ActiveCampaign Updates for Q2, 2024 feat. Kay Peacey

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris 0:32
Welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast where I am your host, Chris L. Davis, as you heard on the intro, and today, in this episode, we’ve got some Active Campaign updates. We’ve got some Active Campaign updates, if you’re new to the show, we do this. We attempt to do it quarterly. All right, you know, last time he got away from us a little bit, but it makes this episode that much more better. And some of you’re like, Yeah, we’re gonna talk about Active Campaign. Chris, tell us everything you know, well, guess what? I don’t know everything about active campaign. But I know somebody who does and that is our guest today back for ooh, this may be the third time I believe. Okay. We have today with us. Kay Peacey. She is the Kay has honed her email marketing automation skills to the very at the very highest level over the last six years of consulting and training for small businesses. She is the world leading Active Campaign specialists with a seat listen to this on the customer advisory board for Active Campaign. Okay. This is why I said I know somebody who does have all the tea for us to drink collectively. And she founded the Active Campaign Academy at her own business slick business at her own company slick business. She’s got a unique combination of top level strategy and technical skills plus a lifetime of teaching, which makes her the perfect person to help your business unlock bigger return on investment from your email marketing automation whilst keeping the human touch. Okay. Welcome to the Welcome back to the podcast. How are you doing?

Kay Peacey 2:29
Right now I’m, I’m I’m just I love it when you welcome me back in like this, because I love being a repeat guest with you guys. Because I know your audience that kind of geeks like me, but I am here for you to be so obsessed with Active Campaign that you just don’t have to be and I love that even you’re off the hook on this one. Because you can just ask me, I’m gonna take that as the biggest compliment ever. Yes.

Chris 2:51
So So bring everybody up to speed. There was once a day where I was internal to Active Campaign. And since then, I have enjoyed immensely watching Kay evolve. And I would I would say you’re also the world. Well, I will say where I would not renowned queen but it’s really odd. Right? I think that’s what I see more more people say Auntie K said don’t send that.

Kay Peacey 3:24
Yeah, Auntie K. Yeah, one of my clients in the really early days, said, You know, when you’re done with me, Auntie K, my business is going to be so slick. And the auntie K thing just kind of stuck. And I think it’s because, you know, I’m a middle aged mom. I’m very nurturing. That’s what I like to do. And I’m a teacher. I like to look after people. So I’m like, Auntie K for Active Campaign. This is where you come when you want a big soothing comfort blanket around your Active Campaign? And you?

Chris 3:54
Yes, and it’s important, because it is a very technical tool. I wouldn’t say that before, because I was so familiar with it. But I’ve seen so many people struggle with it. Things that were second nature to me. They’re like, Oh, why do you do that. And I’m like, you have to have a from name on the email. But it just, it allows me to understand that there are so many levels that you can play on in the email marketing automation space. So having that nurturing that, that teaching background, right, that will really take the time to make sure that you understand, and the fact that you’re strategic as well. So it’s not just like you’re an external component of Active Campaign teaching the tech, the technical aspects of it, you’re putting it together for their business context. And with that being said, you and I were talking before this, we were like, hey, when’s the last time you’re on the podcast and it was last year in July. So if my Math serves me correct, it’s over six months, and a lot can take place. A lot can take place in six months, and I believe a lot has. So I am ready to just give you the flow. And talk about what has transpired since July of 2023. Within Active Campaign, and even within the community, this last thing, everybody the other benefit to Kay being here is that she has her own community, she has her own committee on Active Campaign. So she’s not limited to just hey, here’s what I’m seeing in Active Campaign, Facebook group or forums or whatever. She’s got her own community where they have their own questions and their own opportunities of learning that are there. So Kay, the floor is yours? What do we need to know what has taken place?

Kay Peacey 5:53
Oh, man, you know, six months is just too long. Chris, I’m going to want my finger at you here. Because six months is too long. I agree. In my notes for this, I have a page full of notes on things that have changed really significantly in Active Campaign land. I don’t think I went right back to July. So forgive me if we miss one or two from last year, just after that last time I was on your show. Don’t leave us so long next time. So yes, ma’am. What am I going to start with, I’m going to start with sending limits, because I think this is one that crept in under the radar that many people missed. And this came in for new Active Campaign accounts. I’m gonna say it was around three months ago, but I couldn’t pin down the exact date when this came in. email sending limits, this is brand new to Active Campaign. If your account existed inactive campaign before these, these came in, you’re good so far. But new accounts now have an email sending limit that says the most emails you can send during a one month period is a multiple of your top contact limit. Right? So if your contact limit is 500, contacts, the multiplier on that they’re saying you can send 10 times that number of emails during a one month period. Okay, so that limit goes up a little bit for the other plans. If you’re on a Plus plan, you’ve got a little bit more if you’re on a Pro Plan, you’ve got a little bit more, but it’s in my opinion, it is. It’s a standard limit. It’s not like a generous limit on your email sending in previously inactive campaign and for existing accounts from before this change came in a couple of months back. We still have unlimited email sending, right. So I don’t need to stress about this. If you’ve had your active campaign account a while. I do think it’s important for people who are advising other people on what tech to get. And I know you do this a ton more than I do. Chris, right. People come into my world when they’re already I’m in for Active Campaign and need my auntie Kay now. But the people who are in your world or for consultants out there who are working with clients, they really need to be aware of that sending limit and how it’s going to impact what they can do within their contact limit with their frequency of sending, okay, because I’m thinking about the people who want to send daily emails, if you want to send a daily email, and you have an active campaign account that’s brand new, and you are going to be up near that contact limit. You can’t do that within the new sending limits. Yeah,

