Customer support and community played a major role in my decision to switch from Mailchimp to Active Campaign.
The product being better was a really nice surprise. I knew it would offer similar features. The support & onboarding put Active Campaign over the top.
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Keegan 0:00
In this episode we’re talking about why I switched from MailChimp after three and a half years to Active Campaign.
Keegan 0:24
What’s up and welcome to another episode of the Divi addicts podcast. You know this week we’re talking about we’re talking about email marketing a little bit you know, and if you if you’re in the game of email marketing or if you’re if you run a business and you’ve not started email marketing, I’m going to tell you first and foremost that you need to get on board with that. And there’s a couple things we’ll talk about here in this episode, a few different platforms that I do suggest and that they’re really easy to jump into the first one whenever we first kicked off Keegan Lanier media was Kal designs back in the day we signed up for a free MailChimp account just so that we could start collecting information.
Keegan 1:02
And we weren’t blogging very much you know, I wasn’t doing a whole lot of a whole lot of stuff on the website as far as business blogging or WordPress blogging or you know, WordPress development or anything like that. I was just kind of writing and I had this MailChimp account and it evolved, you know, as things do over time, I eventually jumped into a paid plan so that I could get some of the automations and some of the socials connection and things like that. And you know, I stayed with with MailChimp for a long time I got very used to it, I liked what they did, I thought the platform had evolved very well, the rebrands were good, the additional services and features that they had inside the platform, I thought were great, you know, they did a really nice job for for the entry level stuff. And it’s pretty powerful. Honestly, I think the bang for your buck when it comes to MailChimp is really solid.
Keegan 1:51
And so, you know, I really wasn’t looking to pick up any different platform wasn’t looking to switch wasn’t looking to do really anything different than what we had been doing. But I’ll give you this and this is under the hood, you know, this is just raw as real as it gets. We hadn’t put a lot of effort into building email lists, and we had 40 or so people on the list. We did no lead generation we did pretty much nothing. It was kind of like here’s a form on the website, sign up if you’re interested. That was pretty much it. So one day, you know, I’m scrolling through Twitter through the feed and Twitter and there’s a girl that I follow. Her name is Carmen. And you know, she was asking a question about which email marketing platforms she use.
Keegan 2:39
And it was talking about MailChimp and people were kind of complaining about MailChimp. And I wasn’t sure why. I was like, man, I need to I need to dig in and do more research. So I kept following the topic. And again, the girl name is Carmen Kay. She’s a web designer, she does some some really cool like girlboss style. She works on efficiency building systems for your business, and really all kinds of stuff. It’s at I am Carmen Kay, on Twitter. She’s phenomenal. Go follow her go check out her material. It’s very, very good. And she’s she’s awesome at what she does. Go check her out.
Keegan 3:16
Or in the midst of that topic on Twitter. somebody mentions Active Campaign. As you know, I think I’ve checked that Active Campaign out at some point in time, but it didn’t really stand out. I thought maybe it was cool. But I didn’t want to change. I don’t I don’t know I really don’t remember I didn’t think too much about about Active Campaign in general. until until something happened. I mean, not long after somebody mentioned Active Campaign, they didn’t even tag Active Campaign. It wasn’t an ad mentioned. They just it said Active Campaign in the tweet. And Active Campaign social manager, they jumped in, they got after it got into the conversation. We’re like, Look, you know, if anybody’s interested, we’d love to do a discovery call. No pressure, but here’s what we offer. And if you’re interested, you know, here’s how you check us out and learn more.
Keegan 4:05
That always resonates with me, I’m somebody who loves Twitter. I love social media, pretty much in general, you know, as long as you control it, right? And you make it what you want it to be. Social media is phenomenal. And so, you know, this stood out to me and I immediately within a day or two I was on a call with with the Active Campaign onboarding team. We started talking through what it was that gave them the rundown on the business, kind of the things that I do as far as content and right there on the phone. He’s like, Look, email, you know, here’s some some income generation or lead generation that you can use. Here’s two or three different ideas, I implemented them. And, you know, we’ve continued to grow we’ve continued to do little things here and there really over the last few weeks. It’s not a brand, I mean, it’s a brand new thing.
