ActiveCampaign Archives - Business RadioX ®

Jeffrey Rohrs With ActiveCampaign

February 9, 2024 by Jacob Lapera

Atlanta Business Radio

Jeffrey Rohrs With ActiveCampaign

00:00 /

Jeffrey Rohrs, VP of Brand Marketing at intelligent automation provider ActiveCampaign, is a creative, strategic, and experienced marketing leader with a passion for collaboration, innovation, and building dynamic brands in today’s fragmented media landscape.

He is an author, recovering attorney, bacon-lover, and Clevelander-at-heart. He has served as Chief Marketing Officer at Tendo, Filo, Jobvite, and Yext as well as VP of Marketing for Salesforce and ExactTarget.

Connect with Jeffrey on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

About ActiveCampaign and his role.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

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: [00:00:24] 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, Onpay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Jeff Rohrs with ActiveCampaign. Welcome.

Jeff Rohrs: [00:00:43] Thank you Lee, great to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:45] I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Active Campaign. How you serving folks?

Jeff Rohrs: [00:00:50] Yeah. So we help small teams power big businesses with intelligent marketing automation. Essentially, our platform enables companies to integrate with existing systems, whether they’re point of sale, whether they’re informational customer data, etc., so they can power more personalized, relevant and timely messaging at the moment that mattered. So some customers come to us and they use us for basic email marketing, but our vision is to always help them graduate up to, uh, increasingly better, more efficient, more agile kind of uses that are automated and working while they sleep. And that just simply allows those businesses to develop better relationships with customers, more responsive relationships. So if you’re signing up for a newsletter or if you’ve purchased something, you’re getting those responsive emails right away, regardless of the time of day. And it also enables you to kind of nurture folks and do communication strategies that drip out the information that you want about your business over time, so that you have a more educated customer base who is more appreciative and embraces the totality of what you offer.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:55] So what is kind of the sweet spot for your ideal client? Because I would imagine that, you know, every size business needs help in this area.

Jeff Rohrs: [00:02:05] You’re absolutely right. And our sweet spot, it really falls on that small teams piece of our message. We find that a lot of marketers, entrepreneurs, they might be multiple hat wearers. So we could be dealing with somebody who is a solopreneur, right? They’re the only one in their business on up to kind of the mid-market, where you might have a team of five, ten, 20, 30 folks, but inevitably they feel smaller than they really should be. They’re underfunded. They’re understaffed. They need to do more with less. And so we really kind of operate in that area across all different types of verticals. So we have customers in real estate, customers in franchising and multi-location, customers in health care and food service and e-commerce and education. So it’s it’s great to have a flexible platform because it suits many types of business applications. And with both the intelligent marketing automation platform and our CRM, we can do a lot of great things for folks as they look to grow their business.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:02] So when you’re saying small teams, so like the solopreneur, this isn’t a good fit for.

Jeff Rohrs: [00:03:09] No, it is actually a good fit. We’ve got a lot of folks who are, you know, the chief cook and bottle washer of their operation. Right. They’re interested in growing a business. It could be somebody who’s a content creator. We’ve got folks who operate yoga studios and other types of businesses where there are not a lot of employees. And the reason it’s great for them is because they can invest the time on the front end to set up the types of communication, cadences and integrations that power the different communications via the automation platform and just let that run their business, dipping in when they need to do new types of promotions or they have new types of offerings. Um, and then also we have a great and a very vibrant partner community who can offer services as well. So as the business grows, it might be growing in terms of revenue, but maybe that entrepreneur does not want to grow it in terms of employee count. They can look to hire help, uh, from our community as well. Uh, and then if they get to the point where they do want to add staff, um, we’ve got, you know, a number of certified consultants around the globe being a company that services, you know, uh, customers in about 170 countries worldwide.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:21] So let’s kind of drill down and, and help that entrepreneur that, that, uh, hypothetical yoga studio, uh, entrepreneur. So you’re, you know, you had this dream, maybe you work corporate and you say, hey, I’m going to open a yoga studio. So now I’m all in. I’m a yoga studio operator. And I realized pretty quickly that, um, in my head, I was spending a lot of time doing yoga and helping people with yoga and sharing my love and passion about yoga. But in reality, I have to get people in the door. So now I’m also a marketer, and maybe that’s not my, you know, go to skill set. How would I kind of leverage active campaign? Like what would you do on day one when you decided to open up your shop and, and to build out some sort of a marketing plan, leveraging all that active campaign has to offer?

