Getting Started with ActiveCampaign in 9 Minutes

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Hello and welcome to Getting Started with ActiveCampaign. In this video, I'm going to walk you through how to set up your account so you can quickly leverage ActiveCampaign for your business success. Feel free to have the application open as you follow along to get started with ActiveCampaign.

If you don't currently have an account, please feel free to use one of our 14-day free trials. You can do so by visiting the activecampaign.com website, adding your email address, and clicking Try It Free. Then add a bit of information about yourself and your business to help configure your account, and click Take Me to My Account. This will then take you to a dashboard where you'll see a number of resources that are there to help you get started.

For the purpose of this video, we're going to jump right in. But you can always return to this screen by clicking the ActiveCampaign logo in the upper left. If you exit out of those, this is where you can see the Customizable Account Summary Dashboard. Okay, let's get started. First, let's configure this account with your information. There's a couple of important settings that you'll want to make sure that you have in place as we get started.

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Go to the bottom left and click the settings icon. The first setting that we're going to put into place is your address. Adding an address to your ActiveCampaign account enables you to actually send emails. By law, every single email that is sent must have a physical address associated with it in the footer of that message. You can add your address by selecting Add an Address.

Once your address is added, the next setting we want to ensure that you have in place is site tracking. To turn on site tracking, in the left-side menu, click Website and Site Tracking. Under Site Tracking, click the Enable Toggle to set it in the on position. Then add your domain name in the Website URL section, excluding the HTTP protocol. Then copy this tracking code so you can paste it in the footer of each page of your website that you wish to track in ActiveCampaign.

The next thing we want to do is create a list. Every contact in ActiveCampaign has to exist on at least one list. So let's get that started. To create a new list, in the left-side menu, click Contacts and Lists.

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Then click Add a List in the upper right corner. Give your list a name, and add your site URL. You can also add a short description of what this list is and click Save.

Once your list is created, it is now time to import contacts onto that list. To do so, you can select Import contacts next to the list that you created, or you can select contacts and select Import. There are a few ways to import contacts into ActiveCampaign, including our app integrations. But for the sake of this video, we are just going to import contacts using a CSV file. To do so, click the button Import from file and select the CSV that you wish to open.

You'll then be presented with our Import mapper, which looks for first name, email address, last name, and various other custom fields. The most important for now are first name and email address if you have them for your contacts. Once those fields are mapped correctly, scroll down and make sure that you select the list that you wish for these contacts to be added to, as well as any tags that you wish to add.

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It's a best practice to always include at least the date in which you've imported this contact and where you got them from, the source, whether it's a Google Sheet, a Facebook, whatever it may be. You also have the option to import your contacts as active, as unsubscribed, or as an excluded email address. We'll keep the default and select Import.

Now, the import process can take a while depending on the size of the list that you're wishing to import. But once the import is complete, you'll be able to see all of these contacts that you recently imported on the contacts page.

The next step is to add an amazing automation that will send a message to these contacts whenever they get added to this list. To do so, select Automations. Similar to the dashboard, you are presented with some suggested ways to get started in the form of automation templates that we call Recipes. Please feel free to explore these later. But for the sake of this video, we are just going to keep on keeping on and get ready to build. Go ahead and click the new automation button. In this pop-up, we are going to select Start from Scratch.

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Again, we have a ton of amazing automation recipes that you can explore at any time, but for the sake of this video, we are just going to select Continue. Start Trigger is the way in which contacts are added to your automation. You can think of them as the front door of your automation. It's what actually allows your contact in to start whatever journey or workflow you've built for them.

For now, we'll select Subscribes to a List. Then select the list that we created. We can choose to have this run once or run multiple times, or even segment contacts entering the automation. But to keep things simple, let's select runs once and unselect the segment option. Then click Add Start.

The Add A New Action modal will open. This is where we can choose the first action that we want to happen when somebody subscribes to our list or is manually added to that list. Let's select Send an email under the Sending options. Let's give our email a name for our reference and select Start with a Template. You will then be presented with Choose a Template type. Let's click Email Designer.

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You will then be presented with our Template Library. Feel free to browse and choose a template that best matches your brand, or you can simply build from scratch. But there are a ton of amazing different designs on this page. For now, I'm going to hit Save and Exit and send immediately on the next screen and then hit Save.

Now you'll see after somebody subscribes to our master list, they will be sent this welcome email as soon as we take it out of draft mode. The next thing we want to do is give this automation a name. Next, we will want to activate the automation so it runs for all of the contacts being added to this list moving forward.

Another great way to add contacts to a list is through a form. You can find forms in your main navigation by clicking on Website and Forms. Additional resources on forms and other great steps can be found in this video's description.

There you have it. Congratulations. You have just configured your ActiveCampaign account. You have your first automation set, and you're ready to start nurturing and sending emails to contacts as soon as they subscribe to your list.

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But that's just the start. We want to ensure that you have everything that you possibly need for success. For that reason, we've created valuable resources to help you every step of the way, which we have shared in the description below. We are also adding more and more training videos here as well, so subscribe to stay up to date, and please comment below if you have any questions or comments about this video. We are so excited for you to be starting your ActiveCampaign journey. Thanks for watching, and happy building.