ActiveCampaign Insights: New Pricing Structure, Latest Trends and Strategies 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 sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis

Chris Davis 0:32
welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I am just, I’m happy. How about that? How about that simple word happy? Because I get to, at times hand select people that I would like to come on to the podcast regularly. And guess what everybody? Sometimes when I hand select them, they actually say yes. Okay, so it is our treat today to have back on the podcast and just let me get you all ready. You’re gonna start seeing the theme of regulars. All right.

And she is definitely one of my favorite regulars. Kay Peace she is the U K’s leading Active Campaign specialists. We could probably expand that even beyond the UK now now. Okay, well anyways, and the founder of slick business, they’re active campaign Academy provides expert help training and support to email marketers all over the globe. Kay has a unique combination of top level strategy and technical skills. Plus, which is actually one of my favorites, a lifetime of teaching. Okay, that is extremely important when we’re talking about tech. All right. And she is these are the things that make her the perfect person to help your business unlock bigger unlock a bigger return on your investment from email marketing automation while keeping the human touch. Accurate. Kay, welcome back to the podcast. Glad to have you on. And I just have to say this before I give you the floor. Listen, everyone. Kay and I have been talking for like 30 minutes

Chris Davis 2:35
or record this podcast. So we’re already warmed up. We’re already warmed up and ready to go. Kay, I’ve got you on your You are my Active Campaign insider. You are you if there’s anyone that has a pulse on what’s happening at Active Campaign in the platform. You’re my go to. I’m glad to have you on to tell us about you know what, what’s what’s up in the Active Campaign world? How you doing? Okay. Oh,

Kay Peacey 3:08
man, that was a lot of flattery in that intro. I’m down with that.

Kay Peacey 3:14
Yeah, you deserve it. You earned it. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a while since we’ve been on the podcast. And I know Yeah, we could talk about marketing and automation just all day. So I think half an hour we got off pretty lightly there.

Unknown Speaker 3:30
Yes, yes. Yes. Oh, so

Kay Peacey 3:33
yeah, Active Campaign world. Interesting things have been happening in Active Campaign land. And you guys know, I’m completely obsessed with it. It’s the only platform I work with in ESP world and automation world. This sort of high level perspective where you’re looking at multiple platforms across this whole range. I’m very zoomed in. I’m looking just to Active Campaign aware of its position in the market, but really looking just at Active Campaign with this very critical friend i. So I’m not afraid to call them out when they do stuff that I think is less than ideal. But I’m also their biggest evangelist and champion. And it’s it that’s an interesting place to be and it’s where I’m at my happiest. Definitely.

Chris Davis 4:23
Yeah. I share those sentiments with you. I think that they need every every every software platform needs evangelists to hold them accountable. And keep them honest. Yes, yeah.

Kay Peacey 4:39
Yeah, yeah. So in schools in the UK, we have a system of governance and every state school is required to have a governing body and the governing bodies job is to do exactly that to hold the staff at that school accountable and say, You are here to serve the children at this school. And to me, I see my place in relation to Active Campaign. In that same way, I am the critical friend. So I’m outside of the organization looking in, but always there to represent the user. I and I have been right from the very start. And what’s really nice now is that my, my sort of status and stature in the Active Campaign community just means that I have a little bit more clout I’m a bit more listened to, than I used to be in that feels really good. So yeah, I think it’s been an interesting patch. In active campaigns relationship with users, we’ve seen a lot of change on the pricing that has been. Where do you want me, Chris?

Chris Davis 5:35
Let’s start there, okay, because I have to say, I know the value, I know the value of marketing automation. And I am not afraid or opposed to paying top dollar. I was one that pay $2,000 as a Kickstarter fee to Infusionsoft, which is now keep and pay $300, a month, before my business was really profitable. And I looked at it as an investment. So I’m no stranger to paying top dollar for platform. But I’ll let you let you speak on et. Que, from my vantage point, you know, looking at LinkedIn and social and just across the board, there was so much confusion and and so much disappointment and how they did it. I think, for the most part, those of us who really know how to leverage it are okay, paying a little more. But how you get us to pay more is really where you can lose, you lose a lot of people.

Kay Peacey 6:38
Yes, I completely agree. I think communication has has been the weakest thing that I’ve seen from Active Campaign in 2023. And, and that’s really hard for me to see that unfold is really hard. Because I’m an evangelist for this platform. And because I completely wholeheartedly believe it, it’s it’s excellent value, even at the top end current pricing, this platform is worth every penny of that, if you’re leveraging it, right. I think where we’re seeing so much difficulty is on two levels. One is the communication. But the other level on which we’re seeing difficulty for users is people who have been using the platform, maybe for quite a long time, and who came in on lower pricing on lower legacy pricing and have been sort of coasting with the platform. So there may be just scratching the surface. This is a phrase, I hear a lot people who are aware that they’re just scratching the surface of what this tech can do. And I’m really until the pricing increases of 2023 happens, you could get away with doing that because you weren’t paying the you weren’t paying the actual value of the product at that time. So yeah, we’ve had two major changes to the pricing with Active Campaign in 2023. The first one happens straight out of the box in January, like I literally came back from holiday day one, oh, my God, everything has changed. It was actually overall a really positive change for users. Because what it did was separate out the CRM, part of Active Campaign from the marketing automation part of Active Campaign. And that is something that is actually really good for users, because so many businesses don’t use the deals and pipelines part of Active Campaign, often because they actually don’t know how, which is another topic of conversation. But what was happening a lot was that people were paying for these higher levels, and then just not using those products at all those features of the product. So it separated out into marketing, which is all of your automations, custom fields, tags, all the stuff that pretty much everyone uses. And then sales, which was the CRM and pipelines and the more b2b features like accounts as well. There are not that many businesses even on Pro and Enterprise who are using those features. So to me, it made sense for that change to happen.

Chris Davis 9:04
Yeah, right. Yeah. I, you know, I was a bit taken aback because it was felt so abrupt, right. And then I don’t think their sales page or their pricing page did a really good job. I should say they didn’t even do a bad job. It was like a horrible job at explaining what’s what what you get in each level, but to your point, I saw it. I said, Okay, yep, it makes sense. decouple the couple of this, the CRM, you know, and things like that. So, yeah,

Kay Peacey 9:40
the delivery of it was fumbled. I think it was very, very abrupt. And so it came pretty much out of nowhere for users, including me. That one caught me off guard I did not know that was coming. And then because the pricing page in its first iterations It was muddy, it just it wasn’t clear what you were getting and what had changed for users. So whenever whenever I just complain, do something like that I try and see it as an opportunity. So I ended up taking going and spent, I spent two days trying to decipher what does this mean, for users? I mean, two full days. And I’m, I’m in people’s inboxes, active campaigns, with with all of those nitty gritty questions, what if this particular situation arises? What does that mean for that user? Where do they sit? Now? What does it mean, if they were on the all in one product, and then they change their contact limit? What’s going to happen then? And so there were lots of really detailed questions that had to be answered there. And I was able to take that and reframe the whole thing, and put up a blog about it. And actually, what we found was that people were going to my blog instead of to the Active Campaign pricing page, because it was doing a better job of it. And actually, that I have to be honest, that situation should not arise. That shouldn’t happen.

Chris Davis 11:01
Now, let me say this. Everybody listening, if you haven’t heard of Kay before, and again, I said in the intro, she has an academy Active Campaign Academy, what you will find is that there are oftentimes people who are actually helping the small businesses who are actually using the software that understand it in a more contextual, it means that can help you navigate the tool a lot better. I’ve got a podcast episode where I talk about how marketing companies don’t, aren’t who you should go to for marketing. They’re soft, I should say, marketing software, they’re there to create software, they’re not there to help you grow your business, although they try they shouldn’t. But although they try. And I say all that to say everybody, this is the importance of knowing K, and knowing a variety of people that use the tools that you use extensively, because there were a lot of people, okay, I’m always on LinkedIn. And there are a lot of people posting about the pricing and doing write ups. And when I went to him, I mean, they were just sloppy, you know, is just kind of the first to go. But the fact that you took your time took two days to write it and saw that people were going to that instead, listen, these are the type of people that you all need to be following if you’re using Active Campaign, because a person like que is not only going to take the time and make sure that it’s accurate. But you also did your due diligence and reached out to support and you know, got your clarification from from the company as well.

Kay Peacey 12:40
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, for me might one of my strengths is I’m working with small businesses, from very tiny, one person, people who are making craft and selling that right through the small to medium business spectrum, and then up to sort of global corporate sized businesses as well. So that means that I see this huge range of user experiences. And it’s super interesting to me that there is really strong commonality across all of those users in where they get stuck on the platform. What are the things that don’t make sense to them about ways stuff is presented. And so that day, when the pricing change came out in January, I went to look at the pricing page, and I was like immediately on email to Active Campaign. Like, you need to fix this because you’re just gonna have absolute chaos of people not understanding what this means. Because if I don’t understand it, yeah, completely immersed in Active Campaign, if I’m going to read and understand what you’re telling me. There’s something wrong here. Yes. And listen, everybody. Me changed it really quickly.

