How to Use ActiveCampaign's CRM to Manage Your Business Processes

Recording of Office Hours hosted by Chris Davis on September 28, 2018. In this session, we examined a unique way to use the Deals CRM—to manage your business processes. We also troubleshot an event reminder automation, and learned about the new “Mark task as complete” action.
Transcript

Chris Davis: 00:00 All right, perfect. All right, let me start from the top. Nicole has an automation issue. Sharon, I know you said something else. Nicole, sorry about the last one. Okay, hit the wrong button. My client … All right, perfect. I’m just going to copy and paste this. … All right, and then I’ll just read it from the screen here if that’s okay with you. Nicole … All right, I got it. … There we go.

All right. My client has an automation. We’re going to import this automation, too, if we need to, that is set up with goals. She says it’s working great until the 24 hour reminder. It has been sending the text too early, too late, and not at all. Too early, too late, and not at all; so it’s just all wrong. She thought she had it fixed, but it started again. I think I know what to do that it needs to be a day of goal with a set time that it goes out. Does that make sense? Any who, she wanted me to check here on office hours. Great.

Well, you definitely did the right thing, Nicole. You’re in the right place at the right time with the right folks. I have a strange suspicion you may be on to something already, but let’s import it. Let’s import it and see. We’ll see exactly what we’re doing here. The date base goals for webinars can be a little tricky. Let me … Did I do that right? … Here, let me make sure I copied the right one. Yeah. Oh, I know what happened. I probably had a trailing space. This is what happens. … Yup, there’s that space. Let me delete it. There we go. …

All right, so we’ll go through the wizard, eight steps. … I’ll just say … lab open date. That’s fine. Oh. … Easy enough. … Boom. … Oh, yeah. Look at that. I should have a … Here we go, meeting date is … That’s fine. That’s fine. We should have … Yup, meeting date. This is the day before. This is the day before, and that’s the one that we’re probably having issues with. … We’ll just do that. Subscribing to a few lists here, general, that’s fine. … All right. Okay.

Nicole says she’s hanging in there until her connection cuts out. All right. Let’s see here. I think you have it configured right. Oh, I see it’s a mess in here. Okay, so everything working fine. They come in here. There’s a notification that goes out that a field has changed. I’m assuming that this field change is when they’ve scheduled something, or … Yeah, yeah, yeah, look at this. Strategy session reminder, so when there’s this date field of when the strategy session is scheduled, I’ll bet you that’s what’s triggering this, right? Triggers a custom field, is filled to a new time for a strategy session. Great, perfect. Perfect. Thank you for that, Nicole.

All right, so they schedule for a strategy session. Seven days prior, they get a reminder. Here’s the email that goes out. Then, one day before, they are supposed to get a reminder. So 24 hours before, you wait 32 hours, and … Oh, that may be a issue. If I go 24 hours ahead of time and wait for 32, this is going to go out beyond the 24 hour mark. This text is actually going out eight hours later. Eight hours after a full day has elapsed. Yeah. Yeah, I would … Yeah, don’t do this one.

Okay, so anyways, the issue is right here. The 24 hour reminder, let’s look at it. Okay. Which, this is correct. Meeting day is current day plus one. Let me double check. The way that I double check, I do not … The language here can be a bit confusing, so that’s my only reason, but let me … just do something. I want to make sure you have this, Nicole. … I’m pretty sure you have it, so yeah. This graphic shows that plus is before, minus is after the day of the event. Let me put this in the … in the chat for you all. I just wanted to make sure. This is great. This is great, actually. Current date is plus one. That should send it right before. Wait until conditions are met. You’ve done a great job with this. Same one here. Current date is … Okay.

So what’s going to happen here … So the difference I see is the time, right? … 24 … So one day … Ah, here we go, here we go. Here’s some things that could be throwing it off. Though, the 24 hour reminder … First off, as it’s configured, will go after the … It will go eight hours … Am I getting this right? Yeah. It’ll go eight hours after the … and that’s the best case scenario is it’s eight hours after the strategy session. It could go even further. What happens here when it says ’24 hour reminder,’ what’s going on is whatever the date is. So let’s say, Nicole, let’s say that the event is … September 30th, okay? September 29th at midnight, 12:00 a.m., September 29th, this becomes true, all right? So at that point, this, at midnight, the day before the event, this becomes true and then the day … So that entire day elapses, and then eight hours into the day of the event, this reminder goes out. So depending on what time they schedule, that is probably exactly why sometimes it go out before, sometimes it goes after later. That’s probably the case there.