Chris 8:27
yeah, it’s, on one hand, I think it makes sense for the average user, that you cap it at 10 emails per user, if you’re at your max. So it does cover maybe your common most common, where it starts to get interesting is daily sending, as you mentioned, which, k by the way, is not a rarity. I’m actually seeing more people with their business, sending you know, daily, daily emails, and also launches, especially in the E commerce space, if you’re doing frequent launches. Ouch. You know, yeah,

Kay Peacey 9:13
that’s the scenario that I in my role in the customer advisory board. I do a lot of critical friend stuff with Active Campaign, right. So they’re, you know, their hearts sink when I get on the email with them because they know I’m going to be grumbling about something. And whilst it’s very critical friend, I do have real concern about people who are going to get caught out by the sending limit, and that’s why I definitely wanted to highlight it. That was my first thing I wanted to raise for your listeners is if you’ve got a brand new account, you need to know that that sending limit is there. Because otherwise what’s going to happen to people is there going to do a launch or a big thing and not know that halfway through the month, they will hit that contact the sending limit, sorry, the multiplier, and then they’re sending will go get stopped. And if you are in the middle of a launch that you have put a lot of money and effort and time behind. That’s going to be heartbreaking. And for me as the advisor, as in the anti Kay role, I don’t want to see that happening. So I will do anything I can to just make sure that people know, if you’re on a newer active campaign account, the spending limit is there, you’ve got to be watching your sense, okay. And

Chris 10:23
you know, what out, I’ll say to people and think about this case, it’s always been the case, right? We’re really just highlighting the fact that email list building is not a hobby, unless you just want to pay for me, I guess. But you really want to be making sure that the list that you’re building and creating, you know how to monetize it, because I don’t think these costs are going anywhere. But as we move forward, so if you have a list, just the habit, because some guru said, build a list, or you heard it in some conference, and now you’re scratching your head, like, what do I do with them, I’m paying so much, you really need to start focusing on what is the the method of monetization for that list, so that you can start to cover these costs. Oh,

Kay Peacey 11:20
I am. So with you there, Chris. And if you think about how this is stacking up now with the picture, and this is across all of the email services, it’s not just Active Campaign, Active Campaign a keeping up with industry standard in this and I don’t begrudge them that, I do want to communicate about it. And if we think about what stacking up there in terms of making sure that you are getting value from the contacts you’re actually sending to, you’ve now got contact limit, which was always a lid on, you know, if you’ve got a load of people in there who are not earning their keep, and you’re paying for them, that’s not a great idea. We’ve always had deliverability, if you’ve got people who are active contacts who are not clicking anything, you got to question the value of what they’re doing in there. And that deliverability factor is now much bigger than it used to be. And now on top of that, we now got a sending limit as well. So you literally don’t have that sending capacity to keep going if you’re going to do a big launch, you are going to have to make sure that the contacts you are launching to and sending, you know daily emails, even if it’s just for a 234 week period, which is what you need, right? To get the oomph to do that big launch, you are going to have periods where you are ascending at near daily frequency. Even if it’s not your normal cadence. In order to have the capacity to do that, you’re going to have to make sure that the people you’re emailing for that are tightly focused, right, because you, you absolutely cannot get away with the whole scatter gun blast and hope thing, it’s not happening anymore, and it’s going to actively harm you and your wallet. And it might just cut off your sending mid launch if you’re not careful. So,

Speaker 1 13:00
so critical. So critical. So this is why I’m excited to have you on because we’re listening everybody, we’re talking about features. But as you can see, we’re talking about the impacts that they may have on your business, and ways to mitigate and look out for that so that you can continue to get the most out of the software that you use. I think now’s a good time to just state the pricing of email marketing that many of us who have been in the industry for a while new is gone. I mean, you can go across the board, even MailChimp is not as inexpensive as it once was, it was almost like a no brainer for people like Well, I’m using MailChimp because it’s free. There’s still a free portion to it. But when you start needing to actually use it to perform real marketing, oh, they they the price shoots up quickly. So listen, you need to be making sure that that list, you have a plan for him. All right, what’s what’s next?

Kay Peacey 13:58
Well, I bet you can see this one coming. My next one is deliverability data. And, you know, I kind of I can’t imagine that there are people listening to this particular podcast, who don’t already have some awareness of the February Google Yahoo. Changes to email authentication. So Chris, just reassure me do I need to do the the pep talk on that or are we good?

Chris 14:25
Okay, I don’t as much as I would like to I don’t want to assume any any intelligence and may and leave somebody out like Wait, what just happened? Is that why my email, stuff reaching? So you can cover it in the most layman overview terms as as possible. that’ll probably be good. All right. Okay.