Jeff Rohrs: [00:05:17] Sure. So you open up those doors. We’ve got a free 14 day trial, and we will onboard you with personal one on one training to basically set up the first types of email or other communications that you need to have going out to get your business underway. And that could be that you’ve got a website that you are perhaps selling subscription or memberships, and what you need is via whatever platform you’re using for the membership component. You need it to integrate with active Campaign to power those communications that confirm your membership, that then perhaps put you on a multi-touch kind of campaign to educate you about what to expect in your first visit to the studio, as well as how often you may want to come and what other services there are. So what we find is that when you’re that type of an entrepreneur and you’ve got that level of commitment, folks are pretty, pretty savvy as to how they want to communicate. And so those one on one trainings, combined with other educational things we do, like we have traveling study halls in cities around the globe where our customers and partners get together with our trainers over 1 or 2 days and actually get their hands on in the platform, learning how to do more and more sophisticated things with active campaign.

Jeff Rohrs: [00:06:35] But it starts with that first email. It starts with that first integration. Those are the keys to marketing automation. The integration is the heart and soul of it, right? So you integrate active campaign with something, let’s say a point of sale system. Now, something that happens in that point of sale system can trigger an email. That data from the point of sale system goes into your customer database. You begin to build a profile on which you can then trigger different messaging. So as that sophistication goes up, the training and the opportunities the individual has to learn increases. Well, some folks tend to outsource that. Maybe it’s a small family business and they want to have a brother or a sister or a son or a daughter, a husband or wife do that work. We often see that. But as the company gets bigger and they begin to hire marketing talent, that becomes a more specialized. And then we also see, as I mentioned before, partnership uses. So it’s an extremely flexible platform in that regard. It really depends on where the individual is in terms of their abilities and and whether they want to handle that stuff on their own.

Jeff Rohrs: [00:07:38] We find with a lot of kind of those savvy solopreneurs, they want to they want to get their hands on it because they want to control the messaging out of the gate. And then as it grows, they want to hand it off, and they want to automate more and more so that the business is running, you know, while they do the things they love. And that’s ultimately what marketing automation should do. It should make more time for the things you love, whether that’s, you know, surfing in the case of our customer, boat surfing, yoga, um, you know, that’s very much what he likes about, uh, having active campaign is it gives him more time on the waves, more time with his customers and the folks that he’s teaching how to surf. We’re teaching yoga. Um, for others, maybe they want more time in their business, uh, for strategy or training employees. So it’s really up to them. But the sky’s the limit when it comes to marketing automation, because as you add more systems, that’s more data. And data is just gold today to power those personalized communications.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:33] Now, do you still feel that email marketing, uh, should be, if not at the heart of but a large part of, uh, small to midsize business owners marketing?