Chris Davis 13:50
Yes, listen, I reached out to que me. Okay. Let me just do a refresher for everybody who forgot. I was the Director of Education at ActiveCampaign. It was my sole purpose to educate the company on how to use the software as well as the user. So many of you have seen me in the videos. I may still be on some. I Chris L. Davis, former director of education. You okay, we if I had a screenshot I put it up right now. I reached out to Kane. I was like, what does this mean? What is going on?

Kay Peacey 14:32
was crazy. To me crazy. I had so many active campaign partners. What just happened? Yeah, what? What does this mean? What does it mean for us? Yes.

Chris Davis 14:47
So with that being said, give us the summary. Hopefully by the time this episode airs, it’s been a lot clearer. But even even if not, we’re gonna make Make sure that everybody is taken care of what what are the main points that any existing Active Campaign user should know about the new pricing?

Kay Peacey 15:10
Okay, perfect question. First thing to understand is you’ve got legacy users, so people who are on the older all in one product, and then you’ve got people who have already moved to or started with the new product model. Okay? So the original one was, if you started your active campaign account anywhere up to January 2023, you’re on the original all in one product. Okay, if you’ve purchased since you started a fresh account, since January 2023, you will have come straight in on the new model. Alright. And the key differences, the old one, I’m gonna call it a Legacy product is an all in one, it had all of the features. And it had these levels, you could get light plus pro or enterprise, but it was always a single product, and you had a contact limits thrown in there as well, right? Over here in the new model, they’ve split it, we’ve now got two bits. Okay. And the best way we found to understand it was that one of them is the cake. And the other one is the icing on the cake. All right. The cake is the marketing. That’s the main functions of Active Campaign automations, custom fields, tags, emails, the stuff that is the meat and drink of marketing. Okay, that’s all in the marketing component. And that’s the one that pretty much everyone needs. Then if you wanted it, you could have the icing on the cake, too, which is called sales. If you get both bits together, that’s roughly equivalent to the all in one. Okay, yep. Yep. And if you get both bits together, they call it the bundle. So what we’ve got now is, the original Legacy product is roughly equivalent to the bundle product in the new pricing model. Okay. All right. And it’s hard for people to understand because the way it’s laid out on the sales page, on the pricing page for Active Campaign makes that really hard to understand. Because it actually lists it as the marketing product. Then the sales product, because technically, you can buy the sales product on its own. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know anyone. reliever. Tell me like, if you’re listening to this, and you’ve got the sales only come find me because I want to know what you’re

Speaker 2 17:27
doing, please. Yes. Because I don’t I can’t

Kay Peacey 17:31
see a use case where you would get sales on its own. And I think that’s where the the waters got really, really muddy. Yeah. Because it gets complicated then between marketing only sales only, or the bundle product. And then you’ve got Legacy product in there as well. And there are differences in how many users you can have and what the contact limits are. And the pricing is really hard to visualize. Yeah, so I think the main challenge there was to simplify it as far as possible. Okay, so that was why I wrote the blog, which has, you know, a grid where you can actually see all of the different pricing in one place, and try and make a decision based on what features you actually use, how many contacts you have, and then figure out what you should be paying now. Right? Yeah,

Chris Davis 18:21
yeah. Don’t worry, everybody. Oh, go ahead. I’m sorry. Okay, go ahead.

Kay Peacey 18:26
Sorry. Yeah, I was just to say the other complication was that if you were on the legacy pricing Originally, the thing that really threw everyone who had been using Active Campaign for a long time was that if you then changed your contact limit, or your plan level at all, you were straight into the new pricing over here,

Chris Davis 18:47
that now that was the biggest thing, what I was gonna say real quick is Don’t Don’t worry, everybody we’re gonna have the link will have the link to that blog post that that k is mentioning. So we have used in the show notes. But that piece right there, K is where I started to feel the friction, right? Because if we go back historically, Active Campaign disrupted the space by providing a level of flexibility and functionality in the Small Business CRM, CRM landscape. That was at a price point that was practically unbelievable. That is how they stay. That’s how they became who they are. Now. That’s only half the story. The other half is power users like myself, would jump on and really test its limits. And we would be we were evangelists, me and Barry more, very more. We had the automation nation Facebook group and everything. You had the podcast, and we were really strong evangelists, and we weren’t the only ones but there are a ton of early adopters that have a heavy Hand in the success of Active Campaign, because they didn’t have to do much marketing, they just had to do product development. And we were essentially their marketing force. Right? Yeah. So to do pricing in a way, that your legacy, the folks that late, they’re early bricks, their pricing is gone, and not communicate that here’s the thing, it’s one thing to remove grant grandfathered pricing, we don’t see that often K, we really don’t see that often, that grandfathered pricing is not removed. But when we do see it, there’s usually some communication that says, hey, you’re on a legacy plan. We’re changing this, here’s what to look forward to. But the fact that there was none of that, you know, was tough. It was a tough pill to swallow.

Kay Peacey 20:48
Yeah. And that’s where the critical friend in me gets antsy about it because it hurts, it hurt a lot of music. Because I care about users, I really do I feel their pain. And it was really painful to see a lot of people who were, for example, about to go up a contact limit, or who were just about to move to plus, if they had known that that change was coming, they could have made that change earlier, or reconfigured what they were going to do to accommodate this knowing that their pricing was going to change, they were going to have to think about what features they actually needed. There was a lot of decision making that needed to go into it if you had to make a change. With no warning at all. It felt really unfair. And I think it was unfair.

Chris Davis 21:33
Yeah, I think that’s the best word for it. Right? Just felt unfair. And in. So I finished up the premium premium podcast. And I’m pretty sure I talked so many places, I can’t remember where I say stuff anymore. Okay, but I’m pretty sure I was on my premium podcast. And I mentioned that though we were hurt, you know, we’re still there. However, you’re going to have to be careful how you treat your people, because the technological landscape is changing. And there are certain things that I can now do without Active Campaign that I used to have to rely on Active Campaign to do. So it’s no longer I just got to take it, because there’s nothing else out there. The landscape is maturing and developing fast. So you really have to be sure that you treat the people. It’s like, um, when I was in fast food, I used to work at McDonald’s. And they would always tell us that a person in the store is more valuable than a person calling. And then when I went and worked in retail, they said the same thing. If there’s somebody in the store, they’re more important than the person calling in, because that person may never drive in they are here we are the people in the store. Don’t treat the people calling or the new people better than the ones that have really helped build that foundation, you know,

Kay Peacey 23:00
yeah. And I put users in such a difficult position, because they were not given time to make this it’s really important business decision. Whether you know how much you’re paying for your, your marketing automation software? Should you consider migrating? Do I need to go up a level and get these extra features? Or do I need to come down a level and not keep paying for stuff that I’m not using? These are not straightforward decisions? They are complex, they require usually some outside expertise from someone like me who knows it intimately? And who can just answer your question, like you describe to me what you’re doing in your business, I can tell you exactly what active campaign plan you need to figure that out from the pricing page on its own is really, really tough, and that it takes time to make those decisions. So to put users in a position where they were not given any time to do that, that felt really difficult for the Active Campaign user community. And we saw a lot of fallout from that in Active Campaign communities, right across the board. And you

Chris Davis 24:04
have to be careful, okay, because the the marketing automation space with the inception of, you know, AI, and other competitors, like go high level, huge. There’s a lot of people that were just kind of waiting for reason to leave and try the competitor or you know, try something else. So it’s a tough one. So let me say this. Okay. One of the things with the pricing that came to the surface, is how contact how you’re charged for contacts, right? Yeah. So if if those those of you if you don’t know, Active Campaign handles this the right way, I believe. Whereas if you have a contact in your database, but they’re not subscribed to any list, you don’t pay for them, so they can still go to automations they can’t receive emails or anything, but they can still go to automations received He could put notes on their record and everything. This is especially important for those of you who have your CRM integrated with like your LMS, or website and all that. But understanding that, because now with this new pricing, there’s a contact limit that once you exceed it, and you go to the next level, you’re automatically on the new pricing. So I wanted to talk strategically for a moment and see how you’ve been handling this and how you’ve been instructing people to keep their lists nice and clean. So that if they do go over, it’s with engaged leads, in that tire kickers that, you know, haven’t unsubscribed but aren’t opening emails.