I believe, here’s what I would do. My first thing would be to mimic this and say … Let me see. You know what I would do? Actually … that is one of the things I wish we could pass in is the actual time. That would really be there. That would really be good if we could pass in the time, but we can’t. So what I would recommend is the day before, right here … Yeah, I would get rid of this wait, and just send this here; because maybe I want to do something. So I’m going to copy this. I’m free-styling here, so just … walk with me.

So what happened is one day before, right at noon, this is going to fire off and say I can’t wait for our call in one day. Maybe you want to do, since you did it up there, the same thing. … There, and you know what? Watch this. … You know what we could do? Just because we know it’s going out, … right? We know it’s going out at 7:00 a.m.. Did I do that right? Gosh. There we go. … We could do that. Man, we’re still under the character length. Just a little bit of personalization in there, right? Good morning. Can’t wait for our one-on-one. … Right? It’s a easy one, Nicole, right? We’ll get so much more out of that. It’ll be very, very much … I can imagine somebody waking … Can you imagine that? Somebody waking up to a text that says, ‘Good morning, I can’t wait for our one-on-one call today?’ Wow, if they weren’t ready, they will be ready whenever they check.

I think this is going to be key. All right, so one … Oh, and watch this, watch this. All right, here’s what we’ll do, too. Here’s what we’ll do, too. 24 hours before. They’ll get the reminder, and then also, Nicole, also do not … Don’t write off the reminders that come from the system. If you’re using Calendly or Acuity, I tend to lean more towards Acuity just because their email reminders are more customizable. You can fully brand them. Don’t write those off, because when it … If you wanted to send like a 15 minute reminder, or something closer to like a 30-minute reminder, or even an hour reminder, sending those throughout a email marketing platform can sometimes be a bit off; because there’s a polling. At ActiveCampaign, it can take anywhere from five to 15 minutes within the time determined, depending on how many contacts are in your account and the load on the server. This is not ActiveCampaign-specific, this is any email platform. That’s how it works unless you’re on a dedicated server.

What happens, though, is when you’re using the scheduling software, those emails go immediately. I always recommend whether it’s a webinar platform, or a scheduling software, that the time sensitive ones, under an hour, like one hour, 30 minutes, 15 minutes, or so, always send those from the platform itself to ensure that they go out at the right time. I know for Acuity, they have built in SMS. I’m pretty sure they have built in SMS. I’m not sure if Calendly does.

Okay, great, great, you use Acuity. Yeah, so that should be extremely helpful. What’s going to happen is this: so now they get the reminder. All we need to do is wait for the day after. If it’s on the 30th, and I don’t even care what time it is. It could be at 8:00 a.m., it could be at 8:00 p.m., but what I want to do is wait until that next day. I’m going to steal this. Watch I do here, Nicole. I’m going to steal this, … and then I’m going to say this one day later follow-up. Okay, and all I’m going to do is change this from plus to minus. … That’s it. Fairly simple and straightforward.

Now, probably don’t need this wait state, since I’m waiting at seven. Now what’s going to happen is right after, right after the next day, so if it was on the 30th, the 30th, the 31st is … or one day later, at 7:00 a.m., they will proceed to here. Essentially now I see that you’re looking to see, are they in the list? So probably did they sign up on the call or not? Did they proceed or progress to what I wanted them to do? Yes or no. If not, what we’re going to do is just go and essentially in the automation, but if they did … join a list or they were qualified in some way, and they’re in a specific country or county, it’s going to determine which list; which list I subscribe them to. … Yup. That will be … It looks like this will work just fine. Probably don’t need this way … Ah well, you’ve got it … I’m just going to probably … Just want to wait for a day, and then subscribe them from this one.

It’s questionable. You may or may not use … You may or may not need that wait for a day. If you’re putting those in there just to kind of give the actions time to process, I would do like 15 minutes or so. It’s not breaking anything. It’s not breaking anything, Nicole. I’m just giving you some … like maybe you could shorten it up, or tighten it up here; but yeah. With this in place, and in fact, let me … share this automation back to you so you have it. … Let me see, share … Just so you don’t have to start from scratch. … There we go. I’ll call this ‘Nicole, event automation.’ There we go, and I put the link in the chat for you as well, Nicole.

All right. Okay, that sounds great, too. Thank you so much. There were a few things that we … Okay, great. Oh, Nicole, pleasure was all mine. That is … I thank you for asking and sharing. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask those as well. I’m just going to keep going down the line here. Mark had one. … Yes. Mark, check this out, everyone. This is a good one. … Oh, what did I do? … There we go. … All right. Let me pull out your name, Nicole, so it stands out. … There we go. …

Okay, so Mark said, “Just noticed a new task trigger feature. Can you talk about ideas on how to leverage it in pipelines or sales, and/or other systems?” Pipeline, yes. Oh, wait a minute. This just … let me make sure everybody’s aware of where we’re at here. Let me close this out, get to the … Oh, I was right where I needed to be. I’m right here. This is the one you’re talking about, right? Task triggered automations, Mark? … I’m pretty sure. Yup.

