ActiveCampaign Updates for Q3 2023 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 0:33
welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis. And we have back for the third time everyone the third time our our very own I’m saying our because this is this is a family event. If you haven’t realized by now, you all have been listening, I’m meeting some of you in person now. This is like real community, real audio community. So we’ve got our very own Kay Peacey to come back and give us updates on all things. Active Campaign we’re talking about latest features a big update that I will let k display for saw and for those of you who are new to the podcast, and you’re like what family K What three times what did I miss? Let me do my proper introduction, Kay Peacey hone her email marketing automation skills to the very highest level over six years of consulting in training for small business. She’s a world leading Active Campaign specialist with a seat somewhere that I will not announce I’ll let her know where this new seat is. But she is the perfect person to help your business unlock bigger return on investments from your email marketing, automation. wiseness while keeping the human touch, she founded the Active Campaign Academy at her own company slick business and she’s also partial to using the Lego minifigs for paper aeroplanes to drive home the learning. Kay, welcome to the podcast again. Times three. How are you doing? And we can’t wait to hear about this new announcement of position that you have.

Kay Peacey 2:34
It’s been a great start to 2023. I am so happy to be back here with the automation family. I love being part of this. It’s just so exciting, isn’t it, Chris, that when we started out doing this automation, nobody even knew what that was. Now we have our very own automation family. And we’re right at the top table. That is exciting to me. very delighted to be here. Yeah. So yes, exciting news from Active Campaign. And this is something that users have needed and wanted for a really long time. But without necessarily being able to articulate what it was that was missing. I’m gonna say it was missing from the Active Campaign world. And it’s about this close connection that tech companies really need to have with the end users, they need to get tight with them. Because the people who use the platform every day, they know it in a really different way. The people who use the platform in real businesses to solve real problems. We know that tech, and we experienced that tech in a very different way to the engineers or the strategists at the company or the venture capital people, anything that’s going on behind the scenes. It’s like they’re the sales company for the car. We’re the people who are driving it every single day to get our daily stuff done. Right. So for a long time with Active Campaign, there was a disconnect. It started off great in the early days when active campaign was quite small. And then as it grows and get more and more more, more users and more people on the team and it’s growing. And that’s really exciting and fantastic. And the platform’s growing, the features are expanding, and then there’s a day can be a disconnect. And this is what happened with Active Campaign. And what I am delighted to say is that they have pulled back from that is they have now created their very first customer advisory board, bringing you real users and partners of the platform, the people who really care about the platform, but are not employed by Active Campaign, getting them right close to the people who are making the decisions and Active Campaign and listening to them. This is a revolution for users. It really is.

Chris Davis 4:48
Yeah, in case I’ll say this, you the the most important part for me, is that it relieves the weight that At a lot of software companies erroneously place on their employees, and understanding marketing, and real life use cases in the industry. Right? Yeah, they can get it straight from the horse’s mouth, people who are out here on the field, doing the thing, right?

Kay Peacey 5:19
Yeah, that, you know, that just nails it that nails, it’s so well of like, if people expect active campaign team members who may have only been with the platform for six months or a year, they often come to the support desk or to the advisor with an expectation that they, they’re going to be able to explain how to use Active Campaign to solve these real problems or get a return on investment in this specific situation. And it’s, to me, that’s an impossible ask of someone. Yeah, it’s not fair. It’s not fair to keep putting people in that decision and asking them to guide the development of the platform. Without having that experience. It’s basically in the trenches, right? You have to get in the trenches to really understand and feel and experience how a platform works in real life for real humans. And yeah, I think putting that handing that burden to me, I’ve been wanting this burden. I’ve been wanting to do this the whole time, I have been with Active Campaign, because as a teacher, I think it’s important. I’m a teacher, that is what I do, I spend my time thinking how can I make this thing easier and click for humans so that they can be able to just do it without crying and swearing and giving up? This is where the Lego and the paper aeroplanes come into it, you’re gonna have things explained in a way that the human brain can understand it. Engineers are not the best people to do that. As much as I love them. They do great work engineers are not teachers. So when you go into a platform, and you see things like a word that’s used in three different ways, and they all have different meanings, I can tell you immediately that is going to cause problems for every single person who sees that, and it’s not fair. Right? And it’s making life and totally, unnecessarily hard for everyone. So I’ve been dying to get to the top table and say to the people who are making the decisions, okay, you need to change this one word, and it will all fall into place. And hallelujah, we’re here. This is really exciting for me. Yeah. And,

