Preparing A New Active Campaign Account To Collect Emails

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription: This course is brought to you by Appy Pie as part of our academy series now we're gonna be working on step number eight and step number eight is to set up an active campaign account this is an optional step if you want to collect emails on your website then you're gonna want to do this that but if you're not gonna be collecting emails then you can skip this and move on to the next one but before you do that just take a moment to ask yourself could I be collecting emails because a lot of people don't realize the importance of getting an email list and what's so awesome about an email list is you have this one-to-one channel where you can communicate with your audience and you can reach them any time you want and a lot of people say that they owe pretty much all of their success in their online business to their email list and someone that I really looked up to and studied was Dan Kennedy and he said all I need is my email list I can get rid of every other aspect of my business and recreate all my success tomorrow so even if you're running a brick-and-mortar or whatever else it is if you can start collecting emails it never hurts and that email list is an asset for your online business now like I mentioned earlier active campaign is by far my favorite email automation tool it's a little bit more complicated than other services such as MailChimp but it allows you to do so much and even if you don't need those more advanced features now having that ability to have a tool that grows with you as your business grows is invaluable and it's also really cheap it starts at $9 a month so that's actually if you sign up for the yearly plan and if you pay monthly it's $15 a month but still I mean that's not a lot of money for what you're getting so I'm going to walk you through how to sign up for an active campaign account from the checklist just click on this link and you'll be taken to active campaigns website or as always you can go to my website Eric.cam /ta and there's a direct link over there oh actually there isn't so use the checklist once you're here click on the try it for free and you get a 15 day trial to active campaign now I already have an account so I'm not gonna walk you through that but obviously it's super easy and I'll show you what it looks like once you've created your trial account so this is what the inside of active campaign looks like now as you can tell this is a test account so I only have 5 contacts but you're gonna have 0 so this is a good reflection of where you're at once you've signed up for your active campaign account you can check that off and move on to the next thing the next thing is to create an active campaign list so the beauty of active campaign is there's a lot of different ways that you can manage and organize your emails with other services such as MailChimp it's all about lists so if you wanted to create a different email list for a different website you would create a whole new list but an active campaign you can do that you can create multiple lists or you can just create one list for all of your websites and then use tags to organize those contacts now if that's going a little bit over your head right now don't worry it's more of an advanced topic but just know that if you have been using other email marketing tools in the past this is one of the reasons why active campaign is so much better tags are flexible so for now we're going to create a list and to do that we click on lists on the left hand side next up I'm gonna add a new list and here you can name your list whatever you want so let's just say thrive architects builders well it's to compute whatever and what website URLs is list form this website is gonna be for Eric camp and then you have to write down a reason why your contacts or on your list and why you're emailing them you are receiving this email because you signed up on my website for some goodies and then create your list and that's it it's that simple you've created your list and when we go to create a form to collect emails on our website all those new contacts are gonna live inside of this list so let's check that off next up is to create an active campaign form and the form is what we're gonna put on our website to start collecting emails to do that we're gonna click on the forms button on the left hand side and in the top right hand corner click on new form and I'm just gonna name this forum homepage but what I like to do is I like to just have one form in my active campaign account and then on thrive architect you can customize the look and text of that one form so for this one I'm doing homepage it's just going to be an inline form and we're subscribing them to our list that we just created which is thrive architect builders and click create so since we're going to be redesigning this form in thrive architect none of this stuff matters as far as the look or the text up here the only thing is whatever fields you want to collect you're gonna want to put in this form now so full name is already here email is already here but let's say you're gonna want to add phone number for whatever reason maybe you have a brick-and-mortar store then you're gonna want to add that to your form and just because that phone number field is in here now it doesn't mean that you have to include the phone number once we put this form on our website but for now I'm never gonna need to collect phone numbers so I'm just sticking to name and email and the next thing we want to look at is confirmation emails so you know when you sign up for a website very often it'll take you to a page that says hey you're one step away from your freebie just click on the confirm link in your email address well the reason why people do that is it's considered a great email practice it helps you filter out people that aren't serious for your product and it makes your list more engaged where you know the people that are on your list really want what you have to offer and the main benefit for this is deliverability if you have people on your email list that are engaged they're more likely to open your emails and when companies such as Google see that people are opening your emails they're gonna trust you and make it more likely that your emails don't go to the spam folder so if you're unsure I recommend just having an email confirmation requirement but if you're advanced then there are some other reasons why you would want to skip the confirmation email which I'm not going to get into now and to create your confirmation email if you want to go over to form action under the options tab and with your list selected drive architect builders you're gonna click on the gear icon and from here you can preview your opt-in email which is the confirmation are you sure you want to join this list so I'm just going to preview it now to show you what it looks like it's pretty bare so you're going to want to take some time to customize this and to change that email you just click on the edit button so here you can put in any text or images you want it's drag and drop so it's really easy thank you for joining our email list you are one step away from receiving your free PDF and then you can spend some time making it look nice there's some padding options that are really helpful and yeah so I'm not gonna spend time doing this now but you get the point and then you can also click on this gear icon to change the subject of your email but by default it's going to say please confirm your subscription to and then it will automatically put in the list name that you entered for your list but you can change that to whatever you want and at any time you can test your email by entering