ActiveCampaign Platform Demo: Automations

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Automation in ActiveCampaign is crucial for enhancing efficiency by streamlining repetitive tasks. This saves time and allows marketers to focus on strategic initiatives. It also ensures consistency in messaging across all touchpoints, maintaining a strong brand voice and keeping your audience engaged.

Automation enables personalized experiences based on contact behavior and preferences, leading to more relevant messaging and improved engagement. As businesses grow, automation facilitates effective outreach at scale without increasing workload. It also supports lead nurturing through targeted campaigns that guide contacts along the customer journey, boosting conversion rates.

Automated workflows provide valuable insights into customer behavior and engagement, enabling data-driven decision-making. By ensuring timely communication through automated responses and follow-ups, automation enhances the overall customer experience. Let's dive into everything you need to know about getting started with automations in ActiveCampaign.

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To begin, head to Automations in the main navigation. Here, you will find all of the automations you have built into your account. You can easily search or filter by status or label. It's a best practice to use labels in your account for internal organization. It's clear whether an automation is inactive or active based on their red or green circle indicator.

Across each row, you'll have your automation stats where you can see contacts currently in the automation, the campaigns being sent from the automation, and the number of goals being completed. Finally, you can edit or drop into automation settings on the right side of your screen.

Select the blue button in the top right corner to create a new automation. You can choose to start with an automation recipe, which is a prebuilt automation template, or you can start from scratch. In this video, we'll start from scratch to explore all of the features available in the builder. Once selected, press Continue.

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You'll first be prompted to select your start trigger. You can view all or sort by category. As you set up integrations in your account, you'll also find additional start triggers and action steps will be unlocked under Apps. The start trigger is the entry point or doorway into your automation. Your trigger is a condition or an event your contacts are completing, which results in them being pushed into the automated journey that you've built.

Some start triggers include when a contact subscribes to a list, when the contact submits a form, when a web page is visited, when a tag is added or removed, when a contact makes a purchase, and so much more. Once you select a start trigger, you will walk through the configuration steps and have the opportunity to segment the start trigger further with advanced settings. With segmentation, you define additional conditions that the contact must meet in order to enter the automation.

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Next, you'll create the subsequent action steps. The actions are steps the contacts will be experiencing since being entered into the automation. To build, you'll use the plus signs. Clicking on the plus sign will make your actions appear.

In the first tab, you'll see the AI suggested steps. The next tab is your sending options from marketing emails to direct one-to-one emails, which are crucial for sales automation, SMS messages, internal notification emails, and more. Then workflow actions that are critical to building personalized pathways for your contacts, whether that is a wait step, so contacts wait for a period of time until a specific date or when conditions are met, or you can use an if-else action to create two pathways based on conditions. You can use a go-to step to jump a contact to another action step in the automation, or a goal step, which acts like a magnet when contacts meet the condition set.

Under the Contacts tab, you'll find actions like unsubscribing contacts from a list, updating contact custom fields, and adding or removing tags. The next tab is filled with actions that all have to do with the CRM. One of the most potent partnerships in ActiveCampaign is the CRM and automations. Managing a CRM was once a very manual and repetitive process. But as you explore all of the actions here, you will find that it can now be automated. From adding a deal to updating a deal status, stage, or deal custom field value, to adding deal tasks, and more.

Lastly is Apps, where you can find how to connect your tech stack and tools to work seamlessly together. Once you are finished building your automation, you can turn it from inactive to active in the top right corner.

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The key to building successful automations is to automate intentionally and build modularly. We encourage you to break apart your customer journey and processes into multiple automations. Moving contacts through automations like a relay, passing from one to the next as they meet your objectives. In return, you will receive valuable time back in your day-to-day.

Automations remove manual and repetitive tasks from your marketing and sales workflows, significantly improving efficiency, effectiveness, and audience connection, and ultimately, driving better business results.