Shay Howe With ActiveCampaign

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by on pay. Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:25] Lee Kantor here another episode of Atlanta Business Radio, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor on pay. Without them, we can’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Shay Howe with ActiveCampaign. Welcome, Shay.

Shay Howe: [00:00:42] Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:44] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. For those who don’t know, tell us a little bit about active campaign. How are you serving folks?

Shay Howe: [00:00:52] Yeah, Active Campaign is the leader in marketing, automation, email marketing and CRM software. We help businesses of all sizes, be it folks from social entrepreneurs to enterprises who are solving very complex challenges, grow by scaling and personalizing their customer experiences, and we largely do so using automation. The idea is that we allow these businesses to accelerate their growth by being able to automate some 1 to 1 experiences that happen across all the different channels, all the different markets by which they speak and get engaged with their customers.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:23] And now there’s several players in this space that you’re in. What kind of separates you from the others?

Shay Howe: [00:01:31] Yeah, it’s a good question. We do a number of different things, one of which we have built a true platform. And what I mean by that is one of which we don’t focus on a given vertical per se, nor do we focus on a very specific size of business. The thought is we want to build a platform that is approachable, that’s intuitive, one by which anyone can come to active campaign and learn how to use it. But it’s also depth enough in its capabilities and qualities that it services businesses of all types. Right? So it’s not just for small businesses, but it also works for that mid-market to enterprise. Truly, anyone can come in and figure out how to use that to campaign, but also figure out how to get it to address the complex needs that they may have within the organization. And so many other platforms probably go deeper into one very specific vertical or one very specific market of customers per se. We tend to think wider than that and how we could service a much larger range of customers, if you will.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:27] Now, for the folks who are kind of choosing, which is the right automation or service for them, how would you recommend they go about kind of doing that kind of research to land on the best fit?

Shay Howe: [00:02:39] Yeah, it’s a good question. I think every business is going to have different needs, right? And they should think about those needs. They should spend some time writing those down, documenting those and doing the evaluation of different platforms against them. A lot of it may depend on how you go to market, how you reach existing customers, how you engage new customers, how you want to retain them. Does you think about that pretty end to end holistically and evaluate tools against that set? One of the things I would recommend in doing that though, would be also considering and weighing out the idea that every business uses a plethora of tools to operate, right? It’s very rare that you have just one tool you use to run your business. Liam Venture To guess. You have numerous tools you use day to day at work, right? You think about a platform that is able to integrate and connect all of those different tools. And I say that because if you bring automation into that experience, the way to make that automation personalized is by bringing those tools together so that you’re capturing the data from the different odds and ends of it to ensure that you’re able to take use on that to change a customer’s experience based off what might be their behaviors or existing actions, but things you can know about them.

Shay Howe: [00:03:48] And you have to have that data across all those tools to do that. I can give you an example. If you are a sales rep about to reach out to an existing customer because they have a contract renewal, or you think there’s a good way that you could upsell or expand their their account, you probably want to double check inside of your customer support or service system to ensure that that person doesn’t have any open tickets or outstanding issues. Right. And can make and help bring the integration across all of those so that you’re not creating tasks for a sales rep to go reach out to folks who may have those open areas of opportunity or issues per se. What was the opposite that we could be looking at folks visiting your website, they’re visiting your pricing page, they’re visiting very specific categories of your blog, but which you can detect. And that person has a very specific interest in this type of service or offering, but they’re not currently engaged in with us. We should reach out to them and ask them if they have any curiosity. Want to learn more? There is anything we could help them learn or educate on that very specific end. So how do you think about the integrations you have can matter significantly into what type of platform you might choose.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:53] And then how skilled of a technologist do you have to be to implement all those integrations? Is that something that’s pretty intuitive or is it something that you work with your clients to help them integrate? Or so how does that part work?