Kay Peacey 25:42
Yeah, it’s that’s a drum I’ve been banging for a very long time. Very, the first course that I put out that you could buy independently, instead of hiring me as a consultant was to deliver better deliverability and engagement with Active Campaign, because keeping your contact list tight, is all connected, it’s intimately connected with deliverability. And the engagement of contacts with emails, and deliverability is so fundamentally important, because if your emails are not getting delivered, delivered to the inbox, then what the heck is the point, they can do nothing if they’re not getting delivered. Alright, so I’ve been talking about deliverability a lot. And it’s really interesting to me that when it suddenly becomes a case of, you’ve got to get your contact limit under control, or it is going to cost you money right now. People understand that in a different way. I have not needed to do my deliverability rant so much, because people really small businesses really understand intuitively and very quickly, if they are carrying a lot of dead weight in their contact list, which the vast majority of Active Campaign accounts are right now, carrying a lot of zombie contacts, right. And they’re either unsubscribed from all lists. So they’re not costing anything, but they’re just cluttering the place up zombie laying around in there and coming up in your searches in segments. Or they’re still subscribed to a list, but they’re not opening anything. And those guys, I’ve seen accounts with 10s of 1000s of them in there. And all of a sudden, everyone’s just woken up and gone. Oh, I forgot anything about contact reduction? Like yes. The Academy, you know, we have, we have some very active training and threads in there that are all about contact cleaning, and what are the steps you need to go through from clearing out the very obvious bots and bounced contacts and dead weight, right down to the really more nuanced stuff of someone who has once been a customer, but isn’t now or someone who is the customer now but never opens their emails. There are a lot of different decision points in there. And so, for us in the academy, I engage with every business who comes in and really helps them find their way through that maze to do the cleanup. And then they come out of it with a routine that they can run like once a month or something, go run this segment. Those guys delete these guys make a Facebook audience. These guys give them a tag leave them over there. Right? Yeah,

Chris Davis 28:20
I it was just a light mention, but the you all see the strategy just oozing out of K, you you literally just witnessed the teacher, the technician, and the AC expert all in one right there. Because what’s your what’s your saying that I caught is that though they aren’t on your list, and you may not be able to reach them via email, you can still add them to other channels. Okay, everybody, we are in the year of 2023. And beyond depending on when you listen to this. No longer are we relying on one channel called email to do all of our messaging. You have other options. Other ways, and I’ll say this case, as much as I didn’t like the delivery of the pricing. The piece that I did like that came out of it was that now there’s an increased focus and attention on the amount of context. Yeah, so I like

Kay Peacey 29:32
that one. Yeah, I’ve had this conversation with people of I can I can see the cherry on the cake here for me. Yes, it hurt a lot of people I would much rather it had been handled differently. But the there is a silver lining, which is this outcome that suddenly pretty much universally in Active Campaign land. Everyone’s suddenly paying attention to cleaning their list. That is great news, because everyone should have been doing that all along. Yeah, and they’re kind of almost like people doing it for the wrong reasons now because they’re doing it to save some money. But and it has this handy side effect that it means that emails are actually going to get delivered to the inbox. And I am all for that. Yeah, that’s absolutely, yeah. Because otherwise, we’re spending so much time and energy creating amazing automation sequences and beautiful emails. But unbeknownst to many users, then not getting delivered to the inbox. And that is heartbreaking.

Chris Davis 30:23
Yeah, me. Yeah, you know, okay, I deal with a lot of large databases. What’s the smallest database I’ve dealt with recently? Maybe 150k ish, you know, in, they’re still using, like small business, marketing automation software, like like Active Campaign, or klavier, or something else like that. And on average, K, on average, on average, half of those leads are unreachable, on Oh,

Chris Davis 30:55
average. So the bigger your list gets, it is not like you start reaching more and more people. And when I deliver this news to these companies, you there’s this term for list synth. This term comes from like, leaders in the corporation that have no idea how email works. In their mind, they just want to, hey, we’ve got a million leads, let’s make sure we’re emailing all of them. So they don’t quite understand how it works. And how deliverability, consistency, relevancy of content, clicks over opens things like we’re all verbs. So on average, and hopefully, this helps you all who are listening to let you know that it is not uncommon to have more than 50% of your leads. Not qualifying as engaged not now. Now, here’s the thing, okay. They’re still on the in the database. So now I have to deliver the news. It’s kind of like the doctor right afterwards, like, the report is in 50% of them are dead. And we’ve got to remove them, they’re like No, but to your point, once you remove those leads from being active, and start mailing, only the active one deliverability increases. And all of your active lead generation efforts, the new leads get to inherit that good reputation.

Kay Peacey 32:24
I know and it’s magical. Seeing that transformation is it’s a real pleasure. And it’s so consistent, we see it with pretty much every person, you brings an active campaign account into the Active Campaign Academy with me, we always address the cleanup early on, because everybody needs that you have to clear the decks, get the clutter out of the way and know what you’ve even got in your hands know the state of play with your account. And there’s a real pleasure in seeing an account go from being a sprawling tangled mess, where nobody, nobody really has a handle on what anything was doing in there. And deliverability is not great. And seeing that transform in the space of it’s usually three months period, depending on how complex that mess is and how much buy in, if they’ve got people above them in the business and they’ve got to get buy in from director level people it can take longer because it just takes time to for them to win the trust. But seeing that transformation to then this amazing cleaned up active campaign account where you can actually do stuff and build stuff and see what’s going on and see really clearly oh, these leads coming in from this lead magnet are great. They are converting really reliably. Let’s lean in to that. It just enhances what you can do with active campaigns. So so so much.

Chris Davis 33:49
Yeah, yeah. And everybody, we we’ve got Kay Peacey the number one a see expert in the space that we’re talking to right now. You see I just took the UK off now I just

Chris Davis 34:04
and and what’s happening, or what I want to communicate with you all is this. Know, if if you are ready to stop wasting your time. I am a strong proponent of community. And when you have a community that’s focused on the exact tool or thing that you’re trying to learn or use, you should join it without hesitation. Because here’s here’s the the opportunity cost here. How How valuable is your time? One? If you don’t have a value of your time, okay, then just leave the podcast now. But if you know the value of your time, how many hours are you willing to spend that equate to dollars wasted? Learning something that you could spend a fraction of that monthly and get access to a brain that It is bigger than k. It’s not just k in the community. It’s K and Company. Right? Like this is the collective brain. And I say that I’m not pitching. What I’m doing is, this is the unique advantage that we have now is that there are communities around these interests in these topics. You don’t have to settle. You know, asking your friend or asking blindly on a Facebook group, there’s dedicated spaces.

Kay Peacey 35:32
Americal really isn’t it. And it’s one of the great joys of the internet is that I can be here in rural southwest UK, sitting by the seat of my tiny little town. And I get to hang out with amazing talented business people from literally all over the world. And the only thing we have in common is that we happen to all use Active Campaign. That’s it, and the relationships and the connections that formed from that and the different things that people bring to the table, depending on where they sit in relation to their business, what’s what’s their business experience, what is their unique and special talent. It’s such a privilege to be the person who’s made that happen in this one specific community. And I totally agree that putting yourself in the community, you don’t have to use it like every day, you don’t have to be obsessed with Active Campaign because you have, the community can do that for you. Yes. And the longer those communities exist as well, when they’re searchable. This is where they get really special because as times gone on, when we’ve been open 18 months now, we have this incredible wealth of full use cases and specific scenarios in businesses. And we have the answers. They’re all in our community in our courses. You just got a search, put in the search words, it’s going to come up for you. Yep. Tutorial is right there waiting for you.

Chris Davis 36:56
Yep. I love it. I love it. Okay, why? Why we’re there. I wanted to ask, you’ve got a community of Active Campaign users of all varieties, right? In all business types. Are there any trends that are are standing out to you are any things that you kind of want to mention to the Active Campaign user that’s not in your community and not connected like that? Are you seeing an uptick in automations? Like, just the floor is yours? Is there anything that you like to share from your vantage point of having access to so many accounts and so many business owners?

Kay Peacey 37:36
Oh, that’s really interesting question. One of the areas I find most interesting watching the development as people step into the academy is the connection with E commerce. So Active Campaign has this really rich, juicy integration with certain e commerce platforms? Not all of them, if you’re on WooCommerce is the most common one. Shopify is another big one. Big commerce, I think, easy digital downloads, as well, as this really it, I call it an intimate integration, because it’s get all of the information about every purchase, every transaction is straight, they’re inactive campaign. Yeah. So what I’m seeing is, the companies, the businesses who are using those platforms are often not using the integration because they don’t know about it. And when you tell someone about that integration, and you get it in place, which is like a five minute job, it’s the whole world explodes with possibility. abandoned cart stuff, follow up stuff, membership stuff, it’s all there on a plate. And it’s like handing someone a massive toy box of all their favorite stuff and a big garage to drive toy cars around. And they’re like, Oh, my God, look what I’ve got to play with. Yeah. So I’m seeing I’m seeing a trend in the businesses who are getting the most value from Active Campaign right now, in my opinion, are the small to medium businesses who are doing e commerce and who get that tight integration coming. Nice. Right? And even if they’re not with one of those ecommerce platforms, you can do it using deals and pipelines instead. So if you can get some Zapier skills in there, and you can make that happen using some of the other and I just I feel like that’s the sweet spot for Active Campaign right at the moment.