Chris Davis 7:30
you know, to your point, there was what I believe, an unofficial advisory board in the very beginning. And it was just by the nature of them really listening to the audience. That’s how I got pulled in. Shout out to Adam Tuttle. But the first time I signed up for Active Campaign, it was accompanied with a personal call with Adam, who walked me through how people are using the platform, and and gave me some examples of some of their top users. And even when I said, Where are the tags that you know, I’m coming from Infusionsoft is nothing but tagline. And this was before active campaign had tags. And before you know it, like two to three weeks later, there’s tags, I was like, Whoa, this is like lightning speed, this platform. They’re listening in, they kept listening. And they kept listening, then at some point, and it always happens when there’s fundraising. And it’s not the money itself. It’s just like the demand of growth and scale and priorities shift. And before you know it, you become tone deaf, to the market that got you to the place that you are without realizing it. And it’s good to see them get back to themselves. Right. I’ve seen other companies K take years more longer than active campaign to really realize, oh, we stopped listening. Thus, we’re out of tune, we’re out of touch. And we need to write this wrong. So it’s unfortunate that it happens. But it’s always good to see a course correction. Tell me this. For the there may be somebody listening, like wait a minute, I’ve got so many good things to say about active. Good it. I’ve got so much good advice, and so many people that I’m helping, how do I get on the advisory board? Not that I’m asking you for active campaigns process, but how was that with you? Was it just a simple reach out like, hey, Kay, would you like to join something special? Was it something that’s been in the works for a while? How did you experience the onboarding of this opportunity?

Kay Peacey 9:32
That’s kind of a hard one for me to answer like I as far as I’m aware, I My understanding is that they will be bringing new people on to the customer advisory board each year. Because it’s really important to have representation from people who are in the different branches of Active Campaign users, if you like so, people who are coming from the partner applications people who are resellers, people who are enterprise level users someone like me who’s like in the head of the small business users, and then just a small business user who’s not like a meta person like me, but who’s in there really experiencing the platform. And I’m not party to the criteria they use. But I see this lovely representation. And I know that there’s a really strong intention to make that better. I think my journey to it has just been completely unique. If I’m honest, I don’t think there’s anyone else who is quite so obsessed with Active Campaign and doesn’t work for them. It’s weird. I don’t know what to tell you. I have been at them this whole time, putting myself in that place of bringing them things that they need to hear, you know, like, the critical friend, sometimes you need to hear stuff from someone who really cares and wants desperately wants really meaningfully wants success, not just for that piece of tech, but for for the people who use that tech, and someone who can bridge that gap. And I’ve always done that, right, from really early on. And, to me, this is the culmination of many years of representing users and advocating and showing that the knowledge that a meta user like me has is really deeply valuable and necessary to the success of a platform like Active Campaign to maintain that closeness with users.

Chris Davis 11:33
Yeah, so So key takeaway, everyone, there’s a advisory board that is hand selected, and very diverse. These are all words that you’re listening for, to be excited about, whenever there’s a company that wants representation of the marketplace, or access to that, to better improve the product. So this is this is great again, congratulations, Kay. The second, I caught wind from you. I was extreme, it made perfect sense. I was like, this is a no brainer. It, you know, should have happened a year ago or you know, but whatever things happen when they happen. But so glad that you’re you’re on there. And in that is there, is there anything that you can share with us that not release dates or anything, but maybe priorities focused conversations that we can be privy to in terms of things that may be coming down the pipe, as well as some some of the newest, newer things that are being have been released.

