This is the first “Transparency Report” by Wild Audience written by Bastián (founder). And I am super pumped about this!

Wild Audience is known for doing Respect-Based Marketing and selling with Relationship Funnels through Wild Mail.

So it makes 100% sense for us to continue with our authenticity & transparency efforts to become a more open, real & transparent company.

From now on, we will publish a monthly Transparency Report in the first week of each month covering the past month to talk about how we grow Wild Mail from 10,000€ MRR to 50,000€ MRR.

In case you have missed it: We launched our first software product called Wild Mail (in partnership with ActiveCampaign) and we have hit 10,000€ in MRR in March 2020.

You can read the whole story of how & why we turned SaaS in this article.

The monthly Transparency Report talks about what we do in order to grow and how we progress on our journey (including the good & the bad).

In the past months, we aimed for a 16% growth rate. Looking at our performance, I can see that we grew on average 14% every month.

But due to the corona pandemic we have decided as a team to go with a more conservative approach moving forward as we are not sure yet how bad our company will be impacted.

10% MRR growth rate would mean that we would hit 50,000€ MRR in September 2021. A 14% growth rate would allow us to hit our goal in March 2021 (keeping a linear growth rate is hard to do so we will adjust our target as we go). We will do our learning over the next few weeks and months and may adjust our growth goal up or down.

Since this is a new initiative by Wild Audience & we missed the first two months (January & February), I will do a little exception and cover the first three months in this article.

Our goal is to have a super transparent business. Obviously we can’t go from 10% transparency to 100% transparency and that is why we will roll out our transparency initiative month-by-month, adding more elements to our Transparency Report each month. I hope you’re excited!

Transparency Report:

1. Revenue
2. Customer Success
3. Product
4. Marketing
5. Sales
6. Founder Talk
7. April 2020 Outlook

Revenue

We tested the waters with software for the first time in 2019 reselling ActiveCampaign. Our MRR for Wild Mail on January 1st 2020 was €7,014.

By the end of the first quarter of 2020 we managed to grow it beyond 11,000€. As the corona crisis started we experience some churn and ended the month with €10,442.

If I compare that to Q4 2019, I can see that we grew Wild Mail by almost 50% compared to the previous quarter.

We need to consider two things here:

1. We are still in the set-up phase. We had to build a new website (more about this later) and change our funnels & branding. We are not yet in growth modus.
2. Corona crisis is hitting as we speak. Let’s see what the impact will be over the next quarter.

Overall, we are happy with our growth. We managed to hit the famous 10,000€ MRR goal and 100,000€ in annual run rate.

Customer Success

In this chapter we will talk about you guys. The most important people in our business: Our customers.

Thank you so much for believing in us and trusting us with helping you grow your business.

In Q1 of 2020 we had a total of 1189 conversations with 579 customers. We are so happy to have Emilie in our team to support and help you guys.

Our customers (you!) are giving us a 94% happiness score which is great!

One metric we need to improve on this quarter is our “First Response Time” aka how long it takes us to respond to the initial ticket. The reason it is slightly up in Q1 is mainly because of Christmas holidays.

Our normal “First Response Time” is between 4-5 hours which is also what we achieved the previous quarter in Q4 of 2019.

We also published three new customer success case studies!

Case Study #1:
How Frank went from €300k/year to €300k/month [Accelerator + Wild Mail]

Case Study #2:
How OMR built stronger customer relationships [Wild Mail]

Case Study #3:
How ActiLingua generated 71% of their digital sales with email marketing [Wild Mail]

Pretty stocked and happy for our customers 🙂

And we started a new initiative for customers to submit customer testimonials. We used a tool called VideoAsk for that and it worked out well. We received 8 new video testimonials which made us really happy 🙂 You can click on the videos below and watch them if you like.

Product

Let’s talk product! We have lots to share and we were able to ship a ton of new things. Here’s a summary!

“What’s new?” Page

We have a new public page since February 19th 2020 called “What’s new?”: Link

The goal is to publish all new things we ship on this page. Think Instagram Stories but in text format with links and screenshots 🙂

The goal is to keep the people that follow us in the loop of what we are working on. Most companies focus on new features but our What’s new? page covers marketing, sales, website, content, product etc..

100% Public Roadmap

In the spirit of transparency we have now made our internal roadmap public. This is the exact same roadmap we use internally to plan our sprints. It covers all departments of our business (not only product!). Have a look here.

Wild Mail

Wild Mail is our marketing automation software that enables companies to grow their business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation. Here’s a quick demo:

We work together with ActiveCampaign to provide the product while we do the billing, support and marketing & sales ourselves.

While our goal is to build new features and products on top of Wild Mail, we focused in Q1 to build the foundation. That meant in order to support our customers best, we wanted to launch our own billing app.

Our most requested feature was for customers to be able to download their own invoices. So we built it 🙂

We released new banners to make it easier for new trials to schedule software demos with our team.

And we also fixed 30 bugs!

While Q1 and Q2 of 2020 is all about building a great foundation for our new SaaS journey, Q3, Q4 and beyond will be about launching new features and offering more value to our customers 🙂

Accelerator

Accelerator is our done-with-you consulting program that is designed to help companies implement a marketing automation system to build authentic relationships with their audience and grow their business.

While we have not changed anything inside our offer (it is rock solid and proven to work), we have done a lot to support our clients grow.

I asked Benji (our head consultant) how many consulting calls he did and how many questions he answered from our awesome Accelerator clients:

• Consulting Calls: 27
• Consulting Questions: 275

Pretty cool 🙂

We have also published a new Accelerator client success case study and have a few new ones in the pipe.

Case Study: How Frank went from €300k/year to €300k/month

Frank is such an amazing guy and keeps crushing it with his business. Here’s an email he sent me on the 5th of March 2020.

If you want to learn more about Accelerator and apply to work with us, you can do that here.

Automation University

In case you were wondering what AU is ..? Automation University is the new name for our previous membership “Automation Rebels”.

Automation University is an online university that teaches entrepreneurs how to grow their business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation.

What’s the difference between the two offers?

• We are changing the way we deliver the offer
• We will update the pricing
• We will move everything from MightyNetwork to Thincific

But we will share more about the change in our April 2020 Transparency Report. We are working on this project as we speak and plan to launch Automation University sometime in April 2020.

If you are a current customer of Automation Rebels, don’t worry. By the time you read this you will already have received a customer only email explaining what will change.

Let’s move on to marketing now..

Marketing

Giving insights & transparency into our marketing is something we plan to do more and more over the next few transparency reports. We take things step-by-step.

Lead Generation

In Q1 of 2020 we welcomed 3171 new people to Wild Audience and exposed them to our Relationship Funnel. So that’s an average of 1000 new leads per month or 35 new leads per day.

We were using a mix of paid advertisements like Facebook ads, Instagram ads and YouTube ads as well as content marketing. I won’t go into the breakdown of our acquisition channels at this point. But that’s something I will start doing a little later this year 🙂 Stay tuned!

In the same time period we also registered 148 new Wild Mail trials. That equals a 5% conversion rate from lead to trial. We will work on improving this in a few weeks.

Wild Mail Partner Program

In March we launched the official Wild Mail Partner program! You can find all details about becoming a Wild Mail partner here.

We have onboarded our first 23 partners so far and even generated our first partner MRR already. Pretty happy with that considering we have not started to promote this big time.

ConvertBox

We switched from SurveySlam to ConvertBox. We are super happy with the switch! We used to recommend SurveySlam in the past years but last year the team behind SurveySlam did not deliver what they promised and that is when we switched. We use CB now on all our blog posts and PPC landing pages.

New Positioning

I took a lot of time to think through how to best position Wild Audience and its products in the market. After going into myself, talking with the team, doing customer & competitor research we came up with the following positioning:

Wild Audience with all its products is positioned as “helping companies build authentic relationships with marketing automation to grow their business”.

