How Whole30 creates a personalized customer journey with ActiveCampaign

Who is Whole30?

Whole30 has been changing lives since 2009 when Melissa Urban blogged about a self-designed life-changing dietary experiment. Since then, millions of people have transformed their health, habits, and relationship with food through the Whole30 program; eliminating cravings, improving energy and sleep, relieving symptoms, and discovering lasting food freedom.

The Whole30 website currently serves millions of visitors a month with readers checking in from more than 100 different countries, and has a combined social media base of more than 3 million fans and followers. Their flagship book, The Whole30, has sold more than 2 million copies. Melissa and the Whole30 team are committed to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive Whole30 community, where everyone who wants to be a part of the Whole30 movement feels represented, welcomed, and included.

Why CXA?

Whole30 was using Mailchimp to send emails to a list of users that they had accumulated over time. It was basic and didn’t have the ability to expand more with automations or segmentation. In addition to that, the Whole30 team felt like they were on their own when they ran into problems. There was no dedicated support team, in fact, they had a tough time reaching out to someone that was human. This was massively important to the Whole30 team because they take pride in their dedication to human touch and making sure everyone feels valued and part of the Whole30 Community. With the growth that Whole30 was experiencing as well, they soon realized that they needed a new platform that could help them achieve their goals of being smarter with email and growing their email program exponentially.

When it came time to look for that new platform there were three main things that the team wanted. The first was a dedicated account team that would partner with them and help them grow. If something went wrong, they want to easily connect with someone that could provide that human touch. The second was finding a platform that would allow them to grow their automations and get smarter with their segmentation. The last thing the team wanted was a more intuitive platform. They wanted to be able to run reports and dig deeper into them. They wanted to be able to see how many new users they were getting a month, what that information tells them, see the trends, and what the lifecycle of a user over time looks like. This lead Whole30 to ActiveCampaign where they see themselves building a partnership and achieving their most important goals.

The CXA Experience

With ActiveCampaign the community member journey now looks something like this: A new person will either go through the website or get referred to the program. That person is then put into a three-part welcome series that introduces Whole30, provides community testimonials, and insights into the community and meal planning. This lasts about a week, which then the user is put into the normal funnel of emails which range from newsletters to partner-specific emails. The team at Whole30 wants these emails and all touchpoints to make their community members feel like they are part of the community and not just getting emails. 

To achieve this experience for their community the Whole30 team started by integrating Facebook with ActiveCampaign using the Facebook Custom Audiences Integration. Now when someone signs up for emails they will also start seeing ads on Facebook to sign up for specific types of content. This leads to how Whole30 segments and creates a more personal experience for their community members. Community members are tagged in different ways for smarter segmentation. For example, you have some members who are tagged as mothers so they’ll receive the “Whole Mamas” newsletter or you have members who signed up for the April group Whole30. Additionally, Whole30 in the future wants to gather accurate demographic information about each member when they sign up. Information such as birthday to send automated birthday messages or geolocation so send specific partner promos within that area. To further understand their customers they also want to start tagging based on email responses, things such as the type of question, or volunteering to help with an activity. This information will be used to help shape future content and the way the community is engaged. All of this segmentation and tagging leads to personalization. Being able to send a promotion of partner in the Chicago area to only members in that area, or sending individual birthday emails through automation are all ways that ActiveCampaign facilitates communications and personalization. The one personal touch that is important to every member at Whole30 is a simple note included in every email. That note at the bottom of the email reassures community members that if they reply to the email with an issue or question the Whole30 WILL get back to them. These experiences and customer journeys are powered by automations within ActiveCampaign. When the Whole30 team first started they only had a welcome series automation. Now the team has over 15+ automations with some of their favorites being the re-engagement automation and a new welcome automation! One of the automations the team would like to set up in the future is a rewards automation that would send emails to their most engaged members. This will leverage ActiveCampaign Contact Scoring to help see who the most engaged and dedicated members are. 

The Whole30 team is now running a smarter and tighter ship when it comes to their email programs. They also have a super phenomenal account manager in Christina Hart, who is always super responsive and a partner in their success. Because they are spending less time trying to solve problems or get into contact with support they are able to give back more to their community. In their words, they are able to focus their time and support on their community now that they have the support from ActiveCampaign.