Jeff Rohrs: [00:08:44] Absolutely. If it’s not, you are behind. Um, I have been in the email marketing industry now for, uh, over 25 years, and I used to do a presentation in the late 2000, uh, 2000. So probably like 2008, 2009 that I could still give today verbatim about email is dead. And what I would show people is articles from every year, and I could do it from every year since then to today, where somebody is declaring that email is dead and it’s not. It is the for many people, it’s the silent driver of the majority of their online revenue and their communications. And the reason is it is extraordinarily affordable. It is something that everybody has access to and checks, and it is not subject to the whims of ownership, as we’ve seen, perhaps with Twitter, where you have an owner come in, change the rules of the game, and now all of a sudden, people’s engagement dries up and they’re left holding the bag going, well, how do I reach my customers? Well, with email, you’re building a database of subscribers that’s an owned asset. The more subscribers you have, the more people you can reach, the more amplification you have and the more business opportunity you have. And so one of the cold truths of the last few years, I’ve seen many social media mavens who kind of shoot, you know, kind of, uh, eschewed, uh, email for other, you know, newer channels, kind of have the cold realization that they should have been building email lists, and now they are they’re going back to that. Well.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:17] Yeah. That’s something that I always recommend to my clients, is that you want to own kind of the ability to communicate with the people important to you. All these third party apps out there, um, that are encouraging you to create content and share stuff and build the following. At some point, they’re going to charge you to reach those people. And even if they’re not charging you right now, you’re not reaching the totality of your people that you’ve spent all this time and energy and money in, in putting on this platform. All you’re doing is helping them. Something a long time ago told me, if it’s free, then you’re the product and so on. All these on all these platforms, you’re really helping them get advertising dollars. You are the content for them that they’re making money off of you, and you don’t have any control over the people that you’ve been building up as followers unless you write them a check.

Jeff Rohrs: [00:11:20] You’re absolutely right, Lee. And that’s one of my favorite quotes in business. Uh, and I actually wrote a book ten years ago called Audience Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, fans and Followers. And it was all about this. It was about the fact that there are different types of audiences depending on the channel you’re in, and you need to understand when you’re building something on someone else’s land. That’s what happened with Twitter. That happened with a lot of different social media channels that ebbed and flowed. But if we look across the last 25 years, what has remained steady, the ability to go to a website, the ability to search and the ability to send and receive email now, we’ve added additional channels over those years. One of the ones that is now central to our lives is text messaging, right? Sms has grown dramatically. It has not eclipsed email when it comes to the communications around, let’s say, e-commerce discounts, subscriptions, newsletters, etc. but it is a critical cog in the machine and one that again, you can power with marketing automation when it’s the right channel to communicate. But you’re you’re really hitting around this important idea of owned audiences, which is what email is, which is what a base of of of text messaging, SMS subscribers is. And it’s actually kind of the foundation of a big event that we’ve got coming up for Leap Day, where we’ve linked arms with a lot of other, uh, B2B software providers in the industry, uh, to create an event that’s going to help, uh, customers and businesses of all sizes learn how to make more time.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:50] So let’s dig into this Leap Day extravaganza. That active campaign is, um, kind of headlining. Uh, tell us about the event and some of the partners, uh, and what what a person can expect.

Jeff Rohrs: [00:13:05] Yeah. So it is called the Active Campaign Leap Day Extravaganza. And it’s brought to you by Active Campaign Calendly. Uh, gold cast and the juice and calendly is synonymous with time because they are a calendar application that allows you to get much more efficient with scheduling by enabling people who want to schedule time with you to access your calendar. Gold cast is the platform for this virtual event, and the juice is a great B2B subscription. Uh, that. If you’re interested in B2B content about marketing, I highly recommend subscribing to them. The reason we’ve all joined together is like our customers and our partners. Everybody’s being asked to do more with less these days. And so that drive towards efficiency and productivity means that Leap Day is really the perfect day to be reflective on this, right? What is this year give us? It gives us 24 hours out of the blue. When you really take a step back and think about that. That’s kind of crazy in a modern society that every four years we just have to throw another day on the calendar in order to catch up. But we thought about it in, in a different way, and that was one of the promises of active campaign is efficiency. That’s intelligent marketing automation. Automate things so that you have more time.

Jeff Rohrs: [00:14:13] And so instead of doing a usual run of the mill conference, we’re pulling together all of these customers, all of these speakers, all these sponsors, and every single one of the sessions. All of this is for free, by the way, is going to be about how to make more time leveraging technology, strategy or process. And so there will be technology providers showcasing how you use their tools. We’ve got an author of a new book called Time Boxing about doing one thing at a time. Well, we’ve got great speakers from across the marketing universe, and this is 29 hours straight of content on February 29th. And the way we pull that off is the magic of time zones. So we are running effectively for your listeners from 4 p.m. eastern on the 28th of February until about 8 p.m. eastern on the 29th of February. And if folks want to register, it’s totally free. They just go to leap, Leap Day, dot live forward, slash Atlanta, and you can go ahead and register there. Folks from around the globe are going to be participating. And we’ve got content for entrepreneurs, marketers, folks who are interested in improving their career, interested in improving their SEO, their email, their marketing automation, their events. There’s something for everybody who is an entrepreneur or a marketer.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:28] So, um, how am I going to consume this content? Is this something that if I don’t if I miss it live, I can get a replay? Or is this like a perishable that, hey, you, you better be there or you miss out?

