How to Find the Right Tools for Your Marketing Stack

Recording of Office Hours hosted by Chris Davis on August 10, 2018. In this session, we looked at a few options for building a marketing stack around ActiveCampaign to capture leads and collect payment.

Transcript

Chris Davis: 00:00 All right. Jeff, you should be able to talk now. You there, Jeff? I see your mic, Jeff, are you still here?

Jeff: 00:20 Hi, Chris.

Chris Davis: 00:22 There he is. I can hear you now. Hey, Jeff, how are you doing? You went away.

Jeff: 00:30 I’m doing all right.

Chris Davis: 00:30 There you go. Yes.

Jeff: 00:31 I’m doing all right.

Chris Davis: 00:36 Great. The floor is yours. The device seems to be a little choppy.

Jeff: 00:42 Can you hear me now, Chris?

Chris Davis: 00:44 I can hear you, yes.

Jeff: 00:46 Excellent. Excellent. Let me start by saying, I like you, I’ve told you that before.

Chris Davis: 00:51 I appreciate that, Jeff.

Jeff: 00:56 I know I’m going to get a good answer from you. Because that’s the way you work. I’m wrestling with my conversion path tools. ActiveCampaign is my marketing automation platform. I really like ActiveCampaign. I think dollar for dollar, the marketing automation tool is really, really good. I use HubSpot for my CRM, and I’ve started Elegant Themes Bloom for my forms. I feel like I’m sub-optimizing everywhere. I really want to pull some of these things together. I want to talk specifically about forms. All right? ActiveCampaign has an integration with Bloom, and I like it, you can use custom fields and what have you, which is a nice change, but you can’t use tagging. Or at least I don’t know how you use tagging between [inaudible 00:02:07].

I had been using ActiveCampaign forms, but I found it was difficult to work with the forms, particularly on anything that wasn’t inline, and didn’t use the ActiveCampaign [inaudible 00:02:22], kind of update and just insert, which is nice. Which uses shortcode. But here’s what I’m looking for. I use Bloom because it’s just a great user interface, very easy to build and duplicate forms, and just link to a list. But you lose the tagging ability. I really like the forms from ActiveCampaign, and the tagging, the contact activation, and setting all the automations in motion. Maybe I just don’t know enough about ActiveCampaign forms, but I’ve read almost everything I could online on ActiveCampaign.

I’m looking for a solution that makes forms easy to integrate in WordPress, and I want good analytics behind them that shows views, and conversions, or where the form is appearing, A/B testing. The A/B testing on Bloom is really nice, because it really just want to learn what’s working and what’s not. The problem I’m running into is the website tracking is not working unless we’re tagging or going through a form on ActiveCampaign, but I don’t get some of that retroactive visit history and other stuff like that. Really, I’m at a point where do I switch over to HubSpot, use their Lead Flows, and stuff, and then just use AC marketing automation. But then I still run in sub-optimized tagging and really segmenting. Does that make sense?

Chris Davis: 04:22 It all makes sense, Jeff. You explained it perfectly, man. I’ll start with saying, or just kind of rephrasing, or reiterating, or repeating, the main goal here is to be able to capture contact information on your WordPress website in a way that allows you to track them going forward as well as be able to identify how well the capture is working on your website, right?

Jeff: 04:53 Yes. And to do that as easily and as cost-effectively as possible.

Chris Davis: 05:00 Yeah, yeah.

Jeff: 05:01 I definitely do not want to be copying code from one system into another. Shortcode integration is okay, but I want to eliminate one of these three.

Chris Davis: 05:18 Sure, sure. Yeah, I think you may be able to eliminate two of them. But we’ll see. Watch this. Two tools that come to mind based on our users’ experience … one is Thrive Themes, I’m not sure if you’ve heard of this. But actually, I can be more specific, leads, Thrive Leads. This is a list-building plugin built for WordPress. What it does is it has all of the pop-ups, as you can see. [inaudible 00:05:54] tool with Bloom and everything. But the better thing is that it integrates directly with ActiveCampaign. When someone fills out one of these forms that you create on your WordPress site, it looks beautiful, matches your design, and you can pretty much do what you want, they’ll be automatically added to ActiveCampaign without any code. Right, [crosstalk 00:06:17] copying and pasting.

Jeff: 06:17 All right, so I can do that with Bloom, but it just adds to a list.

Chris Davis: 06:26 Yes, this one will either add them … you can submit a form or tag them right when they opt-in.

Jeff: 06:34 Okay.