Kay Peacey 12:38
So I can definitely talk about things that have recently come out that a very, very user centered, and the thing I’m excited about going forward from there is that the things that I’m party to as part of the CIB process are very intentionally user focused. Yeah, that’s the bit that most makes a difference for me. And that I know, I’m 100% confident that things are going to improve for users regularly going into the rest of 2023. And that’s amazing. So things like things that have changed already, we’ve got multi select on tags, when we’re, and this is gonna sound really obscure. But when you’re looking for a segment of people who have this tag, and this tag, and this tag, and this tag, he used to have to put them in one at a time, that can get really tiresome. But now we’ve got if you can just take the tags. And that’s like a revolution.

Chris Davis 13:35
So simple was so effective. I haven’t used it yet, because I rarely use it. Okay, because I can only look at one tag. So I always go into the segment builder. So that’s a list drop down, right? Very rarely you

Kay Peacey 13:47
it’s been actively these restraints have been actively preventing users from doing more complex and ambitious things, because it was just too painful to do them. And I’m the same this stuff, I just don’t go near it, because I’m just like, I just cannot deal with that interface. It’s gonna take me half an hour, and I have not got the patience. I’m just gonna find some other way to do it. Yeah, so I know where all these holes are, right. And what’s really interesting and exciting is seeing Active Campaign fixing those things. And not only that, but going a step further and making them much much better than than even we would have hoped for. There’s a really trivial example I’m going to throw in there which is alphabetize ation, just having a drop down when it comes out. And it’s in like the order these things were made. That does not help the humans who are trying to work with Active Campaign and are squishy idiot brains who need to scroll through stuff and find it alphabetize stuff and magically, a whole load of stress and problem goes away. So this and this comes back to what we were saying before, which is the engineers and salespeople and technicians and company development people who are amazing strategists and brilliant grown neck company that if they’re not in there using that platform every day, they’re not feeling that pain in the same way. You got to feel the pain, identify the facts, tell someone you can fix it. Fix gone. Yeah, that’s the magic that’s play here.

Chris Davis 15:13
That’s perfect, because they’re strategizing from that technical vantage point. And then because they’re strategizing the developers and product folks, because they’re strategizing, and building from that perspective, they know, they’re like, Oh, well just do this. It’s like, no, the end user, by the time that feature reaches the end user, they don’t know that that’s what went behind it in all of this coding. And that’s how it’s supposed to display. They’re just confused, because they just created a tag, it started with a W. And all of a sudden, they don’t know where it’s at, they can’t find it. Because it’s by some method of date created or, you know, whatever the case may be, we’re now I, alphabetically I can say, oh, W, let me just take this little bar, and just drag it all the way to the bottom, because I know w is at the end of the alphabet,

Kay Peacey 16:06
you know, yeah. And what’s really lovely is seeing the there’s an uplift in feeling, you can feel it in the Active Campaign communities. So there’s the big Active Campaign official Facebook community, where you see that there’s definitely less grumbling already, this sort of cranky, downward emotion is lifting, I feel like a cloud is moving on. And I’m certainly feeling that in my community on Facebook and in replies, I’m getting my emails is different, it feels like we have an optimism. And we’re now able to start thinking about our wishlist items, which is where we go even another notch up from there. So something brand new, that’s just come out. And I know I tagged you in the post on this, because I knew he’d be interested in this is list status. Yeah. So just to go into a little bit of background for the non active campaign people lists of weird in Active Campaign in some ways, it’s historically it’s been a bad idea to have a lot of lists for all sorts of reasons. But one of them was that we weren’t able to search easily to check someone’s status on any given list, like, are they hard bounced? Have they? Are they actively subscribed to it? Have they unsubscribed from it? What else have they never been added to it in the first place. And these are subtle things that a lot of people inside Active Campaign, I think, did not, we’re not aware that users really needed to know, they needed to be able to search on this stuff. And this week, just this week, we have now got a really thorough, well worded set of list conditions. And it has revolutionized how, how we can clean up contacts who should not be there or recognize contacts who should be there and are valuable to us and check where they’re at in terms of at least subscribe, can we send them emails or not? What’s going on? We can search on all that stuff. And that happened this week. Hallelujah. Yeah, this