Chris Davis 39:36
No, that’s good. I know, I’m, I’ve had personal experience, by no intentional choosing of my own. I’ve been in this e commerce space for years now. I guess I could really claim to be an expert. I mean, some of the things that I do or even I’m like, wow, I didn’t even know and it all revolves around segmentation. because you can pull so much data in, you know, as an E commerce owner, you want all of it, you want number of orders, data last time, you don’t do they can’t give you last time in order was placed. But you know, you run an automation that just timestamps a date field that says last order. You know, make sure that whenever there’s an order placed, that’s the start trigger goes in, and just timestamps, you can have that. So where you can have time, between orders and all of that. But I will say it gives you so much so much information from those from those e commerce platforms is great to hear you say that because I think, again, outside more agnostic and even more general to technology, I’ve been seeing a very strong uptick in E commerce, whether it be physical products, or even just courses are digital products. I’ve been seeing that uptick. And I welcome it. I welcome it. I do I think, you know, Amazon blazed a trail and Shopify has done a great job really penetrating the market, with enabling people to say, hey, look, be your own Walmart, right? Be your own Amazon, don’t rely on them sell your own stuff. So that’s refreshing to see. Last thing, last thing, Kay? I feel like I know the answer to this before I ask. But it’s, I have you, I have you and I want everybody else to experience this too. One of the strongest, most powerful features of any marketing automation platform, is the ability to personalize your marketing to increase the effectiveness of your marketing. In order to do so one must use segmentation accurately. Okay. So here comes the question. Have you heard anything big on the segmentation front, from Active Campaign do well, we get a segment manager, so

Kay Peacey 42:16
I’m still asking for a segment manager, we don’t have one yet. And by a segment manager, we’re talking about segment with a capital S, meaning being specific objects in Active Campaign. And just to get technical from wanting to send a campaign email to a chunk of your contacts, you need to build a segment. And right now in Active Campaign, it’s really hard to see your segments. And Chris and I have had this as a running joke for what, six years now? I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t personally understand why we don’t have that. I don’t understand why technically, that is such a challenge. I do understand the fact that segments as a technical data object live kind of somewhere in between contacts, and contact data, and lists and searches. It’s complicated. And I’m not a developer. Right? So there’s a barrier in there somewhere, we would love to see that go away.

Chris Davis 43:19
Oh, okay. I can’t even tell somebody where to access their segments, they’re looking for like a button to click that says segments, it doesn’t exist.

Kay Peacey 43:29
Chris, I have I have the faith I have the hope and I am there tell you what I am seeing I am seeing active campaigns, senior management, listening to users Good, good. I am feeling a sea change and a leaning in. Okay. So whilst I and I’m not speaking out of school here, because I’d tell Active Campaign this stuff to their face the whole time, like, you know, you guys, you gotta give us more notice if you’re gonna change the pricing, because it’s not okay. Small businesses don’t have the sort of cash flow, where we can suddenly decide to pay annually. In order to get around a pricing increase, we can’t do that. And and it’s not fair on users to change stuff without notice, okay? I have these conversations with them as much as I possibly can. And what I’m feeling as a user advocate is a shift in that I feel more heard by active campaign than I have ever done previously. So I’m taking this as a good sign. And I think it speaks well to the future. Because where I see this going is yes, pricing has changed. The the coasting on legacy pricing has pretty much gone, you might hold on to it for another year, but you’re not going to be able to hold on to it forever. You’re going to have to be paying at least a lot closer to current pricing for this amazing, incredibly powerful product. And what that means for many legacy users is they are suddenly going to pay attention to their contact limit. and they’re gonna pay attention to the feature set that they’re actually using. Because if they’re not using the feature set, or they’re carrying a lot of dead weight in contacts, it’s untenable to keep paying current pricing levels. So they’re going to either focus in on what they’re doing and get proper value out of it, or they’re going to migrate. Okay, so I think, you know, we are gonna see some people migrating, but the ones who stay are going to be leaning into this platform, which is incredible, boundless, a boundless playground for marketers. And all you need to do is get that little bit of support and education to equip you to be able to use the toys that you have to play with. Yeah,

Chris Davis 45:40
yeah. You. In closing, I want to mention one thing that you and I touched on prior to this podcast, and I want to include our listeners. And that was, you know, with the inception, and extremely fast evolution of artificial intelligence, you know, GPT, three, and four and chat GPT and implementing it into platforms. We saw HubSpot, make a power move, power move with getting a chatbot installed into their platform, haven’t tested it out, just you know, the founder put it on LinkedIn. Mind blowing, right? Hey, you could tell it to go get grab a segment of people who’ve taken this action and that action, and it will go do it for you. Oh, my goodness, just beautiful. Just the sound of it. So what we were talking about it and listeners, you may agree. But can you imagine a world where active campaign was doing similar? Right, creating that chat that AI experienced that could do some data analytics segment building and potentially even automation building on a very basic level, right. And they announced that along with their price increase. Now now, okay, that has a totally different feel. Because AI is so hot right now. It’s so you know, relevant and in demand, I don’t think you would have heard much of anything, I think people would have been so excited about testing out headlines and copy and all of this other stuff, that they will gladly pay the overage. And I bring this up, everybody is just a lesson to us business owners, founders, anybody who was going direct to consumer, that there are always opportunities, sometimes we just have to be a little more patient. I mean, who at Active Campaign could see that AI was going to take off like this, right? Perhaps somebody in there saw it and just wasn’t listened to. But if you can be in tune with the market, there’s a lot of times there’s something happening in the market, that you can just ride that wave to. and mitigate, if there’s a big change like this, you can mitigate it and make sure that even though I’m changing pricing, I’m also adding value, because old value doesn’t convert, add, like new value. You know, you can’t say, hey, this platform has been valuable for 10 years, we’re going to up the price because you know the value of it.

Kay Peacey 48:12
When the vast majority of users actually on a lot of the features, you know, Chris is still told, I tell people all the time about conditional content for emails, which is the most astoundingly powerful thing to have in emails. And in the new email designer for Active Campaign. I’m still calling it the new one. It was last year it came out. In the new email designer, you can do nested conditional content across whole sections of the emails. No, I

Chris Davis 48:47
didn’t know that. And that’s

Kay Peacey 48:49
probably something you didn’t. Okay, so conditional content in the new email designer is just astounding, it has really leveled up what it can do. But there’s, I found out that one of the reasons it was so late being added into the new email designer was because take up of conditional content is actually really low as a feature. And that makes me really sad. But it doesn’t surprise me because I spend so much time telling people, you could use conditional content to do that. You have conditional content and like, what

Unknown Speaker 49:23
were what? Yeah, yeah.

Kay Peacey 49:27
Yeah. So my mission continues to show people where the gold is in active campaign without them having to cry, swear or give up or migrate to a different platform because they think the grass is greener. Yeah. I appreciate that. It may look greener. I appreciate that Active Campaign is not always doing the best job it could of showing their value and communicating in a transparent timely way with users. But the value is there. Absolutely.

Chris Davis 49:56
There is there in as you mentioned, conditional content, it is just such a strong reminder everybody of how much is in the platform, right. And I want to take you all off the hook. Because when I was there at Active Campaign, I used to hear people say this, and I still hear people say this, this statement of, I know I’m not using it all. You don’t have you never will use all of the features. I hate use me that right. And there’s some features that I used to use that I no longer use. As long as you have access to the features that matter for your business now, and you’re aware, and you’re accurately leveraging them, you are leveraging the tool, exactly how it was created to be used. And with that being said, I want to reiterate what Kay said about conditional content, because it is something where I think we can safely say we’re beyond days of just emailing a list, email blasts are gone, your mailing segments now. And because you’re mailing segments, you have this ability to make your emails more contextual, to the behaviors that people have done, that you have tracked. So if we just dropped the new terminology on you, you’re like additional content. What does that mean? Again, you have a resource to go to. And with that being said, Kay, where can people we’ve mentioned that Academy, we’ve mentioned your expertise? Where can people go to connect with you and learn and find out more about your your community and your expertise?

Kay Peacey 51:39
Thank you. So we have a couple of free places, you can come find me and hang out. I’m on LinkedIn, which I’m actually loving. I’m doing more on LinkedIn these days. So you can just find me by name Kay Peace, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, we have a big free community for Active Campaign users. So everyone’s welcome in their house called automate your business with Active Campaign. We would love to see you in there. And then on my website at slick business.co, you will find some free resources, which includes accelerated Active Campaign, which is the most killer, quick run through the best cookies in the jar of Active Campaign. There is far none. Okay. Yeah. Is that’s helped 1000s of Active Campaign users, including actual active campaign staff to get to grips with that can get to that platform really fast and easy, right. And it shows you conditional content. And then the Active Campaign Academy is our signature program. Technically, it’s a membership. I like to think of it more as a subscription. It’s like a pay as you go for Active Campaign consultancy, because what you get is access to me. And my ridiculous obsession with Active Campaign means I can answer literally any active campaign question you have any day. We run Office Hours twice a week, which is a drop in Ask me anything. And we have a big bank of courses, tutorials, resources, helpful links, hundreds of screengrabs with annotation that solve the problems that every Active Campaign user has, right? Because I know the themes I know where everyone gets stuck. So I’m way ahead of you. And all it is, is we just drop a leg for like, oh, go do this, that will fix your problem. Or you got some business use case, we’re going to tell you okay, you need this bit this bit in this bit. Here they are. Come back if you get stuck.

Chris Davis 53:36
Yep. Yep. Great. Well, we’re going to do our due diligence and make sure that all of those links are in the show notes, everybody, so you don’t have to go scrambling trying to figure out everything. Kay, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. It’s always a joy having you on. Thank you, Chris. Always a pleasure. Yes, yes. And to my listeners, thank you all for your time. Thank you for listening to this episode. And for everybody. Everybody. Automate responsibly my friends. I will see you all on the next episode.