This was hands down one of my most favorite features that I didn’t realize I loved until I saw it, right? I didn’t realize just how powerful this was. I will, because I actually did this twice because it was so great. Let me get you this one, because this is going to go into a deeper dive than I did. There it is, automatically move a deal when a task is completed. I went into an extensive example on this one, Mark. It was right in the beginning, so you don’t have to [inaudible 00:15:42] too far. But that one you’ll like, but let me just talk about this for everybody who doesn’t know.

First and foremost, the task function in ActiveCampaign is attached to our CRM. A CRM is a customer relationship management system. That’s where you house all of your contact data and you use that data to provide a more personalized and customized experience for each contact. It essentially is the difference between email marketing and marketing automation. Email marketing, you email lists. You treat lists as your end game. In marketing automation, you treat contacts. You mail contacts. That differentiation, you can always tell … If you ever wanted to know like, ‘Hey, I wonder if there’s a marketing automation platform.’ Does it have a CRM? If no, it’s not a marketing automation platform, okay? It may be able to do some automation, and it may be able to market, but a true marketing automation platform has a CRM.

With that, we have tasks. What’s important with the tasks is that when a contact exists in your CRM, you can assign a task for you to do something, or someone on your team. Mark, the example that I used, and this one was a pipeline. I can show you the pipeline, actually. It was a pipeline where each person on the team, you see this, Mark? So one was Chris owns all the deals on this stage in this pipeline. Then, Jamie owns all of the contact … all of the deals in this stage. Essentially, when they filled out a form or whatever the action was, a deal was added to this pipeline. I was sent a notification and assigned a task to do.

When I completed that task using this feature, so now I can say when this task is complete, trigger another automation. Mark, what that automation ended up doing … What am I looking for? Here we go. … I can show you both of them. Man, I went through this and everybody was like, ‘Oh, that was great. How can I get it?’ Here’s the task complete automation. Just make sure … Hold on. Oh, I should just change this to 20. There we go. … Task complete. There it is. Okay, so let’s look at both of these. Task complete, move deal. So what happens, Mark, is when the deal moves, moved it … Okay, yeah, anyways. Let me go back, I’m ahead of myself. … Where’s my task completion? Task complete move deal. … Uh-oh, which one did I do? … There we go. That’s the one I wanted to show you.

Okay, so they submit a form, and they get this deal added. Look at this task. This task is to call. Once they’ve called, they mark it as complete, and guess what it does? It starts the next automation that moves the deal, okay? So now, in the example I gave, Mark, was now the owner … of these deals, all they … When a deal is added to that stage, they get an email notification and they see the task. They’re either trained every morning to log in and work off their deal task list, and just go and knock out their tasks. Or, they’re operating off this and clicking into the deal itself.

When they mark that task as complete, they’re done. That’s all they have to do, right, Mark? In the prior life, they not only had to mark it as ‘complete,’ but then they also had to remember to go in here and update, right? Like update the next stage and where the deal is supposed to go. With this in place, all I have to do, as you see, I marked it as ‘complete.’ It automatically moved the deal to the next stage, which I’m not a owner of; Jamie is. She now gets an email with the new deal, and if I need to assign her a task, I’m doing that, as well as adding in automation.

So now, I can have three different people specialize on my team at three different stages. All they have to do, look, Chris goes in, calls them, knocks out the call; hits ‘task complete.’ The automation automatically moves the deal over to the next stage, which notifies Jamie. Jamie does her thing, marks it complete. Then it automatically moves the deal from this stage to the last stage, and we’ll call this the closer. We’ll say Carlos. … Close it, Carlos the closer. Carlos … owns it, right?

So now Carlos is just sitting, twiddling his thumbs like, ‘All right, you guys line them up, I’ll knock them down.’ Just line them up, I’ll knock them down.’ The previous people, Chris and Jamie, all they’re doing is marking those tasks as ‘complete,’ because by using this new feature triggering automation when this task is complete. We can now automatically move deals or any action, honestly, when … with a simple click of marking the task as complete. Definitely check out this one. Did I put this in the chat? Yeah, I did. Definitely look at that one, Marcus. I go into a deeper dive. The one thing to keep in mind is that this function, this feature is available within automations. If you create a tag at the contact level, you won’t see these options. It’s relative to the automation builder and tasks assigned automatically, all right?

