime they click a link in an email. Now, if I had, if I could only use one of those, I would use clicks a link in an email, because I trust that more than a trust contact reads any email because sometimes email service providers will open the emails, Gmail is notorious for that they’ll trigger an open. So I don’t really believe that. However, I know that if somebody clicks a link, they actually did. But for this, we’re simply looking for an open or click.

And then what we do is we basically clean up tags, and I haven’t shown you these yet, but I will in a second, we basically remove tags that they may have collected as they were inactive, should make sense 30 days of inactivity 60, 90 days, then we take them out of this automation, if they’re in there when they should be the inactive or if they’re in the re-engagement automation, which occurs after the inactive we want to pull them out. So that’s why we actually Exit that exit that and then we put them right back into the Tas inactive automation. So that’s how we restart this automation we exit them, we put them back in anytime they read or they click a link.

So let me show you the next automation. So this is the inactive automation. One way they get in here is when they first subscribe that’s a one-time deal so if I do this it just once, otherwise they get put back in by that other automation. And then we do a sanity check. I know it sounds silly, but what if for whatever reason they’re no longer on the list of interest shouldn’t happen but it’s just a sanity check if they’re not on the list we do to go to another action we basically go to the bottom and then we wait. So the first wait is it 10 day wait. And then right there we check has this person is their first date subscribe, and that’s why I collect that custom fields. I want to know when do they subscribe. Is it basically within 10 days, and do they have this tag? The reason they have this tag is because we test everybody through zero bounce. It’s a service to validate email addresses. And we want to make sure they have not opened any campaign.

Let’s think about that for a minute. Person subscribed within 10 days, 30 emails valid, but they haven’t opened any email. What does that tell you? They signed up and they have done nothing, Zippo Zilch. Now, if that’s the case, we put them down the yes path, we apply this tag and it’s not really necessary wait for a day. Then we go to another action. Look, what we do we go all the way to the bottom, put them into this reengagement automation. Haven’t shown you that yet, but will otherwise if they’ve been in here more than once we send them down this path. So if they met this criteria, we’re only giving them 10 days to be active. If they’re not we’re going to put them in the reengagement and they don’t respond to that they get pulled out. However, if somebody’s been in here before, and they didn’t meet these conditions, they get another 10 day wait another 10 day, wait, that’s 30 days, we apply a tag says they’ve been inactive for 30 days, we do another 30 days in increments of 10. And remember, anytime they open or they click, they automatically get pulled out wherever they’re at. And we just apply another tag. And if they make it down to here, congratulations, 90 days of inactivity, yay, not really. And then we put them into another automation.

And this is what I mean by breaking up your automation. So I want to I could have put the reengagement here, but I did it. I like to keep it a little bit separate, so that I know where people are getting added and removed. So let’s take a look at the reengagement automation, it’s nothing fancy, the way they get in here is from the inactive automation that we just exited. And it’s basically a series of three emails, all we want is somebody to open the email. That’s it,right because that’s what triggers activity. They get pulled out of this and they get put in back into the inactive. Now what I’m doing here is I’m spreading it out over three different times during the day. So if we have the contacts time zone, then wait till 8pm in the evening, send out this email, wait for a day, and then send it at noon in the contacts time zone. And then finally wait for another day and send out the 3rd email but this time at 8am.

So we’re covering the whole day, we’re giving them plenty of chances to open to read it. Obviously, not everyone does that. And then finally, just wait a few days and again, I just want to I break it up so I get an idea of how many people each day are likely to be unsubscribed and then we unsubscribe them from the list and we add this status tag, not that this ever gets used, but it’s a way to identify everybody that’s been unsubscribed. So the combination of those three automation are used for list hygiene.