Jeff Rohrs: [00:15:40] Uh, thank you for asking that question. Because in putting it together, the last thing we wanted to do was convey that you got to sit there for 29 hours straight. Now, I’m crazy enough to do that, but I got to make sure this thing comes off without a hitch. Uh, but folks are welcome to dip in and out throughout the, uh, the broadcast on the 28th and the 29th. And then we will be making it available on demand through the end of March. Uh, and that provides everybody with a chance to find the content that is of interest to them and participate in it and, uh, and ultimately get the value that hopefully they find several things that are going to help them be more efficient this year. I should note, though, that the benefit of participating in the live event is that many of our sponsors, many of our speakers, are going to be participating in the live chat. So they’re recording sessions, but they’re going to be in the live chat there to answer questions. And each of our sponsors is creating virtual booths so that, as folks say, oh, that’s interesting. I want to learn more. They don’t have to go search for it on the web. They can just move on over to the booth and they can ask and answer those questions. We’re also providing for our community of of customers and partners, uh, a help and education area, so that we can answer their questions right away. So it’s going to make for a really fun, uh, 29 hours, uh, of content. But yes, it will be available on demand and all of it for free.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:58] And if somebody wants to learn more about active campaign, where should they go?

Jeff Rohrs: [00:17:02] Yeah. For active campaign, just go to active campaign.com. As I mentioned at the top, uh, we offer two week free trial for new customers. You can come in, sign up, you’ll get, uh, one on one introduction to the platform and learn about it over those two weeks. And our folks will do their best to show you how it can benefit your business. And if it’s for you, great. If it’s not, we understand. And, uh, the the leap Day extravaganza is for customers, partners, and anyone doesn’t have to be a customer or partner. And again, that’s at Leap day dot live forward slash Atlanta.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:36] Good stuff. Well thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Jeff Rohrs: [00:17:42] Thank you very much and I hope you have a great day.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:44] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.

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Jeffrey Rohrs with ActiveCampaign

February 1, 2024 by angishields

Chicago Business Radio

Jeffrey Rohrs with ActiveCampaign

00:00 /

The ActiveCampaign Leap Day Extravaganza! is a free, global, virtual event for marketers and entrepreneurs looking to leverage technology, strategy, and process improvements to #MakeMoreTime in 2024. Attendees will hear from some of the brightest minds in AI, content creation, customer experience, ecommerce, email, entrepreneurship, intelligent marketing automation, podcasting, sales, and time management—all from the comfort of your home or office. You can register here.

Jeffrey is an author, recovering attorney, bacon-lover, and Clevelander-at-heart. He has served as Chief Marketing Officer at Tendo, Filo, Jobvite, and Yext as well as VP of Marketing for Salesforce and ExactTarget.

Connect with Jeffrey on LinkedIn.

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:03] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Chicago, Illinois, it’s time for Chicago Business Radio, brought to you by Firm Space, Your private sanctuary for productivity and growth. To learn more, go to firm space.com. Now here’s your host.

Max Kantor: [00:00:21] Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Chicago Business Radio. I’m your host, Max Kantor. And before we get started, as always, today’s show is sponsored by FirmSpace. And thanks to FirmSpace because without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. And we got a good one for you today. On today’s episode, we have the VP of Brand Marketing of ActiveCampaign, Mr. Jeff Rohrs. Welcome to the show, Jeff.

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:00:44] Thanks, Max. Happy to be here.