All right, let me see. … Lisa. … I think so, Lisa, I think so. …

Lisa says, “I don’t see the deals tab in my account. Do I need to upgrade?” No, that’s fine. You’re perfectly fine asking that here. Yes, so if you go to your dashboard and you don’t see … All right, yeah. I’m still expecting the verdict at the top now. If you don’t see deals, then yeah, you’ll have to go into … I believe it’s settings, probably account. Yeah. Go into your account, yeah, billing and upgrade. The one, the CRM is on the account … it’s under the account. It’s under the plus. That’s what I was trying to say. It’s in the plus account. … Yeah, and it’s …

Listen, everybody, I’m not saying this to try to upsell you. You know I do not do that on office hours. I’m not trying to get anything from you except questions, honestly; but the CRM is going to add another level to your business. If you’re still thinking like, ‘Oh, well I don’t have that many contacts.’ Replace CRM with process automation, okay? Process automation, if you’re not using it as a CRM, use it for process automation, and you will be just fine. Let me get these follow-up questions marked. …

All right, when you add the task in the automation, can you assign it to a user? Yes. That’s actually the key, right? That’s one of my keys in doing this is … I add a new deal. When I add the deal, I’m assigning it to a specific person on the team, okay? Because if I don’t do this assigning, this is why, Mark, this is a good question everybody, that Mark is asking. If I don’t assign here, and who knows? Maybe at the … pipeline level, I have it set up to do round robin or what not, but I would highly recommend dictating and determining the owner within the automation. If I don’t assign it to an owner here, they won’t get the email notification that a new deal has been assigned to them, and they won’t see the task.

Yes, I assign it right at the deal creation. At any point, which we’ll see, … For some reason, I thought I could access that from here. But what we’ll see here is that I think I’m doing it this way. Let me just make sure. … Move deal. … I think I reassign it. … Yeah, look at that. So I update the deal owner, I move the … I move it over into the next stage, and then I update the deal owner right here. I’m using the automation to move it and assign who owns it. Yeah. Assign it, and then or do you need to add the task to a stage, which is owned by a user?

All of your tasks will be on the deal. Whoever owns the deal will automatically be assigned those tasks, okay? To add a user … Yeah, so you won’t … Yeah, so the task, you won’t add a user to the task. All right, hold on, hold on. Let me get your questions up here, because I want everybody to see these. These are really good questions. All right. Uh-oh, what happened? Okay, there we go. Let me know if you guys can still see my screen. It blacked out on me for a second. Hopefully you can still see it. …

I don’t see the ability to add a user to a task, so you need to do it at the deal creation stage. Yes. Yes, Mark. So right here, … let me go back … Right here where you create the deal, the task assign … the assignment of tasks is always at the creation of the deal. I mean it’s always to the owner of the deal. So wherever this owner is, any task that you create going forward will be tied to that owner. If you use the action here in the CRM that says ‘update owner,’ let me just say update it to Jamie, … Whatever this pipeline [inaudible 00:26:19] … Right at this point, now any task that I add under this one are going to be … it’s going to be assigned to Jamie. Yup. Yup, that’s how that’s going to work. Would it be good to add ability to add specific … I agree, I agree. Throw that one in ideas and I’ll up vote that one, Mark. I will up vote that one. So as of now, … and it’s more for like a ease of use thing. It’s whoever the owner of the deal is, because they’ll get those notifications that they own a deal, and they’ll see all the tasks associated with it; so yup. Great questions, great questions. Lisa, yeah, I hope I helped you out there.

Also, Lisa, if you don’t have the deals tab, that probably means you’ve just been emailing it and doing some automation. If you have some questions specific to your business on how you could be using the deal CRM, feel free to ask those, too. Just so you all know, when I go and speak, I just got back from South Dakota. I’m going to Brazil next week, actually, everyone if any of you are in Brazil. I would love to meet you. Whenever I go speak, as excited as I am and as energized as I get about talking about marketing automation, and just automations within our app, the thing that resonates the most with users that I meet personally is the CRM. When they can understand that the CRM can be used for processes, to automating processes, beyond sales, too, beyond sales process; just any process in your business, they just … Their eyes get big, and they’re like, ‘Oh,’ because this is really unseen in marketing automation platforms. You cannot automate a process using a pipeline. Those are normally usually restricted for sales only. It’s like, ‘Hey, this is the sales only club. If you’re not a sales process, get out of here.’

