How Slick Business uses ActiveCampaign to Help Small Businesses Succeed

Kay Peacey might be the biggest ActiveCampaign fan of all time. She’s one of those dream brand advocates turned evangelists who will shout her support from the tallest rooftop when given the opportunity to do so. 

With a background in education, mathematics, and databases, Kay began her journey as a business automation consultant somewhat by accident, when her friend was looking to hire an ActiveCampaign expert for their digital design company. Not knowing anything about Kay’s background she said, “You seem a likely suspect… go learn how to do this stuff and let’s work together to grow this business.” 

That serendipitous conversation took place a little over four years ago. Now, Kay has a thriving ActiveCampaign consultancy and training business of her own, Slick Business, and helps thousands of ActiveCampaign users. “I literally live, breathe, and work in ActiveCampaign every single day,” Kay commented. 

Teaching clients to fish

Kay lives in a very rural corner of the UK county of Cornwall. “We’re right down in the little toe of the UK.” It’s a rural area; but with the arrival of digital broadband some years ago, there’s been a significant shift towards people who live in the region working globally in digital industries. 

The demographic benefiting the most are adult women returners, who have raised their kids and are ready to work again. “We are fired up and we’ve got all this suppressed energy and brainpower that’s just waiting to be unleashed on the world. We’re discovering these whole new careers that didn’t even exist the last time we were in the workplace. And it’s incredible watching that unfold. It’s so exciting to be a part of a movement.” 

Kay subscribes to the ‘teach them to fish’ mentality. It isn’t her way to just set something up in ActiveCampaign for a client and say, ‘go do this and if it breaks, you’re going to have to come back to me.’ She always wants people to “understand that thing, and own it, and be really good at it.” 

Revealing the ‘gold dust’ 

“One of the things I love about ActiveCampaign is that the Lite plan with under 500 contacts is so completely affordable for someone who’s at that early stage of business growth. The value you get from it, to grow your business and to look like a total magician who’s been doing it forever when actually you’ve just started – that is gold dust.” That’s where Kay started when she first signed up for her own ActiveCampaign account. 

It isn’t just Kay’s clients who are reaping the benefit of integrations and automation. With the ActiveCampaign & WooCommerce deep data e-commerce integration set up on the Slick Business websites, Kay is also tracking and nurturing growth in her own business. When someone purchases a course or opts in for her free ActiveCampaign training, the onboarding and content delivery is completely automated—creating that gold dust of data that Kay loves, and getting the goodies to the consumer fast and fluently.

As with many of her clients, ActiveCampaign automations have been a lifesaver for Kay. It has freed up more time for her to devote to expanding her ActiveCampaign training offering and actively nurturing leads into sales. 

She has Facebook Custom Audiences integrated with ActiveCampaign, and uses data-driven decisions to find and connect with potential customers. Engagement data provides the insight needed to identify hot leads and nurture them through the customer journey, to serve their individual needs quickly and accurately, without losing the human touch.  

Digital transformation during the pandemic 

Many of Kay’s clients are new to the digital business world but have made the commitment to learning and understanding how ActiveCampaign will help their business compete and grow. This commitment to learning created a seamless transition from face-to-face to online operations when the COVID pandemic impacted businesses from early in 2020. 

“They were already in ActiveCampaign, and what that meant was when we hit the first lockdown in the UK, they were able to pivot their business really quickly and effectively,” commented Kay. 

Griffin Teaching is one of those companies that made this digital transformation. It’s a tuition club for 11-year-olds in the UK. When they first came to Kay, their business was almost entirely offline. “They have a lot of admin,” added Kay. “There’s parent communication, homework coming in from the kids, managing different tutors, and they were struggling to stay on top of all the layers of communication efficiently.” 

To start, Kay recommended Griffin Teaching use ActiveCampaign to manage their email sending. “We brought ActiveCampaign in really early on because I was very clear that this was the key part of the whole stack; that you get ActiveCampaign in as the hub and you start learning how to use it because if you don’t know how to drive it, you’re going to run into trouble.” 

This immediately solved their problems around email communications and connecting their subscribers with the right message at the right time. They then started to learn about segmentation, tagging, and custom fields.

Kay also added WooCommerce to the Griffin Teaching website, so they could productize their mock exams. They then brought in Foo Events for date-based ticketing, Calendly to handle appointments with parents, and Zoom for calls. All of these processes were new tech for Griffin, but Kay helped them gradually build their tech stack to optimize their business processes and improve the experience for their parents, staff, and students. 

ActiveCampaign Academy and SlickBusiness’ Growth

“Slick Business was formed to support Active Campaign users all over the world and from any layer of business but primarily small to medium businesses because they’re my heroes,” explains Peacey. Recognizing the challenges faced by many business owners in navigating digital tools, the Academy emerged as a solution to provide comprehensive guidance. “And we help people with the strategy, the practical stuff, and the really technical bits of how to use Active Campaign to grow your business and bring more revenue in without you crying, swearing, or giving up,” Peacey adds.

Central to the Academy’s success is its masterclass series, a significant growth driver, both through attracting new business and effectively retaining and engaging existing customers. The key to the Academy’s success is rooted in automation, with ActiveCampaign serving as one the main hubs of customer info. ActiveCampaign’s integrations with the rest of the tech stack allow Kay to manage onboarding, member access, and ongoing engagement for her global customer base without having to be plugged in 24/7. This gives Kay and her team the freedom to work on what matters most: engagement and education for their community. 

Peacey’s strategic use of ActiveCampaign extends beyond internal management to lead generation and nurturing. “We use ActiveCampaign to help us identify people who may need our help by leveraging our existing customer demographics to create Facebook lookalike audiences,” she shares. By nurturing a highly engaged community through the SlickBusiness Academy, Kay can learn more about entrepreneurs and small business owners who turn to ActiveCampaign for their automation needs, and in turn, can continually expand her reach in a way that continues to add value to all of the audiences she serves. 

The Academy has been wildly successful. Overall, SlickBusiness has been able to increase its member headcount by 60%. That increase translates to a 30% increase in revenue for the business. All of this growth wouldn’t be possible if Kay weren’t practicing what she taught with automation. “I swear ActiveCampaign is like a clone army of me. The flexibility of ActiveCampaign to enable me to manage all of these different processes is astonishing,” she remarks. 

Kay’s closing words of advice

Kay consistently emphasizes the importance of having a solid educational foundation in place when setting up your ActiveCampaign account. Whether you are using the Help Center in the ActiveCampaign platform or enlisting the help of a consultant, you need to understand what parts of the platform can help your business strategy succeed.   

“My best advice to any business, whether it is a huge one, a tiny one, or somewhere in between is that you as the business owner or the strategy-driver in the business, you have to know what ActiveCampaign is capable of. You need to have the understanding and awareness, and to have that systems-thinking of asking “What is this information? Does it belong to a contact? Is it, should it be an AirTable? Should it be in a Google Sheets or a contact note? Not everything has to be an ActiveCampaign itself because you can integrate with almost anything.” 

Sound advice for finding your own hoard of gold dust in ActiveCampaign.

Try ActiveCampaign for free, and discover how a sales CRM with automation can help you keep track of leads, organize your contacts, and help you sell more in less time.