Imagine an artist who can easily use the digital extension of augmented reality to tell how that work was created, from the first stroke until the artwork is done. Or consider the digital artists who are trapped in an Instagram feed and now through print can come to a gallery or a museum.
That is the digital-meets-art experiment that Sergiu Ardelean and Codin Popescu embarked on almost five years ago when they gave technology to the artists and creatives of the world to see what they would do with it.
Founded in 2017, Artivive is the number one platform for augmented reality art. The global Artivive community of artists continues to grow around the platform, embracing its easy-to-use technology. Artivive also works with businesses, museums, and educators from around the world to maximize brand experience through augmented reality, providing a creative approach to storytelling and keeping their audiences engaged.
As the Artivive artist community thrived, the initial challenges of a freemium subscription model required a lot of attention and resources from the marketing team. One of the primary objectives was to keep community members and users engaged in the platform, but they lacked the resources they needed to create the engagement levels they wanted to reach, and communication gaps with booking artists created issues with their clients.
They needed a low-cost solution that was easy to integrate with their existing tools, remove their communication gaps, keep users coming back to do more, and upgrade users to a paid subscription.
Nurturing an Artist Community
When Andra Coros joined Artivive as a Growth Marketing consultant, she recommended ActiveCampaign for its ease of use and robust automation tools. They switched from HubSpot to ActiveCampaign, and the Artivive community grew from 100 to 100,000 artists in the first four years.
One of the first campaigns Artivive launched using ActiveCampaign targeted their list of cold leads. “Our open rate on that initial automation in ActiveCampaign was over 70%,” Andra commented. This automation contributed to their initial growth, and with their artist referral program activated, an engaged artist community continued to fuel their growth.
“ActiveCampaign is an amazing tool where you can easily build automations yourself,” said Andra. “You can make different blocks conditional based on what the user does in the Artivive app, and they receive different messages based on those actions.”
Artivive also leverages the ActiveCampaign API to integrate with the Artivive content manager, passing critical user data between the two platforms. With this deep data integration, they’ve been able to create automations that prompt users at particular points in their journey. Each of these prompts is designed to keep the user engaged in the Artivive platform and expand the artist community.
The key driver of growth for both the Artivive community and their revenue has been to keep the users engaged and producing projects, enticing them to upgrade to a paid subscription.
“To start with 100 artists and get to 100,000 with just one community manager shows that ActiveCampaign was the right choice. We didn’t have to hire anyone to take care of the communication with our community, because it’s been very easy to scale with you.” — Sergiu Ardelean
Beyond Subscriber Growth
Sergiu emphasized the other creative ways his team is using ActiveCampaign. For instance, Artivive has moved its support ticketing into ActiveCampaign. Using Deals, they have a Pipeline specific for their ticketing workflow.
Using the ActiveCampaign CRM, the sales team has full visibility of the pipeline and can see how many users are close to purchasing and how many deals the sales team closed in the last month. It’s been invaluable to prioritizing resources while the organization grows.
“It’s very easy for our colleagues to follow and see how long a client has been with us, or what the email conversation was until now. How can we help. It’s everything you need in one system,” said Sergiu.
He also enjoys the visibility to sales and marketing activities he has in ActiveCampaign. Sergiu commented, “Sometimes I’m just looking in ActiveCampaign to see what’s happening with campaigns. It gives me a very good overview. I can see the open rates of the newsletters that we’re sending. We have an open rate of about 30-35% for our newsletter, which I think is amazing!”
Sergiu recognizes that the importance of a personalized customer experience never goes away. “People reach out and say, ‘Sergio, we talked two years ago, this is something that is bothering me,’ or ‘this is something that we’re doing.’ I still feel that I’m very connected with the community.”
If the community is creating and working with Artivive artists, Sergiu believes they’re “winning.” “We have to keep them engaged, and we have to understand how they’re creating, what their pain points are and, how we can solve this. If they feel that we’re listening and understand them, then they’ll share feedback with us. I think the worst-case scenario is when you have an unhappy client and you don’t know why.”
“I couldn’t imagine our product without ActiveCampaign,” continues Sergiu. “Without it, we would have to dedicate a lot of hours to developing the automation that we already have. I think everything that we’ve accomplished has been with the help of ActiveCampaign automations, and through the relationships that we’ve built with our artist community.”
“If ActiveCampaign didn’t exist, we would have to create it ourselves, which we wouldn’t be able to afford.”
Endless Possibilities to Fuel Growth
Since 2017, Artivive has steadily increased its contact and plan level with ActiveCampaign, taking full advantage of the scalability of the platform all along the way. To support that 1000x steady growth over the past 4 years, Artivive has expanded from the Lite plan to Professional, opening up functionality such as Landing Pages, Predictive Sending, CRM, and Attribution.
“I think every startup should have the chance to use ActiveCampaign and automations,” said Sergiu. “It’s so easy to use, and it takes so much workload off of people who are writing emails. That’s a real win.”
Try ActiveCampaign free today and explore the platform Artivive uses every day to provide an industry-leading customer experience.