🙂

New Website

The biggest project of this quarter was for sure our brand new website.

Building a brand new website from scratch is literally a three months project. It took us two months to design & develop everything and around one month to add the content.

The website features our all new SaaS look, new positioning, new branding and two languages: English & Spanish.

We will do another round of improvements in Q2 adding more functionality and updating the graphics.

The technology we use:

• WordPress
• Gutenberg by WordPress

We used ThriveArchitect in the past but decided to switch to Gutenberg for a few reasons.

ThriveArchitect gives you great flexibility and allows you to build a lot of things. The problem with that is though that it’s hard for team members (especially with less technical experience) to follow best practices and brand guidelines if you can pretty much adjust anything.

So what we wanted is:

• Visual drag & drop builder
• Beautiful design
• Less flexibility and options
• Make it easy and fast for non-technical team members to build awesome pages following our branding

And we achieved exactly that 🙂

Sales

We did 70 sales related calls in Q1 (based on Calendly). That’s 1.17 sales calls a day.

Our team does Wild Mail demos and Accelerator calls only on Tuesday & Thursday. Keeping that in mind, it means we got 3 sales calls each Tuesday and 3 calls each Thursday scheduled.

Founder Talk

In this section I want to share some general thoughts about our first quarter.

Looking back, I am extremely happy with the decision we have made to switch from a service-based business model to a SaaS business model.

I also love our new transparency initiative and hope that other founders find this sequence of Transparency Reports helpful and can learn from our experiments and failures.

Cashflow:

As the CEO of Wild Audience, one of my main focuses is cash flow. Being able to have the right amount of cash available at the right time to pay team members and growth efforts is key.

And that is why I have doubled-down on my financial planning and cashflow forecasting efforts. As a result, I feel more secure now in my decision making. I suggest to everyone reading this to go over expenses & past revenue (growth) and then project your revenue & expenses for each month. This makes realistic decision making easier.

Corona Pandemic:

The corona pandemic is on our mind these days. If you are Wild Audience customer or a fellow founder friend .. we all think about it constantly & wonder how this may impact our lives & businesses. Personally, I am mostly concerned about our own customers.

If you are our customer, please know that we are here for you. If you have worries, reach out to us.

Sometimes a friendly person listening to your worries does wonders. Sharing the grief and worry with someone is how I personally approach this crisis. I am in constant contact with my friends to exchange our feelings about personal & business matters. It helps.

We understand that our customers are the heart of our business. And without you guys there is no Wild Audience. Thanks for putting your trust in us.

What’s coming in April 2020?

And lastly I want to share with you our roadmap for April 2020 and beyond.

(1) Automation University:

The biggest announcement in April 2020 will definitely be the launch of Automation University. We did our learning about running a membership the last few months and are currently implementing our realizations.

The launch will include:

• New product strategy
• New platform
• New pricing structure
• New delivery strategy
• New content

Stay tuned 🙂

(2) Wild Mail:

We will also ship a few fun features:

• New Cancelation Feature (to make it super easy to cancel)
• Discount Feature
• Our own API to connect data points of different tools (Wild Mail, ActiveCampaign API, HelpScout, Zapier..)
• In-app messaging for our products (to make it easier to talk to our customers)

(3) New Newsletter Strategy:

In the past we automated our newsletter 100%. It was called the “Evergreen Newsletter”. We have done our learning and will now update our strategy. We will add some cool tweaks. You will see everything in action this month (April 2020)!

(4) New Lead Magnet:

I will work on a new lead magnet for the top of our Relationship Funnel. We do this because we updated our positioning & product strategy.

(5) New Tutorials:

From sprint #8 onwards (April 13th), we will start publishing short video tutorials on YouTube to help our audience grow their business by automating their marketing.

(6) New Website:

And finally we will ship new features for our website which we launched in March 2020. Our development efforts will focus on new blocks for customer video tutorials, client case studies & brand new tutorial library. The development will go into May 2020.

That’s a wrap!

Remember: Wild Audience with all its products is positioned as “helping companies build authentic relationships with marketing automation to grow their business”.

That’s our goal and that is how we can help you 🙂

Hey this is Bastián! Founder and CEO here at Wild Audience.

Today I want to share our story and tell you why we decided to change our business model from service to SaaS.

If you want to read the SaaS announcement and skip the story (I do this sometimes too haha) click here.

You can jump to each year here: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

I started Wild Audience back in 2017 as a one man show selling my first online course called “Relationship Funnel” while traveling the world.

2017

The first year was a crazy year. I left Silicon Valley in 2016 working with Steli Efti for Close in Palo Alto. My first stop was Costa Rica where I was able to reduce my living costs a lot and work from the beach.

I launched a blog about technical marketing to basically document what I taught myself while studying other marketers. This blog turned into my first online course called “Relationship Funnel” which I started to sell while being in Bali.

I found a fun screenshot from archive.org ..

It was just me alone having a great time generating $20,000 per month in revenue.

All of that revenue was generated through my online course “Relationship Funnel”. Most of that year was spent traveling and learning.

2017 learnings:

• My biggest lesson was about focus. When I started Wild Audience I was generating 1k-2k a month, not much. But my mind was everywhere driven by curiosity and wanting to do it all. Once I stopped and slowed down (and traveled less) I started to focus which worked wonders for me.

• My second learning was about doubling-down on one single traffic source instead of trying to get new leads from different corners. Suddenly I was able to drive the amount of leads I needed into my funnel.

• Facebook ads worked extremely well for me. Once I doubled-down on Facebook ads my revenue started to increase from 1-2k per month to 15,000-25,000 per month. That was a game changer for me!

2018

After traveling for a while I decided to come back to Europe (I’m from Austria) and chose Barcelona as my new base. I love the latin vibes, good weather, beach+ocean and Europe 😉

I hired my first two full-time team members James & Daniel when I arrived in Barcelona. James is a friend and Daniel was a Wild Audience customer.

During our first team retreat in Barcelona we talked about our plans. One thing we all wanted to do is launch our own software in three years 🙂

Now being three people, I had to learn a lot of new things like project management and leading a team. As a first time founder I was of course absolute clueless (even if I thought I knew stuff hehe) .

In 2018 we decided to start offering consulting. That meant creating a new offer (Accelerator) and finding product market fit with that offer. Along the way we had to learn how to do sales calls, client service and delivering results. The switch from selling online courses as our main product to offering consulting services as our main gig, was a big switch and took us some time to get right.

This was also the year I had to go through quite a bit of personal learning. I started to question the importance of Wild Audience and what we do as a company. In 2018 I became an animal rights activist (after being vegan for many years) and as a result my mind & focus got distracted as I started to get involved in more and more activism projects on the side.

One project I am very proud of is actually writing a book about the most common objections against veganism (here’s the PDF version).

2018 learnings:

• That year I experienced the rollercoaster ride of what it means to be an entrepreneur for the first time. I had months of +30,000$ in revenue (less than 5,000 ad spent) and then other months not being able to pay myself.

• In 2018 we were still getting most our leads through Facebook ads and that’s also when I learned how important it is to not be dependent on one source of traffic. It’s why we started to diversify our traffic channels and produce content.

• I decided that Wild Audience is my highest priority and as a result reduced the amount of energy flowing towards other (activist) projects. I will have more time to do activism again in the future 🙂 There is no hurry to do it all at the same time.

2019

In the beginning of 2019 we hired Emilie to join us as Customer Success & Project Manager. We love Emilie! We tried to convince her to move to Barcelona but so far she prefers the north of England. Who would have guessed, right?

This was the year of scaling things-up. We chose two ways to speed things up:

1. Spending more aggressively on PPC to book our consulting services
2. Opening the Spanish market
3. Launching a membership

Growth:

Overall our goal in 2019 was to have our first 100,000€ month (in hindsight an ego driven goal..).