Chris Davis: 06:36 This adds a few other levels of abilities, and the A/B Testing is in there, which is really nice, since it’s WordPress-based, you can even, you see where it says Ultra Precise Targeting? You could even set like which blog post, or which categories you want particular pop-ups to display on.

Jeff: 06:56 Yes, that’s important too, because I’m doing in Bloom, and it’s … I’m on Divi, so it integrates really nicely with the blogging feature, so I don’t have to copy and paste any URL, some of the blogs in there [crosstalk 00:07:11] uses simple search.

Chris Davis: 07:13 It sounds like, from the Bloom site, they’re really just missing the tagging feature for you.

Jeff: 07:19 Yes.

Chris Davis: 07:20 Yeah, okay. You’ll be very familiar with this. This is literally just like Bloom, except it has the tagging feature in there. And you can apply multiple tags at once too, so you’re not limited to one tag per form. Perhaps you want to add a couple tags on the form that they fill out, you can do that all within this platform.

Jeff: 07:42 Okay.

Chris Davis: 07:42 That’s one, but the second one, now this is going to get a bit more interesting. On ConvertFlow, I have met with the founders a few times, they’ve been to the office and have walked me through their tool. Now, what you won’t have with Bloom, or Thrive Themes, is that ability to track. You won’t have that ability to track out the gate, because this is not an ActiveCampaign form, we have to wait until they click a link in an email to put the site tracking on. ConvertFlow changes that. ConvertFlow will actually … you can set up your funnel in ConvertFlow and say, “Hey, if they have this particular tag in ActiveCampaign, show them this box. Then, once they have another tag, show them another box.”

It makes your website a lot more dynamic to the information you’ve already captured. If they don’t exist in ActiveCampaign, ConvertFlow will continue to track them until they do click a link on ActiveCampaign or whatnot, and they’ll send all of that information to ActiveCampaign.

Jeff: 07:42 Okay.

Chris Davis: 08:44 So you don’t lose … [crosstalk 00:08:44] all the same stuff. It has the pop-ups, it has the direct integration, the thing that’ll get with Convert Kit is things like these. If somebody does this right now, generate more leads, and it goes here, right now, I’ve been tagged in ConvertFlow. As soon as I put my email address in there, it will then send all of that information to ActiveCampaign so nothing is lost. Even if I come back another day and I’ve clicked around. If I’ve clicked like five pages, I’m just collecting tags on my contact record, because this tool is tracking all of my clicks and what I’m doing. Then, when I finally submit my email, all of those tags get pushed to ActiveCampaign, so you don’t lose out.

Jeff: 09:39 I’m happy to hear you say this, because I just set up a ConvertFlow account. I met them at Activate.

Chris Davis: 09:46 Okay, great, great.

Jeff: 09:48 I had been looking at them along with [inaudible 00:09:54] and I spoke to Ethan, and I was really, really impressed with what they’re doing. In my mind, ConvertFlow is going where the conversion path process is going.

Chris Davis: 10:10 Absolutely.

Jeff: 10:11 Instead of email, landing pages, onsite retargeting, so I like that. That’s probably the right solution.

Chris Davis: 10:19 Yeah, this sounds like it’ll do what you need it to do. Then, this definitely only replaces Bloom. You may even be able to replace HubSpot CRM with our CRM depending on that information that you’re capturing on your website now that you have a tool like this in your back pocket.

Jeff: 10:38 Okay. All right. Good.

Chris Davis: 10:43 Do me a favor, Jeff, try this out. Get it up. You can even send me a website that you have it on now, I opt in myself so you can see it. I’d love to know how it works out for you, man, so I can report to others too.

Jeff: 10:57 Okay. All right, I’ll do it. That was simple and straightforward. I told you, I told you you would give me the answer.

Chris Davis: 11:10 That’s it, Jeff, we have enough to get you started, man. I’m looking forward. If you have any questions, man, don’t hesitate, jump back on, send me an email. Let’s talk it through, man.

Jeff: 11:20 All right. Good. Thanks.

Chris Davis: 11:25 No problem, Jeff. Good to hear you again. All right. That was a great question. Great, great question. Let’s see. I’ve got, let me see, I have another question that was emailed to me. If you all have … Renee, are you on? Oh, Renee, you’re here, all right. Great. If you all have any questions, feel free to get them in the chat. Those of you who are just now coming in, one of the things that I mention up front is to ask your question at any time. Do not qualify. Don’t think it’s too small, too large, too stupid, too beginner, too whatever. It is the perfect question just as it is. We like questions, we accept all questions as they are. Use the chat below, let me say this again. Just so you know where it’s at.

