How ActiveCampaign Increased AdClients’ Open Rates by over 30% in a Month

This is a contributed post from Sales Studios, an ActiveCampaign partner.

Founded in 2015, AdClients, led by Jon Penberthy, aims to provide intelligent contact center solutions, online training, and mentorship for private and public companies throughout Scandinavia. 

As the demand for email marketing increased over the years, implementing the correct system felt like entering a lion’s den. Even after they migrated to ActiveCampaign, without a clear plan for the migration, AdClient’s open rates declined to under 8%. The result was a negative customer experience, a decrease in sales, and the marketing team was managing everything else on the back end.

AdClients was confident they had the right platform, but they were unfamiliar with the migration process. Armed with a list of what the challenges needed to resolve, they went in search of an ActiveCampaign expert and discovered Sales Studios.

Untangling Deliverability

If you migrate to ActiveCampaign, or any service that delivers emails, you may see an initial dip in deliverability rates immediately following the migration. It’s very important to inform email providers like Yahoo and Gmail that your business is legitimate. This is why ActiveCampaign configures DNS (SPF/DKIM) records. This set-up will also protect your email platform from getting spammed, increasing your email open rates. 

With this in mind, Sales Studios implemented the following for AdClients:

• Added tagging to identify their contact list
• Warm up the sending to notify the email host prior to the bulk sending
• List clean-up and identify bounce emails to remove segment inactive lists
• Re-engagement emails to remind subscribers of the product value
• Automated email for inactive contacts to motivate them to be attentive

Unsubscribes are a touchy topic in marketing automation. However, applying a solid subscription management strategy will allow the contact to choose from specific emails they want to keep receiving, like the newsletter, special offers, and product updates. Some people don’t like receiving bulk emails, but they still want to buy from you if the offer is right at the perfect time. 

Sales Studios implemented a workflow for AdClients so that leads that were unsubscribing could choose what they wanted to see, instead of unsubscribing to all lists. Their leads could choose from General Updates, Newsletters and offers. This reduced the unsubscribe rate and improved the overall deliverability, creating a better customer experience as the contacts were receiving emails of their choosing. 

Streamlining Sales using CRM 

Using a pipeline strategy in ActiveCampaign, each stage can be automated where an email is sent directly to the list depending on the trigger, and can even trigger a reminder to contact the list, close the sale, etc. This helped AdClients place all its leads in one place. Now, they can see all emails in one place, regardless of who from the team logs into ActiveCampaign. 

“Using ActiveCampaign in combination with the help provided by Sales Studios to come up with a strategy to warm up our email list, the end result was an increased open rate from 8% to well over 39%. This led to more engagement and subsequently, a 30% increase in revenue.” – Jon Penberthy, Founder at AdClients

Sharing Best Practices

There’s no point in implementing an entire solution and not showing the client how to look after the system. And since AdClients already has a team that does everything internally, Sales Studios backed up their work by giving AdClients a checklist of best practices for deliverability, business continuity, engagement, and future improvements. 

They Documented AdClients’ current environment for a full understanding of what they had implemented, and collaborated with the AdClients team to understand their requirements, the steps it would take to accomplish their goals, and the timeframe it would take to get those tasks completed. 

Some of the tasks were implemented by Sales Studios, while others were implemented by AdClients’ team with Sales Studios’ consulting and supervision. 

Sales Studio provided a clear end result

After only one month, Sales Studios was able to increase AdClients’ open rate from 8% to 39%, by optimizing their campaigns, implementing deliverability best practices and implementing and refining the technical side: DMARC, SPF and DKIM.

On the sales front, AdClients saw a 30% increase in sales revenue due to CRM improvements and an optimized customer journey.

If you would like to explore how Sales Studio can help you see the full potential of ActiveCampaign, visit their website for more information. 

Interested in becoming an ActiveCampaign partner like Sales Studio? Find more information about ActiveCampaign’s partner program here.