We started to spend more on PPC (mainly Facebook ads) and as our Relationship Funnel was rock-solid and tested we got a lot of sales calls scheduled for our consulting services.

Revenue was going up quite a bit month by month but in the end we did not achieve our goal of 100,000$ (US dollar not Euros) per month but we got somewhat close. We were generating on average between 40,000€ and 60,000€ per month. Our biggest month was July 2019 with almost €70,000 and a 50% profit margin.

Even if we did not achieve our financial goals , life was very good 🙂 We had healthy profit margins and fun personal lives.

Spanish Market:

Wild Audience started with all its products in English language but as we were based in Spain and had Spanish speaking natives in our team we decided to open up the Spanish market.

Opening the Spanish speaking market came with a lot of learnings of course. We had to rethink some of our sales process. People in LATAM do business differently and we had to adjust to this new way of doing business (more WhatsApp and Skype, no Zoom, low show-up rates & lower email engagement rates etc..).

Membership:

When buying a ton of leads for a high-ticket consulting offer, the majority of leads won’t qualify for Accelerator as their budget or experience is too low.

These type of people are looking for something else. They want to learn stuff at a lower cost.

That’s why we decided to launch a membership called Automation Rebels.

We got 70 rebels at 97€ per month into our membership in the first month of launching it. That was a great success for us 🙂

We soon learned that running a membership is not easy. Producing new content, tutorials and online courses takes time and work. We spend most of 2019 figuring out the right format to offer our membership.

And I am happy to say now that we did our learning and I have found our way! We will rebrand our membership to Automation University in April 2020 and launch the 2.0 version 🙂

Looking at our affiliate income of ActiveCampaign, I decided it made logical sense to become an official partner of ActiveCampaign and resell ActiveCampaign to our own customer base. The launch was a huge success and we got more than 100 paying customers within two weeks (we had no initial billing set-up and so I hacked something together with TypeForm+ThriveCart+Stripe).

Reselling ActiveCampaign was our first experience with software 🙂 We hired our first developer Leandro working remotely from Argentina.

During this year we did a bunch of surf trips to France, some fun parties on our roof-top co-working space and just generally lived a really good life.

And we also welcomed Benji as our new head consultant & digital marketing manager to the Wild Audience family.

2019 learnings:

• I became obsessed with automating my business as much as I could and I was very successful with that. Some months I was able to reduce my work to 1-2 hours a day.

• Automating your business can also have downsides. For me as the CEO I lost touch with the most important people, our customers. Our processes automated pretty much everything: Our weekly emails, monthly promotions, PPC lead gen, content creation in form of articles, customer support, sales & consulting. Everything I once had to do in the past, I was able to delegate or automated (which is not an easy thing to do).

• During our team retreat in Q4 of 2019, we decided it was time to double down on software due to a few big learnings in 2019. More about this below.

2020

2020 is the year of SaaS for Wild Audience. SaaS stands for software as a service in case you were wondering 😉

We changed our focus from digital products to services in 2018. Now in 2020 we pivot one more time from services to software.

So why did we change our focus again? Or why would you change something that works?

I remember the day when I wrote down the pros and cons of my consulting business. Everything you read below is based on my own experience (I am not trying to generalize here) and might be useful to you or might be totally different for you even though you have a service-based business model yourself. Keep that in mind.

Consulting is great for many reasons:

• It’s easy to get started (no real upfront cost)
• The only thing you need is expertise which you can learn on the internet or from past jobs
• You keep learning a ton by solving your clients problems
• You get insights into other industries and become better at what you do
• As a business owner you can automate & delegate pretty much everything

But like everything consulting has its downsides. Here are my top picks..

(Revenue) Inconsistency:

Consulting did not bring in consistent revenue for us. For Wild Audience, our Q1 was usually pretty okay (meaning steady growth and profitable) and Q2 + Q3 were always amazing. Q4 was bad (end of the year and Christmas). That meant we had to generate enough profits in Q2-Q3 in order to take Q4.

There are a few reasons for that. One reason is the way our offer was and still is structured.

Our consulting offer is structured around a “done-with-you” model which is the opposite of “done-for-you”. The reason we chose that model (and I tried done-for-you in the past) is to be more human efficient. Implementing funnels done-for-you style for clients takes a lot of man power which means the only way to scale is hiring more talent.

Look at Vayner Media by Gary Vaynerchuk. They have +200 people in their team. As much as I love to work with an awesome team and build culture I prefer to do that with a small team. But this is not compatible with a service-based business model if you want to scale it.

Sure, we could have chosen an agency style container model and offer a 3 months done-with-you consulting service and then a recurring container for lead generation services for example. That might have changed our situation but in the end we chose not to do it due to the reasons mentioned above.

That meant most of our clients paid for a 3 months project and that’s it. If you run an agency you probably have similar projects. They go over a specific time period and then they end. In order to squeeze more money from a client you would have to offer another related service to the same client. We did not have that kind of high-ticket service offer in place which meant we had to go out and find new clients. But we did noticed that most of our clients started to use ActiveCampaign (more about this later).

So if I had to summarize in two lines why a SaaS business model makes more sense for myself and Wild Audience, this would be my answer:

• Predictability
• Recurring revenue

That is why I have always loved the SaaS model. It has both of those ingredients.

Predictability: From a personal point of view there is nothing I love more than hiding behind my screen and building models.

Recurring revenue: This means that you can close new deals today and add that new revenue to the revenue you closed yesterday. How awesome is that?

Let’s explore what our plan is for SaaS in 2020..

Wild Audience turning SaaS

We have been a long-time ActiveCampaign customer (I signed-up for AC in 2016). In 2017 we became an affiliate. In 2019 we became an official partner focusing on the European market. In 2020 we decided to build new software apps on top of ActiveCampaign. I will explain what this means in a moment.

Building software is not easy. Even more difficult is building something that actually solves a problem so that companies are willing to give you money. My thinking was that building a brand new SaaS company and product from scratch is a 10-year project. That’s how I tackled the situation.

But I also learned about myself that I did not want to spend years and years building a product which is a very personal choice.

From the age of 16, I knew that one day, I would have my own company. As a young boy I always wanted to be rich and successful. But over the years I learned that there is more to life than business. I learned that running a 100 million dollar a year company is not that important to me anymore. 1-3 million a year (in revenue) does it for me too.

I know this may not sound very humble for a few readers but this amount pays for the freedom of a small team and funds small activism projects. In summary, I became simpler in my desires and started to discover what really fulfills me in life.

For me that’s not millions, VCs, board meetings and it’s also not sitting in front of a computer all day.

Instead I discovered a non-capitalistic world of activism and different ways of living that bring happiness, passion and fulfillment into my life. I met new people and made new friends that opened my eyes in many new ways.

To be clear: This means that my team and I are here for the long-term. Our goal is to serve our customers as best as we can and build small products that solve their problems. We want to stay small on purpose and be as authentic and personal as we can with our audience and customers. We are also building a culture that supports freedom, activism (for me that is climate & animal rights activism) and allows us to pursue the passions that elevate our spirits.

Taking into account the above, starting from scratch was not an option for me. But instead, it made sense to partner-up with a company I love and believe in. That is how our partnership with ActiveCampaign started. They focus on product development. We focus on our customers, marketing and selling as well as building additional products & add-ons on top of ActiveCampaign.

This is a win-win. This is our strategy.

Let me explain our strategy step-by-step:

The first thing we did already back in 2019 was to create our own brand “Wild Mail” for our ActiveCampaign product.

Why did we do that?

Imagine one business owner is asking another: “What email marketing tool are you using?” If the other guy is actually using ActiveCampaign through Wild Audience but answers that he uses ActiveCampaign, then Wild Audience would not benefit from that referral.