Kay Peacey 14:45
So email authentication when we dispatch our paper airplanes of emails, and our email sending service sends them onwards for us. They should have some little badges with them, that are badges of Vil. validity that say this definitely actually did come from Kay Peacey at slick business. And here are her credentials. And the reason that stuff needs to be there is because otherwise, the mailbox providers who are like the guards of the inbox Citadel, they are there to keep the spammers out because nobody wants their skanky spammers in their inbox. So the mailbox providers, they’re doing their job, they’re guarding the Citadel, if your email your paper airplane arrives, and it does not have those badges on it, the mailbox providers will not let you in. This has always been the case to a degree. But in February 2024, the lid blew off the whole thing because Google and Yahoo really got very specific and put some very tight limits on what’s going to happen if you do not have the exact badges that they are looking for. Okay, yeah, that’s the potted version. Alright, and this is all called email authentication. But it’s really just do you actually do the emails that you’re sending. And by the way, it’s not just from Active Campaign, it’s from any platform that sends emails on your behalf. I’m just gonna throw in here in case you’re listening to this, and you don’t have this on your radar. Google workspace is the big one. That’s the biggest one that I’m seeing people mess in their authentication. They don’t realize that they need to do stuff on that one, too. Now, I’m going to come back to Active Campaign. Okay. The two big hitters that changed in February was that accounts that send more than 5000 emails per day to Gmail inboxes must have a demark record. Okay, now, demark is the one we’ve all been able to get away for quite a long time. If you weren’t a deliverability. Expert, you didn’t really need to have demark. I did not have my demark setup. Okay, remove it. Okay. I’m so glad you said that, Chris. Thank you. So we all had to go and learn how to do demark. Now demark is really dangerous. Okay, I’m going to tell you really briefly why if you put a demark record on there that is too heavy duty, it will make sure that any emails that don’t have the correct badges are automatically batted away from mailbox providers. And I have seen people do this, they’ve got the wrong demark record in place that says reject or quarantine. But they haven’t done their other bits of email authentication. And it means that the mailbox providers are turning away all of the email that people are sending. It’s It’s honestly really distressing to me, I’m seeing a lot of people hiring someone to do their demark record, but not checking the other bits of the email authentication that are critical. And if Yeah, Chris, I’m sure you’ve seen this as well, it’s, it’s really concerning. So if you’ve seen your email, interactions drop off a cliff, if you’re suddenly not seeing any clicks, that’s the first place I’d be looking. I’d be like, show me your demark record right now, because that’s the most likely culprit. So anyway, there’s the demark bit, you have now to have, you have to have this demark record. And I’ll tell you Active Campaign is actively encouraging every user, not just the people who’ve got 5000 or more contacts or sending 5000 or more to Gmail inbox, Active Campaign is encouraging all of their users to put demark in place. Okay, now, it sounds terrifying. But actually, there’s a very easy like, I call it the minimum viable demark record. And it’s not that hard, guys. It took me literally 30 seconds to do mine. The first time. It’s not that hard. The minimum viable one is it doesn’t have quarantine or reject in there. It just says do nothing. Yeah, that’s it. It’s a really safe demark record. And that’s the one that active campaign or a pushing everybody to have as a minimum thing. If you don’t have this in your Active Campaign, you’re going to be seeing read scary warnings every time you go to send an email. They will still send it at the moment. But you are going to see mornings. All right. And then the other piece that’s really important is D Kim decom is just another one of the badges and we have always advised everybody to have the D Kim in place because D Kim is the thing that makes it so that when the email lands in the inbox, it doesn’t say it’s come via AC E and blah blah, blah, blah, blah, horrible email address. Okay, it says it’s come from Kay Peacey’s slick business from Kay-Peacey@slick business.co That’s what Deakin does. So deacons always been a good thing. But with the new rules, Google and Yahoo have said you must have decom basically. All right, you just got to have it. And if you don’t have it, you are going to start seeing your emails rejected. And nobody wants that.

Chris 19:58
Okay, nobody was so

Kay Peacey 20:00
yeah, I mean it. It’s been scary for people. So the change we saw an Active Campaign was the Active Campaign took it in two ways, really, number one is they’re putting a lot more active warnings in the account. And I will say that some of those warnings do make it look as if your emails aren’t gonna get sent at all. And that’s not true. Okay, you can still send emails, if you don’t have your demark. And your Deacon, you can still do that. It’s just not a great idea. And Active Campaign is going to tell you very clearly, this is a bad idea, go sort this out, here’s where to do it. Which brings me to what Active Campaign have done to make this easier. All right, so it’s gonna get slightly technical here, guys, hold on to your seats, and don’t panic, do not panic. The things that you need to do the badges that you need to put on the decom, the demark, they live in your DNS records, which are usually the place where your website hosting is, most small businesses don’t have a clue where this is. But it’s usually with your hosting, like, if you’re with SiteGround, it’ll be at SiteGround. If you use CloudFlare, it will be at Cloudflare. Alright, you as a business owner really need to know where those live. Now, you can’t really get away without it. Because you’ve got to be able to go and edit it if you need to, you’ve got to be able to go and add a new sender if you need to, if you want to start using I don’t know, postmark or some other email sending service or bond Euro, you got to go out the deacon records, right. So my plea to all of you is know where your de your DNS records live. And make sure that you have got you are in possession and ownership of the credentials to log in there. I can see Chris nodding because he knows how important this is.

Chris 21:46
Okay, this is go let me let me um, mortalized. myself here. I’m, I am an expert in the areas I’m an expert in Kay. Okay. I do not claim to be an expert in all things. Email. Authentication is an area I was aware of. But far from an expert, I wouldn’t even call myself an expert now. But one of the best things that happened when I was migrating my website to a to another hosting was that the web developers set up my D set me up in Cloudflare. So all of my DNS records are in CloudFlare, which I didn’t know at the time, but it makes everything so much easier. Oh, my goodness, so much. So where I will say that there are some email providers now that you can go in and when you sign up, they will set up all of those records for you. If you’re using a service like CloudFlare, or something, you just literally authenticate your login, and they add all the appropriate records. So like case in if all of this technical mumbo jumbo was like, What do you mean? Listen, as a responsible business owner, we don’t expect you to know what the terms mean, and how it functions. But as she mentioned, you better know what your DNS records are. The ending s you better know your website will go down and sometimes, okay, Google, Google Domains just sold all of their stuff to Squarespace. And I get these notifications, because I had quite a few Google domains. Tangent, I’m really being becoming an anti Google person, because they, they create and kill so many products. Okay, back to the regular schedule.

Kay Peacey 23:33
Stay on the page here, coming down to Google ownership rabbit hole today.