Chris Davis 54:17
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 you 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

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 sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis

Chris Davis 0:32
welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I am just, I’m happy. How about that? How about that simple word happy? Because I get to, at times hand select people that I would like to come on to the podcast regularly. And guess what everybody? Sometimes when I hand select them, they actually say yes. Okay, so it is our treat today to have back on the podcast and just let me get you all ready. You’re gonna start seeing the theme of regulars. All right.

And she is definitely one of my favorite regulars. Kay Peace she is the U K’s leading Active Campaign specialists. We could probably expand that even beyond the UK now now. Okay, well anyways, and the founder of slick business, they’re active campaign Academy provides expert help training and support to email marketers all over the globe. Kay has a unique combination of top level strategy and technical skills. Plus, which is actually one of my favorites, a lifetime of teaching. Okay, that is extremely important when we’re talking about tech. All right. And she is these are the things that make her the perfect person to help your business unlock bigger unlock a bigger return on your investment from email marketing automation while keeping the human touch. Accurate. Kay, welcome back to the podcast. Glad to have you on. And I just have to say this before I give you the floor. Listen, everyone. Kay and I have been talking for like 30 minutes

Chris Davis 2:35
or record this podcast. So we’re already warmed up. We’re already warmed up and ready to go. Kay, I’ve got you on your You are my Active Campaign insider. You are you if there’s anyone that has a pulse on what’s happening at Active Campaign in the platform. You’re my go to. I’m glad to have you on to tell us about you know what, what’s what’s up in the Active Campaign world? How you doing? Okay. Oh,

Kay Peacey 3:08
man, that was a lot of flattery in that intro. I’m down with that.

Kay Peacey 3:14
Yeah, you deserve it. You earned it. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a while since we’ve been on the podcast. And I know Yeah, we could talk about marketing and automation just all day. So I think half an hour we got off pretty lightly there.

Unknown Speaker 3:30
Yes, yes. Yes. Oh, so

Kay Peacey 3:33
yeah, Active Campaign world. Interesting things have been happening in Active Campaign land. And you guys know, I’m completely obsessed with it. It’s the only platform I work with in ESP world and automation world. This sort of high level perspective where you’re looking at multiple platforms across this whole range. I’m very zoomed in. I’m looking just to Active Campaign aware of its position in the market, but really looking just at Active Campaign with this very critical friend i. So I’m not afraid to call them out when they do stuff that I think is less than ideal. But I’m also their biggest evangelist and champion. And it’s it that’s an interesting place to be and it’s where I’m at my happiest. Definitely.

Chris Davis 4:23
Yeah. I share those sentiments with you. I think that they need every every every software platform needs evangelists to hold them accountable. And keep them honest. Yes, yeah.

Kay Peacey 4:39
Yeah, yeah. So in schools in the UK, we have a system of governance and every state school is required to have a governing body and the governing bodies job is to do exactly that to hold the staff at that school accountable and say, You are here to serve the children at this school. And to me, I see my place in relation to Active Campaign. In that same way, I am the critical friend. So I’m outside of the organization looking in, but always there to represent the user. I and I have been right from the very start. And what’s really nice now is that my, my sort of status and stature in the Active Campaign community just means that I have a little bit more clout I’m a bit more listened to, than I used to be in that feels really good. So yeah, I think it’s been an interesting patch. In active campaigns relationship with users, we’ve seen a lot of change on the pricing that has been. Where do you want me, Chris?

Chris Davis 5:35
Let’s start there, okay, because I have to say, I know the value, I know the value of marketing automation. And I am not afraid or opposed to paying top dollar. I was one that pay $2,000 as a Kickstarter fee to Infusionsoft, which is now keep and pay $300, a month, before my business was really profitable. And I looked at it as an investment. So I’m no stranger to paying top dollar for platform. But I’ll let you let you speak on et. Que, from my vantage point, you know, looking at LinkedIn and social and just across the board, there was so much confusion and and so much disappointment and how they did it. I think, for the most part, those of us who really know how to leverage it are okay, paying a little more. But how you get us to pay more is really where you can lose, you lose a lot of people.

Kay Peacey 6:38
Yes, I completely agree. I think communication has has been the weakest thing that I’ve seen from Active Campaign in 2023. And, and that’s really hard for me to see that unfold is really hard. Because I’m an evangelist for this platform. And because I completely wholeheartedly believe it, it’s it’s excellent value, even at the top end current pricing, this platform is worth every penny of that, if you’re leveraging it, right. I think where we’re seeing so much difficulty is on two levels. One is the communication. But the other level on which we’re seeing difficulty for users is people who have been using the platform, maybe for quite a long time, and who came in on lower pricing on lower legacy pricing and have been sort of coasting with the platform. So there may be just scratching the surface. This is a phrase, I hear a lot people who are aware that they’re just scratching the surface of what this tech can do. And I’m really until the pricing increases of 2023 happens, you could get away with doing that because you weren’t paying the you weren’t paying the actual value of the product at that time. So yeah, we’ve had two major changes to the pricing with Active Campaign in 2023. The first one happens straight out of the box in January, like I literally came back from holiday day one, oh, my God, everything has changed. It was actually overall a really positive change for users. Because what it did was separate out the CRM, part of Active Campaign from the marketing automation part of Active Campaign. And that is something that is actually really good for users, because so many businesses don’t use the deals and pipelines part of Active Campaign, often because they actually don’t know how, which is another topic of conversation. But what was happening a lot was that people were paying for these higher levels, and then just not using those products at all those features of the product. So it separated out into marketing, which is all of your automations, custom fields, tags, all the stuff that pretty much everyone uses. And then sales, which was the CRM and pipelines and the more b2b features like accounts as well. There are not that many businesses even on Pro and Enterprise who are using those features. So to me, it made sense for that change to happen.

Chris Davis 9:04
Yeah, right. Yeah. I, you know, I was a bit taken aback because it was felt so abrupt, right. And then I don’t think their sales page or their pricing page did a really good job. I should say they didn’t even do a bad job. It was like a horrible job at explaining what’s what what you get in each level, but to your point, I saw it. I said, Okay, yep, it makes sense. decouple the couple of this, the CRM, you know, and things like that. So, yeah,

Kay Peacey 9:40
the delivery of it was fumbled. I think it was very, very abrupt. And so it came pretty much out of nowhere for users, including me. That one caught me off guard I did not know that was coming. And then because the pricing page in its first iterations It was muddy, it just it wasn’t clear what you were getting and what had changed for users. So whenever whenever I just complain, do something like that I try and see it as an opportunity. So I ended up taking going and spent, I spent two days trying to decipher what does this mean, for users? I mean, two full days. And I’m, I’m in people’s inboxes, active campaigns, with with all of those nitty gritty questions, what if this particular situation arises? What does that mean for that user? Where do they sit? Now? What does it mean, if they were on the all in one product, and then they change their contact limit? What’s going to happen then? And so there were lots of really detailed questions that had to be answered there. And I was able to take that and reframe the whole thing, and put up a blog about it. And actually, what we found was that people were going to my blog instead of to the Active Campaign pricing page, because it was doing a better job of it. And actually, that I have to be honest, that situation should not arise. That shouldn’t happen.

Chris Davis 11:01
Now, let me say this. Everybody listening, if you haven’t heard of Kay before, and again, I said in the intro, she has an academy Active Campaign Academy, what you will find is that there are oftentimes people who are actually helping the small businesses who are actually using the software that understand it in a more contextual, it means that can help you navigate the tool a lot better. I’ve got a podcast episode where I talk about how marketing companies don’t, aren’t who you should go to for marketing. They’re soft, I should say, marketing software, they’re there to create software, they’re not there to help you grow your business, although they try they shouldn’t. But although they try. And I say all that to say everybody, this is the importance of knowing K, and knowing a variety of people that use the tools that you use extensively, because there were a lot of people, okay, I’m always on LinkedIn. And there are a lot of people posting about the pricing and doing write ups. And when I went to him, I mean, they were just sloppy, you know, is just kind of the first to go. But the fact that you took your time took two days to write it and saw that people were going to that instead, listen, these are the type of people that you all need to be following if you’re using Active Campaign, because a person like que is not only going to take the time and make sure that it’s accurate. But you also did your due diligence and reached out to support and you know, got your clarification from from the company as well.

Kay Peacey 12:40
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, for me might one of my strengths is I’m working with small businesses, from very tiny, one person, people who are making craft and selling that right through the small to medium business spectrum, and then up to sort of global corporate sized businesses as well. So that means that I see this huge range of user experiences. And it’s super interesting to me that there is really strong commonality across all of those users in where they get stuck on the platform. What are the things that don’t make sense to them about ways stuff is presented. And so that day, when the pricing change came out in January, I went to look at the pricing page, and I was like immediately on email to Active Campaign. Like, you need to fix this because you’re just gonna have absolute chaos of people not understanding what this means. Because if I don’t understand it, yeah, completely immersed in Active Campaign, if I’m going to read and understand what you’re telling me. There’s something wrong here. Yes. And listen, everybody. Me changed it really quickly.

