Internet Strategy Labs
Internet Strategy Labs (ISL), a veteran B2B SaaS marketing agency and ActiveCampaign partner with over two decades of experience, leverages...
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Internet Strategy Labs (ISL), a veteran B2B SaaS marketing agency and ActiveCampaign partner with over two decades of experience, leverages ActiveCampaign’s marketing and sales automation software to streamline their operations, deliver results for their clients, and drive business growth. Founded in 2001, ISL initially focused on building websites, SEO, and conversion rate optimization. The agency expanded to support franchise businesses around 2007.
By 2009, ISL was building numerous franchise development websites and hundreds of microsites for brands, integrating web forms directly with CRMs to capture critical lead data. This focus on data-centric strategies set the stage for their evolution into a SaaS platform in 2014, transitioning from a traditional digital marketing agency to an analytics-focused powerhouse.
Jimmy Weeks, the driving force behind ISL, explains, “We closed our digital marketing agency in favor of opening a SaaS platform and we are an analytics-only house. We basically create a FranTech stack for brands.” This strategic pivot allowed ISL to offer sophisticated data integration and analytics solutions, positioning themselves as partners for franchise brands seeking to optimize their marketing and sales processes.
Understanding Client Challenges
ISL primarily serves franchise brands, e-commerce businesses, and agencies, which often grapple with two significant challenges: siloed marketing and sales teams, and fragmented technology stacks. “There are two unfortunate silos. There’s the marketing team that is bringing in leads. Then there’s the sales team that’s trying to work those leads,” Jimmy explains. “If the salespeople don’t have all the marketing information, they can’t tell the marketing people what to adjust, what to tweak, and where to allocate more money.”
Clients typically invest heavily in multiple marketing channels—from Google Ads and Facebook Ads to broker networks and AI-driven software solutions—but struggle to consolidate and interpret the resulting data. This fragmentation leads to inefficiencies, such as unqualified leads clogging the sales pipeline and misallocated marketing budgets.
Before adopting ActiveCampaign, one client struggled with a 40% rate of unqualified leads clogging their sales pipeline, resulting in a 25% decrease in recruiter efficiency. Post-implementation, ISL leveraged ActiveCampaign’s automation to reduce unqualified leads by 35%, significantly enhancing sales team productivity.
The Solution to Fragmentation
ISL discovered ActiveCampaign in 2020 and quickly recognized its potential to address their clients’ pain points. “We started using the ActiveCampaign CRM for our own platform because we knew it was customizable and could integrate a lot of non-traditional things,” Jimmy shares. This flexibility made ActiveCampaign an ideal choice for creating a unified FranTech stack that seamlessly connects various marketing and sales tools. They quickly adopted the platform while also becoming an ActiveCampaign partner.
Highly Customizable CRM with Robust Integrations
“ActiveCampaign has a very open architecture system where you can create custom fields,” Jimmy shares. This capability allows ISL to tailor the CRM to each brand’s specific sales funnels and data requirements. Additionally, ActiveCampaign’s ability to integrate with tools like Calendly, Zoom, and DocuSign through APIs and webhooks ensures that all client technologies are connected.
ISL created custom fields in ActiveCampaign to capture franchise-specific data such as ‘Financial Qualification Status’ and ‘Desired Territory.’ These fields enable precise segmentation and targeted marketing. Additionally, integrating ActiveCampaign with DocuSign automates contract management, allowing recruiters to send and track agreements directly within the CRM. “For example, when a lead books an appointment via Calendly, ActiveCampaign automatically updates the lead status in the CRM and triggers a personalized welcome email, ensuring a smooth transition through the sales funnel.”
Advanced Automation for Efficient Lead Management
Automation is at the heart of ISL’s strategy. By utilizing ActiveCampaign’s automation features, they can manage lead qualification processes automatically, reducing the manual burden on recruiters and improving efficiency.
“If somebody comes in and they’re not financially qualified or not in the proper territory, we put them in a holding stage and send them an automated email,” explains Jimmy. “This way, we don’t bog down the recruiter with leads that aren’t ready, and we can still engage those prospects through targeted follow-ups.” This reduces manual qualification tasks by 50% and increases engagement with potentially re-qualifiable leads by 20%.
Reactivation strategies that re-engage prospects who may have otherwise fallen through the cracks. “If a lead hasn’t been contacted after a 70-day drip, they get moved into dead lead status with an automated DQ reason. This ensures that no lead is left unattended, maximizing the potential value of every lead.”