Chris Davis 18:07
this is this is huge. And I feel like the people who really appreciate this are the people who appreciate it clean list. Right? If you don’t appreciate in the appreciation of the clean list comes from knowing how much better your deliverability is, how much sharper your marketing is, when you’re marketing to people who actually are engaging. I think that’s where this really hits home, right? Because now, when I’m going to clean up my list, or even identify what my true list size is, you know, there’s still people that look at the all list, they don’t even know on the dashboard, you can hit that little drop down and select from all the active. Now we’ve got even more granularity that says, okay, within that active bunch, who has been on this list, who’s bounced who’s never been added to this list. So you can just start to identify holes for me when we were engaging on LinkedIn. And I was just asking for use cases, it was a little harder for my mind to go around it. And I’m, I’m a little unicorn in this right low bias because I used to be the Director of Education at active campaigns. So I had to know all of the rules. And one of them was, every contact must exist on at least one list. That was one of the first statements I was saying, onboarding when new employees would start so that they would understand. So I didn’t have a lot of use cases where contacts were in my database and not on a list. Because I had this rule of thumb ringing, every contact must exist on at least one list. So even if the integration didn’t do it, the automation did it. However, when you’re out in the wild, and these automation, or these integrations are just tagging context. That’s it. They don’t add them. You know, you brought this To my awareness que and I was like, Oh, wow. So now you can go and do your maintenance and in short and find those holes. Those are those integrations that you need to couple of automation that subscribes them to a list, or just holes. Wait a minute, they should have been on this list. After they did this, what happened? Now you can go troubleshoot.

Kay Peacey 20:22
Yeah. And it’s it’s so massively important. And I know you touched on deliverability, which is critical, we need our emails to actually get to the inbox or what the heck is the point of all that effort, that’s important. We need our people to be engaged, read them to click on the emails, that’s really important, too. And it’s more rewarding to us if our audience is engaged, because then we feel great. Like, yeah, everyone loves me and my business, I’m great. But as well as that, we need to keep an eye on the cost of our Active Campaign accounts, and your counts of contacts who are actively subscribed to at least one list. That’s the defining thing to the cost of your active campaign account. So you need to be able to keep a very tight handle on that, especially since all the pricing changes, that’s become dramatically more important to Active Campaign people to do that. And this change just makes all of that possible in a way that it wasn’t and I have come across. So many accounts have come in either when I was doing before when I was doing consulting, but also into my Active Campaign Academy. People come in, because they know they’ve got some issues like they’ve discovered, they’ve looked under a rock, they’ve hit that show me all contacts, and they’ve found 40,000 contacts who are not subscribed to any list. And they’re like, Whoa, where did they come from? What are they doing here? How did they get here? Were they ever on the list? Or did they unsubscribe from a list? Now we can tell the difference? That’s the first time we’ve had that ability inside Active Campaign.

Chris Davis 21:56
Yeah, that’s good. I mean, just a simple is not on lists, and has never been added to lists, just those has never be possible.

Kay Peacey 22:07
And I’m, you know, I am happy. I am proud to say that I was involved in the conversation that got that wording pinned down and made that happen, because we’ve lobbied hard for that for a very long time. And that shift in in intention, from Active Campaign to listen to, and to respect and value the experience of users is a palpable change.

Chris Davis 22:31
Yeah, yeah, they’re very, very well, you know, there’s another feature that I wanted to just bring up and make sure that everybody is privy to I try to use the so everybody, we bring K on at least quarterly. And if you all want to hear more from K, feel free to email us and let us know. But we try to bring on at least quarterly to make sure that you are up to speed with all things Active Campaign. And an A one of the features that I realized maybe a month ago was automating one to one emails. So I know this has more of a sales trend to it. But it’s it’s using an automation you. So historically, everybody automations are one too many emails. But now within an automation, you can have a one to one conversation, which in my mind for sales, prospecting is probably the most applicable use case for it. But I wanted to highlight that, that feature, just so people know what’s available and give you the floor k and if if you’ve seen people use it, or if that’s opened up any other opportunities or possibilities?