That is why we launched the name “Wild Mail” so that our customers refer to “Wild Mail” and not “ActiveCampaign”.

That means if you’re currently using ActiveCampaign but you want to move your account over to Wild Mail, you can do that with one click here. The only thing that changes is the logo as well as you will get access to our additional features (read on to see what I mean).

The next step was to update our positioning. How do we compete with ActiveCampaign and other tools like MailChimp, ConvertKit and Drip etc.? These guys have huge brands and big marketing budgets.

For us it’s obvious. Wild Audience started with a product called “Relationship Funnel“. We then created a marketing approach called “Respect-Based Marketing“. Everything around building authentic relationships with an audience comes natural to us. Hence we found our new positioning:

“Grow your business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation.”

This is how we position all our products (click the links and see for yourself):

Wild Mail (software)

Accelerator (consulting)

Automation University (membership)

Wild Tracking (stand-alone software built on-top of Wild Mail launching in 2021)

This is how we plan to create our own little world.

Now you’re asking yourself what Wild Tracking is, huh?

Think Baremetrics for marketing attribution. Or ChartMogul for marketing attribution.

With Wild Tracking we want to solve the marketing attribution problem.

Potential use cases are:

• Is most of your revenue coming from Facebook ads or YouTube ads?
• Is it cheaper to acquire a new customer through your blog or YouTube channel?
• What is the CLV from customers coming from Facebook ads?
• What is my ROI for Instagram ads?
• Should I invest my marketing budget into PPC or content marketing?

These are the types of questions we want to solve with Wild Tracking.

Our special sauce is a tag-based approach (in contrast to link-based or pixel based tracking). But more about this another time. If you want to learn more about Wild Tracking and become a BETA customer, you can get in contact with me here.

2020 learnings so far:

• Changing business model also means changing your mindset. SaaS requires a completely different mindset than consulting and I love it. Our day to day changed quite a bit for us as a team.

• Changing business model also means to be smart with cashflow forecasting. The dynamics of cash changed after we changed our focus to Wild Mail.

• Product development is a completely new game for us and I am super happy to step into my new role as Product Manager at Wild Audience and learn all I can about this new & exciting skill-set.

• I am getting better at enjoying every part of our process. I am trying not to project the future of Wild Audience into the present anymore and therefore miss the present moment. You might be able to relate. We always think and aim for the goal and often we totally forget the here and now. We have now incorporated this into our team culture and try to be more aware of this phenomena.

• And the last learning of 2020 so far is about slowing down. This silicon valley VC high growth capitalistic area we startups live in, makes us start & ship new projects extremely quickly and without thinking things through in a deeper way. Don’t get me wrong: It’s good to ship fast and move on but at least at Wild Audience we shipped so many things too fast (even my founder friends asked me how we did that..) and thus we had to change things over and over again and simply missed out on the present moment.

Alight! That’s a wrap.

I know some of our lessons as a team and my personal lessons may sound a little strange to you and you might not relate to them. That’s cool! We are all different and want to create different lives for ourselves 🙂

Conclusion:

In summary, I am extremely proud of our journey so far and what we have learned.

Building & selling software has changed my attitude towards business again. I feel like it’s 2017 again where I worked 11 hour days and loved every minute of it. This next chapter of Wild Audience is an exciting one.

I am forever grateful especially to my team. Without each team member that has joined me on this wild journey so far, this would not have been possible. Thank you James, Daniel, Emilie, Benji & Andrew for riding along. You all taught me so much!

I am grateful for the 220+ Wild Mail customers we already work with. We love you guys to the moon and back. Wild Audience was and is 100% customer funded and we will keep it this way.

To the 1000s of customers and clients we worked with through our consulting services and digital products: Thanks for making this possible!

Thank you for putting your trust into Wild Audience.

Bastián
Founder

FAQ:

1) How do you fund the development of Wild Tracking?

Building software is not cheap of course but we are fortunate to have revenue streams from our consulting service called Accelerator and our membership Automation University that pay for the development of Wild Tracking.

2) What happens if I am an existing Accelerator client or Automation University (former name was Automation Rebels) student?

If you are a customer, client or student there is nothing you need to worry about. We will continue supporting all our clients and invest into both products. We will still grow both products and are very excited about our roadmap for Accelerator & Automation University.

3) Can I still become an Accelerator client or Automation University student?

Of course! You can apply for Accelerator here and enroll for Automation University here.

4) How can I get started with Wild Mail?

You can try out Wild Mail by getting your trial account here. Wild Mail is perfect for service businesses (use case), online businesses (use case) and SaaS startups (use case) that want to grow their business by building authentic relationships with marketing automation.

5) How can I move from ActiveCampaign to Wild Mail?

You can do that with one click here. The only thing that changes is the logo as well as you will get access to our additional features. The whole process is simple and literally takes 1 minute.

Company name: Actilingua Academy 
Location of client: Vienna, Austria 
Industry of client: German language courses
Product/Service purchased from WA: Wild Mail 
Rating: 5 stars 

Results Achieved 

Using Wild Mail, Actilingua Academy generated 71% of their digital revenue from email marketing alone. They did this by creating an advanced email marketing funnel around their existing leads. 

They were already receiving 50% of their leads digitally through a combination of SEO, social media, and paid marketing, but needed a better way to convert those leads into sales. By using Wild Mail’s tagging, segmentation, and automation features, they further segmented their email contacts and directed warm leads down the right path of the funnel, which led to an increase in sales and conversions. 

Who are you, and what do you sell? 

Actilingua Academy is a German language school operating out of Vienna, Austria. They offer German courses to students and professionals who need a German language credit for school or work, or who just want to learn German for fun. They also host sightseeing and cultural activities around Vienna for their students. 

During the summers, they host adults and students at their annual German language immersion program. These events attract thousands of students every year. In addition to their physical school, they offer free German online courses and language tests on their website deutsch-lernen.com. 

What results did you achieve with Wild Mail?

Through Wild Mail, Actilingua Academy generated 71% of its digital revenue using email marketing and automations. They implemented a simple automation sequence that segments their audience based on specific interests and intentions. Through these automations, they’ve also collected information from their subscribers that helps them send emails that are specific to their needs. 

When we break down the impact of their digital marketing channels, we see that the free course sign-ups are divided in the following channels:

• Email (our focus) generated 71% of sales
• Paid marketing generated 9% of sales
• Social media marketing generated 15% of sales
• Other sales and marketing initiatives generated 5% of sales

Can you walk us through an automation in Wild Mail? 

Actilingua Academy uses a simple system of emails to segment its audience into automation sequences that are specific to their needs. They capture the majority of their leads when people organically find their free German language courses. When someone signs up for one of the free German courses, the Wild Mail automation kicks in. Once they are in the automation, here’s a breakdown of what the customer journey looks like. 

• After signing up for a free German course, the user receives an onboarding email and chooses their German skill level. 

• When they click on their choice, they enter an email sequence based on the level they selected.

• The user is tagged in Wild Mail based on their skill level. 

• Then the subscriber receives an email introducing them to the course. 
• They receive a new email lesson every two days until the automation is complete.

• At the end of the course, they receive a sales email, and they are moved into a Wild Mail sales sequence. 

• The sales sequence uses information that the subscriber filled out in a survey to direct them down the funnel that best represents why they need German language classes.

• Based on their needs, they enter a sales sequence based on their German skill level which pitches Actilingua’s in-person workshops.

The end goal of this sequence is move the user from the free German course into one of Actinilgua’s in-person German courses and workshops in Vienna. 

Since email was already their most reliable channel for generating in-person course bookings, they used Wild Mail to create a sophisticated system that makes sure that everyone who signs up for a free course gets segmented into the right automation. 

In addition to the email automations, they also send out monthly newsletters to share student testimonials and let customers know about different sales promotions. 