Scalable Multi-Brand and Pipeline Management
As franchise brands often manage multiple sub-brands or locations, scalability is a critical requirement. ActiveCampaign’s ability to manage multiple brands within a single platform is a game-changer for ISL. “You can create a master snapshot of the entire franchise recruitment process and then clone it for all other brands, customizing only the necessary elements,” Jimmy states.
For a client managing 12 franchise brands, ISL utilized ActiveCampaign’s cloning feature to replicate a master recruitment pipeline across all brands. Each cloned pipeline was customized with brand-specific email templates and automation rules, ensuring consistency while allowing for individual brand identities. This approach streamlined the onboarding process for new brands, reducing setup time by 70%.
Enhanced Business Intelligence and Data Integration
Data-driven decision-making is a cornerstone of ISL’ approach, and ActiveCampaign’s robust integration capabilities significantly enhance their business intelligence. By connecting ActiveCampaign with their analytics dashboard, they consolidate data from various marketing channels and CRM interactions, providing comprehensive insights into mid-funnel activities and campaign performance.
ISL integrates ActiveCampaign with their proprietary analytics dashboard using API connections, allowing real-time data synchronization. This integration enables the aggregation of metrics such as cost per lead, lead-to-deal conversion rates, and campaign ROI. By analyzing these metrics, clients can identify high-performing channels and optimize their marketing spend accordingly. “For instance, one client saw a 30% increase in ROI by reallocating budget from underperforming Facebook Ads to more effective Google Ads based on ActiveCampaign data insights,” Jimmy says.
Managing and Growing Their Own Business with ActiveCampaign
ISL doesn’t just implement ActiveCampaign for their clients; they also use it extensively to manage and grow their own business. “Our dashboard reports better when we’re using an ActiveCampaign CRM,” Jimmy emphasizes. The seamless integration between their proprietary dashboard and ActiveCampaign allows them to automate alerts, disseminate insights, and communicate effectively with clients through SMS and email.
Internally, ISL leverages ActiveCampaign to manage client onboarding through automated workflows that assign tasks and track progress. They use SMS and email automations to keep clients informed with real-time alerts and updates. Additionally, their custom snapshot CRM models allow them to quickly replicate successful processes for new clients, fostering scalable growth. As a result, they have reduced their staffing needs by 20% while maintaining high service quality.
“We have built our own snapshot CRM that is already integrated with our platform,” Jimmy reveals. “This bespoke solution enhances our ability to deliver customized services to clients, further solidifying our position as a leading B2B SaaS marketing agency.”
Business Impact and Future Prospects
The impact of integrating ActiveCampaign into their operations has been profound for ISL. By automating and customizing their workflows, they’ve significantly reduced manual tasks, improved lead qualification processes, and enhanced their ability to deliver data-driven insights. This efficiency translates into better client outcomes and sustained business growth.
“Our platform is really being taxed and worked and creating insights. And that’s when our business intelligence in our platform really comes alive,” Jimmy notes. The ability to pull unique data from multiple sources and integrate it into a single, coherent system has empowered ISL to offer unparalleled value to their clients.
The integration of ActiveCampaign has led to some major business growth and increased efficiency. Some key metrics include:
- 40% increase in lead conversion rates
- 35% reduction in lead qualification time for ISL’ clients
- 25% year-over-year revenue growth for ISL, driven largely by improvements powered by ActiveCampaign
One notable success story is Dream Vacations, which achieved a milestone of 2,000 franchise locations partly due to the enhanced data insights and automation workflows provided by ActiveCampaign.
Future Innovations: FranDevPro
Looking ahead, ISL continues to explore new ways to leverage ActiveCampaign’s capabilities. They are on the brink of launching FranDevPro, a white-labeled CRM solution tailored specifically for franchise development. “We have built our own snapshot CRM and are excited to take it out for a test spin soon,” Jimmy shares. This upcoming launch promises to further enhance their service offerings and provide even more specialized tools for franchise brands.
“We feel that our future for ActiveCampaign would be to create a ‘FranDevPro’ CRM that is largely built for the franchise development manager, thus making custom fields part of the core setup. With these metrics core to the platform, a rich setup of reports would reduce some of the need for a dashboard like ours.”
Conclusion
Internet Strategy Labs cleverly leverages ActiveCampaign to drive operational efficiency and client success. By addressing common client challenges through customization, automation, scalability, and enhanced business intelligence, they have not only optimized their own operations but also delivered exceptional results for their clients. As digital marketing continues to evolve, ISL’ strategic use of ActiveCampaign positions them—and their clients—for sustained growth and innovation.
If you’d like to see how ActiveCampaign can help you grow your business and support your clients through powerful automation, learn more about becoming a partner here, and start a 14-day free trial today!