Kay Peacey 23:46
Great question. And it is a brilliant feature. It the first thing I want to say about that is it’s only available on Pro and above plans, it’s only Pro and Enterprise, you have access to this. And that’s really important to know. Because on the lower level plans, you can still send personal one to one emails. But it’s a much more manual process, we have a feature called Saved responses where you can do pretty much the equivalent thing where you’re going to put some copy into an email, it’s there and you can was saved responses, you can tweak it for every send, but you can’t automate that you can you can have it like you can respond, but then you have to go send it for that specific content, that contact sorry, what’s different with the what they call a one to one personal emails is that you can put them inside an automation. So it creates this wonderful process of a one to one very personalized email conversation, but it’s much more automated meaning you can scale it up a lot better. Now, I’m not seeing a lot of people using this because in my world right now the majority of my Active Campaign Academy members are typically using plus, the plus level of campaigns don’t have access to that feature. The ones I do see using it on pro one of the major wins with it is the the replies the conversation is now threaded. So that’s a big improvement because it’s made it fit. I’m trying to think, what’s the quantity, the qualitative change, being able to do this in automations is that it now feels like what it is, which is a real conversation in a real inbox. And we can automate it without that showing on the surface. So we can scale up while still being and appearing authentically, completely human and one to one, you can even take it further, if you get really swishy, you can start to use custom contact fields, to put in a paragraph of text that’s specific to that one, contact. So if you want to take it a level up, you can go up from there and all there is some power under that hood.

Chris Davis 26:02
Yeah, so So those of you who often have this statement, Oh, I see other people doing automation. But But I can’t do that, because I have to be personal. With my outreach, my marketing has to be personalized, you’re starting to be equipped with more and more tools and tactics to be able to achieve that at scale. So now you can have one to one at scale, not one too many. But you can have multiple one to one threads going now. And let the automation do the heavy lifting for you. So that was that was a good one to see. Anything else? Kay, any small UI changes or interface tweaks or like you said, alphabetizing, things of that nature that we should be mindful that you know, sometimes they just drop it in there. And you got to kind of stumble upon it and be like, hey, wait a minute, I think I can now do this.

Kay Peacey 27:00
I hate I hate and sometimes this happens to me live. So we’ve run Office Hours calls twice a week in the ActiveCampaign. Academy. And you can you can they can bring anything and often we’re screen sharing, and someone will be doing something, I’ll be like, wait, what? Put go back? What was that? What was that? One of the ones I saw recently? Was a segmentation condition for text fields. And the condition, there’s an option in the middle one where you can choose contains any of Yeah, I was like, wait, what that? How does that work? Because I had never seen it before. That a complete double take, and then had to get back in the thread of the conversation. But afterwards, I followed it up and you can put in a list of comma separated values. And it will return with a yes. If the text value contains any of your common separated items. Oh,

Chris Davis 27:58
let me What can we do with that we could look for oh my gosh,

Kay Peacey 28:02
yeah. Anything from a selection of postcodes, or yeah, there’s Yeah,

Chris Davis 28:07
I had one use case, there was a company very large database. That just seems to be, you know, I, people don’t know it by looking in, I guess by following me. But I tend to attract big databases, right? Like, Hey, Chris, I’ve got a million you. And it’s like, how, how did you? I would you know,

Kay Peacey 28:30
but it’s because it’s so trustworthy crew, right.

Chris Davis 28:34
So I had this database, and it had deliverability issues. And what we wanted to do was isolate the sending to particular email addresses to understand our domains to understand which one of these were the culprit of driving down the deliverability. And it was your usual outlook.com. I clouds, sometimes Yahoo. And Hotmail is like any Microsoft email usually drives it down, and Gmail within like, out of 90 days, tight timeframe, windows, they get really, really restrictive. Gmail is like, hey, look, they haven’t opened one of your emails in the last two months. No more. So Gmail, it has better deliverability. But they get strict quick not to turn this into a deliverability episode. But I bring that up to say, can you imagine Kay, my segmentation off every email extension if they have this or this because you think of the main ones, but then all of a sudden, there’s like people still use aol.com. Who, and you start seeing all of these extensions? Well, now instead of having all of these and in or clauses which by the way, every one year, you’ve only got so many of those in the segmentation builder in the segment builder. Now I can have that comma separated has a and just have Gmail, Yahoo, this, this and that. And then have that be my segment.

