If you’ve ever used Instagram to grow a brand, you should know about Iconosquare.
Founded in 2011 in Limoges, France, Iconosquare started as a free plugin for Instagram that made it easy for Instagram users to see performance statistics about their account.
One week after the plugin was launched, it had 20,000 subscribers.
Since then, the company has hit countless milestones and evolved to a paid business model. The business also has focused on agencies, social media experts, and big brands, including IKEA, ASICS, Lufthansa, and Patagonia.
Today, Iconosquare is a powerful analytics, management, and scheduling platform for brands and agencies worldwide looking to boost their social media presence.
Read on to learn how Iconosquare has used ActiveCampaign’s customer experience automation (CXA) to scale their sales and marketing efforts, saving countless hours of work and improving the efficiency of their customer communications by 30%.
Finding the best value in ActiveCampaign
Because Iconosquare is a growing software company with a talented technical team, they first decided to develop all the tools they needed in-house, including their email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM.
In the beginning, this in-house solution saved money and gave them complete control over the technology. But as they took on more customers and started selling up-market, Jonas Couffignal, Head of Growth at Iconosquare, realized that their Marketing and Sales teams were too reliant on the Product team to scale their efforts efficiently.
They couldn’t execute basic tasks without Product’s help. This dependency was taking away from the Product team’s focus on improving the tools of their core business.
To solve this problem, Jonas considered a number of solutions, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, and ActiveCampaign.
According to Jonas, ActiveCampaign was the most user-friendly and provided the best value.
“For me, ActiveCampaign provided the greatest value when I considered its cost, technology, and integration options,” Jonas says.
He found ActiveCampaign’s flexible automation to be particularly powerful. With Iconosquare’s in-house solution, automations had to be triggered manually, and they could only execute linear email automation sequences that couldn’t be paused or ended if a customer’s needs changed. ActiveCampaign’s automation enables dynamic paths that automatically change mid-course based on customer actions and where they are in the customer journey.
With this kind of automation, the Iconosquare team could be more effective in their outreach and communications. The automations provided a seamless experience as contacts went from prospect to current customer and as each customer’s needs and preferences changed. ActiveCampaign’s automation also saved the team time, so they could get back to focusing on the important work of growing the business.
“By switching to ActiveCampaign, our developers are able to devote 100% of their time to the Iconosquare app, and our Sales and Marketing teams are better aligned and more productive.”
Becoming a leader in customer experience
With ActiveCampaign, customer communication has been effortless for Iconosquare, and the company’s Sales and Marketing teams save time while doing more to positively impact the customer experience.
They use ActiveCampaign to map the entire customer journey and track metrics like email open rates that help them measure the effectiveness of their communications.
“ActiveCampaign not only lets us track the entire customer journey for any segment we want to look at, but also helps us easily improve the customer journey using features like A/B testing. When we can be this in tune to the customer journey and what’s working and what’s not, we can engage our customer base more meaningfully, and be a leader in providing great customer experiences,” Jonas says.
For Iconosquare, another key factor that sets their customer experience apart from the competition is the integration of Pendo and ActiveCampaign via Zapier.
Pendo helps Jonas and his team understand how customers are using their product and which actions they’re taking within the tool that may indicate specific needs or intent. For example, a customer may be ready to upgrade or may be at risk of churning.
Whenever a customer takes a specific action in their platform, a corresponding tag is applied to that customer in ActiveCampaign. The team then can use that tag to trigger an automation that sends a targeted, relevant message to that contact based on the action they just took.
“This automation allows us to send the right message to the right person at the right time,” Jonas says.
Iconosquare also uses native integrations with Slack and Zendesk. This powerful stack allows Iconosquare to centralize relevant information about their customer journey in ActiveCampaign, segment it in real time, and take action accordingly whether via automation or human action.
Still growing, more efficiently than ever
With ActiveCampaign, the Iconosquare team is more efficient and effective. It takes them 40% less time to create and send a campaign email, and Jonas estimates that overall the efficiency of their customer communications has improved by 30%.
They also experienced a 93% increase in contacts in six months—proof that customer experience matters, and a positive one will drive incredible growth.
If you would like to explore the platform that Iconosquare uses every day to provide an industry-leading customer experience, try ActiveCampaign free today.