Shay Howe: [00:05:08] Yeah, good question. I think it’s that can be intimidating, right, to think about. Okay, hold on. I got to build all these integrations then to go out and build out all of these automations, all these emails, that can be a lot of work. That is it’s not the case for that to. We focus a lot on how to keep the platform truly intuitive. So when you set the integrations, largely the way you connect the tools and authenticate across them is no different than logging into them. And we help provide a lot of easy default and settings so that when you’re connecting, you can see which data is getting passed from tool to tool. You can customize that if you wish, but we’re going to be intelligent in what we recommend. As you think about building out automations, we’ll give you what we call recipes, which are largely just recommendations of based off of this trigger. You probably want to take these actions and you could use those directly out of the box, or you could go in to begin to customize those and what might be the messaging or language within an email. We also provide a lot of email templates or landing page templates by which you can jump in and not have to design something from scratch, but start with a strong foundation and grow and build from there. So we certainly do our best to make it as intuitive, as easy to get started as possible. We really want folks to find that kind of value very quickly.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:25] Now, in your work, I guess in your background, you started as a technologist and moved into marketing.

Shay Howe: [00:06:32] Yeah, I’m a weird background, to be honest with you. I started in design, but it was designed in the sense of how to use design to go out and solve a very specific problem. I spent the first six years of my career working in different marketing agencies where designing websites, emails, ads, you name it. I learned a lot about how to drive organic traffic through search engines as well as how to do paid customer acquisition. After that, myself, I went deeper into software as a service or SAS start ups where designing and building the product. And throughout that journey I went from design deeper into what would be the engineering or product management ends and how to actually go out and solve a customer’s problems. But in doing that, also understand where where is there a viable commercial opportunity or market that truly wants that? And come to learn. It’s almost like a field of dreams, right? If you build, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going to come. And that’s where I went deeper into marketing, learning about more on how to garner interest and how to go out and acquire customers. But further, how do you actually drive adoption of those folks who are interested and how to retain them as a customer for a long time? That’s led me through different, different roles in design, product engineering and marketing, and a number of number of different companies.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:48] Now, as part of active Campaigns marketing, you’re hosting a live event in Atlanta on February 7th. Can you talk about that and how this kind of building community through face to face live, you know, in real life events comes into play in an organization that prides itself in marketing automation.

Shay Howe: [00:08:10] Yeah, Yeah. You know, we have on February 7th in Atlanta is what we call a study hall. And a study hall is a half day workshop where we have live instruction on learning from in-house experts on email marketing, market automation, customer relations, anything you would think about in terms of how to grow your business. So if you’ve ever wanted to start a business or if you have an Etsy shop or a brick and mortar business or you’re already in the wake of it, or if you’ve used technology to help scale your business in the past and maybe it hasn’t worked well, you should come check it out. You will walk away from a study hall with the principles and best practices that don’t do launching personalized marketing campaigns that help you garner attention and grow sales. The entire idea of a study is that folks walk away with the skills to run an effective sales and marketing team and functions, and we go deep into to all ends of that. The idea of getting together in person is one by which we get hands on. We can ask and answer questions more directly. We can pull up our computers, walk through accounts, those integrations, all the campaigns, automations, etc. will directly help you set those up. We’ll do that together, live in the room. And it’s so fun to sit in one of those rooms because what you’ll see and find is you might have a very specific idea or thought of how you want to set up an automation or something in your business. But someone across the room is going to ask a question, perhaps completely unrelated, but the answer to it is going to unlock a new potential or thought in your own mind of, Hey, that’s an interesting question. I bet I could use that in a unique or different way in my own business. So the energy in those rooms is really dynamic. The buzz across them as folks start to build automations and change the operations of their business is really exciting to see.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:55] Now, are the folks that are in these rooms, are they entrepreneurs? Are they kind of the marketing person in the organization? Is it kind of a solopreneur all the way up to somebody that might be in an enterprise organization? It’s just a hodgepodge.

Shay Howe: [00:10:10] Yeah. Yes, all the above. You will find folks who are social entrepreneurs who run and grow their own business. You’re going to find folks who work in small businesses where there is maybe a team of a dozen folks. You can find folks who come from organizations with 1000 plus employees, and they sit on the marketing team, or maybe they’re in a sales management or operations role. You can find folks from from all different kind of backgrounds and functionalities. And it’s kind of the beauty of it, right, to bring a diverse audience and crowd together like that, to start to share some ideas really starts to unlock the potential or thoughts that you otherwise may not have had, have not had gotten into a room with those folks.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:49] And the way the the day will kind of unfold is there’s kind of learning education, somebody teaching something, and then there’s breakout sessions and places to ask questions and to kind of work together.