Everyone, whatever it’s blinking on your screen, that’s where the chat is at. Use the chat as your notepad. Any things that come to mind, they don’t necessarily have to be questions, you can just reaffirm something like, “Oh, so wait a minute, did I hear you say.” Right? This is for you. This is for you specifically to be interactive. Renee, how are you doing? Renee, let me put your question up. And let’s get an answer going here. Renee emailed me, so that’s how I knew we had another question. All right.

Renee uses ActiveCampaign for her travel business. She writes a newsletter that includes links to her lead pages, where readers can get information on trips. Then, they click on the lead page that takes them to this site, just walking through it, and at any moment, Renee, if I get this wrong, stop me immediately. They go there, where they can purchase the trip. That’s fine. So they can come here and purchase … you probably want to send them to a more targeted page, maybe they get overwhelmed with what to click on at this point. Maybe you want to send them straight to pricing, or maybe that’s too much, maybe send them to How It Works. Maybe, I don’t know, anyways.

When they’re ready to purchase, they go there, WeTravel.com will give them the option to pay in full or start a payment plan. All right, so here’s the problem everybody. Okay, you can see my page right here. All right. This is Renee’s page. All right, so you go here, okay, I got it. Click here for more info. Perfect, all right, yeah, this makes sense, because this is a very much targeted page. This is a nice pic. Now, look at what the problem is, everyone. [inaudible 00:14:17]. The problem is that the payment plan offer will only accept up to five payments. If the customer wants to go longer, then I have to go into Square and set them up to receive monthly invoices. Is there a way to do this … is there a way something like this can be done in ActiveCampaign and simplify it all? Thank you.

All right, excuse me, I think I get it. At this point if I wanted to break this $1000 payment up into payments, you’re saying the most I could do is go to payment plan, the furthest I can go is triple, quad, single, is five. Which is probably the quad. Which means the first one counts, and then four more. But what you’re saying, Renee, is you want more freedom to provide a payment plan beyond just five months. Like perhaps six months, or maybe even a year. Maybe somebody wants to break $1000 down into a $100 a month for an entire year, something like that.

Or, she says, “Most trips are $2900.” There’s not a lot of people that are walking around with $3000 of disposable income just ready to spend. However, those same amount of people probably would pay for the trip if they could break it up. Even having something as simple as 12 payments, they could then say, “Oh, okay, I’m going to start now, and by the end of the year, I’ll have made the lion’s share of the payments, and I don’t have to worry about whether I can afford going on this trip or not.” What it sounds like, the answer to the simplifying of this process, Renee, is going to be the payment processor. WeTravel.com right now is doing the payment processing for you.

ActiveCampaign doesn’t do payment processing, however, we integrate with payment processors. It looks like that may introduce a level of complication for you, a lot of our users use like ThriveCart, WooCommerce, or Shopify to sell their products, where they can have more control over the payment plan. But, any way to offer 12 months would be outside of WeTravel, and I’m not sure if you could do that with your business, because it looks like WeTravel is … I mean, they’re giving you this beautiful page, that shows the reviews, the group size and all of that. Oh, you can, Renee. Renee says she can eliminate WeTravel.

So that opens up the floodgates, and I’m going to give you, I’m going to pull out of … I’m going to the bag of my secret weapons. I want to introduce you to this. ThriveCart. You don’t need to read anything on this page other than this platform is the strongest standalone payment processor that integrates with ActiveCampaign outside of the e-commerce space, I will say. So many people uses, I use this personally. It is great. You can do exact … Renee, the level of flexibility you’ll have in this tool is going to remove any issue that you’re currently facing right now, and very much simplify it. Here’s what I mean. Hold on.

I want to go from ActiveCampaign to pay. Yes, yes, yes. Check this out, check this out, Renee. I’m getting a little excited. I’m sorry, I’m getting excited with certain things. Depending on the level, the developer that you have, guess what, you could essentially build out a page on your website that looks very similar to this. Because what ThriveCart will do is, it will give you an embed code for the checkout form, and you can embed the form like on that page. We could very much mimic and mirror what you have at WeTravel, if you really like this. You can send it to a developer, have them build it out, and then right here, where you see this, this could be an embedded ThriveCart form.

What ThriveCart is going to do is, it’s going to allow you to break up those payments however you want to. You could break them up in 12 months, 24, 36, 18. You can do whatever you want, and they’ll appear similar to here, you know, how you have the options, except they’ll just be radio buttons. They’ll be radio buttons on the form. Let me see here. Ryan, welcome. Thanks for chiming in, Ryan. Ryan, you have to change it from all panelists to all panelists and attendees and then Renee will be able to see it.