Kay Peacey 30:06
Yeah. And you can roll that out really, really easily. And you can also roll out variations of that really easily. Because if you throw in something like air table to create your list of comma separated values, that’s like a two minute job, where before, it would have been horribly painful. And we would have been trying to find some admin or system that we could pull it off on and say, Please do this, because I just can’t face it. Yep. Yep. though. Yeah, the power is, is more in our hands to solve the real business problems. And I’m seeing a consistent flow of often improvements to existing features, not new features, but rock solid, and very much wanted improvements to existing features in a way that matters to the users.

Chris Davis 31:01
End users. Hey, everybody, this is what we’re looking for, okay, you have two approaches to building software, one, you should be adverse to and go the other way, one you should embrace. And the first is just doing everything at you look at all of these features. And it looks good on the surface. But usually it’s poorly executed. And then on. So those are the type of companies you want to stay away from. They make great app sumo products, they make great shiny object syndrome, satisfiers, they’re all of that. But they they have no substance, they look good, no substance, then you have the other side where it’s minor thing, apparently minor things. But they’re extremely useful. So like that checkbox of being able to have multiple tags, that’s not something that you would put on LinkedIn, or social and be like, Look, you can select multiple tags now and everybody’s like, Oh, my gosh, I have to have that, that’s more of once you’ve used the tool, you understand the power of such a feature. So when a company is able to start to have that type of precision, with executing on their features, that’s what you want to pay attention to, because they can’t get there by themselves. Hence, what we started out talking about is they have an ear for the market. And they know the precise update. So like you mentioned K, it doesn’t always have to be a feature release. It could be an existing feature update or improvement. It’s all the same in terms of the value that that is received. And as you said, also, there’s a collective sighing happening in the industry, like, finally, you know that that’s like, if there’s a product if the product owner is listening to this podcast, that’s the biggest accolade you’re ever going to get is the collective sigh of Ah, right. That’s your job well done.

Kay Peacey 33:07
Yeah, I gotta say, it feels good, it feels really good. I’m very happy to be where we are with Active Campaign. Because, you know, realistically, I’ve spent seven years now immersed in this platform, which means you come to know it in a way that’s so intimate and deep. And I certainly would not choose to jump to another platform, unless I really, really had to, because that’s not knowledge that you can let go of easily. It’s a bit like the London taxi drivers. They study for years, until they know every back road, every shortcut every one way, where the traffic lights are slow. They know it. And it’s called done knowledge. And it’s an you have to pass an exam. We don’t have an exam for Active Campaign, I would pass it I’m just saying. But you don’t want to be letting go of the people who have the knowledge. You don’t want to be letting them move away from your tech. You want to be keeping them there by showing them that you care enough about their daily experience. And that is what we have with ActiveCampaign

Chris Davis 34:13
yep, yep. Love it. Kay, I can’t have you on and let you go without asking probably the most, the biggest elephant in the room. Right. At this point. It’s multiple elephants in the room. And you are in no way responsible or on the hook for any insight. However, yes, no, to keep it easy and protect your confidentiality if there is some. Have you seen any thing to be excited about in terms of a new segmentation handling process?

Kay Peacey 34:53
I saw that coming about halfway through what you were saying and I should have to end early because we’ve had this conversation every single time with you So I am excited for the year ahead. I’m really excited for what’s coming from Active Campaign because I know that they are listening, and that things are coming that are going to serve our needs. On the segmentation front. Yeah, yeah, I’m 100% confident that things are getting better.