How Does Wild Mail Work?

Now that you know how Actilingua Academy used Wild Mail to archive email marketing success. Let’s talk a little more about how Wild Mail works, and who it’s for. 

Wild Mail is an all-in-one email marketing and automation software. Wild Mail makes it easy to automate your marketing by setting up email automation, creating marketing workflows, and segmenting your audience. 

Here are some of the most common ways our clients use Wild Mail: 

• Targeted emails: When you want to make sure that the right person gets the right message, you can create targeted emails for different segments of your audience. Actilingua Academy uses complex targeting to tag every person on their list based on their actions and interests. Then they use these tags to send emails to a targeted list.

• Targeted emails: When you want to make sure that the right person gets the right message, you can create targeted emails for different segments of your audience. Actilingua Academy uses complex targeting to tag every person on their list based on their actions and interests. Then they use these tags to send emails to a targeted list.

• Autoresponders: Send automatic responses when people take a certain action on your site. Examples of email autoresponders include newsletter welcome emails and lead magnet delivery.

• Email funnels: You can set up email automation sequences that turn your contacts into paying customers through a series of emails that add value and build trust. The entire goal of Actilingua Academy’s email automation system is to create a funnel that turns its free users into paid customers. 

• Scheduled emails: If you have a weekly newsletter or send regular updates to your audience, you can schedule them to go out at the perfect time. Actilingua Academy uses Wild Mail to schedule their monthly newsletter. 

• Broadcast emails: These are best for when you need to talk to your entire audience at once to make big announcements without specific segmentation. 

Wild Mail’s dynamic content and segmentation features let you send customized messages to the right people in your audience. You’ll be able to segment your audience and send them only things they want to see, which helps build trust and nurture the relationship. 

When users are on your website, you’ll be able to collect information based on their behavior and send them automated messages based on their actions or interests. 

Security is a big issue when it comes to email marketing. Wild Mail fully complies with GDPR. So even though you are collecting data to send your audience the best emails, you never have to worry about whether your customer’s data is secure. 

Wild Mail also works as a sales and marketing CRM. You’ll be able to track all of the deals in your pipeline and see when each deal will close. Then all of your customer information and sales and marketing data are organized and stored in one place. 

All of this data also makes it easy to create reports and find out what’s working and what isn’t. With Wild Mail, you’ll always know how your email marketing and automation campaigns are running, and where there is room to grow. 

Reporting within Wild Mail is simple and helps you see which emails are doing well, and which should be adjusted. You can also use simple split testing options to try out new strategies and see where you get the most engagement. 

The software is easy to use, even for people who aren’t experts at email marketing. You don’t need to be a tech expert to create and send beautiful emails. The interface features a drag and drop email designer and simple ways to customize your email layout.

Wild Mail is more than just an email software. With a Wild Mail subscription, you’ll get access to our 20-lesson email automation video course. Your account will also come with our free, done-for-you sales funnel automation templates. You can install these into your email sequences with one click. 

If you’re already using different marketing software, don’t worry. Wild Mail integrates with over 250+ different software.

If you’re already using another email marketing provider, we’ll move everything over to Wild Mail for you, for free. Wild Mail also offers 24/7 tech support if you ever get stuck. 

What type of results will a new client achieve using Wild Mail?

Clients that use Wild Mail report having stronger relationships with their audience which leads to higher conversions and more sales. Wild Mail users build scalable systems that they can replicate and apply to future campaigns.

Wild Mail gives you control over what you send your audience by letting you create campaigns that meet a variety of goals. You can send whatever type of email campaigns make the most sense for your business. 

When you build a relationship with your audience, they will feel a stronger connection to your brand. A stronger connection results in higher engagement, conversions, and sales. Wild Mail gives you the tools to build these relationships through automated messages that are both personalized and full of value to your audience. 

With Wild Mail, you’re not just sending emails. You’re creating an experience for your subscribers that appeals to their interests and builds trust with your brand. After going through your emails, they’ll be excited about your brand and ready to buy, like this: 

They might even THANK YOU for emailing them, like this: 

When you use Wild Mail to build a system that helps you add continued value to your audience and make the experience customized for their needs, your message does the selling for you. 

The best part? You can get a free 14-day trial account of Wild Mail right now. If you’re ready to automate your marketing and sales process and level up your email marketing, click here to learn more or request a demo.

Company Name: OMR
Location of client: Hamburg, Germany 
Industry: Marketing services, digital products, and an annual exhibition  
Product purchased from WA: Wild Mail
Rating: 5 stars

Results Achieved

Using Wild Mail, OMR was able to create over 30 different custom automations to send its contacts through. They now collect valuable data on their audience and can create custom campaigns and automations based on their users behavior. By using Wild Mail, along with Wild Audience’s email automation strategies and techniques, they got to learn more about their contacts. Having this information helps them create content that adds consistent value to their audience. As a result, they’re building stronger relationships with their audience and only sell to contacts that are ready to buy.

Who are you?

Chris is an online marketing consultant and manages the performance marketing channels of OMR, a digital platform and exhibition for digital marketers based in Hamburg, Germany. 

What does your company do?

OMR creates content for digital marketers, and hosts an annual exhibition covering digital marketing topics. They’ve been growing steadily since 2011, and in addition to the exhibition, they sell several digital products, host several podcasts, and create tons of digital content for marketers. 

Their annual exhibition is the largest digital marketing exhibition in Germany. It attracts over 40,000 attendees every year eager to hear about the latest best practices in digital marketing from world-class experts. 

Now they also have the OMR Academy, which is a pilot project that sells beginner Facebook marketing courses. 

How did you first hear about Wild Mail?

As a digital marketer, Chris sees a lot of Facebook ads. Sometime in 2018 he came across a Wild Audience ad that really caught his attention. He took a screenshot of the ad for his personal swipe file and clicked on the ad. 

“The ads felt really personal, and the content stood out,” says Chris. (this could be a pull quote?

OMR began working with Wild Audience’s techniques to build their first Relationship Funnel. Then about five months ago, Chris heard about Wild Mail. At the time, OMR was using MailChimp and looking for ways to solve the problems they were facing with the platform. Wild Mail addressed all of those problems and provided solutions. 

Why did you decide to become a customer?

As we mentioned above, OMR was initially using MailChimp to do all of the email marketing for their company and exhibition. Their team was frustrated with the user interface, which made it challenging to track what was going on within their campaigns. 

In MailChimp, users are limited to what they can do with a contract once it’s on the email list. OMR was looking for a way to tag their audience and collect information so they could send them more specific emails. 

They realized that MailChimp is much more of a newsletter tool than it is an email marketing automation tool. Wild Mail is designed to be the exact opposite. It was designed around automation and personalization and happens to send newsletters as well. 

What was the main problem you wanted to solve for your business?

Chris was running profitable Facebook Ads for OMR, but he could see a trend in the data that showed that the ads wouldn’t be realistically sustainable long term. So he began looking for ways to proactively help the funnel stay profitable when Facebook ads got too expensive. At the same time, he knew that they still wanted the content and funnel to feel personal to their audience. 

How are you using Wild Mail?

When someone enter’s OMR’s online world, a lot of things happen on the backend. There are over 30 automations that run when a new contact enters the funnel. They collect data on the contact based on where they entered the funnel, and the contact begins an automation. 

They’ve also found it very useful to be able to create an evenly split path to A/B test different automations. The logic works by setting a particular action as a trigger. Then when a contact takes that action, it triggers Wild Mail to send 50% of the contacts through one automation and 50% through a different automation. 

These two sequences are on the same topic but use separate copy, headings, and calls to action. They can compare the analytics on each email to determine which series gets the most opens and clicks. 

This type of test has to run for at least a few months before you will see any significant results. But once you have the results, you can continue to run these tests against new copy and strategies to continuously optimize the funnel. 