We kind of broke that. We broke that approach and opened it up, and said, ‘Hey, why just let sales? Why discriminate, okay? Let any and everybody be able to automate.’ If it’s a process that’s not a sales process, hey, you could use us. It’s one of those things where every single business can benefit from it. Why do I know this? Because every single business you have processes. That’s what runs your business, your processes are in caps … They’re encapsulated by systems. Your systems are governed and run by people and technology, and the efficiency of you running those systems determines the efficiency and the growth of your business, right? So we all know you have processes. The key is understanding how to automate across as many processes as possible, and when to pull back and leave it manual. Our deal CRM is a great tool and a great strategy to use for that. Sorry I spoke a little fast.

This stuff is just on my mind all the time, so it comes out a bit quick sometimes just because I can see it. If any of that confused you, just let me know. Just the biggest point I wanted you all to … wanted to make to you all is that the deal CRM is for your processes. Do we want you to use it for your sales processes? Absolutely. Do we want you to stop there? No. No, we do not want you to stop there. We want you to look at all of your processes. Again, my favorite process that I’m using the deal CRM for right now is the podcast. I use the podcast. I’ll show you. I’ll show you everything. Mark’s seen this before, but I’ll show you all. … Just so you know, … Oh, I said deals, I mean the automation.

This is an example. I don’t manage it. I manage it throughout the other account now, but look at this. Are you interested? Did you schedule time? I mean did I send a request for you to schedule time? Did you schedule? Did we record, and did we publish? Simple. Simple, right? This allows me to manage that entire process. Now, what if I were to blend what Mark said with what I’m doing here, and actually have some automations that when they scheduled some … When they were interested, it’s somebody I created a task to go vet the … person, the guest. They go on and they look at the guest and say, ‘Hey, they’re a good … this is a good fit.’ They just complete the task that says they’re a good fit, and then it would automatically move it to this stage that says, ‘schedule time request.’ Then, when they schedule in Acuity or what not, it automatically moves them to scheduled time, right? Then maybe I have an automation that updates the owner to ensure that the time doesn’t conflict, and everything’s fine. It doesn’t need to be rescheduled. Then, when the podcast is recorded, maybe the host, myself, goes in and just marks it as recorded, and that sends off another automation or whatever.

Now you see, you can start seeing how oh wow, I would have never have thought to use the CRM for a process like that. You see that it comes to life, and all of these little features now allow you to operate just way more efficiently. Mark has a suggestion, rename deals to deals and processes. Mark, get out of my life. Mark just stay out, because this is kind of scary, honestly, Mark. I just had this conversation internally today. My proposal was there may be some business owners who are attaching CRM to a sales team or bigger businesses, and are just simply overlooking it, whereas if we did do a name like processes, or process automation. Or Mark, I even played with the idea, what if we quote unquote relaunched the CRM as process automation, as a actual feature, … and the name of it was process automation. Now, automate your processes with ActiveCampaign. It was just a relaunch of the deal CRM.

As hilarious as that would be, I think it would get some traction. You saying this … You saying what you said, Mark, is my first validation of someone who didn’t even know this was in my mind. I think that there is something there, Mark. I really do because when people are able to see it as processes, it’s a lot easier for them to conceptualize using … Bill, hey Bill, welcome. … Bill, yeah … Oh, Bill, this is a good question. Oh my gosh. I got to put this up, Bill. Great question. Great question. … Let me put this up. … Bill, if I could hug you, I would.

Deals are processes or you use deals as a place for processes. It’s they are one and the same, okay? I’ll put it like this. Here’s how I like to put it: your process is your pipeline, okay? So when you think of the word ‘pipeline,’ think of processes. Each process has steps within it to execute it right, so those steps are stages. That’s what you’re looking at right here; stages. Those are those vertical columns. Those are stages. So pipelines are processes and the stages within those pipelines are the steps required to execute the process, okay? The deals are the visual representation of where the contact is through in that process. That’s how it all works, Bill. Although you’re looking at this deal and it has Kelly’s face and everything, it lets me know that Kelly is right here … is at step one of the five step process.

That’s why, Bill, your question is just validating again; but it’s why we should add some language about process, okay? Processes with the deal CRM and not just deals. So yup, yup. Oh, absolutely. Yes. I will repeat it, Bill. Yup, no worries at all. I’m going to start from the top. So what we’re looking at right here is a pipeline, okay? What I want people to do is you can still call it a pipeline. I’m not saying not, but a pipeline is really a process. In traditional sales, the pipeline is strictly for sales processes. That’s it. That’s why this is a little … kind of like, ‘Hmm, wait a minute, say that again?’ Because this is not a traditional use of a pipeline. Your pipeline is your process, okay? They’re one and the same. Every process has steps that need to be taken in order to execute that process, right? Those steps are called stages.