Chris Davis 35:21
Yeah, I’m gonna double down on this because I’ve got a little insight. I have some resellers in my community, as well as just connection with resellers. And some of the conversations that they have been telling me that they’re having make me smile, like the Joker, ear to ear. And I can the fact my consolation is the fact that these conversations are taking place. So active campaign did release a video, maybe a month and a half or so ago, I don’t know if it just went to people in the certified or reseller community. But it was sent to me, I can’t even remember how I got my hands on it. But it was, I think two of the product owners talking about their upcoming approach to the features and everything that they wanted to add into it. And it was kind of like bittersweet, it was sweet to see like, oh, man segmentation, done in measurable, they’re thinking about being able to measure segments and growth of segments, things of that nature. So that was the sweet part. And the bitter part was like, there were no screenshots, there was nothing to actually show that this thing is taking place. So it seemed kind of half baked to like, try to hurry up and get out. But since then, in my community, I’ve been talking to the partners, the partner, I said, resellers are actually partner certified partners in my community, as well as outside, and without them knowing each other, the collective conversations have been very similar. And the things that are being focused on are very exciting. So I’m gonna keep keep pushing that, that that button for this to be launched, because I, if there’s anything holding the platform back from reaching that next level of it, marketing enablement for their users, is segmentation. And once that is in place, Kay, I think that we’re going to see, you know, it’s almost like you can only dream so far right now. Your your your ideas can only go so far right now. But when the segmentation is opened up, it’s going to unlock a whole nother way to use and leverage automation within the platform. And that’s what I’m excited about what what is about to unlock that we can’t see right now. Right?

Kay Peacey 37:57
Yeah, I do you know, what, Chris, we should schedule in a party, right? When this when this when we get a segment, a segment Manager, which we have been talking about? I think it was on one of the podcasts from you way back in the day that I first listened to when I was baby Active Campaign. Yeah, we know, we want this, we are going to throw a party when this comes out. I agree. And I’m confident that we’re headed in that direction. Bring it on Active Campaign, because I’m so with you, once segments, as a thing are surfaced in that platform and visible and intuitive. It is going to blow the lid off how people use that platform. Not just new users coming in, but people who’ve been using the platform for years, and have not been able to get their head around it. Because at the moment, it’s varied. It’s buried under a ton of difficulty that doesn’t, in my opinion, need to be there. But I understand from an engineering point of view, things are more complicated than that. You can’t turn it around on a sixpence but the intention is there.

Chris Davis 39:03
Yeah. Yeah. And just to get get you all excited, I’m gonna say something real basic. What can you imagine a day in Active Campaign, where you can duplicate a segment all of those if else and conditions go over. You could just change one or two, and have a brand new segment waiting there instead of having to rebuild it from scratch, with two windows open to make sure you’re matching all your if

Kay Peacey 39:34
I’m just gonna have a little Daydream now. Just having a nap and dream. My little Daydream is true with us. It’s on my wish list. It’s on my wish list. And I get to share my wish list with people who are making decisions are active campaign via the customer advisory board.

Chris Davis 39:51
Yep, yep. Well, great. Kay, we appreciate you here in the automation bridge community. And it looks like they’re pretty Jason is definitely there in the Active Campaign community as well. People should know by now where to connect with you, you’ve got the top Active Campaign community online, I think we can confidently confidently say this, okay, I’m in the space agnostically. So I go across all these communities, I have not found one greater. So if people have not heard, or don’t know how to connect, how can they connect with you go deeper with Active Campaign stay in the know.

Kay Peacey 40:33
Oh, bless you. That’s, that’s such a lovely thing for you to say, Chris. My Facebook group free community is called automate your business with Active Campaign. And it’s got my picture big at the top, so you can’t miss it. You can find it by going if you type in slick business.co forward slash group that will take you direct to the Facebook group. We’ve got a free training called accelerated Active Campaign, which you can find on our website at slick business.co. And when you want to go a notch up from that, come find me in the Active Campaign Academy because that’s where you get the direct access to me, we do the strategy, the technical stuff, we do the hand holding the gross cheerleading, the whole works. And it’s like, micro consultancy on tap, as many times a week as you need it for as long as you need it.