Max Kantor: [00:00:46] Uh, so let’s jump right in. Tell me a little bit about who you are, what your role is, and a little bit about active campaign.

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:00:53] Sure. So active campaign helps small teams power big businesses with intelligent marketing automation. So most people are familiar with email marketing. And really, what’s happened over the last ten years or so is that the technologies and tools have been democratized. They’re available for anybody, whether you are a one person company or you are tens of thousands. And we help companies of all sizes, of all industries use intelligent marketing automation to save time to grow their companies, increase profitability, to increase their reach and build audiences. And and so my role at as the VP of Brand Marketing is to increase awareness of what we do, connect with those audiences of customers and partners and prospects around the globe and and ultimately try and help folks, you know, power their businesses in better and more efficient ways.

Max Kantor: [00:01:46] So I understand that active campaign can can help small teams power big businesses. So how are you doing that, exactly? For anyone listening who’s like, what is active campaign like, how can it help me? How can active campaign help these small teams?

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:02:02] Sure. So when you’re a business, there are a lot of marketing needs that you have. And obviously digital marketing is is really what is ruling the roost these days connecting with consumers electronically, moving them through a customer journey, customer life cycle, and being on top of things so that you’re communicate with communicating with them. Whether you’ve got a new product, a service, you’re trying to be responsive in customer service or other touchpoints along that journey. And what we effectively do is have a platform for email and other type of communication. We integrate with over 950 different types of technologies. And even more than that, through great partners like Zapier. And what it allows you to do is draw data from different systems that you might have already in place, whether it’s a CRM through us or, say, Salesforce could be information that you have about customers in an e-commerce system. It could be Google Sheets, it could be ads that you’re running. But the bottom line is you’re trying to gather the information that you have about customers so that you can be very responsive in the moment. So let’s let’s use the example of somebody comes to your website and they’re looking for information, and maybe they fill out a form because they want to hear from you in terms of an email newsletter. Well, in the old days you used to have that they’d sign up and maybe you’d send them one email just thanking them for subscription.

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:03:24] Well, with intelligent marketing automation, what we can do is set up a series and that can be entirely automated and based on how they behave if they, you know, sign up for that first newsletter and they convert right away, you might change the behavior of the the communications that you have with them, shift into a different type of cadence of of conversation. And if they don’t, you may want to keep them on a drip campaign so that you’re giving them more and more information until they become very comfortable with purchasing. So that’s one example. And another is if you’re an e-commerce company, an e-commerce merchant, if you have folks shopping on the site and they abandon their cart, you know, it’s great to try and recover that lost opportunity. So having an automation that sends out an abandoned shopping cart, reminding them that they have items in their in their cart to purchase is a great way to ultimately boost revenue and and keep that customer engaged. So it’s really this kind of dimensional thinking about your business, using technology to automate those things. So you don’t have to be the one doing it over and over and over again. And that’s really where the power of the platform comes in to help grow company, help you get more profitable and help you save a lot of time.

Max Kantor: [00:04:36] Yeah. So it sounds like to me you’re just really helping businesses talk to their customers and to adjust with how a business talks to a customer depending on the situation.

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:04:49] Absolutely. And that’s and again, that is the power of of automation. When you integrate the different systems that you have and you have the different signals coming from those systems in the form of data. What? You’re really doing is getting the value of the data that those business systems produce, and you’re using it to power personalized, timely, relevant communications. At the moment, they matter most.

Max Kantor: [00:05:11] And if I was a small business owner listening to the episode right now, do I need a certain customer size to use active campaign, or can I use you guys from really day one?

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:05:22] You can use this from day one. That’s the power of the platform because we are we’re simple but not simplistic. And what I mean by that is if you just need an email marketing solution, we can be there. However, email marketing isn’t where it should end. It should graduate up. As you get more familiar with how you want to run the business into automations. Those are the things that run while you sleep, and they make your business much more responsive to a customer or a prospect’s needs. So we see a lot of customers start with us as solopreneurs, and then as they grow and as they add team members, they get a greater level of complexity to their program. And that’s really the the place that our our platform, that active campaign really shines, because we have that level of sophistication that you can get to over the time of your business maturing. You don’t have to necessarily use it from day one, but knowing that it’s there gives you the comfort that you’re going to be able to have a partner that grows with you. And then you put on top of that the community of of of customers and partners we have helping each other, the resources we have, the training. We really work hard to make sure that our customers not only succeed, but they get value on day one and day two and every day after.