Shay Howe: [00:11:01] Yeah. Yeah. So you have an instructor that’s leading a little bit of a lesson per se, but very interactive. It’s not someone standing at a podium just talking for a few hours. There’s questions to the audience. It’s not just a presentation. We’ll actually have the platform. We’ll be walking through building things, live together. We’ll stop. We’ll do breakout groups to work on some of those problems together. We’ll also leave space in the day for folks to just be in their own account, setting up automations, trying to build stuff very hands on. Honestly, I’d say the majority of the session is not actually a lecture per se. It’s more conversational and doing live demonstration, if not sitting with folks individually, going through what they could be doing in the platform.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:47] Now, are these people that are attending, are they your existing customers right now, or is this good for a new person that maybe isn’t familiar, that can educate themselves and get maybe launched in your product? Yeah.

Shay Howe: [00:12:00] That’s both. So we certainly have a lot of existing customers come because they’re always curious to know, Hey, what else could I be doing with Active campaign? What capabilities the platform might not be taking advantage of. We also have plenty of folks who are just either curious about ActiveCampaign or quite honestly, more curious about marketing automation, email marketing, kind of figure out ways of what is the relevant messaging, how to stay topical, really understand what what resonates with customers in today’s landscape of marketing, etc. We dig in all that. So we have folks that aren’t customers with existing customers, and that’s part of the benefit, right? Again, that diversity really provides a richer form, more depth of conversation and understanding how to grow.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:48] Individual businesses and where is this event happening? Because it’s a live event. It’s not a virtual event that’s running live, Right? This is in real life.

Shay Howe: [00:12:58] Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we will be live in Atlanta. We have a venue set aside for we’ll have breakfast, we’ll have lunch together. Yeah, we will be in person through and through.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:11] And then is this the only event that active campaign is hosting or are there other events throughout the year and other locations?

Shay Howe: [00:13:19] Yeah, we’re going to be doing a bunch of study halls this year. As I mentioned, we’re in Atlanta on February 7th. Directly following that, we will head over to Charleston, where will be on February 8th and then later in February will be in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Indianapolis. We’ll head over to Europe and do some events in Dublin, London and Amsterdam. And honestly, we have a whole slate of cities we’ll be visiting throughout the year. So my recommendation would be over to to head over to Eventbrite and search for active campaign. And you’ll be able to find out all the different cities we’re in and what dates will be at them.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:55] Now in the markets that you serve, do you have kind of active campaign offices or active campaign partners that help people?

Shay Howe: [00:14:03] Uh, we in some sense do. Yes. Our team is fairly distributed. We have hubs in Chicago, Indianapolis, Dublin, Sydney, as well as down in Brazil. So we have folks there, but we also have folks just remotely spread out throughout the globe. And then we have a partner network, be it of resellers, referrals or consultants globally as well. A number of those folks, those partners will come to the events to help out, to engage with that local community. Local employees will come as well. Servicing as a bit of a teacher’s assistant, answering questions, walking in the room, helping folks out. So as we host the events, we try and engage the broader ecosystem and community around active campaign as well and make sure it’s the best event for everyone involved, that everyone walks away getting their questions answered. Finding new ways to essentially add automation into their business.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:57] Now, any advice for the business owner out there? And the best way to leverage a marketing automation like you’re a marketing automation company, but yet you’re doing it in real life event. So is there a combination or the right recipe to market in today’s world that combines automation, email in real life events?

Shay Howe: [00:15:20] Yeah, absolutely. I think maybe while as a marketing automation company, we tell folks all the time, Hey, do not over automate. With a sense that if you’re doing things that aren’t personalized, people begin to notice or feels that there’s a there’s a machine or a robot perhaps behind the scenes on that, right? There are certain parts of your business you can automate because they’re mundane or just topical and easy to to offload where automation shines, where you can really begin to personalize it so that folks feel as if they are your only customer regardless if you have one or 1 million customers. I think that’s where the spirit of automation comes into play. You should always be playing with that line of What am I automating versus what am I doing by hand, or layering in that human touch aspect to. I think you’ll be interested to find there’s some things that work really well, automated. There’s some things that that personal touch you can’t beat, right? And that’s something we would recommend folks to to adjust to play around with, iterate on. And for us, the ability to get together with our customers prospects live not only helps us educate them and hear their stories around how to grow their business, but it’s feedback for us and how we can iterate, build, evolve our own product, platform, marketing, you name it. So it’s one of those areas where we automate a lot of the scheduling of the events, the event reminders, the scheduling and marketing around the event, but nothing beats getting in person with those folks live to have those conversations, to hear their feedback, really dig in 1 to 1, if you will.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:03] And so you’re thinking that’s a mistake some people make is to rely too much on automation and and forget about the fact that business ultimately is done kind of human to human at some point.