So Bill, the formal terminology is pipelines and stages. That’s the sales rhetoric around what we’re talking about here, pipelines and stages. You say that any sales person, they’ll be like, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, I’ve got a few pipelines and you know, just managing the stages, and just making sure that everybody’s moving through there efficiently,’ right? So that’s the language that is traditional. That’s the formal language, pipelines and stages. What I’m proposing is since our CRM is so much more flexible, it’s easier to think of it as processes and steps. Where we say ‘pipelines,’ we now say ‘processes.’ Where we say ‘stages,’ we now say ‘steps.’ If you look at here, I have step one is you’re interested. Step two is schedule time. Step three is you have scheduled time. Step four is your podcast is recorded. Step five, podcast published.

These steps, Bill, would probably exist in a document somewhere. It’s like my training document. Hey, here’s how we handle our podcast schedule, right? You will go and say, the first thing we need to do is we need to gauge there. When someone submits that they’re interested, we need to vet them. Once we’ve vetted them, we need to send them a request to schedule some time. Once they’ve scheduled the time, we want to make sure that we’re sending our confirmation and getting them all the information they need before the podcast is up. Once they record the podcast, we need to make sure that we’re sending all of the appropriate media to the right people. Then when it’s published, we’ve got a few steps that need to be done when the podcast is published.

I can see that entire process in a Word doc. That’s normally where it exists, Bill, right? In a Word doc somewhere, or some people use an Excel sheet, or whatever. So now we can put all of those steps down as stages, and name the encapsulation of all of those stages, a pipeline, which we know is our process. That’s why I named this pipeline right up here, it says ‘internal podcast interviews.’ Okay, because that’s the process. That’s the name of the processes. Internal means people who work here at ActiveCampaign, and these are podcast interviews. The good thing is starting out, this will be very much linear-like. This is a very linear process, right? You do this, then this, then this, then this, then that. But I don’t have to stay linear. I could jump around. I could skip … I don’t want to confuse it, but yes. Let me see. … Deals is …

Oh, oh and then lastly, … the deal is actually … We have stages and pipelines, and we just kind of reworded to steps in the process, right? How I know where someone is within my process is by using a deal. The deal is the representation of their location within your process. The idea is to move the deal forward or just mark the deal as won or lost, or as won. Well, a loss could be a goal, too, if it’s not a good fit. Okay, so that’s how all three of them, deals, stages, and pipelines, how they all play into one another. Let me know if that makes sense to you, Bill, because I do not mind spending time on this at all.

All right, … let me see. … Let me see, a deal is the current title. It’s a linear process you custom develop. Yes, yup. Absolutely, Mark, absolutely. Mark also says [inaudible 00:39:33] … That is a good one. Please. Okay, so there’s two ideas, Mark, that I hope you post and send me the link to the idea so I could up vote them. Sharing pipelines just like you share automations. Oh, that would be great, man. That’s a great idea, Mark, great idea. All right, … Oh, Bill, let me get this question up. Yeah, this will probably help. All right, so my business coach wants me to send out a weekly broadcast email every Thursday. Where would that fit in? Where would the info about who was opening, not opening, or unsubscribing, et cetera, … All right, yup. Then, how would I delineate who has maybe raised their hand for a meeting in Acuity, or watched a video I have posted? Look at you, Bill, all right. Bill out the gate with three solid questions. Man, really good questions.

All right, so if you want to send a weekly broadcast email, the simplest way to do it is to click on the email icon here at access campaigns. But I will say this: everybody listening, please do this, please do this. Take some time before you even think about sending an email and figure out who you’re sending the email to. I know that sounds like basic like Chris, of course I need to know who; but here’s what I mean. The step that most people skip when they get started in marketing automation is sitting down and determining their segments beforehand, because you’re going to use the criteria when it comes to sending your campaign on who to send it to. The easy one is to say, ‘Hey, I have a newsletter list, I just send it to people who get my newsletter.’ That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that.

What I’m saying is if you’re like you, Bill, let’s say you have … your business coach is saying send out a weekly email. What I would do is I would sit down with you, Bill, and say, ‘Tell me about your business. Tell me about your product. What do people need to know about your product, and who are those people?’ Right? Once you tell me who they are, then I’m going to ask a few more questions like what does the process look like for these people? Who’s the best person that’s going to take action the fastest? Who’s the tortoise and the hare in your business? You need a path for both, okay? The tortoise, these are people that are this, this, and that. The hares, they’re coming to me. They got their wallet out, X, Y, Z.