All right, in ThriveCart does the cust- … oh, here. Let me put your question up there, because Ryan’s got some good feedback in there for you, Renee, so if you could put that back in there again, Ryan, post it again, and just do it to all panelists and attendees. In ThriveCart, does the customer get their own account to set up when they first register for the trip? or do I have to set that up for them when they make their first-? It’s automatically set up for you. In fact, they have their own client management portal. When they buy, you give them access and they can manage their … if they want to change out their credit card, if they want to update their information, it’s all hands off. It’s 100% hands off to you. Which is, oh my gosh, it’s so much easier.

This is the key, right here, simplify. This is the key. I haven’t even got to the good part. The good part is this. When they buy, you can automatically tag them in ActiveCampaign or add them to a specific automation. Let’s say every time they make a payment, you just wanted to send them an email saying, “Hey, thank you for your payment, you’re one step closer from achieving your trip. You know, for paying off the trip and having the time of your life, XYZ, keep up the good work, blah, blah, blah.” Or whatever you would like to do. All of that flexibility is in there. Maybe if they missed a payment, you want to send out an automated response saying, “Hey, I didn’t get your payment, is everything okay?”

you can do all of that. You can do it all within ThriveCart and ActiveCampaign, because they so tightly integrate with one another. All right, then Ryan says, “Vacation Labs has a platform that may be of interest to you.” Let’s check that out. I’m just going to pull it up just to make sure this is the one … Ryan, is this the one? Just let me know and I’ll post a link too. Look at that. Your travel website. Fully loaded. Within a week. Yeah. Okay.

One other question Renee has. Welcome to Office Hours too, Renee, I think this is my first time seeing you. You too, Ryan. Would I still send them to the lead page or skip that part too? Now, this is where it gets really interesting, right? It’s up to you. Because essentially, if it’s a lead page using Leadpages, you could actually embed the ThriveCart, the payment form from your ThriveCart on the lead page using their HTML module. You can make that step all one, which is probably the most preferred way, honestly, Renee. If they’re getting a newsletter, and they see something in the newsletter that gets them to click on a link, the next page that they go to should very much be the landing/sales page that provides more information and then the opportunity to go forward.

If your landing page is already built, perhaps you can swap out where the button is on that page, put a HTML module there, and copy the embed code, and then have the form appear on that page. Then make it just checkout right on that page, and you could eliminate a step. All right. Renee, I actually feel like that’s going to work really well for you. But one thing to know, ThriveCart doesn’t have like open, you can’t go here right now and purchase it, so you have to find affiliate link, that’s just the way that they’ve chosen to do it. If you need one of those, let me know, email me, and I can get something to you. If you want to go the more rogue, and maybe dangerous, I guess, ThriveCart sign up link, you could go here.

No, no, no, no, no. I think it’s purchase ThriveCart. You can go here and then there’s a few people that are packaging it with bonuses. But then I said this is kind of like a little rogue, because I don’t know who these people are, and once they get your information, I don’t know if they’re going to start spamming you or you know, it’s just one of those things. Yeah, just email me today, and I’ll get you taken care of. All right. Great. Thank you so much for that question, Renee. And, make sure you let me know how it works out for you. If you get stuck in any capacity, or confused, or anything, please come back and ask your question, email me just like you did.

I want to make sure that you keep moving forward as fast as possible, because … let me just say this, I don’t think in our society, I’m talking about America now, I don’t think we value vacations enough. For those of you who run companies, and you have people on staff, or freelancers, or whatever the case may be, sometimes that extra mile that you want them to go, that extra set of urgency, can’t just be demanded, sometimes they just need a break. I don’t know about you all, when I take a break, and I go on vacation with either my wife or our friends that we really enjoy, and we turn off our cell phones, close the computers. Oh, my goodness, you come back and it’s like, you can conquer the world. That’s what it feels like, at least, that’s what I feel like.

I have, from personal experience, I have a vested interest in the success of this beyond just you being the customer of ActiveCampaign, Renee. Please, report back and as far as the Vacation Lab, this one is new. But it look like, where did it go? There it is, this link right here, let me put it into here. Looks like that one is one that you can check out. Thank you for that, Ryan, as well. Yeah, if you haven’t taken a vacation, please, don’t let 12 months, can we all agree 12 months is too long to pass without a vacation? Now that you all know Renee, she is a resource to get you taken care of. Please do it, even if it’s staycation, people, just do it. Take a vacation. You’re business owners, you deserve it.