Max Kantor: [00:06:40] Now, something that I think is cool that you guys do is every so often active campaign will host events. And I know because I was fortunate enough to attend one of the events and you got a really cool one coming up because as we all know, it’s 2024 and we have a bonus day. It’s it’s a leap year. We do. It’s it’s it’s a free day for us to do whatever we want. Uh, and so you guys are partnering with Calendly, Gold Coast, Gold Coast and the juice um, on active campaigns, leap Day extravaganza. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:07:13] Yes. So this was born of the idea that, hey, isn’t it crazy that every four years we’re just given magically 24 hours to do with as we please? Um, and when you really take a step back, that is kind of a nutty thing that we just have to rebalance our calendars, and it goes all the way back to Julius Caesar. Uh, when he established that, uh, in like 350 something BCE. So we were pondering this and said, well, wait a second, what if we what if we really owned Leap Day? Because the idea of giving you time is very much in line with the idea of intelligent marketing automation. In fact, when you automate things, it’s giving you back time that you would have otherwise spent on these arduous manual tasks. And so the theme of the event is make more time. And what we have done is we have pulled together, uh, you know, over 25 sponsors, over 100 speakers on topics ranging from AI to marketing to email to careers to leadership, uh, to sales. And every single speaker is going to be talking about how you can use technology strategy or process improvements to make more time in 2024. So it’s a free event. It is completely virtual. And, uh, folks are able to register right now. In fact, uh, launched it today and uh, excited that folks can go register at leap day.activecampaign.com and they can dip in or out for all of the 29 hours. You don’t have to sit through all of it like I will be doing. Um, but it will also be available on demand. So people who register are not only going to get to to attend the days that it runs, uh, but also throughout March.

Max Kantor: [00:08:56] And tell us who can attend. Who is this open to?

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:09:00] So this is targeted towards marketers and entrepreneurs who are looking to, uh, automate and find efficiencies and productivity gains in their business. And just as we serve folks from solopreneurs on up to large companies, so to our sponsors are bringing those kind of audiences to the table, uh, but where it will probably resonate, most are going to be those folks who are, you know, dealing with, um, you know, perhaps they’re in a marketing team that has fewer people than it had last year, or they’re being asked to do more with less, uh, or their budgets are limited. This is a scrappy event on our side, and it is meant to give folks a lot of ideas on how they can again, reclaim time, make more time, and then be able to deploy it for the things that they want to. Right? If you don’t have to do all the manual, arduous tasks around marketing communications, um, you know, uh, customer service, etc., you’ve got more automations in place. That’s giving you time that then you can go focus. Let’s say you want to focus it on your business strategy. Maybe you want to focus on coaching your employees up so that they are better able to serve your customers. Or maybe you want time back because you want to spend more time with your family or your friends, or on your hobbies. I mean, we have a great customer, um, uh, body yoga and surf. And he actually had said something to us that kind of triggered the idea for this event and said that, you know, active campaign gives me back time so I can spend more time surfing, which is what I love to do. So that’s what the best technologies should do for us in our business, is give us time back so that we can be even more productive and even more present in our lives.

Max Kantor: [00:10:41] Um hum. Um, Jeff, I just have one more question for you. This is how I like to wrap up every episode of Chicago Business Radio. Um, you’re hearing you talk about the event and what active campaign is. Uh, you’re very passionate about what you do, and that’s how it comes across. Uh, can you tell me what’s the most rewarding part of what you do for Active Campaign?