Chris 23:39
But what happens is, you know, they sold them to Squarespace and I get these notifications that my domain has now moved. But since I don’t have to reconfigure all of my DNS at every single one of those domains, nothing, there’s nothing happening to my websites at as, as that transition goes goes forth. So many people listening, you’ve had something happened to your website. And you’re like, What is going on? You don’t know where to look. So if you don’t know what DNS is or where it is, be sure you have someone on your team that does that. You can say, Hey, can you listen to this? And do you understand it? And they say, Oh, yes, I understand it. Thumbs up, you’ve got a good person on your team. And I think that an active campaign when I first when February 1 hit, I did it all manually. But okay, now, I think I logged in. It’s almost like I had to redo it because they had their built in authentication that I had to go through and just like hit the buttons to check is that am I getting that accurate? Was it wasn’t it kind of like a two phase thing that they did?

Kay Peacey 24:49
This is a bit hashtag. It’s complicated. Okay, so in this in this major scramble because everyone was losing their heads over email or authentication, like it was Just carnage in email or forgetting. And so a lot of the service providers out of campaign included, pushed through as fast as they possibly could to put something in place that would make it easier, or at least less technical and less intimidating to get these records in place. Right? It’s in their interests, because they want to have they want to maintain their incredible reputation for deliverability. And out of campaign is one of the best consistently at getting your emails actually delivered. So they’re doing absolutely the right thing. They pushed out a thing, which I call it the auto authentication tool. I don’t even know if it has an internal name. But it’s basically it’s changed the whole interface in the place where we used to go and be able to look and see, well, what should my Deacon record be? Okay, it they built a whole new fancy thing, if you had already set up your stuff, like Chris here is saying, when you go in there, it kind of looks like you haven’t done it because your domain isn’t listed. But here’s the secret spoiler, you just type your domain in and it goes and does the check for you. And it tells you tick, tick, tick, you’re done. All right. So it’s not so Val, I’m going to tell you a little bit about that, or that auto authentication tool. The things you need to know about it are number one, if you want to use the automated system to put your D Chem, your demark, your SPF, and another little one that I want to tell you about as well. But all of it in place with the whistles and bells, you are still going to have to know your login, your login email, and your login password for don’t go into your DNS records. If you don’t know that you cannot use the auto authentication tool, the end. And I gotta tell you, that’s the biggest problem I’ve had with it is people who didn’t know their logins. So that’s why I’m making such a big deal of it. What that tool does is if you have got a domain that happens to be held at one of the big hitters, like I’m gonna say GoDaddy, SiteGround CloudFlare, one of the more conventional hosts, shall we say, that auto authentication tool will detect where it thinks your website is hosted, and therefore where it thinks your DNS records are. Now, if you’ve done something crazy, and you’re using some weird server routing, it’s not going to work for you. If your DNS is hosted by a service that is not covered by this authentication tool, and we have found a lot of those, especially in the UK, in the UK, we seem to have sort of fallen off the map of, you know, the hosting providers that Active Campaign thinks is worth doing, or something somehow, there are lots of hosts that are not listed there. If you’re if your hosting is not with one of the people they can connect you to, they’re going to tell you to do it manually instead. Okay. Now, the auto authentication tool is either going to do for you or help you and instruct you with what records you need to have in place for 1234 different records, to for the D Chem, they’re pretty easy. Paste them in one for your D mark, and be warned that is going to be the minimum viable demark record with no reporting built in. Okay, no demark monitoring. Chris, I can talk more about that if you really need us to, but I think it’s a bit of a side issue. And the fourth one that they’re now offering and this used to be on enterprise accounts only is a little cherry on the top is you can now have a custom mail server domain on any active campaign plan. And you’re probably thinking her word, I don’t even know what that means. It means you’re going to get this elusive thing called SPF alignment. Which means that your return path, which is when someone replies to one of your emails, or a bounce happens think it’s actually just bounces when a bounce happens. The Return Path domain matches the sending domain. Oh, now that sounds like a horrendous mouthful. But all it is is another way of saying to mailbox providers. Remember they’re the ones guarding the inbox Citadel is saying this email is so valid. It’s so definitely from slick business Dotco like we are doing everything to put all the right badges on and be totally legit and definitely not a skanky spammer. Okay, and that feature the reason I’m mentioning that is that used to be on enterprise accounts only. But it is now available on all Active Campaign plans. Which means if you’re listening to this, you’ve been inactive campaign for a long time and you’ve been all over your decom your spiff and your demark great, but now go and add your CMSD record as well.

Chris 29:50
Yes and to humanize it all for you, everyone. This is actually a good thing. This is a good thing because As as more people flood the email marketing airwaves, just by the nature, you’re going to have more abuse. And you’re going to have more misuse and, and people trying to import a list burn through the list. And what was happening, Kay is that all these email providers have shared servers. So you could be on one server doing absolutely nothing wrong. But somebody else can be spamming. And since it’s all sent from the same server, Google G, I mean, Gmail, Yahoo, all of the email providers have to say, hey, wait a minute, I don’t trust this server, therefore, I can’t trust you. So really, we should be authenticating our own domain and sending so that that reputation, here’s the parquet, the reputation that you build on your domain is yours, regardless where you go, it’s your reputation. So I’m a big fan of it. Is it cumbersome? Is it a bit of a pain? Absolutely, absolutely to because we never had to do it. Now for the new age, email, marketers, they won’t know a life without it. Because it’s standard in every platform now when you go forward, but I am actually a heavy proponent of it. Because I never send spammy stuff. I feel like my emails deserve to be delivered and be read. And because I went through the process, I have that much more confidence. And it’s not just an Active Campaign. It’s in my server, automation, bridge.com. It gets all that reputation and all that good job. And hey, we trust you. So it’s really future proofing the lifetime of me sending emails.