Chris Davis 13:50
Yes, listen, I reached out to que me. Okay. Let me just do a refresher for everybody who forgot. I was the Director of Education at ActiveCampaign. It was my sole purpose to educate the company on how to use the software as well as the user. So many of you have seen me in the videos. I may still be on some. I Chris L. Davis, former director of education. You okay, we if I had a screenshot I put it up right now. I reached out to Kane. I was like, what does this mean? What is going on?

Kay Peacey 14:32
was crazy. To me crazy. I had so many active campaign partners. What just happened? Yeah, what? What does this mean? What does it mean for us? Yes.

Chris Davis 14:47
So with that being said, give us the summary. Hopefully by the time this episode airs, it’s been a lot clearer. But even even if not, we’re gonna make Make sure that everybody is taken care of what what are the main points that any existing Active Campaign user should know about the new pricing?

Kay Peacey 15:10
Okay, perfect question. First thing to understand is you’ve got legacy users, so people who are on the older all in one product, and then you’ve got people who have already moved to or started with the new product model. Okay? So the original one was, if you started your active campaign account anywhere up to January 2023, you’re on the original all in one product. Okay, if you’ve purchased since you started a fresh account, since January 2023, you will have come straight in on the new model. Alright. And the key differences, the old one, I’m gonna call it a Legacy product is an all in one, it had all of the features. And it had these levels, you could get light plus pro or enterprise, but it was always a single product, and you had a contact limits thrown in there as well, right? Over here in the new model, they’ve split it, we’ve now got two bits. Okay. And the best way we found to understand it was that one of them is the cake. And the other one is the icing on the cake. All right. The cake is the marketing. That’s the main functions of Active Campaign automations, custom fields, tags, emails, the stuff that is the meat and drink of marketing. Okay, that’s all in the marketing component. And that’s the one that pretty much everyone needs. Then if you wanted it, you could have the icing on the cake, too, which is called sales. If you get both bits together, that’s roughly equivalent to the all in one. Okay, yep. Yep. And if you get both bits together, they call it the bundle. So what we’ve got now is, the original Legacy product is roughly equivalent to the bundle product in the new pricing model. Okay. All right. And it’s hard for people to understand because the way it’s laid out on the sales page, on the pricing page for Active Campaign makes that really hard to understand. Because it actually lists it as the marketing product. Then the sales product, because technically, you can buy the sales product on its own. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know anyone. reliever. Tell me like, if you’re listening to this, and you’ve got the sales only come find me because I want to know what you’re

Speaker 2 17:27
doing, please. Yes. Because I don’t I can’t

Kay Peacey 17:31
see a use case where you would get sales on its own. And I think that’s where the the waters got really, really muddy. Yeah. Because it gets complicated then between marketing only sales only, or the bundle product. And then you’ve got Legacy product in there as well. And there are differences in how many users you can have and what the contact limits are. And the pricing is really hard to visualize. Yeah, so I think the main challenge there was to simplify it as far as possible. Okay, so that was why I wrote the blog, which has, you know, a grid where you can actually see all of the different pricing in one place, and try and make a decision based on what features you actually use, how many contacts you have, and then figure out what you should be paying now. Right? Yeah,

Chris Davis 18:21
yeah. Don’t worry, everybody. Oh, go ahead. I’m sorry. Okay, go ahead.

Kay Peacey 18:26
Sorry. Yeah, I was just to say the other complication was that if you were on the legacy pricing Originally, the thing that really threw everyone who had been using Active Campaign for a long time was that if you then changed your contact limit, or your plan level at all, you were straight into the new pricing over here,

Chris Davis 18:47
that now that was the biggest thing, what I was gonna say real quick is Don’t Don’t worry, everybody we’re gonna have the link will have the link to that blog post that that k is mentioning. So we have used in the show notes. But that piece right there, K is where I started to feel the friction, right? Because if we go back historically, Active Campaign disrupted the space by providing a level of flexibility and functionality in the Small Business CRM, CRM landscape. That was at a price point that was practically unbelievable. That is how they stay. That’s how they became who they are. Now. That’s only half the story. The other half is power users like myself, would jump on and really test its limits. And we would be we were evangelists, me and Barry more, very more. We had the automation nation Facebook group and everything. You had the podcast, and we were really strong evangelists, and we weren’t the only ones but there are a ton of early adopters that have a heavy Hand in the success of Active Campaign, because they didn’t have to do much marketing, they just had to do product development. And we were essentially their marketing force. Right? Yeah. So to do pricing in a way, that your legacy, the folks that late, they’re early bricks, their pricing is gone, and not communicate that here’s the thing, it’s one thing to remove grant grandfathered pricing, we don’t see that often K, we really don’t see that often, that grandfathered pricing is not removed. But when we do see it, there’s usually some communication that says, hey, you’re on a legacy plan. We’re changing this, here’s what to look forward to. But the fact that there was none of that, you know, was tough. It was a tough pill to swallow.

Kay Peacey 20:48
Yeah. And that’s where the critical friend in me gets antsy about it because it hurts, it hurt a lot of music. Because I care about users, I really do I feel their pain. And it was really painful to see a lot of people who were, for example, about to go up a contact limit, or who were just about to move to plus, if they had known that that change was coming, they could have made that change earlier, or reconfigured what they were going to do to accommodate this knowing that their pricing was going to change, they were going to have to think about what features they actually needed. There was a lot of decision making that needed to go into it if you had to make a change. With no warning at all. It felt really unfair. And I think it was unfair.

Chris Davis 21:33
Yeah, I think that’s the best word for it. Right? Just felt unfair. And in. So I finished up the premium premium podcast. And I’m pretty sure I talked so many places, I can’t remember where I say stuff anymore. Okay, but I’m pretty sure I was on my premium podcast. And I mentioned that though we were hurt, you know, we’re still there. However, you’re going to have to be careful how you treat your people, because the technological landscape is changing. And there are certain things that I can now do without Active Campaign that I used to have to rely on Active Campaign to do. So it’s no longer I just got to take it, because there’s nothing else out there. The landscape is maturing and developing fast. So you really have to be sure that you treat the people. It’s like, um, when I was in fast food, I used to work at McDonald’s. And they would always tell us that a person in the store is more valuable than a person calling. And then when I went and worked in retail, they said the same thing. If there’s somebody in the store, they’re more important than the person calling in, because that person may never drive in they are here we are the people in the store. Don’t treat the people calling or the new people better than the ones that have really helped build that foundation, you know,

Kay Peacey 23:00
yeah. And I put users in such a difficult position, because they were not given time to make this it’s really important business decision. Whether you know how much you’re paying for your, your marketing automation software? Should you consider migrating? Do I need to go up a level and get these extra features? Or do I need to come down a level and not keep paying for stuff that I’m not using? These are not straightforward decisions? They are complex, they require usually some outside expertise from someone like me who knows it intimately? And who can just answer your question, like you describe to me what you’re doing in your business, I can tell you exactly what active campaign plan you need to figure that out from the pricing page on its own is really, really tough, and that it takes time to make those decisions. So to put users in a position where they were not given any time to do that, that felt really difficult for the Active Campaign user community. And we saw a lot of fallout from that in Active Campaign communities, right across the board. And you

Chris Davis 24:04
have to be careful, okay, because the the marketing automation space with the inception of, you know, AI, and other competitors, like go high level, huge. There’s a lot of people that were just kind of waiting for reason to leave and try the competitor or you know, try something else. So it’s a tough one. So let me say this. Okay. One of the things with the pricing that came to the surface, is how contact how you’re charged for contacts, right? Yeah. So if if those those of you if you don’t know, Active Campaign handles this the right way, I believe. Whereas if you have a contact in your database, but they’re not subscribed to any list, you don’t pay for them, so they can still go to automations they can’t receive emails or anything, but they can still go to automations received He could put notes on their record and everything. This is especially important for those of you who have your CRM integrated with like your LMS, or website and all that. But understanding that, because now with this new pricing, there’s a contact limit that once you exceed it, and you go to the next level, you’re automatically on the new pricing. So I wanted to talk strategically for a moment and see how you’ve been handling this and how you’ve been instructing people to keep their lists nice and clean. So that if they do go over, it’s with engaged leads, in that tire kickers that, you know, haven’t unsubscribed but aren’t opening emails.