Shay Howe: [00:17:15] Yeah. I mean, the end of like, we’re all people. You might be selling into a business as a customer, but this is run by people. Right. I think the relationship there is super important. So not losing sight of that, being personable throughout all of that is very important.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:32] Well, Shae, thank you so much for sharing your story today. The website for Active Campaign. If somebody wants to learn more about that and also one more time, the coordinates for the event via Eventbrite.

Shay Howe: [00:17:45] Yeah. So you can find us online at ActiveCampaign. We’re on all the relevant social channels as well. So be it. Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, etc.. And then all the events, all of our study halls are listed on Eventbrite, and you can find the Atlanta event coming up on February 7th. And for anyone who’s interested in attending as well, we have a coupon code. We’re happy to share with them. The code would be learned so l e a r n, and that will give you half off a study hall. And that coupon code works not only for Atlanta, but all the events we have coming up so you can find those all on Eventbrite.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:22] Now, before we wrap, I have one quick question. Do you mind sharing a story, maybe your your favorite success story of somebody leveraging active campaign to take their business or project to a new level?

Shay Howe: [00:18:36] Yeah, it’s a it can be a difficult question to answer. Lee It’s almost like selecting your favorite child in some respect. I can give an example of a customer in Atlanta, actually, there is Apple. Rose Beauty. Apple Rose Beauty offers vegan cruelty free excuse me, cruelty free, organic skin care and organic beauty products that work for sensitive skin. And they have a very interesting and inspiring story of how they’ve adjusted the business and evolved throughout the pandemic and basically using it to campaign. Apple Rose Beauty turned what was mainly an in-person approach into a thriving e-commerce business when the pandemic hit, right where they had to basically remove that face to face interaction when that wasn’t possible. So Kristy Alexander, who is their founder and chief Big Heart, implemented a number of different automations. She went out and created these 1 to 1 experiences that helped grow the company’s online sales by over 300%, which is absolutely wild. And pre-pandemic they are doing about 30% of Apple Beauty’s business from online sales. Most of that, in some respects was coming from live events where they got immediate direct feedback from customers that help them stay connected and to mimic that experience or that in-person experience online. Kristi pivoted and did far deeper conversational marketing within her email marketing. And while email had accumulated or accounted for roughly 12 to 15%, I believe, of Apple, Rose’s video revenue pre-pandemic today is accounting for north of 30%. So they’ve been able to go in and layer an active campaign, find ways to be conversational, personal in their email marketing, do some automations to find the right moments to engage their customers with the correct messaging, and they’re being able to scale to that, right? So a business that’s in many ways evolved and in some sense grown throughout the pandemic despite any challenges in front of that. So it’s very awesome and kind of wonderful to see them deliver a personalized experience at scale. And wonderful to see Christie and her team focus on delivering great products to the customers.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:42] Now when they’re when they’re working through that is active campaign assisting them in any manner? Or is it just something that they’re figuring out on their own by kind of learning about it as as just kind of stumbling upon what works and doesn’t? Or is there some help by active campaign, whether it’s a library or an academy or a human that helps them kind of wring out the most value from the software?

Shay Howe: [00:21:08] Yeah, they can do in any customer can do either or. Right. We have an entire academy, a learn section, really rich help docs with videos, tutorials and guides where folks, if they want to kind of self service their way to setting up an account and learning how to kind of pivot or evolve their business, they can certainly do so. We also offer just a number of events such as study halls, but also virtual events where we can you can talk to customer success manager or you can jump on the phone with different product experts that will really help understand what’s your use case and how best to set that up or solve for that inactive campaign. So in that same scenario where we have a mix of automation and human touch, we take that exact same approach into the education, into the implementation and enablement of active campaign. So yeah, you can certainly find resources online, but we are also here to help you with the human led experience as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:03] Good stuff. Well, Shay, thank you again for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Shay Howe: [00:22:08] We thank you so much for the time. Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:10] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.