They are also using score triggers for sales emails to a huge advantage. These work by only selling to engage customers who are ready to take your offer. 

OMR recently set up a referral program using Wild Mail. Their contacts can now get rewarded for getting others to subscribe to the OMR email list. To do this, they use Zapier to send the referral data to Wild Mail, which then tells them which subscribers user link was used. 

Wild Mail integrates with over 250+ different software.

Typical Funnel Flow

Here’s what a typical funnel flow looks like for leads coming in from Facebook ads or the OMR website. 

• Depending on where the lead came from, and what action they took, a tag is applied to that contact. Then the contact receives a score depending on their behavior.
• Contacts are sent through different automations with specific content related to the lead magnet or signup source. 
• Every automation uses lead scoring. So every time a contact does a behavior like visits sales pages, opens emails, clicks on the website or email, or purchases something, that action contributes to their lead score. 
• Once they have taken enough actions within the funnel, and they’re warmed up, they enter a sales sequence. 
• They use re-engagement sequences for unopened emails to encourage users to engage with their emails. 

What were the biggest takeaways for you?

Wild Mail is a sophisticated tool that can be somewhat of a learning curve for people who have only ever built newsletters before. Building complex automations is more complicated, but Wild Mail makes it easier to learn how it works. 

It also makes it easier for people who don’t know funnels well to visualize how each contact is moving through the funnel.

It took Chris and the OMR team about two months to fully learn all of the functionality of Wild Mail. Now it’s something they use every day and a tool they actually enjoy using. 

To help with the learning curve, a Wild Mail subscription comes with Wild Audience’s 20-lesson email automation video course. You’ll also have access to free, done-for-you sales funnel automation templates that you can install with one click. 

What do you plan to implement next?

OMR is currently using Wild Mail for all of their digital products. In the future, they want to use it when promoting the exhibition as well. 

As they continue to launch more digital products, they’re also working on a new lead magnet series, as well as a referral program campaign that will launch soon. 

Why would you recommend Wild Mail to other companies?

Some people think businesses should start with a basic newsletter tool to make the learning curve easier. Chris recommends taking the opposite approach. He believes that a company should start using a tool like Wild Mail as early as possible. They can use its core features to begin collecting the data and learn the rest of the tool along the way. 

Chris recognizes that OMR could have seen more significant results with their online campaigns sooner if they had started using software like Wild Mail early on. Since they only switched to Wild Mail recently, they have tens of thousands of people that were already on their list that aren’t scored or tagged. 

If a company is still using Mail Chimp, they have no idea who on their email list is active and how they are active. Without this information, it’s almost impossible to customize their experience. In Wild Mail, you know the activity of every member of your audience and can tailor their experience to their interests. 

What type of company should use Wild Mail?

Chris can’t imagine using any other email tool other than Wils Mail anymore. In addition to companies that have digital products, he can see e-commerce businesses using Wild Mail to create a really customized product follow up emails. 

Online businesses should use Wild Mail to collect data to make their customer journey more personalized. Even small companies or high ticket sellers can benefit from collecting customer data to make their marketing more personal. 

What type of results will a new client achieve using Wild Mail?

Wild Mail lets businesses control what they send to their audience. Whatever type of email you need to send to meet your business goals, Wild Mail can create them. Using Wild Mail lets you build a real relationship with your audience by creating a customized experience for them. 

When your audience is receiving value, it builds trust and strengthens the connection. A stronger relationship means higher engagement rates, conversions, and sales. Wild Mail gives you the tools to build lasting relationships with your audience through automated messages that are both personalized and full of value.

Building relationships with your audience goes beyond emails and marketing. You’re creating an experience that continues throughout their entire buyer journey. By the time they reach the checkout, they’ll already feel excited about your brand and ready to buy, like this: 

Your audience will be so impressed with your content that you might even get some emails like this: 

When you’re building a system that adds continuous value to your audience, you don’t need to make hard sells. You’ll only sell to warm leads, and your message will do the selling for you. 

If you’re ready to automate your marketing and sales process and level up your email marketing, click here for 14-day free trial account or request a demo. 

⚠️ Our consulting program Accelerator no longer exists.

However, we have launched a new course called Relationship Funnel available to all our Wild Mail customers for free. This course is a step by step guide on how to implement a Relationship Funnel in your business.

If you would like to access it for free, sign up to Wild Mail today. Already using ActiveCampaign? Move your account to Wild Mail in 1-click.

Read the article  👇

Company name: Frank den Blanken PT 
Location of client: Netherlands 
Industry: Online Fitness Coaching 
Product/Service purchased from WA: Accelerator 
Rating: 5 stars

Frank had a successful online fitness coaching program but needed help understanding how to set up his funnel on the backend. After spending months trying to figure it out himself, he joined our Accelerator program and got the funnel up and running in only nine days. 

Results achieved

• Got his funnel up and working in 9 days 
• Made €70,000 from two ads by spending only €4,500 over 11 weeks.
• Took his business from 300k/year to 300k/month with the help of Relationship Funnel 
• Built a system that can be replicated for all new products he launches
• Improved audience segmentation and retargeting 

Who are you, and what do you sell?

Frank is an online fitness coach and the founder of Frank den Blanken PT, where he sells fitness programs to people in the Netherlands who want to make a complete body transformation. He has online fitness training and nutrition courses that sell for €497 as well as one-on-one personal training programs that sell for €1997. 

How did you find out about Wild Audience, and what made you jump on board?

While trying to learn about email marketing and automation, Frank came across Wild Audience in a YouTube video describing Relationship Funnel. He was interested in building a Relationship Funnel and wanted to learn how he could do it himself. 

It turns out, doing it yourself is easier said than done, and Frank knew he needed an expert to step in and guide the process. That’s when Frank upgraded to Accelerator  to get the coaching and expert advice he needed to get the funnel set up and working more efficiently. 

Frank also knew that he needed help in understanding how his funnel worked on the backend. He’d played around in various mail platforms but wanted an expert to walk him through how each piece worked together. 

What was the main problem you wanted to solve for your business?

What began as a simple product — selling a fitness program to men in the Netherlands — exploded into a massive brand reaching nearly 10% of the Dutch market. Frank ended up with a huge pool of leads and no proper way to send them to the right offer. His main goal was to segment his audience in a way that gets the right offer in front of the right people every time. 

What results did you achieve with our Accelerator?

After months of trying to figure out the funnel on his own, Frank had a Relationship Funnel up and running within nine days of starting Accelerator . Over the next 11 weeks, he made 29,000 euros off of one ad and 41,000 euros off of another, while spending only 4,500 total.

How much revenue did you make before? How much revenue do you make now?

Using Relationship Funnel alongside his other marketing strategies, Frank grew his business from €300k per year to €300k per month.  

Can you walk us through your Relationship Funnel?

Relationship Funnel can adapt to every unique business and target audience, but usually looks something like this: 

You can learn more about how we’ve helped businesses use Relationship Funnel to scale their revenue, here.

Now let’s walk through Frank’s Relationship Funnel. 

• First, Frank generates leads in the Netherlands by targeting his audience with a free 14-day video course on Facebook. This ad links to a form that asks questions about their fitness level and basic demographics. Once they answer these questions, they get access to the free course. 
• Then they’re directed to a landing page that asks if they want to sign up to get a custom workout schedule. This page asks questions about fitness level, commitment, and which aspects of the program they are most interested in. 
• Once they’ve expressed their needs and interests, they are directed to a thank you page, which is specific to the offer they will be shown next.
• This thank you page contains a video describing the common reasons that people don’t reach their fitness goals. The videos are all specific to the answers people shared in the questionnaire. The page is also full of social proof and progress photos of people who have successfully gone through the program. 