Keegan 4:54
And we went from you know, 40 or so to over 70 or 80 like almost 100% Said increase just with a different platform being able to tag and do some different automations. And using a couple legions it’s made a difference, you know, I can say if I, if I would have done something like this or had a had a partner in this email marketing journey, who was just saying, hey, like, why don’t you try this, I know you’ve been with us forever, we’ve been collecting $10 you know, 120 bucks a year for the last three years you made you know, 360 bucks off of you, you know, maybe we can give you a tip or two. And you know, had that happened, I probably would have done more with MailChimp. But I switched and within a month, I doubled the amount of people who were on the mailing list by using Active Campaign.
Keegan 5:41
And there’s a few reasons for it, you know, I did create some additional lead gen things I had done some towards the end of MailChimp, but I did you know, a couple layouts, some free Divi layouts, and had people sign up for the layouts, give me their email. And when I did that, I tagged them, so that I can send out some customized newsletters and things like that to the people who were interested in those templates, also, so that whenever this course launches, I know we’ve talked about it here on the podcast, and I’m a bit behind. But there’s a lot going on in life. So I’d rather it be complete. And I’m pushing I’m almost done recording all of the all of the videos and then I’ve got to go through and do the editing. And then we’ll make a hard last push for this launch and get some signups before we get to the to the actual go live date.
Keegan 6:24
But you know, there’s, there’s so many things that I’ve used to collect those emails, including the course launch, but I want to make sure that people, people are getting some value. And that’s that’s really helped drive those those numbers up. So Active Campaign was a big part of that, because they made it so simple. You can tag somebody, you can kick off a act an automation based off of those tags. And something else that’s that’s really, really important is that you can actually tag people based on when they click, and you can funnel, you know, either if they did this, if they took this action go this route on the automation, if they didn’t go this route, it’s very visual and easy to set up. So you can check and say like, did the person click on this link inside of the email? If they didn’t, let’s take them on a different journey.
Keegan 7:13
So this is ways that you can very intuitively segment your audience, you say send out a message to your whole entire audience and say, you know, what kind of problems do you have, and it could be WordPress development, it could be SEO, and depending on which link, they click, you can create it so that you tag somebody, they click SEO, you can tag them with SEO, if they click WordPress development, you can tag them with WordPress, and then you can segment the types of message that goes to them based on their preference.
Keegan 7:46
So you can do that with pretty much any email marketing. And that’s kind of what their purpose is. But Active Campaign just take it from somebody who’s used both extensively now Active Campaign, it’s so much easier, it’s very, very user friendly, when it comes to the automations. And the team of support is just incredible. I can’t say enough great things about the onboarding process for Active Campaign and the support that they give you once you’re a customer, it’s not just a let me get your money and then forget about you kind of situation they do, they do a great job, they’ve got a great social presence, they have a really good platform, which I know is that’s the key to at all they have to have a good product and they do.
Keegan 8:25
So that essentially in a nutshell is why I switched from from MailChimp over to Active Campaign. And I can’t say enough great about Active Campaign. If you’re interested and you want to learn more about it or just hear about my experience, specifically, go to Twitter at Keegan l media ask us a question hit me with a DM and I’m happy to talk pretty much at any time about any of this stuff. So thank you, thank you so much for for being here. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. And yeah, we’re gonna we’re gonna cut this one off, we’re gonna go to the to the sponsored read, which you may or may not like, and then we’re gonna hit it with a closing right after that with a resource for you for the week. So thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you in the next episode.
Keegan 9:11
So as always, you know, we mentioned it a second ago in the closing part of the main part of the podcast. I appreciate you listening to this podcast week in and week out, hope that you get some some real true value from this and if you do, it’d be awesome. if you would subscribe to the podcast, maybe leave a review on Apple podcasts or anywhere you listen. And that would be huge, massively appreciated, and will continue to grow this audience and allow me to come back here each and every week and deliver some value to you around WordPress around development around business around all things website and business promotion related.
Keegan 9:53
So again, I know I say it a lot you probably get tired of hearing it but thank you I truly like legit Ultimately mean that from from deep inside, I do appreciate each and every one of you who listen and especially appreciate each one of you who shared this with somebody who you think may get some value from it as well. Have an amazing week. Stay safe, stay healthy, and we’ll see you next week with another episode of the Divi addicts podcast.