Kay Peacey 25:42
Yeah, it’s that’s a drum I’ve been banging for a very long time. Very, the first course that I put out that you could buy independently, instead of hiring me as a consultant was to deliver better deliverability and engagement with Active Campaign, because keeping your contact list tight, is all connected, it’s intimately connected with deliverability. And the engagement of contacts with emails, and deliverability is so fundamentally important, because if your emails are not getting delivered, delivered to the inbox, then what the heck is the point, they can do nothing if they’re not getting delivered. Alright, so I’ve been talking about deliverability a lot. And it’s really interesting to me that when it suddenly becomes a case of, you’ve got to get your contact limit under control, or it is going to cost you money right now. People understand that in a different way. I have not needed to do my deliverability rant so much, because people really small businesses really understand intuitively and very quickly, if they are carrying a lot of dead weight in their contact list, which the vast majority of Active Campaign accounts are right now, carrying a lot of zombie contacts, right. And they’re either unsubscribed from all lists. So they’re not costing anything, but they’re just cluttering the place up zombie laying around in there and coming up in your searches in segments. Or they’re still subscribed to a list, but they’re not opening anything. And those guys, I’ve seen accounts with 10s of 1000s of them in there. And all of a sudden, everyone’s just woken up and gone. Oh, I forgot anything about contact reduction? Like yes. The Academy, you know, we have, we have some very active training and threads in there that are all about contact cleaning, and what are the steps you need to go through from clearing out the very obvious bots and bounced contacts and dead weight, right down to the really more nuanced stuff of someone who has once been a customer, but isn’t now or someone who is the customer now but never opens their emails. There are a lot of different decision points in there. And so, for us in the academy, I engage with every business who comes in and really helps them find their way through that maze to do the cleanup. And then they come out of it with a routine that they can run like once a month or something, go run this segment. Those guys delete these guys make a Facebook audience. These guys give them a tag leave them over there. Right? Yeah,

Chris Davis 28:20
I it was just a light mention, but the you all see the strategy just oozing out of K, you you literally just witnessed the teacher, the technician, and the AC expert all in one right there. Because what’s your what’s your saying that I caught is that though they aren’t on your list, and you may not be able to reach them via email, you can still add them to other channels. Okay, everybody, we are in the year of 2023. And beyond depending on when you listen to this. No longer are we relying on one channel called email to do all of our messaging. You have other options. Other ways, and I’ll say this case, as much as I didn’t like the delivery of the pricing. The piece that I did like that came out of it was that now there’s an increased focus and attention on the amount of context. Yeah, so I like

Kay Peacey 29:32
that one. Yeah, I’ve had this conversation with people of I can I can see the cherry on the cake here for me. Yes, it hurt a lot of people I would much rather it had been handled differently. But the there is a silver lining, which is this outcome that suddenly pretty much universally in Active Campaign land. Everyone’s suddenly paying attention to cleaning their list. That is great news, because everyone should have been doing that all along. Yeah, and they’re kind of almost like people doing it for the wrong reasons now because they’re doing it to save some money. But and it has this handy side effect that it means that emails are actually going to get delivered to the inbox. And I am all for that. Yeah, that’s absolutely, yeah. Because otherwise, we’re spending so much time and energy creating amazing automation sequences and beautiful emails. But unbeknownst to many users, then not getting delivered to the inbox. And that is heartbreaking.

Chris Davis 30:23
Yeah, me. Yeah, you know, okay, I deal with a lot of large databases. What’s the smallest database I’ve dealt with recently? Maybe 150k ish, you know, in, they’re still using, like small business, marketing automation software, like like Active Campaign, or klavier, or something else like that. And on average, K, on average, on average, half of those leads are unreachable, on Oh,

Chris Davis 30:55
average. So the bigger your list gets, it is not like you start reaching more and more people. And when I deliver this news to these companies, you there’s this term for list synth. This term comes from like, leaders in the corporation that have no idea how email works. In their mind, they just want to, hey, we’ve got a million leads, let’s make sure we’re emailing all of them. So they don’t quite understand how it works. And how deliverability, consistency, relevancy of content, clicks over opens things like we’re all verbs. So on average, and hopefully, this helps you all who are listening to let you know that it is not uncommon to have more than 50% of your leads. Not qualifying as engaged not now. Now, here’s the thing, okay. They’re still on the in the database. So now I have to deliver the news. It’s kind of like the doctor right afterwards, like, the report is in 50% of them are dead. And we’ve got to remove them, they’re like No, but to your point, once you remove those leads from being active, and start mailing, only the active one deliverability increases. And all of your active lead generation efforts, the new leads get to inherit that good reputation.

Kay Peacey 32:24
I know and it’s magical. Seeing that transformation is it’s a real pleasure. And it’s so consistent, we see it with pretty much every person, you brings an active campaign account into the Active Campaign Academy with me, we always address the cleanup early on, because everybody needs that you have to clear the decks, get the clutter out of the way and know what you’ve even got in your hands know the state of play with your account. And there’s a real pleasure in seeing an account go from being a sprawling tangled mess, where nobody, nobody really has a handle on what anything was doing in there. And deliverability is not great. And seeing that transform in the space of it’s usually three months period, depending on how complex that mess is and how much buy in, if they’ve got people above them in the business and they’ve got to get buy in from director level people it can take longer because it just takes time to for them to win the trust. But seeing that transformation to then this amazing cleaned up active campaign account where you can actually do stuff and build stuff and see what’s going on and see really clearly oh, these leads coming in from this lead magnet are great. They are converting really reliably. Let’s lean in to that. It just enhances what you can do with active campaigns. So so so much.

Chris Davis 33:49
Yeah, yeah. And everybody, we we’ve got Kay Peacey the number one a see expert in the space that we’re talking to right now. You see I just took the UK off now I just

Chris Davis 34:04
and and what’s happening, or what I want to communicate with you all is this. Know, if if you are ready to stop wasting your time. I am a strong proponent of community. And when you have a community that’s focused on the exact tool or thing that you’re trying to learn or use, you should join it without hesitation. Because here’s here’s the the opportunity cost here. How How valuable is your time? One? If you don’t have a value of your time, okay, then just leave the podcast now. But if you know the value of your time, how many hours are you willing to spend that equate to dollars wasted? Learning something that you could spend a fraction of that monthly and get access to a brain that It is bigger than k. It’s not just k in the community. It’s K and Company. Right? Like this is the collective brain. And I say that I’m not pitching. What I’m doing is, this is the unique advantage that we have now is that there are communities around these interests in these topics. You don’t have to settle. You know, asking your friend or asking blindly on a Facebook group, there’s dedicated spaces.

Kay Peacey 35:32
Americal really isn’t it. And it’s one of the great joys of the internet is that I can be here in rural southwest UK, sitting by the seat of my tiny little town. And I get to hang out with amazing talented business people from literally all over the world. And the only thing we have in common is that we happen to all use Active Campaign. That’s it, and the relationships and the connections that formed from that and the different things that people bring to the table, depending on where they sit in relation to their business, what’s what’s their business experience, what is their unique and special talent. It’s such a privilege to be the person who’s made that happen in this one specific community. And I totally agree that putting yourself in the community, you don’t have to use it like every day, you don’t have to be obsessed with Active Campaign because you have, the community can do that for you. Yes. And the longer those communities exist as well, when they’re searchable. This is where they get really special because as times gone on, when we’ve been open 18 months now, we have this incredible wealth of full use cases and specific scenarios in businesses. And we have the answers. They’re all in our community in our courses. You just got a search, put in the search words, it’s going to come up for you. Yep. Tutorial is right there waiting for you.

Chris Davis 36:56
Yep. I love it. I love it. Okay, why? Why we’re there. I wanted to ask, you’ve got a community of Active Campaign users of all varieties, right? In all business types. Are there any trends that are are standing out to you are any things that you kind of want to mention to the Active Campaign user that’s not in your community and not connected like that? Are you seeing an uptick in automations? Like, just the floor is yours? Is there anything that you like to share from your vantage point of having access to so many accounts and so many business owners?

Kay Peacey 37:36
Oh, that’s really interesting question. One of the areas I find most interesting watching the development as people step into the academy is the connection with E commerce. So Active Campaign has this really rich, juicy integration with certain e commerce platforms? Not all of them, if you’re on WooCommerce is the most common one. Shopify is another big one. Big commerce, I think, easy digital downloads, as well, as this really it, I call it an intimate integration, because it’s get all of the information about every purchase, every transaction is straight, they’re inactive campaign. Yeah. So what I’m seeing is, the companies, the businesses who are using those platforms are often not using the integration because they don’t know about it. And when you tell someone about that integration, and you get it in place, which is like a five minute job, it’s the whole world explodes with possibility. abandoned cart stuff, follow up stuff, membership stuff, it’s all there on a plate. And it’s like handing someone a massive toy box of all their favorite stuff and a big garage to drive toy cars around. And they’re like, Oh, my God, look what I’ve got to play with. Yeah. So I’m seeing I’m seeing a trend in the businesses who are getting the most value from Active Campaign right now, in my opinion, are the small to medium businesses who are doing e commerce and who get that tight integration coming. Nice. Right? And even if they’re not with one of those ecommerce platforms, you can do it using deals and pipelines instead. So if you can get some Zapier skills in there, and you can make that happen using some of the other and I just I feel like that’s the sweet spot for Active Campaign right at the moment.