All right. Renee says, “Staycations are great.” Yeah, they can refill you too, refill you. All right. Oh, okay. You’re very welcome, Ryan, you’re very welcome. Thank you. Ryan says he’s learning a lot. So thank you very much. Yes, and you too, Renee. The pleasure is mine to help, so this is the step one in the process of setting up the system, and once you get it in place, and everything, let me know if there’s any questions, but I’m excited to see, because your thinking is spot on, Renee. You got to break those payments up longer. When I think of the bigger trips that I’ve made above $2000 and such, it’s normally, at least, 12 months, 12 to 18 months that my wife decides to break them up. It’s painless.

It’s like, you forget about it, a couple hundred here, there, then before you know it you’re like, “What, vacation time? Where is my shorts? Where is everything?” Will do, will do, Renee, yeah, will do absolutely. All right. Thank you. In fact, let me copy this [inaudible 00:27:24]. All right. Perfect. Got it. All right, is there any more questions? Listen, I want to welcome you all, this is a … I think aside from Jeff, I got the chance to meet Jeff in person at our Activate Conference, everybody. It’s our annual user conference. Hopefully you all can attend the next one. But, it’s great to see all of these names. I really do. I don’t recognize [inaudible 00:27:53], maybe you were on before, maybe I just recognize your name from somewhere else, but welcome everybody.

Let me, Teresa has a question. All right. All right. Teresa says, “An A/B test email got delivered before our scheduled send time, why would this happen? Now we don’t know which subject line was the winner, and if all 2000 emails were delivered.” I wish I could help you with this one, Teresa. Your fastest answer will probably be Support. What I can estimate, maybe, potentially, is that it was in the setup. Let me just walk through the setup for everybody. Excuse me, if you’ve never run an A/B test out of ActiveCampaign, let’s do that. Martin (AB Test). This is one, make sure this is selected, everybody. It very much could’ve been that they accidentally hit go before setting up the second variation. Teresa, I’m not sure honestly.

But, somebody in support can actually look into your account and see what happened. If we have our design figured out here … do I want to, let me see, do I want to do anything? No, I don’t want to do anything yet. All right. You see this? If you continue on from here, and you hit next, and then you don’t add another test, and you hit … actually you can’t, it doesn’t look like you can. You have to have added another test. So that takes that away. The second test, if the person doesn’t modify the test, you know like, you see I just created it, and then from here I hit send. It will appear as if essentially the same email was sent. That’s one thing that I would say check, outside of that, you’ll want to definitely get a support ticket, and you’re going to let them know that you came on Office Hours too.

But you’ll definitely want to check that. Both designs have been counted for. When I switch over here, and hit close, now I can change this, right? If I take away Commander, and say Greetings Firstname. Now you’ll see, when I go back to test one, it should so, where is it? Is it just … wait a minute. No, the subject line is hoverboard again. Then in test one I just use your hoverboard. You’ll want to make sure, make sure this is set up correctly, actually. Because it’s been a while since I done my A/B test in here. Yeah, I would definitely get out a support ticket. Because as I’m seeing here, there’s a few ways you could potentially actually mess this up.

We should really make this flow a lot easier. Which ideas [inaudible 00:31:23] ActiveCampaign.com. But yes, yeah. Teresa, I would love. I would love, love, love, love, love to know how this performs for you once you get it set up right. Because the way that you’re thinking as far as testing your emails before you send out to the whole 20,000, these are the things that we give you these tools for that very reason. This is the reason why we do that, it’s because business owners like yourself can now test things with your audience, see what’s working, and then the more you test … let me say this to everybody. The whole point of your marketing is to become independent from the advice of the gurus.

I know that sounds kind of like anti-guru, but the goal is for you to become a guru in your business. Because guess what? Anybody on social media or online talking broadly cannot … they just have the inability to speak specific to your business. It’s not their responsibility. They’re just giving you a broad direction. Say, “Hey, go West.” It’s your job to figure out “how far West do I need to go? Okay, maybe I need to go a little Southwest, stop here then go here.” Right? When you become an expert at that path, when you become an expert at how to talk to your audience, guess what? You don’t need to listen to anybody. You see what I’m saying? [inaudible 00:32:54] you still want to stay plugged in to latest marketing strategies and trends, but listen, like Teresa sends this email, and maybe it’s two buttons. Like one button say see hoverboards, and another button says see wheels.

