Alclair increased conversion rates by 40% with ActiveCampaign

Alclair is a Minneapolis-based company that manufactures stage and studio in-ear monitors for musicians. They’ve been in the hearing industry for over 60 years, and they are passionate about providing the best tools to help their music-obsessed customers perform at their best. Alclair’s marketing director Andy Swanson originally joined the company in 2016 as a consultant. “My niche has been taking small companies that are starting to grow and helping them look a lot bigger than they are. A tool like ActiveCampaign is absolutely essential in achieving that.” Andy knew that the combined automation capabilities of ActiveCampaign for Sales and Marketing would help him take the business to the next level. 

Tuning up Alclar’s tech stack

When Andy joined Alclair, he quickly realized their tech stack wasn’t going to cut it to reach his goals. “We were using a CRM called SharpSpring and it just wasn’t working for us. Everything has its quirks, but I think the number of Zapier connections you have to make to your CRM is a good indication of whether it’s working for you or not. It was challenging.” From there Andy began researching new solutions on G2 and other review sites. Seeing that ActiveCampaign had a robust library of native integrations was a big part of what led Alclair to make the move. “With ActiveCampaign we have a few Zaps, but for the most part it really just does everything we need it to.” 

Having a centralized marketing and sales tool, as well as a well-integrated marketing stack, helped set Alclair up for future success across all areas of the business. “As we’ve then scaled and gotten bigger, ActiveCampaign just becomes a more essential tool. It goes from helping a small company look bigger than we are to helping a big company stay connected and be uniform in our communication with prospects and customers – instead of haphazard individual outreach.”

Getting in the groove with one-to-one communication

Andy started off fairly simply, testing ActiveCampaign along the way with straightforward automations. But he quickly realized he could do much more. “As time went on and I made a couple of those initial automations, I started to realize there was a lot more power in the platform and my ability to set up triggers, for example. I’d have one thing start or end another automation. That was huge. Little things like ‘wait until this happens.’ It’s a small thing but it was huge because it just gives us so much flexibility.” From there, Andy felt empowered to start innovating Alclair’s marketing approach. “That started to get us thinking about everything that we can do.”

Personalized messaging is a huge component of Alclair’s marketing strategy. Their previous solution did not give them much outside of tracking email opens and basic follow-up flows. With ActiveCampaign, they were able to jump straight into powerful automations, as well as gain valuable insight into their lead funnel. “With ActiveCampaign I can tell when someone’s gone to the website, but not just that. I actually have another automation set up where if someone visits this certain page that’s called ‘Best for Bass Players’ to find the best model for them, it now adds a tag and flags them as a bass player,” Andy says. From there leads with these tags are then served emails with conditional content blocks that target their specific interests. “We can speak to people directly in the way that they want to be spoken to about what they’re interested in and that increases our conversion percentage enormously.”

Bridging the gap between physical and digital

Alclair also hosts in-person events for organizations that have groups of musicians that need to be fitted for monitors at once, including production facilities and churches. Setting up follow-up and reminder automations for people who show interest in hosting these events has helped ensure that these events are well attended and drive revenue for the company. Alclair comes on-site and does custom fittings for the musicians, but not everyone decides to purchase on the spot. “Using a combination of Landing Pages, Forms, Pipelines, and Automations for our live events, we have increased attendance by around 40%. We’ve reduced no-shows by around 20%, and we’ve been able to increase our conversion rate of leads from these events by around 40%.” Take a look at some event automation recipes to get you jump started here. 

Centralized customer info keeps Alclair in sync

Having a centralized record for sales and customer communication is also key for Alclair. Their business is unique because their monitors are custom fit. This makes keeping track of the customer journey incredibly important because it doesn’t end when they click “purchase.” Alclair has connected Woocommerce to ActiveCampaign’s CRM to make sure sales and support staff can track purchase data, but Andy has set up a sophisticated set of automations connected to their deal pipeline to keep customers in the loop about where their custom earpieces are in the manufacturing process. Additionally, Zendesk feeds into the contact record to keep all customer info in one easy-to-access place. Not only does this provide a much better customer experience (especially given the small team managing the process) it makes it easy for support staff to help with service requests along the way. 

The road to success

Thanks to the one-to-one messaging Alclair is able to execute with ActiveCampaign, they have seen some impressive success. “Due to the ease of building a campaign and automations, the number of campaigns we send has increased 2x. In addition, we have a number of automated campaigns based on user interest that we did not have before. An email designed to help people find the right product for them has a 75% open rate and a 32% click rate. Thats HUGE!” Additionally, Andy shared that 12% of revenue comes from email automations, and that Alclair saves a whopping 200 hours a month using ActiveCampaign. 

The growth doesn’t stop there for Alclair. Andy is looking forward to expanding on the automations they have in place to continue driving the success they’ve seen with ActiveCampaign. If you’d like to see how ActiveCampaign can help you increase open rates and conversions through one-to-one communication and automations, sign up for a free trial today!