the email that you want to send a test email to and clicking send test and it just sends it right away so in that case it didn't like that the emails from this email address and I'm sending it to the same one so I would just put in a different email to test it out and that's it and once you're done you can click on done and you've completed your confirmation email and the next thing you get to do is confirmation action so when someone clicks on the confirmation link in your email what do you want it to do and usually what I like to do is redirect to a URL on your website and it's just a page that says hey thanks for confirming your email your download is on its way something really simple but since we haven't created that yet I'm just gonna click on show message and that's good enough thanks for signing up because we're gonna change this later anyways and I'll click Save and that's it so now I'm just going to click on integrate and this is the form that we're gonna be using it a little bit but for now we don't need it so I'm just gonna click on save and exit and we've created our form next up we want to create an active campaign automation so this is a way for the person to get our email freebie when they sign up and to do this we're gonna be used using something called tags tags are why I love active campaign you can create tags for all different purposes and what we're gonna be doing on our website is anywhere we want to collect an email address we're gonna be putting the home page form it's misleading that it's named homepage but it should just be like main form we're gonna be putting that form wherever we want to collect emails but let's say you have a form on your home page that sends someone one PDF and then you have a blog post with a form that you want to send them a different PDF how do you do that well I think the best way is with tags so for each of those different forms you can say when someone enters their email on this form add this tag to their contact information or then if they go to the blog and they sign up for a different PDF add this other tag and I'm gonna show you how we can create tags in active campaign and later I'll show you how you can have these tags added when they enter a form on your website again if this is going a little bit over your head don't worry I know this is a lot of new information and it sounds complicated just like learning any new thing but as soon as you started playing with this yourself it's gonna start to become really simple for you and easy and at that point you're gonna see the potential of it and I hope you're gonna get excited about it as I do now to create this tag we're gonna click on contacts and here manage tags and then you can create as many tags as you want here and as a general naming convention for lead magnets I like to put LM and a colon and just name your lead magnet so let's say on your homepage you're offering a ten day email course then you just put lead magnet 10 day email for us and click on add tag and that's it you've created your tag awesome so to complete this we have to create an automation so we want to say when someone signs up to our active campaign account and that tag is added lead magnet 10 day email course we need to send them or 10 day email course so how do we do that we do that by creating an automation so hover over automations and from here I'm going to click on new automation and start from scratch and now we need a trigger so what's going to trigger this automation and what I'm gonna put is they subscribe to a list and continue and the list is thrive architect builders but keep in mind that we only want to add people that have joined this list if you also have the tag 10-day email course to do that we're gonna segment the contacts enter this automation and the condition is under contact do tells and tag and we're looking for does the tag exists lead magnet ten-day email course so now it's only going to bring people into this automation if they're join the list thrive architect builders and they have that tag 10-day email course so now let's add that start and now it's asking us for our new action so as soon as someone enters for that 10-day email course and they've confirmed their email what do we want to do what do we want to have happen and in this case it's an email so we're gonna create a new email here and I'm just gonna say email lesson number one since this is a 10 day email course and you can use any of active campaigns templates to design your emails and for now I'm just gonna keep it pretty simple and use the personal email or you could build it from scratch [Music] continue and here it's automatically going to include their first name I'm just gay hey first name here is all of the information for an email lesson number one enjoy and then just like before you can click on that gear icon and change the subject for your email or leave it as it is and send test emails to see what it looks like before you add it to your automation once you're finished just click on next and you can review all the information here and click finish [Music] and now I'm gonna name it so I'm gonna say end a email course and once you've completed your automation you have all the emails that you want just switch it to active and you're good to go is automation is live now if you were delivering a PDF then you would probably only have one email and inside that email you just have a download link to download that PDF and in this case since this is a ten-day email course if you wanted to have it wait a day before sending lesson number two that's one of the options here under conditions in workflow and wait for a specific period of time for one day and say and then here you would add email lesson number two so I know there's a lot here in active campaign but it's so worth it if you realize the important and you probably already realize this if you run an online business the importance of having an email list then having a flexible tool like an active campaign is a game changer there are so many awesome features here such as if they visited a certain page on your website you can start sending them specific emails based on that page they visited and different weight actions and goals and I'm gonna be making tutorials just about this software because it's an amazing amazing tool so I'm just saying this because in the beginning I know it can be frustrating when you're looking at it you're like I don't know what this means is too many options here is overwhelming and it could be tempting to go back to a basic tool like MailChimp but if you stick with this tool and become comfortable with it it's gonna pay you huge dividends in the future now of course if you're just like a brick-and-mortar business and you want to collect emails but it's not that important it's a very small part of your business then maybe a simple tool like MailChimp is the way to go but if you want to make all your money from an online business you want to have like ninja style skills with your email list and active campaign gives you those ninja skills and if you ever need help you can click on the help icon in the bottom right and then contact us and usually they have Live Support the reason why it's not showing live support right now is because it's not in their open hours since I'm based in Europe and they're based in the US so it's like 4:00 in the morning over there but if you're within their open hours you can always Google what they are they have instant very helpful live chat and it doesn't matter if you have the most basic beginner questions or advanced questions they're always there for you so that's it that's all I had to say about activecampaign you've created an active campaign automation congratulations and you finished that number eight.