Or she doesn’t sell hoverboards or anything, I’m just using an example. And one of the emails gets more clicks. She knows now people are more interested in product B than product A. What is she going to do? She can now shift, it’s one less question she has in her mind with, “I wonder where our people are at or what they like.” Right? But you don’t get there without testing. You don’t get there without saying, “Okay, I’ve got 20,000 people, let me put two different options in front of them and see which one resonates the most.” Some of your greatest product ideas, enhancements, updates, adjustments, are going to come from the existing audience that you have right now by asking them or giving them the option to show you what they want from you.

Never ever, ever settle for assumptions when you can own knowledge. Like we assume because we don’t know. But if you can know, get rid of those assumptions. Split testing is one way. Teresa, great job. Great job on that. I hope support gets it all figured out for you so you could report back and let me know. Yeah. Jeff says, “Get marketing set up and then start learning.” Yes, that is marketing, everybody. If somebody has told you differently, and they said, “Oh, marketing is getting your people to buy your product.” No, that’s sales. Sales is important, but marketing and sales, they’re actually two isolated processes and systems, they should definitely talk to each other, and share information. But they’re definitely different. A lot of times marketing and sales just get coupled in one, it’s like, “Okay, yeah. I need to figure out how to get more people to buy my product.” Okay. Are we talking about sale strategy, or marketing strategy?

Either one, you set something up, and then you start learning. You have to commit to learning. Do not approach this space one-sided to where all you want to do is get, get, get. And you’re only giving for the sake of getting. People can see through that stuff. You may get an initial influx, but overtime, if you’re not committed to your audience, if you’re not committed to adding value to the space on an ongoing basis, people are going to see it. They feel it. Have you ever met somebody, you shook their hand and they didn’t really want to shake your hand? You could feel it. We’re humans, we can pick up on a lot of the unspoken, unsaid, undone things, more so than the things that are done. I want your marketing to be genuine. The main way to be genuine is coming from a genuine place of truly giving.

And saying, “Once I have given so much and you see so much value, you will reward me or give me feedback by purchasing or taking the next step.” But don’t approach it by, “Man I just need to sell 1000 of these. If I sell 1000, I’ll be up to $50,000 a month. Then I’ll just need to find a way to get 2000.” I get it. That’s good to run your basic analysis, on the numbers, because we have to pay attention to the numbers. But at the end of the day, listen, it’s value. Give people value. You all are running businesses. You are the ones with all of the value with respect to your businesses. Marketing is a medium that allows you to make that value apparent by giving, not taking, not receiving, by giving. If you do that well enough, trust me, people will give back in the form of a monetary exchange.

All right. Teresa says, “Is there any place I can go to get live training with a human teacher?” Yes. Yes, Teresa. Let me post this as a follow question. So that everybody sees. Here’s the best place to get started. Campaign. Ryan, fingers are a lot faster than mine. Ryan has posted the link in there. Thank you for that assist, Ryan. Or maybe I have the assist, and you’ve got the score. Thank you for the score, Ryan. But ActiveCampaign.com/training, select one-on-one right here. Then schedule your one-on-one. This is not a stock photo, this is Tim Gorski, he is on the Success Team, and there is a high change that you’ll speak to him when you set up a one-on-one. These are people, Teresa, live people that are talking about your business. There’s no canned responses. They’re not trained to upsell you a particular thing, or make you do a particular thing their way.

They will listen to your use case and give you the best advice regarding your business in ActiveCampaign. Feel free to attend these calls with your guard down. Right? It is not a sales call. There will be no persuasion. If there is, it’s persuasion to be successful faster. But yeah, we’ve got a variety of Success Team members that are here. Guess what? They got hired to do exactly that. They wanted to be live on the phone with you to help you out. Ryan says, “Finally a photo of an employee.” Yes. “That is what you call true customer support, believe in your employees.” Yes, absolutely. Absolutely, Ryan, because we could’ve easily just got a stock photo, right?

But this is Tim, actually on a call. You all have gone at restaurants where the waiter or waitress just doesn’t want to be there? You’re just like, “You know what? I was excited about coming here and eating this food. And you whole energy is just bringing me down.” Right? Nobody likes that experience. If you’re going to do the job, do the job. That is how our Success Team is. They are not here just kind of twiddling gum through their teeth, like, “Okay, how can I help you?” They’re excited. They’re ready to go and answer your question. Yeah, Teresa, do that. In fact, Teresa, I would love, after you’ve got your one-on-one signed up, if you let me know who you ended up signing up with, that’d be great. Just to know who you talked to.