And let me show you one very, very interesting piece of data to remember how we track the unsubscribe date. Well, here’s where it gets used. So we send a web hook to this website, and it’ll catch the information it tracks when they subscribe, and when they unsubscribe. So far, there’s been about 20,000 unsubscribes and of those 3400 do so in the first nine days. So in other words, about 15, 16, 17% of anybody that’s going to unsubscribe does it within the first 90 days. That’s kind of important. So, you know, you got to get them engaged as soon as possible. And if you Look, notice this, there’s this 9% of people that have ever subscribed happened to occur basically on the 10th day.

Remember what that is, we put them into the reengagement automation, almost immediately if they haven’t opened within the first 10 days of the first time subscribing. I basically says 9.4% of the people that sign up, don’t even open an email after they signed up. And then if I look at this a little bit closer within I broke it up based on, you know, the number of people that have been here for nine days, you know, the majority happened on the first day, you got the lower percent on the second, third, fourth, fifth, six are all in the double digits and then it drops off. And then as a percent of overall 9% occur here, and you got bigger numbers early on, and then it drops off.

But notice what happens down here at 99. So this is when people get put into the reengagement automation for the first time. So in other words, they may have opened an email and did something. So they didn’t go through the 10 day version, they made it to 90 days, we reengage or try to, but they didn’t do anything. So adding these up is like 25, 27% of people will engage once and then no other time. So important to get people engaged early on. And this is the kind of data that tells us that about 10% of the people don’t even do anything. About 27% of the people will engage at least once early and that’s it.

Okay, stop with this depressing news and let’s go move on to something else. I see this isn’t Active Campaign, but we’re using a interact. I think it’s try interact. It’s quiz software. It connects to Active Campaign via API. So it’s based on results, we can send over information. In this case, we can send over tag information based on their answer. In this case, I think there’s like three different levels that people can be and we tag them appropriately based on the answers they provide. I’m not going to go through it, but I will show you the automation. Three animations correspond to three tags that people can get when they go through that quiz. And if you look, there’s this, this and this and you can kind of get an idea of how many people are in each. So majority of people end up going into this automation based on their quiz results. And again, using your eyeballs here, these automation is all kind of the same, the messaging is definitely different based on the results. So if I go ahead and dive into one of these, so based on the tag that gets applied, and it only happens once they get put into here and notice what happens down here. We remove the other tags. That’s under the assumption that they’ve been applied because sometimes people come back, they change their answers. And they get put into a different group, we just want to clean up those tags if somebody started here, but ends up in here, we want to make sure this gets removed, so the other automation would do that. And then we use our good old Do Not Disturb, because we put them in here, they’re busy. Please don’t disturb them. Exit to other automation. And guess what they’re the other two that are associated with this just to make sure they’re not getting emails on top of each other.

And then send out email results. And we could have could have made content conditional in the email based on the tag that was applied, however, gets a little convoluted. So we simply broke it up into three different animations and each email is custom to their level. And then down here, there’s a conditional check and if then check, are they basically customer or they ever visited this page? If they have, we go over here, wait a couple days and this email otherwise, we go over here send this email. And then in this case, we want to do another check, they just open that email in the last day or not. If they didn’t, we want to resend. So we want to give them a chance really want them to open that up, and then basically wait them for a day. But don’t worry or wait them for two more days, and then send them back over to here.

But these different paths are conditional on actions that resulted in tags or some kind of history that tells what they did. And again, another check down here. Did they in this case, attend or register for a webinar? If not, I think there’s probably a reminder followed by another check, which is did they even open that email otherwise resend so there’s actually kind of a lot of repetition you know, if I shrink this down, you might get a better view of it. But everybody eventually ends up on this far right hand side. When you say far right hand side, I mean far left hand side. And are we back to 100% yet. And then one last thing we do is we put them into this automation here.

So they’re in this automation, we fire off this end of their automation. And then we sit here and wait for up to three days for them to exit that and if I remember, right, this is a purchase automation. So if they purchase they automatically get pulled out which would in them here, which means we can remove this tag in this automation. So those are some examples of Active Campaign automation.