Kay Peacey 31:50
Absolutely, I just I agree so much with everything you said there. And trust is everything in email. And it arguably has been always, and really the changes that are coming from the big mailbox, people are so so good for consumers. So good. Nobody wants to have an email inbox full of spam. So but the onus is on you as a sender to make sure that your email is hitting the buttons, it has the right badges on it. And I’m just going to say as well, I am seeing a lot of bad actors or poor practice from people who are being hired on the basis that they say they will do your email authentication for you. So this is my public service warning, someone says they have done this for you go and check that they have done it. And that it’s right. And if you don’t know enough to do that, if you don’t know how to do that, find someone who does know how to check, it takes very short time to do that. That’s one of the major things we’ve done with our members in the Active Campaign Academy, which is the membership I run this purely for Active Campaign people, the majority of the help we’ve been giving to members is, number one, look and see what your current state of affairs is, you know, maybe it’s already done, maybe you’re great, but probably not. And I would say a large proportion, those maybe 60 70% of the people we went and checked who thought their authentication was done, it was not done. And in several cases, we found a very damaging demark record in there that would have been having their emails turned away at the inbox. And they had no idea because it’s not visible on the surface. And I’m not saying this to scare you, I’m just saying step up, take responsibility and make sure you know enough to not get burned. And if you do hire someone, you got to check their work. Absolutely.

Chris 33:46
I’ll say this everyone, this is the importance of being part of communities. Okay, so K has an active campaign community. If that’s the CRM software that you’re using right now, no brainer join, because there’s all types of little nuances. She can’t mention on here. It’s just you. It’s just the world of technology. There’s little bitty things here and there where somebody says, Hey, I listened and I did everything. Somehow they’re still going to know where you know. So you need that support. It doesn’t come from a free Facebook group. It doesn’t come from just you know, randomly asking people you want to be in dedicated areas. One thing that I did I just want to mention the tool postmark because Active Campaign did acquire them. And they do have a reporting tool that once you have all of this setup, you can put an email address in there and then you’ll just get like weekly digest and I’m saying this because when I first started I would get these emails and it will be like 0% aligned. And I’m like, What did I do wrong? Wait a minute, but I’m thankful for it because the first time I set it up, I it was going to be set it and forget it. But since I was getting those emails, I went back of course made sure my Deke him in and all of that stuff. Now I get them 100% aligned, the lowest, I think was like 97%. Once. So it’s there’s tools out there, we don’t have the capacity to go through it. And quite honestly, K, even if we try to describe it, audio waves is just not the medium for it. You have to see this stuff, be able to follow and click along. So we can only do so much on the podcast. So that that’s that was a good thing. Everybody, we’re talking about active campaign, but trust me log into whatever email service provider you’re using, it’s there as well. So it’s just one of these industry wide things. I’m glad for what else we got. We are cooking the date. Oh,

Kay Peacey 35:45
yeah. So let’s go on to some fun new toys that we have to play with. In Active Campaign, this is always the best bit right, and I gotta say Active Campaign are on fire. They really are. Probably, definitely from q3 onwards. Last year, I am struggling to keep up with the new releases of amazing features from Active Campaign. That’s how fast they’re coming out. And remember, I lived and breathed this stuff. So I’m in there every day. What I’m loving about it is they’re getting into some things on two levels, they’re getting into things that users have been asking for, you know, basically forever, and that have been causing pain for users that we didn’t have them or that they weren’t working all that well. So we’ve been getting into user pain points, because they are really listening to the customer advisory board, which includes me on their case all the time saying this particular bit of Active Campaign is kind of sucky. Can we do better here. And when they’ve listened and understood that users are feeling pain, they are fixing them at a tremendous right now. So that’s great. But we’re also seeing new features coming out that we are not necessarily had on our radar, but that they’ve assessed as this is an area where we can really kill it and give people something that you can’t get somewhere else. And those are the ones I want to share with you today. So top of my list, recurring payment integration, and so subscription businesses, and they’re in all sorts of different industries, their memberships, their subscription box, I can’t think of any others off the top of my hands, SAS loads of different things, the customer comes they create a subscription and repeat payments are taken. Historically, those things have been very difficult to bring into Active Campaign without having additional third party tool to do the integration for you. For example, you would have Zapier or something like that, tell Active Campaign, oh, they’ve their recurring audit has come through, and here’s all the detail about it. Or you’ve got WP fusion or something like that. Active Campaign has really leaned into that pain point. And they’ve now introduced a really tight integration for WooCommerce subscriptions. So if you’re using the Active Campaign integration to WooCommerce, your recurring subscriptions will now come through, they come through to the contacts as a kind of custom object with all the juicy detail, not just about the fact that they’ve made an order, but it tells you that it’s a subscription related audit, and here is the parent subscription. And here’s the start date. Here’s the status of the subscription. This stuff is highly valuable information you can now get in Active Campaign. And that’s included. For plus and above plans is no extra tool needed. Well, boom, that’s a big one. If you’re running WooCommerce subscriptions, that’s a biggie. And just last week, they came out with the PayPal equivalent as well.

Chris 38:45
Nice. Oh,

Kay Peacey 38:47
nice as Chris Yeah, I know, right? PayPal payments have been a real, a big pain point for a lot of people. And you can now have your subscription related information that’s done via PayPal, pull straight into your active campaign account in a really usable, viable way. super impressive work from the E commerce department really, really good. And it’s it’s a well thought out integration as well. It’s not lip service. It’s not just on the surface, it’s a meaningful integration that that you can really work with.

Chris 39:24
There’s a, you were talking about subscriptions and how they’ve enhanced because there was deep data. There’s deep data. However, this is in addition to it. And a deeper the I guess this is deeper data,

Kay Peacey 39:43
like double deep or something.