Once you let me know who the tortoise and the hare is, those are at least two segments, right? Pre customer, or two groups, post customers, customers. I have three segments. I have the tortoises, the hares, and the customers, right? Those become my segments. I’m either going to create a tortoise list, a hare list, and a customer list, or I’m going to have an all contacts list and have maybe custom fields or a tag differentiate who’s who.

The reason why I give that long explanation is because when I go to see who gets it, you see this, select ‘lists.’ I’m either going to select one list, or maybe I’m selecting … Let’s say I have all contacts, all my contacts are on one list. Then, I have segments. I want everybody who is on my list that’s opened an email. They’re the only people that get this email. That is how you get the best results out of sending broadcast email. What you want to do, of course, I know you’re already doing this, Bill, is qualify them upfront. Since you’re sending a weekly email, you’re probably qualifying it on your website by saying sign up for my weekly email, every Thursday. Okay, and when they sign up, you’re probably just going to add them to a newsletter list and then when it comes to send, you’ll just check that newsletter list and send it. That’s the easy way, okay?

That’s fine, and then … So yeah, this is where it fits in. This is exactly where you do it, under campaigns, and just go through the wizard. When you’re done, you can just hit ‘send,’ or you can schedule it. You can also schedule. Let me show you that. If you want to build it early, you can also go down here. I thought I could … How do I schedule? I haven’t scheduled one in a while. Here. Yeah, right here. You hit ‘schedule,’ and then you could have it go out at a later date and time. All right, so that’s that one.

Where would I find out info about who’s opening and not opening, or unsubscribing, et cetera? On the email level, you can find that in our reports. Our reports are going to show you per campaign and per automation. If you want to do campaign performance, these are your broadcast emails that you sent out. Okay, all of these will be here. I don’t know if I’ve ever sent an email out of here, but … Yeah, you’ll be able to see at least the open rate of each email, and everything, and now if you go into automation reports, you’ll also be able to see all of those automated emails that are being sent out. You’ll also be able to see that engagement as well, see? Open, click, and unsubscribe rate. This one, sender email, whatever this is, has an extremely high subscribe rate, and this one does, too. Mine is a fictitious … It’s a fictitious account, so it doesn’t matter, but this is where you’ll find all of that information. Campaigns are emails that are sent outside of the automation builder. The automations report is going to show you emails sent within the automation builder, all right?

Then going on to the next one, how would I delineate maybe who has raised their hand for a meeting in Acuity or watched a video, or that I have posted? There’s a few ways that you can do this. If someone … It would depend on how they raised their hand for meeting in Acuity. Maybe there’s a particular action that you’re tracking, and you’re tagging that action. The presence of that tag says, ‘Hey, they’re a good candidate for a meeting.’ When it comes to watching a video, you’ll have to use third party software. I’m trying to think if there’s one that comes to mind quickly. There’s not one that comes to my mind. I know there are, and we actually use one. I can’t remember what it was. Yeah. There on the podcast. I don’t know if it’s been out yet. … Plus this. … It’s a good one. They’ll allow you to, when someone watches a video, it’ll automatically tag that person in ActiveCampaign. Yup.

Can you see what link someone clicks in the weekly broadcast emails? Yes, absolutely. Let me show you one. Let me show you one, Bill. As I said, I don’t send emails … out of this account, so let me just click on one, and it should show me. There we go. There we go. If I forgot what it looks like, I can look at the message. Where is it? Where did I go? Sorry. … I wanted to see the message. … I thought I could preview it here. Doesn’t look like I can. …

Anyways, and now I can see the exact link. This one has, like if I go to link clicks, … Was I where I needed to be? … I was. Here are the opens, the clicks, and the unsubscribes for that email. If I have more than one link, it would also show me which links they clicked. I can’t remember where it shows, though, since I don’t have real data. Because you can see which links that they’ve clicked as well, so maybe you had a link at the top and a link at the bottom, and you wanted to see which one people are clicking, it would definitely tell you which one. I just can’t remember where it’s at. In my regular account, I can see … because this one only has one link.

Anyways, this is where you would do it. You would go to … Let’s see, open some of these. You would go to … There we go. Okay, I’m where I need to be. Go to all campaigns, campaign performance. You’re going to find the email that you want to know about. Let’s use one like … Which one has been sent? Number of sends, this one. Great. All right, and now what I can do is … Yeah, here it goes. Go to left and select message, then it’ll let you see what everything is. Then, when you click on openings and reads, there you go. Now it’s going to show you everybody who’s opened. When I go through clicks, watch this. See that? These are the two links in my email, and these are the … how many people clicked each one. Yup. Yeah, you can definitely see that. All right.