All right. You are a great batch of folks. I appreciate this Friday. Listen, it’s Friday, 1:00, I always want to be able to send you all home on a high note for the weekend. I just thank you all for the questions and everything, because it allows me to do that. Yeah. We’ve got 15 more minutes. If you guys have questions, feel free to put them in the chat. If not, don’t worry, I will not hold you hostage. I know the weekend is just peeking through your window just waiting to be [inaudible 00:40:06]. If you want to get an early start on it, listen, you’re not going to find me holding you back from that, and I know you all are busy. All right, great.

Let me see. Renee’s got another question. I’m going to go back up here. Where is Renee at? Right here. All right. Let me just bold it so I can follow it. Would you compare ThriveCart to Kajabi or Fortapay? Those were other recommendations. For me, with Kajabi. I’m not familiar with Fortapay, so let’s check it out. Oh, okay. Fortapay is an Infusionsoft plug in, it looks like. It looks like they integrate with Infusionsoft to do invoicing. I could see that, right. If you wanted to send a monthly invoice for the total amount … although, I’m not sure if you want to send an invoice monthly, I think you just wanted to automatically come out.

One thing, in fact, it brings me to a point. One thing that I’ve always been told in sales and marketing, of course, is that when you have a subscription, it’s easier for people … your retention will be longer, because if it’s a invoice, we’ll say, where somebody has to go and pay it, you’re going to run the risk … these are business owners, everybody, depending on your audience, or just busy folks. If they have to go and pay every month, not only is it an extra step that they have to do to stay with you, but it’s also a reminder of the money going out of their account. In fact, I’m actually opposed to invoicing, now that I think about it, honestly. I like to … it’s not about me.

Let me just propose some things. I propose that you clearly communicate upfront like, “Hey, look. This is a 12-month plan, or XYZ,” and then let them know that when they sign up, you’ll be deducting every month. Then, sending them a receipt invoice. Like, “Hey, this is what your car was charged this month. No action is taken, just wanted to let you know.” I’m all for that. But if it’s an invoice, and a lot of professional service providers do this, like CPAs, Bookkeepers, a lot of service providers will send you a QuickBooks invoice. Every month you get that email, you got to go in and pay it to keep the service. I like the auto-bill. Renee says, “Yes, I want them to be billed auto.” Okay.

Here it is, let me post this. Let me just make sure I’m getting all the questions, Renee. I don’t want you to [inaudible 00:42:56]. So ThriveCart will charge them, not send an invoice. ThriveCart will do both. It’ll charge them, and then send an … I guess it’s not an invoice, they call it an invoice, but it’s more like a receipt invoice. Every month. Let’s say somebody signed up today, September 10th, they’ll get an email with a receipt, just for their records in ThriveCart, but yeah, it’ll keep going. Then, like I said, you could set up automation that if a payment fails, you can add them to a particular automation in ActiveCampaign that will notify you or someone on your team to reach out to them personally and see if anything is wrong.

Quick tip here, and this one is from personal experience, I have found, believe it or not, Facebook Messenger to be a very effective channel for reaching out to people with expired cards. Yeah. If they’re connected with you in some capacity. Most times there is a group or … even if they’ve connected with you personally, a lot of times, these people are on Facebook. [inaudible 00:44:02] say, “Hey, I saw that a payment was missed.” You’d be amazed, because are not on Facebook for that, but it just continues to surprise me the level of influence that social media has on business nowadays, just because we’re in a much more social … yeah, Renee says she uses Facebook Messenger a lot for biz.

That will be good. ThriveCart can send you that notification that says, “Hey, a payment has failed.” Then, what could happen is you could see if you’re connected with them on Facebook Messenger or if there’s a way to reach out to them that way, or just call them and say, “I just wanted to check in, I know this trip is important to you. The last payment, we got notification.” “Oh, I forgot to update my card. Can you do that for me right now?” “Sure.” Right? Many reasons. If they’re paying over a year, there’s a great chance that a card may expire in that time.

I’m sorry. Kajabi, I didn’t finish up. So, Kajabi, let me see it. This is like New Kajabi or something like that. They keep changing the URL. New Kajabi, yeah, NewKajabi.com. New Kajabi, I’m not familiar with how they process their payments, if it’s as flexible as ThriveCart, but the biggest thing for Kajabi is that it gives you courses. That’s really what Kajabi is for, is if you wanted to add some training along with it. So if you’re not … okay. Yeah. Since you’re not doing training, you wouldn’t need Kajabi. The reason why people probably recommended it to you was for that reason is they have their own pages that can take payment, but all of their payment pages are for giving access to like a course or some form of training.