Chris 39:45
Right. So I know that I’ve I’ve worked with a few ecommerce companies in the past when deep data first started, and it was very basic. So for those of you who are like, Oh, I think that sounds cool. Trust me, the more More information that comes into your account with purchase behavior is just more enablement is more enablement for you to be able to not just convert more, but create a cohesive customer journey, right? Oh, yeah,

Kay Peacey 40:16
the cohesive customer journey, right? Because when that information is coming into Active Campaign at no extra cost to you, by the way, and you can then use that information that’s coming about the rich detail of their subscription and their record of a recurring order, or maybe it’s on hold, or they’re in pending cancellation, when you can send that information and reflect it back to the contact in these beautifully designed active campaign emails. And you can make it into this coherent process. Maybe there’s a text reminder thrown in there when they’re coming up to annual renewal. That’s a good one, right? Or you’ve got a failed payment process. When that information is really seamlessly joined up. My goodness, your job just gets so much easier. Yes. And the customers experience gets so much better, because you’re not having to spend a lot of energy just getting the information into Active Campaign. And it becomes rock solid, reliable in a way that it isn’t when you’re sort of gaffa taping it together. Yes.

Chris 41:15
Yeah, this this is related to Active Campaign, but not necessarily ecommerce. I just remembered, I remembered an update everyone, and I’ll let you expound on it. Kay, I went into my active campaign account one day? Well, first off, let me say the tag manager was different. I was like, whoa, what just happened to my tag manager, but also how tags interacted in automations. With the Tag Manager, I believe Kay, it’s connected now. Because when I removed the tag, it removed it in the automation builder when those two haven’t always, oh, and you had to do some real maintenance is this a real thing that I’m witnessing, because I feel like this.

Kay Peacey 42:02
Yeah, and that’s, that’s one of the ones that I was talking about, where there were pain points for users, that Active Campaign is addressing very, very rapidly across so many different areas of the platform, I couldn’t even begin to list these small user centered changes, the Tag Manager is a great example. So the Tag Manager has had a refresh, it’s more readable. It’s just easier to work with, it’s easier to find. And you can really see in there very quickly how many contacts have a tag, and whether and how many automations, use or reference that tag. And if you go to make a change in that tag, like editing its name or deleting it, you get a very user centered warning on the screen that tells you what’s going to happen as a consequence of that action. Yes, this is stuff that we’ve been wanting for a long time. And we’re now really seeing it come into the Live platform, at this tremendous rate across the board in all areas of the platform. I just find that amazing. I’m gonna tell you about another one that you may not have on your radar, Chris, because it’s not obvious where this one is, in Active Campaign automations. To these are the bits where it’s like a marble run, the contact gets put in at the top or pulled in by a trigger, and dink, dink, dink, dink dink, they go through a series of actions down a path in an automation. Many of many of the times that the automation will include email steps to send the contact an email. And historically there’s been this issue that if someone unsubscribed from an act from an automated email, they would be removed from all lists in the account, right? It’s called the Global unsubscribe, used to trip people up all the time, because they’d be like, Whoa, they’re just gonna have all my lists. What the heck happened? That was the global unsubscribe, well, brand new, under, there’s a big button at the top called manage emails, you can now choose to set the list association for any particular automation. So you can now say, Actually, I just want you to come off my newsletter list. That’s the classic one, right? Or I just want you to come off the list that I’ve created to do with this webinar. Wow. Now this sounds like a tiny thing. Right? And if you hadn’t run into the global unsubscribe problem, maybe it’s completely meaningless to you. What it is doing is giving back control in a way that users can actually understand and see on the surface. You can now control much better what’s happening when people hit the unsubscribe button, which is, you know, that’s pretty fundamental. Right?

Chris 44:36
Here’s the thing K, people have experienced this, and they’re just not aware of it. They weren’t aware that people are unsubscribing from their emails a certain way. And perhaps that’s not what their intention was. They just didn’t want to get that email that was in that automation, but they still wanted your newsletter and you didn’t realize that because they unsubscribed from that email. They were removed from all your lists. So again, to your point, it gives you that extra layer of of granularity and control to say, hey, if they unsubscribe from one of these emails, just remove them from these lists. Here’s what’s, here’s what’s glaring to me, as we talk about this, the responsible marketer always wins. Right? We’re always on the benef, we’re the benefactors of these new updates, that may be sometimes may feel like they’re more constricting or whatnot. No, the responsible marketer loves this stuff, or like, finally, I can save my newsletter folks from, you know, erroneously unsubscribing, and things of that nature. So I have not, I don’t, I don’t think I may have seen that feature. I have not played with it yet. But I’m excited to hear about it and how it’s functioning.

Kay Peacey 46:02
Yeah, it’s just it’s such a great example of active campaign, listening to users, and delivering a feature that we’ve been needing for a very long time, they’re not necessarily making a big song and dance about it, because it’s kind of obscure, it’s one of those things you don’t know you need it until you’ve fallen foul of it. But to people who’ve used the platform a lot, it is a really, really significant recognition that managing unsubscribes as a responsible marketer, is critical. Because the last thing any of us wants, is someone hitting the unsubscribe button. And then you keep sending them emails, that’s the worst thing that can happen. Because if you do that, if they’re expecting to come off, maybe they’re expecting to come off all of your lists, and you only take them off one list, because of the way it works in the platform. And you keep sending to them, they’re gonna spam report you Yep. I’m going to talk about spam reports. Now, because that was the other big change with Google and Yahoo’s deliverability, changes in February, if you’re getting a high rate of spam reports, that is going to hurt you. So as senders we are, we’ve always had to be careful, we always should have been responsible marketers, respectful of people’s unsubscribes, respectful of the choices that we offer them about what we email them about, it is more important than ever, that we honor those choices. And that means you really need to have an understanding of how your particular platform handles unsubscribes and preferences. And I’m loving, absolutely loving, seeing active campaigns step up to the plate and make that easier for us. We’ve always been able to do it, but it’s not always been very serviceable. And I know they’re they’re working on a revision of how how the whole preferences centers work, because these things are now so important. We are getting improved features on so many things.