Once someone makes it to this thank you page, they see a video of Frank speaking at one of the biggest fitness conferences in the world. This further solidifies his authority and expertise in the industry and adds another layer of trust among him and his audience. Then they’ll have the option to schedule a free call with someone on Frank’s team if they want to learn more about his 1:1 coaching programs. 

The team currently fields 8-9 sales calls per day generated through Facebook Ads spending 100 euros per day. On average, Frank’s team closes 60% of the sales calls. 

Through each stage of his Relationship Funnel, Frank continues to add more value to his audience by addressing specific concerns or pain points that they face. By the time they get to the end of the Funnel, they have all of the information, and motivation, they need to make a purchase decision. 

That’s the beauty of Relationship Funnel. It works behind the scenes to build a relationship with potential customers by emphasizing Respect-Based Marketing tactics and installing buying beliefs. 

Once Frank’s audience gets to that final sales call, the team knows that they are already familiar with the brand, and the relationship is strong. 

What was the best part of our Accelerator program for you?

For Frank, the most exciting part of joining Wild Audience’s Accelerator program was being able to have a deeper understanding of segmentation and implementing a belief system like Respect-Based Marketing. What he thought would be one of the biggest challenges of the program turned out to be a fascinating and eye-opening part of the process. 

Respect-Based Marketing, outlined in the graphic below,  is our signature marketing method that combines smart segmentation with compelling storytelling to automate real relationships and build trust with prospects.

What’s next? What does the future look like for your business? 

The next step for Frank’s business is to add even more products into the Relationship Funnel sequence. 

He recognized that the part of his audience interested in fitness education courses would resonate well with the belief system that Relationship Funnel emphasizes. He also plans on building out a more in-depth conversion sequence and adding a webinar to the funnel. 

Since he’s nearly maximized his reach in the Dutch market, Frank sees it as an exciting challenge to find ways to scale his business without reaching many more people. 

Since learning how to use Wild Mail, our all-in-1 email marketing and automation software, he’s now planning on transferring another of his courses to the platform to be able to retarget that audience more effectively. 

Who should invest in our Accelerator program?

Based on his own experience, Frank believes that once your business hits $5-10k per month, it’s time to start working on a funnel. He would recommend Accelerator for business owners who need help converting cold customers and nurturing that relationship to increase conversions. 

At its core, our Accelerator program is a 90-day, done-with-you program for businesses looking to solve their customer acquisition problem. The goal of is to grow your revenue to €25,000 per month through a Relationship Funnel that automatically acquires customers at profit and scale. 

Wild Audience’s Accelerator Program will help you:

• Systematize your customer acquisition 
• Attract the right leads that will convert into customers
• Improve conversion rates
• Decrease lead acquisition & customer acquisition costs
• Understand exactly how much it costs to acquire leads, book sales calls and demos, and how much it costs to acquire customers
• Provide a more personalized sales experience and customer journey by using advanced automation techniques
• Systemize all marketing & sales processes to scale to 7-figures and beyond

What type of results will a new client achieve if they follow the process and work hard?

Just like Frank,  Accelerator clients receive guided support in dissecting the backend of their funnel. They’ll learn the best ways to capture and segment leads that are ready to buy and create retargeting campaigns that continue to nurture their audience until they’re ready. 

Our Accelerator also helps tackle the systems you need in place to replicate your Relationship Funnel and scale your business. The funnel you create will be a tool that you can continue to use as your business evolves. 

Don’t believe us? Here are a few more incredible success stories our clients have shared after using Relationship Funnel: 

Mirna’s very first Relationship Funnel helped her earn $9,000 off of $1,300 in ad spend within 30 days of launching. 

Mubaid consistently sees a 9-10% conversion rate on his sales funnel. 

David wanted to take a modern approach to customer acquisition. He wanted to attract new customers using the same Respect-Based Marketing techniques that attracted him to OUR Funnel. 

Adam is getting a 28% click-rate from his sales emails to his sales page and in total, converts an impressive 3.44% of his leads into paying clients! 

That could be you. 

So if you’re frustrated with getting sales calls booked or feel like you’re spending too much on ads with low return, Wild Audience is here to help. 

If your business needs help getting more leads or improving conversion rates, it’s time to see if our Accelerator is a fit. 

Our Accelerator program could be the solution that takes your business to 7-figures and beyond, just like it’s done for our hundreds of happy clients. 

Click here to learn more about the Accelerator program and to find out if you are a fit. 

ActiveCampaign has made a name for itself as a powerful marketing tool that helps businesses automate their email marketing strategies and create targeted campaigns to send to their audiences. While email automation is a significant part of the platform, ActiveCampaign is so much more than that. With over 100,000 users across the world, they’ve become a tool that users rely on to stimulate growth within their businesses. 

In this article, we’ll break down exactly how ActiveCampaign works, how to take advantage of its features, and the pros and cons of using it as automation software. 

Watch Youtube

What is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is an integrated email marketing, automation, sales software, and CRM platform. It lets users perform powerful automation, email marketing, and customer relationship management. 

It provides a cloud-based solution to marketing and sales automation and includes features to create email marketing campaigns, web analytics, lead scoring, and customer relationship management. The platform gives users access to detailed behavior tracking and marketing segmentation options to create the most customized campaigns for every audience. 

And compared to other automation software, it comes at a very affordable price.  

Company Background

Founded in 2003 by Jason VandeBoom, ActiveCampaign started as a consulting firm helping small businesses automate their marketing tasks and manage their contacts. 

After 20 years of consulting, the company transitioned to a software as a service business in 2013. Now they have nearly 100,000 users utilizing their software to build marketing and sales automation.  

Listen to Podcast

What Does ActiveCampaign Do? 

Now let’s breakdown ActiveCampaign’s most popular features and how you can use them to organize and track your contacts and automate your business. 

Email Marketing

ActiveCampaign lets you send whichever kind of email you need for your business. It gives you ultimate control over the types of emails you send. The best part is that you don’t need to be a tech pro to create beautiful and engaging email campaigns in minutes. 

ActiveCampaign’s drag and drop email builder makes it easy for anyone to build an email from scratch or use one of their templates. Additionally, you can create functional subscription forms, dynamic content, email segmentation, and conduct helpful split tests on your campaigns.

Subscription Forms 

Create simple signup forms to capture your audience’s contact information and tag people based on their interests. From the form, you can create welcome sequences, follow up emails or notify people on your team of new subscribers. In ActiveCampaign, you can create campaigns that are triggered when a contact submits a form.

There are four different forms to choose from, depending on the type you need, including inline styles, floating boxes, modal pop-up, and a floating bar. The signup form builder gives you the ability to embed forms directly on your website in seconds. 

Dynamic Content 

Combine tagging and conditional content to send your audience different messages based on what they want to see. Dynamic content lets you customize the text and media in each email based on who you are sending it to. This allows you to engage with different segments of your audience at once while knowing that they are getting content that is relevant to them. 

Email Segmentation 

Generic email blasts aren’t enough when you’re trying to engage multiple audience segments. Once you’ve created your dynamic content, you can segment your emails so that the messaging goes to the right people, who are interested in that content. With email segmentation, you know that each contact gets the emails that they want to see, which leads to higher engagement rates and open rates. 

Your content will feel more personal and build more trust among your audience. ActiveCampaign can automatically segment your audience based on actions they take, like visiting your website or clicking the links in your emails. Then you can use this information to send more personalized emails to your audience. 

Split Testing 

One split test can help you boost open rates and improve the messaging within your emails. You can split test subject lines, email copy, calls to action, and even images and media within the email to see what your audience likes the most. If you’re running complex automations, you can test the entire workflow to make sure that your funnel is converting as well as possible. 

Marketing Automation 

Automating your emails is like having an extra set of hands to give you time to focus on other tasks. ActiveCampaign has powerful marketing automation functionality to help you track your website events, automation goals, create automation maps, attributions, and split actions. 