One more. Bill’s got one more. … There we go, I got it. … Another thing I’ve been trying to figure out is how can I poll, question a client like 10 to 20 of the same questions each month to see progression, satisfaction, et cetera? Is there a solution you know of to track this over time? … Track it over time, because you’re … Yeah, yeah, okay. So this is for you to gauge their improvement by asking the same questions, and then you’d like to take that data and put it up against their previous sets of data to see the progression. … There’s nothing that comes to my mind that will make it kind of like clean and easy. However, a lot of our users prefer Typeform. A lot of our users prefer to use Typeform. If you wanted to email them a link, like maybe it’s at your business dot com forward slash survey. They click that link and go fill it out. You’re looking … See, how would you combine the data and just add it to … as a new … There’s probably some manual. There’s probably some manual in there.

Mark says, “Push their responses to Google to a Google sheet via Zapier,” that’s another way. Just every time someone submits information, fill it in as a row, and then you could have your internal team … do some configuration to where you can see … you can track that person’s … I feel like there’s probably a platform out there that does this, though, Bill. I just am not aware of it. Zapier to a Google sheet will most definitely work right now, if you’re looking for a solution that you can implement right now. That will definitely work. … Yeah.

Here’s what Bill says. He’s thinking about Typeform, which is great, but how does he take the results to a client file where he can see the progress? That’s what I’m saying, because even with Typeform, … you could have it go to a Google sheet as well. You can go from Typeform to a Google sheet using Zapier. What you’ll need to do … Yeah. What you’ll need to do is … Here’s what I’m trying to think, what would I do? I could see something like this, Bill, and I’m a little over, but just let me finish. Just let me finish my thought here. Maybe this makes sense. It may make sense.

I could see something like this where we have … I’ll call this raw data … and here, I have name, … email. Then I have queue one, queue two, queue three, queue four. Every question essentially goes across. Whenever somebody fills out my Typeform, it just fills in a row and it has all of the data here. This is all my raw data. At some point, I want to go in here and this is what I’m saying. It would be nice for our platform to do this. There may be one out there, Bill, I’m just not aware of it. Your platform would essentially be like a data entry, real low-level person that you can have come in here and grab the question, and create a client file, essentially. When it’s time to meet, or maybe they do this every month, they take whatever the client has submitted and add those questions. It could be just to a separate sheet, or maybe it’s a word doc, or something like that. Yeah, I’m sorry. Marcus, Mark; oh look at you, Mark. … Time. Yup, so you can time stamp it and know which one. Inherently, the ones at the top will be the … later ones, and the ones towards the bottom will be the most recent. But time stamp them just in case, and now what you can do is Typeform is set up with Zapier. When they fill out the Typeform, all of the question data will be here and it’s time stamped. Then, you have somebody at the end of the month to compile this data into the client’s file. Now you have a way of keeping that file up to date. Every month, your automation is just going to send out the link to the survey, and all you need to do is before you meet with them, or whatever you’re doing, check their client file, and you’ll know that it’ll be the most recent information. It’s actually a really good … example of how to blend digital and manual processes.

Yeah, so Bill is saying, “What type of person would I hire to build something like that out for me? Zapier sheets.” I would go to our ActiveCampaign certified consultants, honestly. … That’s going to be my firsthand. You could go to Upwork or Fiverr, or anything like that, but just know it’s going to take some time for you to find some quality help, or train the quality help up. I’m going to put this link in here for the certified consultants for you, Bill. There’s not a job board now, but you can look at the services offered, and I would just do implementation. Then, reach out to a few and go through your interview process and see which one you tended to like the most, and explain what you explained here. You should be good to go, yup.

All right, everybody. We’re a little bit over, but that’s fine. I enjoy every minute over that we went, and I thank you all for staying on for this extended time. I really appreciate it. Remember, our office hours is every Tuesday and Friday; Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. Central, Friday at 1:00 p.m. Central. You can attend as many office hours as you like, and we will most definitely be here to answer your questions. I’m so grateful for you all that attended. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy days away from your business or in your business, maybe you’re multitasking, but whatever it was. You spent some time with me, and I appreciate that. We appreciate that here at ActiveCampaign. We just want you to know that we are a continual resource for your learning and business growth experience. Leverage us, let me know what I can do, email me, Education@ActiveCampaign.com. Whatever it is, we are here to serve you. Until next time, my friends, have a great weekend, great weekend, great safe weekend. I’ll see you on the next office hours.