Chris 47:57
Yep, I’ll say this. In the vein of control, there was a

Chris 48:05
I think I saw this, I was running, I was doing my regular segmentation. And I said, Oh, has entered automation. I use that quite a bit, actually. And then it had another field. And it was like, by by any entry. And I was like, oh, what would my other options would be? I’ve never, you’ve never asked me this question.

Kay Peacey 48:29
I love that you’re like me, like, wait, wait, I’ve never seen that before. What is that? What does it do? Right? This is what I mean about these little user centered changes and improvements that are creeping out all over the platform. And that’s one of them, like the difference between someone who’s entered an automation via a trigger, which I think of as like they’re pulled into the automation activity and watches out for them and pulls them in to the marble run automation, versus something’s pushed them in from outside. That’s manual add to an automation. So manual versus trigger. Users have wanted that for like eternity. And we now have it and it’s right there in the conditions editor that has solved so many troubleshooting problems. We’ve got time windows on email opens an email clicks, right? You’re gonna say, oh,

Chris 49:21
oh, my goodness. I’m sorry, everyone. If you’re watching the video that you saw my face it just keep going. Okay, this was one of my favorite surprises randomly. Keep keep going. I’m sorry.

Kay Peacey 49:35
I know that one was such a beauty right? And that one did come with a fanfare because it was such a big deal. We got time windows on emails. We’ve got a time window where you can say has been sent this specific email within X number of days in the past or the future, or in the past number of months, or between two specific dates. Yes. Oh my god, that relieved so much pain for users in, especially in things where you get users who come around the same automation lots of times being able to have like an F L step that says something like, have you clicked this link in this email within the last seven days? Yes. Oh, hallelujah.

Chris 50:24
Oh, my God. So everybody, just so you know, we’re talking about recency here. You know, the foundation of segmentation is really recency and frequency and how you blend those together and the data and everything. recency is huge. Because now I can tell the level of engagement before I even send the email. Or maybe I just want to know, in the last 30 days, who’s who has opened any email, we were talking about launches, k, right?

Kay Peacey 50:54
Yeah, like engagement, the change, having that time window for email engagement, and I’m going to talk about clicks not opens because I do not, I’m forever steering people away from using open. So let’s talk clicks. If you want to clean up the contacts in your account, like let’s say we’re in that constraint, where we’ve got a lot of contacts, we want to do a launch, we know we’ve got to get the deliverability, right, and all of those things, contact cleanup is a huge task. It’s the most common thing that people do when they first join the Active Campaign Academy, pretty much everyone will do some housekeeping First up, and having a time window condition for emails has transformed that process from something that was very, very hard to something that pretty much anyone can do. You can now tell me, okay, I want you to find me, everybody who has been sent at least one email within the last 30 days, and who has not clicked anything within the last 30 days. And you can see who all those contacts, how many of them there are, and see everything about them. And if you want to refine it, some more you can say, Okay, now show me everyone who was in that bunch, but then also, maybe I hadn’t sent them within the last 14 days. If so powerful for identifying little pockets, either of the contacts, you’ve turned into zombies. So they’re in there, they’re taken up house room, you’re paying for them, but they are not engaging. So they’re not playing the game anymore. You can find zombies now, because you can find the people who’ve been you’ve been sending to within this time period, and they have not been clicking. Great. Off you go zombie man. Yes. But you can also find the gaps, you can find the people who are in there, and they’re subscribed to a list, but you haven’t been sending to them. I find a lot of those. That’s one of the things I make people go looking for. And sometimes like whoa, like 1000s of people in here that I’ve actually not been emailing

Chris 52:49
so great, because I hadn’t listened to everyone. I am a teacher at times and a student. Okay, I didn’t even think of that use case, to go and look and say, Hey, who is on this list, and has not received an email. And for me, it will be in the last 30 days, because certain lists, I know, you don’t even get on that list without sending email. So I can then go back and troubleshoot and really shore up a like you said, get rid of the non clickers designed BS, but be invite the people who would click that are not because I’m not sending because there’s some mixup in my logic or you know, whatever the case may be right

Kay Peacey 53:32
because you know, we’re human, we are fallible, we make mistakes, I’m, you know, still I’m literally that Active Campaign Queen on their customer advisory board, I still make mistakes, because you know, human, imperfect. And so having these time window tools is really powerful for helping us identify holes or problems or get rid of the zombies. And I’m really looking forward to time windows coming out for more aspects of the platform. Like when did somebody submit a form? So it moves on from just being a binary? They did or they did not to? When did this happen? When was this tag added? When was this form submitted? When did they visit this page on my website,

Chris 54:14
all that is beautiful to see, you know, it’s

Kay Peacey 54:16
all coming.

Chris 54:17
I am the hugest fan of time stamps. Kay, the younger me the the younger automated Mark, I just love to build stuff and oh, look at this again. The older mature, more seasoned when I understand the power of when something took place. Oh yeah, give me in fact, there I had to run timestamping automations for my most important tags just for that very reason. Just to know when was it applied? Right. But then you start getting all these custom fields and automate anyway, so I can’t wait for it. Okay, I can keep going. And we can keep going. But I I want to I want to invite everyone. Listen, these are some heavy updates, real heavy updates that Active Campaign has made that you just need to be mindful of. The second part of having que en, is to introduce you to a place where you can go to stay up to date and current with all of them. All right, me and Kate, we can talk for the next two hours, and you’ll see me get more excited, and you’ll see her get excited, we’ll go into the wee hours of the day night, wherever. And we’ll just keep going. However, I want to be respectful of your time. And I want to you know, let’s not show all of our goodies. Let’s leave a little bit to the imagination and give you a reason to connect. But I have to ask the every time k is on question, what is the state k? You may or may not know is is perfectly fine when I have to ask it. Any updates on a segment? Builder update new way of handling stuff? Huh?