Site Tracking 

With site tracking, you can see which contacts interact with your website to better understand what they’re looking for. ActiveCampaign’s site tracking lets you see which products and information your contacts are looking for on your website so that you can follow up with them with more information to help create more engagement and boost conversion rates. 

Event Tracking 

Every click, login, or view is tracked as an event within your ActiveCampaign contacts to keep track of what your audience is interested in. Whether you have a website, membership site, online portal, or shop, you can track user actions that will help you follow up and create even more customized email campaigns to move contacts further down the funnel. 

Automation Goals 

Tracking automation goals lets you see what different segments of your audience needs and who needs more warming up. With ActiveCampaign automation goals, you can see how people are moving through your funnel and where people are dropping off so that you can make adjustments. 

Tracking micro conversions like clicks, opens, and plays lets you see which parts of your funnel are getting engagement, and where your funnel could use some TLC. Goal tracking also gives you an idea of when your audience is more likely to convert, where to upsell, and when to start a sales sequence when your audience is warmed up. 

Automation Map 

The ActiveCampaign automation map is a handy tool that helps you see how your different automations connect and work with each other. It makes it easy to see your email marketing from a bigger picture view and find new opportunities to maximize your business growth. The map view lets you visualize your entire funnel map and see how every component connects. 

The map gives you a high-level picture of your reports based on the performance of each automation so that you can make adjustments to your strategy based on what you see working in your funnel. 

Attribution 

The customer attribute feature lets you see what parts of your marketing campaigns are performing best by tracking your customer journey from start to finish. YOu can see whether they convert better from SEO, social media, PPC, or another marketing challenge that you might be underutilizing. 

Knowing where your customers come from and where they’re most likely to convert can help you create the most profitable funnel possible.         

Sales and CRM

A sales CRM works as your own personal automation tool to help you prioritize, which leads to focus on selling to. ActiveCampaigns sales CRM lest you manage all of your contacts efficiently and store all of the information you need to create campaigns that convert. 

Contact and Lead Scoring 

One of the best ways to increase conversions is to make sure that your audience is warm enough to buy before you start selling. A lead score is a number that is calculated based on how often your contact interacts with your business. The more they visit your site, click your emails, or engage with your contact, the more the lead score increases. ActiveCampaign lead scoring gives you the ability to score your leads by tracking engagement and activity, so you know which users are warm enough to sell to.

Gmail extension 

ActiveCampaign’s Gmail extension helps you manage all of your sales communication right from your Gmail inbox. You can tell how many times your contact has viewed, opened, or interacted with your emails. Then you can respond to them via Gmail and automatically view that information in their contact card in ActiveCampaign, making it a hub for all of your contact information. 

Messaging 

More than ever, people are turning to mobile to access their emails, favorite websites, and more. ActiveCampaign lets you meet your contacts where they are by contacting them on their mobile phones and social media through your ActiveCampaign account. 

SMS

You can send your contacts SMS messages manually or through automated workflows that follow up your contacts at the optimal day and time for them to see it. You can even ask your contacts to subscribe or unsubscribe to your list via SMS and import that information directly into ActiveCampaign. The platform integrates with phone numbers so you can collect numbers via custom forms on your website or landing pages. 

Site Messages 

Site messages let you contact your audience during the exact moment they are engaged on your website. Just like with other message types in ActiveCampaign, you can customize site messages for identical audiences and create custom designs and messaging that relates to the specific contact you are speaking to. 

 

Facebook Custom Audiences 

If your business is using Facebook ads, you can use the information in your Facebook custom audiences to further track your audience through their customer journey. Use the data collected by ActiveCampaign such as clicks and engagements to retarget your audience with custom Facebook ads that speak directly to them and continue to add more value before you start the sales process. 

Conversations 

You can have live conversations with your audience by combining automation with real-time chat on your website. You can use ActiveCampaign’s Conversations feature to send chat follow-ups, tag users, and create custom new deals for users on your website. You can also connect the information you collect via chat to your contact’s record in ActiveCampaign to keep all of your data in one place. 

Who should use Active Campaign?

ActiveCampaign is built for anyone who wants to utilize email marketing to its full potential. Beyond just sending email newsletters, it’s for businesses who wish to automate their marketing to maximize conversions and sales fully. Companies that have complex offers or multiple products can utilize ActiveCampaign to personalize the customer journey, track reports, and manage their contact lists more efficiently. 

Customer Service & Support

ActiveCampaign offers support via email, live chat on their website, and one on one training. They also have a robust Help Center, and online community forum for that users can utilize for help troubleshooting common problems. 

If you need more hands-on support, they offer free migration services and have a directory of certified consultants. You can work with these consultants to create a personalized strategy to use ActiveCampaign to your highest advantage. 

Pricing

ActiveCampaign uses tiered pricing based on the number of contacts in your customer database. First-time users get a free-14 day trial, after which they can choose monthly or annual billing.

Ultimately, how much you pay depends on how many contacts are in your database. The more contacts you have, the higher the cost. The minimum number of users you will be charged for is 500, with the price gradually increasing as your contact list grows. 

The four plans they offer are Lite, Plus, Professional, and Enterprise. 

The Lite plan starts at $9/month for 500 contacts and includes:

• Unlimited Emails 
• Newsletters
• Email Marketing
• Marketing Automation
• Unlimited Chat & Email Support
• Logins for up to 3 Users

The Plus plan starts at $49 /month for 500 contacts and includes:

• Everything from the Lite plan
• CRM and sales automation 
• Deep data integrations 
• Contact and lead scoring 
• Custom user permissions
• SMS marketing
• 1:1 training 
• Conditional contacts
• Logins for up to 25 users

The Professional plan starts at $129 /month for 500 contacts and includes: 

• Everything from Plus
• Split automation
• Attribution
• Site messaging
• Predictive sending ML
• Win probability ML
• Logins for up to 50 users

The Enterprise plan starts at $229 /month and includes: 

• Everything from the Professional plan
• A custom domain
• A custom mailserver domain
• A dedicated account rep
• Custom reporting (Beta)
• Free social data
• Free design services
• Phone support
• Uptime SLA
• In-depth onboarding
• Unlimited users logins

Pros and cons

Pros 

• Pricing – ActiveCampaign offers straightforward pricing, and the value you receive goes way beyond what you pay for. It’s not the cheapest email marketing service, but is also not the most expensive tool, especially when you factor in everything it does. 
• Usability – Its interface may take some time to get used to, but the platform itself is very intuitive for non-designers and non-technical people. Non-tech savvy users love its drag and drop features in the email builder and when creating automations.  
• Comprehensive business hub – Since you can connect dozens of business tools to ActiveCampaign, it acts as a complete hub for all of your user information.  
• Robust data collection tools – From tagging and lead scoring to sophisticated user tracking, ActiveCampaign acts as a robust CRM, helping you collect and store information about your audience much more comprehensively than other email marketing or automation tools.
• Complex automation capabilities – You can import automations and use templates 
• Excellent customer support – ActiveCampaign offers a handful of different options when it comes to customer support, so you always have a way to troubleshoot issues within your account. 

Cons 

• Technicality – It takes a few clicks on the dashboard to find where you are trying to go, which involves a slight learning curve at first. However, once you know where everything is, the platform is easy to navigate and access all of its features. 
• Glitchy reporting tool – One of the biggest complaints among users is the functionality of the reporting tool. You can currently see the necessary reporting data from your dashboard, but need to export the data to dig into the results, which can be frustrating for some people. 

Active Campaign is an affordable and robust email marketing tool. The value the tool provides, the features, the support, the consistent updates to the tool make it a perfect choice for virtually any business who is doing email marketing and automation. 

For a more in-depth look at all of ActiveCampaign’s features, check out our free 20 lesson course covering everything you need to know about creating successful email marketing and sales automation.