Let me see if they if I can show you an example, because they’ve got all of these marketing funnels that go, I can’t even show you, but anyways. They’re like a hybrid of Leadpages, and like an online course site. That’s what they are. ClickFunnels, in fact, they’re probably closer to ClickFunnels than Leadpages, because they want to be able to control your entire marketing funnel and then be able to provide training as well. This one will probably confuse things more than [inaudible 00:46:36]. Yeah. All right.

Any other question? Oh, you’re very welcome, Renee, very welcome. Any other question, everybody? We’ve got a few more minutes. If not, thank you all. I’ll keep my eye on the chat, but if there’s no other questions, I want to thank you all for attending Office Hours this Friday. For many of you, this was your first time, and I truly hope it is not your last. I do this every Friday. I hope you can tell from just my energy, and excitement, especially Renee, when we first got started. I enjoy doing this. You are in no means to being a burden onto me. You’re not bothering me. I literally created Office Hours for this experience. I know how it is. I know how it is on the frontline of marketing your business. With all of these tools and technology, are you crazy? Sometimes you just need to talk to someone who you can trust has your best small business interest in mind.

When we look at … yes, yes, come back, Renee. When you look at Renee, a good example is, you may be surrounded by people with great recommendations. None of the recommendations given to Renee I think were given out of ill will or, “I’ll trick her up.” Right? These are people. We all have communities that are looking to help us. Sometimes, we just need kind of like an experienced or seasoned voice that’s familiar with what we’re trying to accomplish to take these recommendations, to take these things that we’re hearing, we’re seeing, we’re in the information age, and kind of piece it together, and make sense of it all.

Office Hours is perfect for that. We saw Jeff asking about all of those tools. I mean, the tools that you use for your business are so critical, I don’t even look at them as tools, everybody. You know what I honestly look at them as? I look at them as employees. They’re digital employees. I literally. I give them a task, and I assess the tool by the task I need it to do. If it can’t do it, I don’t care who’s using it, right? If you can’t do it, so I’m going to go with another employee, sorry. I would do it in real life. We would all do this in real life.

Is there info on learning to integrate ThriveCart with ActiveCampaign? Yes, ThriveCart has a nice walkthrough that’ll do that for you. But let me show you what you’ll need [inaudible 00:49:03], just so you know where to find it. The only thing that you need when you go into ThriveCart is you need your API key. So when you log into ActiveCampaign, if you click right here to settings, and then under settings, right there, look at that. Account information. Where is it? Developer, I believe. Developer, this. This URL and key. You need to copy and paste both of those into ThriveCart, and then that’s all. And they’re connected, and they’re talking back and forth to each other. But inside of ThriveCart, yes. They’ve got documentation. They’ve got videos that’ll walk you through. You will not be confused one bit. They’ve got a really responsive Facebook group as well as a support that’s really good as well.

So, yeah. You’re very welcome. Very welcome. But yeah, ToolTalk is definitely worthwhile. You need to be using, not the right tools someone told you to use, you need to be using the right tools that your business told you to use. How does your business talk to you? Your business talks to you with dollar signs. That is literally how your business talks to you. The more money, that’s the more talking that’s doing. The more talking is doing, that’s the more you know how you’re performing. If you’ve got a business that talks a whole lot, you’ve got the right tools in place. You’ve got the right tools in place. Because without the right tools, it’s just going to be a struggle.

I think we can all virtually raise our hands and speak to the struggles that we’ve had in business just by having the wrong tool. Just like, “Man, I just I could do this.” Every time you use it, you got an I wish list, instead of it actually checking boxes and making things easier. I look at them as employees, I think you all should as well. Make your life easier and you get the most out of your tool. With that being said, again, this is my last thank you. But I am, I’m just grateful. I know you could be a million places, literally a million places online and you chose to spend some time with me. That means the world to me, thank you for it. I hope that your life, your business is better because of it, that’s what I aim for.

Remember, we’re twice a week, every Tuesday at 9:00 a.m. Central, and every Friday at 1:00 p.m., you can attend as many as possible. There is no limit. I enjoy you either way, Tuesday or Friday. And hope that the experience is equally as enjoyable both days or twice a week if you choose to go to all of the Office Hours. The replays will be up on ActiveCampaign.com/learn, you’ll find all of the replays there as well. Yes, you too. You have a great weekend. With that being said, all of you, have a great weekend everybody. Thank you for attending Office Hours. I hope to see you soon. In the meantime, automate responsibly, everyone.

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