activecampaign

A few months ago, I started sharing my experience shifting my mailing list over to ActiveCampaign.

There had been a miscommunication with the customer service representative who was supposed to give me a call and says she couldn’t get through to me. For the evening, we left it at that, and I was supposed to make another appointment for her to call me so we could go over everything.

Unfortunately, our schedules never synced. I’d made it clear I was only available in the evenings, and this customer service rep’s calendar stopped at 4:30pm, so I’m not quite sure she was assigned to my file.

Anydoodle, I let her know that I wouldn’t be available during her hours, never heard back from her, and that was that. She left me with a few links and I tried to use those to get myself started.

So… so far I would give their customer service a 3/5.

The service itself, though, seems to work great. I spent a week sending up my various workflows and automations, my forms, and my triggers. I haven’t really had a chance to test them out yet (if you’re interested in my fiction work and want to sign up for my newsletter to get some free short stories while also helping me work out any kinks in this new system, here’s the link!)

I love that I get to build my templates from the ground up, and customize the full workflow, allowing me to have slightly different variations depending on whether people are coming from my epic fantasy series, urban fantasy, or just a neutral starting point like my Facebook page or my website.

The first trial, sending an email to my imported existing list, went incredibly well, with higher open rates than I’ve had in a while. The goal now will be maintaining, or even increasing, those rates, but the fact that I can so easily play with tags and segmentation should allow for improved value with every email.

I’ll share one more post in a couple of months with my down-the-road impression, but for now I’m quite happy with the change over.

Have you had any experience with ActiveCampaign? Let me know in the comments!

I’m afraid to say I’m not quite as far in the newsletter changeover as I’d hoped to be by this point. In part because of some animal health issues that kept us away from home at high stress levels for the better part of last week, but also because of some miscommunications.

newsletter

Not that I don’t have anything to report, however.

I mentioned last week that I am making the move from trusted MailChimp to the fancier dancier ActiveCampaign. So far I have nothing bad to say about the service, but that’s mostly because I haven’t really played with it yet.

For the customer service… I’m on the fence.

Mostly, I’m blown away by how on top of things they are. I signed up for the free trial so that I could get my account set up and everything ready before migrating everyone over from MailChimp. Within two days, I was receiving calls from ActiveCampaign looking to introduce me to their service, see if I had any questions, and to set me up with a longer phone call to go over the different features that would best suit my business.

Wow!

I’d never encountered anything like that before and was super impressed! I looked forward to the longer chat, which involves some screenshare time so I could get a crash course in how to best use the service.

So I book the time, and that night, 6:15, I postpone dinner so I can be at my computer in time for the call.

Now, for the intro call, the phone rang within 30 seconds of the clock rolling over to our arranged time.

This time… 6:20 rolls around…. 6:30…. 6:45.

After forty-five minutes of waiting, I send off an email to follow up and make sure we’re all on the same page about the time of the call. A few minutes later, I receive a reply telling me they had tried the number on file, but it had just kept ringing without anyone answering.

Now, I had my phone right beside me. I’d made sure the volume was up, and there was no one on the line. Also, I was confused about why no one followed up with an email when the call didn’t go through, even if it was a “sorry we missed you!” message.

We tried to arrange another time for the call, but nothing has worked with our schedules, so I’m just going to start with a few links they sent me to try to work it out on my own.

So overall… kind of a wash as far as customer service goes (likely, like with anywhere, it’s just a matter of who you get), but I’m still really excited to try out all the different features and see how this can up my game! That is a big part of my goal for this weekend, so I should have at least a few more updates for you by then.