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:11:03] What a wonderful question. And it comes at right in a perfect moment. Uh, I have so enjoyed being a connector in building this event collaboratively, not only with my team, but each of the sponsors and the speakers. And I think each of them is dealing with that notion of having to do more with less in their own way this year. Um, you know, as the markets changed from, uh, really rewarding growth at all costs and, you know, uh, burning cash was not a problem for a lot of tech companies. The flip in the last two years has been to be profitable and grow based out of those profits. And active campaign did that successfully, as did many of the other partners. But they are now in a position where they have big dreams and they’ve got big goals. They’ve got to hit, but they don’t have necessarily the same budget and the same staff. And so to lock arms with these folks in a very collaborative way that is driven by partnership and relationship is where I get my energy. And this has been so enjoyable.

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:12:07] And, you know, I am so excited to get folks in the door for this event because I think it is very different than a user conference or a traditional marketing event. It is going to have, uh, bite sized content from 5 minute to 10 minute to 15 to 20 minute presentations. And again, because it’s running continuously 29 hours on the 29th, as we’re saying. And that’s simply because of the magic of time zones, right? So in Australia, we’re starting at 8 a.m. on leap Day, whereas in the Central Time zone we’re starting at 3 p.m. on the 28th. But people can join at their own leisure over those hours. And even if they miss it, they don’t have to feel stressed because it’s going to be available on demand. Thanks to our great, uh, platform partner, uh, Gold Cast. And that partnership is is really shown in the fact that Calendly gold cast and the Jews came to the table and said, yeah, we want to do this. And that really put momentum in it and got everybody else on board.

Max Kantor: [00:13:02] So, Jeff, remind us, uh, for people who want to learn more about Active campaign or learn more, slash participate in the active campaign, Leap Day extravaganza. Uh, do you have a website? Do you have social media people can go to?

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:13:16] Absolutely. So two websites for you. First of all, uh, active campaign. Com if you’re interested in doing a free trial, a two week free trial that’s available on our site, completely self-serve, and you can get, uh, your, your hands around the product, uh, get some training and, uh, introduction to how it works. And then with regard to the event, you do not need to be an active campaign customer or partner. It’s completely free. And you just go and register at Leap day. Dot active campaign.com.

Max Kantor: [00:13:48] Awesome. Well, Jeff, thanks so much for being on the show today. Uh, exciting to talk about how you’re going to spend your leap day. And it sounds like you got an exciting event ahead of you.

Jeffrey Rohrs: [00:13:57] We sure do. And, Max, I really do appreciate the time and appreciate your listeners time.

Max Kantor: [00:14:01] Not a problem at all. And thank you for listening to another episode of Chicago Business Radio. I’m your host, Max Cantor, and we’ll see you next time.

Speaker1: [00:14:11] This episode of Chicago Business Radio has been brought to you by Firm Space, your private sanctuary for productivity and growth. To learn more, go to firm Space.com.

Shay Howe With ActiveCampaign

January 30, 2023 by Jacob Lapera

Atlanta Business Radio

Shay Howe With ActiveCampaign

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Shay Howe is Chief Marketing Officer at ActiveCampaign, where he leads the marketing, customer activation, partnership, platform strategy, and ActiveCampaign Postmark teams. He has previously held leadership positions across product and design. His product-led growth approach has helped scale the company into a global tech unicorn. Prior to ActiveCampaign, Shay was Vice President of Product at Belly and Yello, where he was responsible for product strategy and design.

He has previously led product teams at multiple high-growth companies, including Groupon. He has held in-residence roles as an advisor with the Techstars, Lightbank, and Prota Venture portfolios. Shay’s passion for building teams extends outside of work. He also serves as a mentor with Techstars and LongJump Ventures.

Follow ActiveCampaign on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

For anyone who would like to attend the ActiveCampaign Atlanta Study Hall, you can find tickets through Eventbrite here, and ActiveCampaign is offering our listeners 50% off for any of their Study Halls. Use the code “LEARN” through Eventbrite. You can also find the rest of their Study Hall events by searching ActiveCampaign on Eventbrite.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

About ActiveCampaign
Live event in Atlanta on February 7, 2023
Events ActiveCampaign hosting this year
ActiveCampaign partners

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

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.