Chris Davis 39:36
No, that’s good. I know, I’m, I’ve had personal experience, by no intentional choosing of my own. I’ve been in this e commerce space for years now. I guess I could really claim to be an expert. I mean, some of the things that I do or even I’m like, wow, I didn’t even know and it all revolves around segmentation. because you can pull so much data in, you know, as an E commerce owner, you want all of it, you want number of orders, data last time, you don’t do they can’t give you last time in order was placed. But you know, you run an automation that just timestamps a date field that says last order. You know, make sure that whenever there’s an order placed, that’s the start trigger goes in, and just timestamps, you can have that. So where you can have time, between orders and all of that. But I will say it gives you so much so much information from those from those e commerce platforms is great to hear you say that because I think, again, outside more agnostic and even more general to technology, I’ve been seeing a very strong uptick in E commerce, whether it be physical products, or even just courses are digital products. I’ve been seeing that uptick. And I welcome it. I welcome it. I do I think, you know, Amazon blazed a trail and Shopify has done a great job really penetrating the market, with enabling people to say, hey, look, be your own Walmart, right? Be your own Amazon, don’t rely on them sell your own stuff. So that’s refreshing to see. Last thing, last thing, Kay? I feel like I know the answer to this before I ask. But it’s, I have you, I have you and I want everybody else to experience this too. One of the strongest, most powerful features of any marketing automation platform, is the ability to personalize your marketing to increase the effectiveness of your marketing. In order to do so one must use segmentation accurately. Okay. So here comes the question. Have you heard anything big on the segmentation front, from Active Campaign do well, we get a segment manager, so

Kay Peacey 42:16
I’m still asking for a segment manager, we don’t have one yet. And by a segment manager, we’re talking about segment with a capital S, meaning being specific objects in Active Campaign. And just to get technical from wanting to send a campaign email to a chunk of your contacts, you need to build a segment. And right now in Active Campaign, it’s really hard to see your segments. And Chris and I have had this as a running joke for what, six years now? I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t personally understand why we don’t have that. I don’t understand why technically, that is such a challenge. I do understand the fact that segments as a technical data object live kind of somewhere in between contacts, and contact data, and lists and searches. It’s complicated. And I’m not a developer. Right? So there’s a barrier in there somewhere, we would love to see that go away.

Chris Davis 43:19
Oh, okay. I can’t even tell somebody where to access their segments, they’re looking for like a button to click that says segments, it doesn’t exist.

Kay Peacey 43:29
Chris, I have I have the faith I have the hope and I am there tell you what I am seeing I am seeing active campaigns, senior management, listening to users Good, good. I am feeling a sea change and a leaning in. Okay. So whilst I and I’m not speaking out of school here, because I’d tell Active Campaign this stuff to their face the whole time, like, you know, you guys, you gotta give us more notice if you’re gonna change the pricing, because it’s not okay. Small businesses don’t have the sort of cash flow, where we can suddenly decide to pay annually. In order to get around a pricing increase, we can’t do that. And and it’s not fair on users to change stuff without notice, okay? I have these conversations with them as much as I possibly can. And what I’m feeling as a user advocate is a shift in that I feel more heard by active campaign than I have ever done previously. So I’m taking this as a good sign. And I think it speaks well to the future. Because where I see this going is yes, pricing has changed. The the coasting on legacy pricing has pretty much gone, you might hold on to it for another year, but you’re not going to be able to hold on to it forever. You’re going to have to be paying at least a lot closer to current pricing for this amazing, incredibly powerful product. And what that means for many legacy users is they are suddenly going to pay attention to their contact limit. and they’re gonna pay attention to the feature set that they’re actually using. Because if they’re not using the feature set, or they’re carrying a lot of dead weight in contacts, it’s untenable to keep paying current pricing levels. So they’re going to either focus in on what they’re doing and get proper value out of it, or they’re going to migrate. Okay, so I think, you know, we are gonna see some people migrating, but the ones who stay are going to be leaning into this platform, which is incredible, boundless, a boundless playground for marketers. And all you need to do is get that little bit of support and education to equip you to be able to use the toys that you have to play with. Yeah,

Chris Davis 45:40
yeah. You. In closing, I want to mention one thing that you and I touched on prior to this podcast, and I want to include our listeners. And that was, you know, with the inception, and extremely fast evolution of artificial intelligence, you know, GPT, three, and four and chat GPT and implementing it into platforms. We saw HubSpot, make a power move, power move with getting a chatbot installed into their platform, haven’t tested it out, just you know, the founder put it on LinkedIn. Mind blowing, right? Hey, you could tell it to go get grab a segment of people who’ve taken this action and that action, and it will go do it for you. Oh, my goodness, just beautiful. Just the sound of it. So what we were talking about it and listeners, you may agree. But can you imagine a world where active campaign was doing similar? Right, creating that chat that AI experienced that could do some data analytics segment building and potentially even automation building on a very basic level, right. And they announced that along with their price increase. Now now, okay, that has a totally different feel. Because AI is so hot right now. It’s so you know, relevant and in demand, I don’t think you would have heard much of anything, I think people would have been so excited about testing out headlines and copy and all of this other stuff, that they will gladly pay the overage. And I bring this up, everybody is just a lesson to us business owners, founders, anybody who was going direct to consumer, that there are always opportunities, sometimes we just have to be a little more patient. I mean, who at Active Campaign could see that AI was going to take off like this, right? Perhaps somebody in there saw it and just wasn’t listened to. But if you can be in tune with the market, there’s a lot of times there’s something happening in the market, that you can just ride that wave to. and mitigate, if there’s a big change like this, you can mitigate it and make sure that even though I’m changing pricing, I’m also adding value, because old value doesn’t convert, add, like new value. You know, you can’t say, hey, this platform has been valuable for 10 years, we’re going to up the price because you know the value of it.

Kay Peacey 48:12
When the vast majority of users actually on a lot of the features, you know, Chris is still told, I tell people all the time about conditional content for emails, which is the most astoundingly powerful thing to have in emails. And in the new email designer for Active Campaign. I’m still calling it the new one. It was last year it came out. In the new email designer, you can do nested conditional content across whole sections of the emails. No, I

Chris Davis 48:47
didn’t know that. And that’s

Kay Peacey 48:49
probably something you didn’t. Okay, so conditional content in the new email designer is just astounding, it has really leveled up what it can do. But there’s, I found out that one of the reasons it was so late being added into the new email designer was because take up of conditional content is actually really low as a feature. And that makes me really sad. But it doesn’t surprise me because I spend so much time telling people, you could use conditional content to do that. You have conditional content and like, what

Unknown Speaker 49:23
were what? Yeah, yeah.

Kay Peacey 49:27
Yeah. So my mission continues to show people where the gold is in active campaign without them having to cry, swear or give up or migrate to a different platform because they think the grass is greener. Yeah. I appreciate that. It may look greener. I appreciate that Active Campaign is not always doing the best job it could of showing their value and communicating in a transparent timely way with users. But the value is there. Absolutely.

Chris Davis 49:56
There is there in as you mentioned, conditional content, it is just such a strong reminder everybody of how much is in the platform, right. And I want to take you all off the hook. Because when I was there at Active Campaign, I used to hear people say this, and I still hear people say this, this statement of, I know I’m not using it all. You don’t have you never will use all of the features. I hate use me that right. And there’s some features that I used to use that I no longer use. As long as you have access to the features that matter for your business now, and you’re aware, and you’re accurately leveraging them, you are leveraging the tool, exactly how it was created to be used. And with that being said, I want to reiterate what Kay said about conditional content, because it is something where I think we can safely say we’re beyond days of just emailing a list, email blasts are gone, your mailing segments now. And because you’re mailing segments, you have this ability to make your emails more contextual, to the behaviors that people have done, that you have tracked. So if we just dropped the new terminology on you, you’re like additional content. What does that mean? Again, you have a resource to go to. And with that being said, Kay, where can people we’ve mentioned that Academy, we’ve mentioned your expertise? Where can people go to connect with you and learn and find out more about your your community and your expertise?

Kay Peacey 51:39
Thank you. So we have a couple of free places, you can come find me and hang out. I’m on LinkedIn, which I’m actually loving. I’m doing more on LinkedIn these days. So you can just find me by name Kay Peace, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, we have a big free community for Active Campaign users. So everyone’s welcome in their house called automate your business with Active Campaign. We would love to see you in there. And then on my website at slick business.co, you will find some free resources, which includes accelerated Active Campaign, which is the most killer, quick run through the best cookies in the jar of Active Campaign. There is far none. Okay. Yeah. Is that’s helped 1000s of Active Campaign users, including actual active campaign staff to get to grips with that can get to that platform really fast and easy, right. And it shows you conditional content. And then the Active Campaign Academy is our signature program. Technically, it’s a membership. I like to think of it more as a subscription. It’s like a pay as you go for Active Campaign consultancy, because what you get is access to me. And my ridiculous obsession with Active Campaign means I can answer literally any active campaign question you have any day. We run Office Hours twice a week, which is a drop in Ask me anything. And we have a big bank of courses, tutorials, resources, helpful links, hundreds of screengrabs with annotation that solve the problems that every Active Campaign user has, right? Because I know the themes I know where everyone gets stuck. So I’m way ahead of you. And all it is, is we just drop a leg for like, oh, go do this, that will fix your problem. Or you got some business use case, we’re going to tell you okay, you need this bit this bit in this bit. Here they are. Come back if you get stuck.

Chris Davis 53:36
Yep. Yep. Great. Well, we’re going to do our due diligence and make sure that all of those links are in the show notes, everybody, so you don’t have to go scrambling trying to figure out everything. Kay, thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. It’s always a joy having you on. Thank you, Chris. Always a pleasure. Yes, yes. And to my listeners, thank you all for your time. Thank you for listening to this episode. And for everybody. Everybody. Automate responsibly my friends. I will see you all on the next episode.

Chris Davis 54:17
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 you 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