Kay Peacey 56:17
Yes, Mr. Dan, it’s coming. It is coming so soon. So soon, I have the privilege as part of my role on the Active Campaign customer advisory board, I have this enormous privilege and of having the trust of users to represent them. Yes, with the slick business team with the sorry, the Active Campaign teams who are developing these aspects of the product. So I’ve been working really closely with the team who are flat out really thinking about how to rebuild the segment manager. And that is going to be a segment manager. Okay. So it’s, I’m just so excited about it. Because the connection that I now have with those product teams means that the changes that are coming very soon, are going to serve users, the things that we’ve been asking for, can I see how many people are in this segment? Can I see how engaged they are? Yes. Can I stack segments in a way that helps me manage overlap between different segments? Can I delete segments that I don’t want to use anymore? Yeah, we can have that. Yes, there is so much amazing stuff, it’s coming, the team who are working on it are extremely talented, I’m super proud and privileged to be involved in working with them. And the work that they’re doing as well on the flow of it and of on how segments are understood and leveraged in Active Campaign, it is going to blow the lid off this platform, watch this space, guys. Because when when this change comes out, it’s gonna change the landscape. Because segments historically, inactive campaign have been so buried that you could literally be using the platform for years and not know that they were the key to unlocking how to send the right campaign email to the right bunch of people. Okay. The reason it’s taken so long for Active Campaign to change this, I feel now they are headed in exactly the right direction, and it is now imminent. Okay, so watch this space. It’s very thoughtful change. And it’s very, very user centered. And you can trust that because I am right there with that team, making sure that it serves the needs of us the users.

Chris 58:40
I love it. I’ll say this, the importance of it is myself. K, anybody who’s who’s aware of and has used Active Campaign at a at a high level, you want to shy away from having too many lists. It’s just it’s just not good, right? However, don’t do it.

Chris 59:00
Right. Don’t do it. However, I have grown to understand. One of the main causes of it is the segment builder being buried. Because most users, they can go to lists and see where all of their current how all of their contacts are grouped. And when I started to pay attention to how people were using it from a functional, not a well, this is really, it’s better as a segment, they would ask me, where are my segments? And then I would show them they’re like, how many people are in there? I’m like, Oh, you have to click it. Then when you click it, you have to do view context is like oh my goodness, I see why you’re creating lists. I get it.

Chris 59:40
Right, you understand now. Just easy visual.

Kay Peacey 59:44
Totally, totally understandable how so so many debts almost universal across Active Campaign users that unless you have a trusted guide, by your side when you first start using it, you’re not going to have found segments because they’re so insanely well hidden, it’s changing, it’s coming. In the meantime, if you want to see where they’re hiding right now, I’m going to strongly recommend that you go to my accelerated Active Campaign training, which is getting a full update right now. Because, you know, we were talking about how much the platform has changed. It’s changed a lot in the last six, seven years that I’ve been using the platform. I think it was around five years ago that I first recorded that the kits like core, you must know this if you’re using Active Campaign stuff. Yeah. And the principles underlying it haven’t changed that much. But the look of the place has, we’re doing a full rerecord. And when this segment manager comes out, that’s gonna be the first place I’m putting it.

Chris 1:00:39
Beautiful. What will Kay Oh, man, this has been so good. And you know, I have you on just to do a sanity check for me, like, Hey, I saw this thing, is it real. And again, there’s there’s so much more, go to the Active Campaign website, they have a product update, page. K has a community. But the other part of this is really just talking strategic shop for these features, right, so that people can say, oh, Active Campaign, not just Active Campaign can do a thing. But all that’s the thing that I was missing. That’s the feature that that I’ve been waiting for. So anyways, thank you for coming on. In closing, we’ve talked about the Active Campaign academy that you’ve created, we’ve talked about your teaching style in this community? Where can people find out more about you and connect with UK?

Kay Peacey 1:01:32
Wonderful, so you can always connect with me on LinkedIn, just search for Kay Peacey I don’t think there’s another one on there, just me. And you’ll recognize me anyway, from the Active Campaign sweatbands, or the Google the Lego minifigs. I also have a Facebook community, which is open to everyone, you can find that at slick business.co forward slash group, there is a free training, totally free accelerated Active Campaign, which is the must have information about how to use Active Campaign as my gift to all the Active Campaign users out there. That’s slick business.co, forward slash fast. And you can find me anytime inside the Active Campaign Academy, which is where I live. That’s my love. Active Campaign Academy is at slick business.co forward slash learn. And I would love to see you in there. If you’re serious about making more money with active campaign with a lot less time and stress. That’s where you need to be.

Chris 1:02:28
Yes, yes. Kay, thank you so much for that our audience appreciate you. You know, I appreciate you. It. It goes without saying but it can’t be stated enough how important it is to have trusted people in invaluable places. Okay, everybody does not operate with the same level of integrity in this space. And unfortunately, it seems like that’s dropping the level of integrity, and the people operating is increasing. So I always I don’t take it lightly to be able to say, Hey, I trust que than if you were to connect with her in any capacity, you will not be worse off. Over time, you will be better off and over time is the key because anybody can make in a one time impression, say oh, they did a good thing. But let’s check back in six months, one year, two year. And the thing with you is especially for my listeners who have been following, you’ve stayed true over the test of time. So some flowers for uk, thank you for always accepting the invitation. This was great. I can’t wait to get this out to everybody so that they can share as well. I greatly appreciate you Okay.

Kay Peacey 1:03:49
Thank you. Always a pleasure and a privilege. Yes,

Chris 1:03:52
yes. So everybody, thank you for listening. And until next time, I see you online automate responsibly, my friends.

Chris 1:04:01
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to and it can be found in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday. So make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly and you can access them all at all systems go podcast.com Thanks again for listening and until Next time I see you online automate responsibly my friends