How Startup Valencia Increased Its Partner Base 5x Using Automations

When Roberto Moragon started working as Chief Marketing Officer in Startup Valencia, the association of the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the Valencian Community, one of his first decisions was to move from HubSpot to ActiveCampaign. He had worked with ActiveCampaign before in other projects and he knew this tool was “the most suitable for a startup since it fits perfectly with its needs”. He had used HubSpot in other projects he managed, but the costs would go up making it unsustainable. He knew he should invest in marketing automation and his solution was ActiveCampaign. 

Startup Valencia was founded in 2017 as the Valencian Startup Association whose purpose is to represent the startups of the Valencian Community (Spain) and be the benchmark of an ecosystem of innovative and technological companies, boosting the competitiveness of the Valencian economy.

Increase in the number of members

Startup Valencia organizes and collaborates with different projects that give visibility to the different agents that take an active part in the ecosystem of innovative and technological companies of the Valencian Community with the aim of adding value to their members and attracting talent and investment to the region.

Each year, the association organizes the Valencia Digital Summit, a technological event of the Valencian Community that will celebrate its fifth anniversary in 2022. It’s a meeting point for technology, innovation, entrepreneurs, startups, investors, corporations, and institutions, with access to content and shared business offers virtually and in-person at The City of Arts and Sciences of Valencia.



In order to add value to their members and attract startups and potential partners interested in joining the association, they needed to quickly divide their audience into segments, send automated and personalized notices, and have a CRM that would adapt to their needs.

To do this, from day one, they put together their marketing funnel and created different automation’s for each stage of the client’s life cycle just like for the different phases of the business follow-up. In this way, the marketing funnel is always updated in real-time and it automates the processes of attracting and retaining.

The results speak for themselves, thanks to the automations, the number of new members per month is 3 times higher. As Robert said, “We are managing to be more efficient in attracting and retaining members and partners.”

ActiveCampaign CRM plays an important role in the project. It stores the information of potential new members and provides an understanding of what stage each contact is at. Through the use of different funnels which are focused on the acquisition of new members or on the retention of the current members, they have a clear view of which contacts need attention at any given moment.

Tags, the key to segmentation

One of the features that have helped Startup Valencia to divide its contacts into segments are the tags, a functionality that was not available on HubSpot and that has proven to be key for sending segmented and relevant messages to their contacts. Startup Valencia uses more than 200 tags that allow you to send segmented messages to the right person at the right time. With these tags, you can add information to a contact in a fast and easy manner to later use automation.

For Startup Valencia, one of the main functions of the tags is to identify in which stage of the client’s life cycle each contact is in and send information of one type or another based on what they need. According to Robert, “Thanks to ActiveCampaign, we have managed to segment our audience in an optimal way.” 

Getting the most out of CRM and automations using incorporations

One of the needs that Startup Valencia has for its events was to be able to integrate some of the tools they already used with ActiveCampaign. One of those is Zoom, enabled by Zapier. The information that comes through this integration is fed into ActiveCampaign and allows them to store all the data in one place.

When a new user registers on Zoom to attend an event organized by Startup Valencia, they have to fill out different fields like name, last name, position, email, or company. Once the contact has subscribed to the event using Zoom and has provided all their contact information, this data is stored in ActiveCampaign and it’s used to activate automations. 

For example, one of the fields that determines which type of information needs to be sent to a contact is their title. If the contact is the CEO of a company, the tag assigned would be Marketing Qualified Lead and they enter an automation that nurtures that contact, turning it into Sales Qualified Lead. However, if the contact is a student, another tag would be assigned and it would enter a different automation. In this way, depending on the type of potential client, notices that are relevant for each one of them are sent out automatically. 

On numerous occasions, more than one person of the same company attends an event or provides their information to Startup Valencia. To collect this information in a better way, contacts that belong to the same company become members using the ActiveCampaign and Google Sheets integration. To do so, they export all the “main” contacts in a sheet (since they have been divided into segments in a list) and then they import each new contact that enters the database in another sheet.

Through simple research, they verify if the new contacts belong to an already registered company. When there are contacts that belong to a company that already exists in the database, the contact is automatically sent out to ActiveCampaign through the contact sync of Google Sheets. After the whole process, the secondary contacts linked to the main contact can be found in ActiveCampaign, so that all the people that belong to the same company will be correctly tagged through automation.

This allows Startup Valencia to go through a process of contacts according to their needs and sync them with the new information (fields, tags…) from Google Sheets to ActiveCampaign. This way, the segmentation is much more personalized.

Startup Valencia also uses the native integration for ActiveCampaign and Typeform, enabling them to more easily gather information, considering that, in some of their projects, they use forms with up to 30 fields to qualify and segment their contacts.

This combination of segmentation and integrations has enabled their open rate to increase by 83% and their click-through rate to double. At the same time, the number of potential clients has increased by a factor of five. 

Creation of landing pages

Before launching the ActiveCampaign Pages tool, Startup Valencia had used Converday to create landing pages. Now they can create pages aimed at conversions like Capital4Startups.org with all the advantages of doing it in the same interface of ActiveCampaign and maintaining a consistent design with the rest of the page.