Chris Davis 41:26
Yep, so we’ll have everyone the show notes will have those links. In the show notes. For those of you who couldn’t wait, you typed it on your phone while you’re listening? Slick business.co forward slash group, and you may be in it by the time I finished the outro. So, Kay, I can’t thank you enough for your time, your free giving and sharing. We look forward to the next recording that we have the updates that we’ll be able to talk about the new possibilities we’ll be able to leverage with with Active Campaign, but more so just knowing we’ve got one of the most stable and consistent human beings that no active campaign in you. And we’ve got that access. So that that makes me happy. So So thank you, just for being uk. Thank you for being you know,

Kay Peacey 42:20
Chris, you making me blushing. Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s always a pleasure to be here and to share that with the wider automation community and come out of my little Active Campaign niche and talk to the wider audience. It’s always a pleasure. Yes, yes,

Chris Davis 42:34
greatly appreciated. listeners. You are also greatly appreciated for your time to tune in to this episode. So thank you all. And everybody collectively continue to automate responsibly, my friends.

Chris Davis 42:50
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 podcast, Google podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday, so make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly. And you can access them all at all systems go podcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly, my friends

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 0:33
welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis. And we have back for the third time everyone the third time our our very own I’m saying our because this is this is a family event. If you haven’t realized by now, you all have been listening, I’m meeting some of you in person now. This is like real community, real audio community. So we’ve got our very own Kay Peacey to come back and give us updates on all things. Active Campaign we’re talking about latest features a big update that I will let k display for saw and for those of you who are new to the podcast, and you’re like what family K What three times what did I miss? Let me do my proper introduction, Kay Peacey hone her email marketing automation skills to the very highest level over six years of consulting in training for small business. She’s a world leading Active Campaign specialist with a seat somewhere that I will not announce I’ll let her know where this new seat is. But she is the perfect person to help your business unlock bigger return on investments from your email marketing, automation. wiseness while keeping the human touch, she founded the Active Campaign Academy at her own company slick business and she’s also partial to using the Lego minifigs for paper aeroplanes to drive home the learning. Kay, welcome to the podcast again. Times three. How are you doing? And we can’t wait to hear about this new announcement of position that you have.

Kay Peacey 2:34
It’s been a great start to 2023. I am so happy to be back here with the automation family. I love being part of this. It’s just so exciting, isn’t it, Chris, that when we started out doing this automation, nobody even knew what that was. Now we have our very own automation family. And we’re right at the top table. That is exciting to me. very delighted to be here. Yeah. So yes, exciting news from Active Campaign. And this is something that users have needed and wanted for a really long time. But without necessarily being able to articulate what it was that was missing. I’m gonna say it was missing from the Active Campaign world. And it’s about this close connection that tech companies really need to have with the end users, they need to get tight with them. Because the people who use the platform every day, they know it in a really different way. The people who use the platform in real businesses to solve real problems. We know that tech, and we experienced that tech in a very different way to the engineers or the strategists at the company or the venture capital people, anything that’s going on behind the scenes. It’s like they’re the sales company for the car. We’re the people who are driving it every single day to get our daily stuff done. Right. So for a long time with Active Campaign, there was a disconnect. It started off great in the early days when active campaign was quite small. And then as it grows and get more and more more, more users and more people on the team and it’s growing. And that’s really exciting and fantastic. And the platform’s growing, the features are expanding, and then there’s a day can be a disconnect. And this is what happened with Active Campaign. And what I am delighted to say is that they have pulled back from that is they have now created their very first customer advisory board, bringing you real users and partners of the platform, the people who really care about the platform, but are not employed by Active Campaign, getting them right close to the people who are making the decisions and Active Campaign and listening to them. This is a revolution for users. It really is.

Chris Davis 4:48
Yeah, in case I’ll say this, you the the most important part for me, is that it relieves the weight that At a lot of software companies erroneously place on their employees, and understanding marketing, and real life use cases in the industry. Right? Yeah, they can get it straight from the horse’s mouth, people who are out here on the field, doing the thing, right?

Kay Peacey 5:19
Yeah, that, you know, that just nails it that nails, it’s so well of like, if people expect active campaign team members who may have only been with the platform for six months or a year, they often come to the support desk or to the advisor with an expectation that they, they’re going to be able to explain how to use Active Campaign to solve these real problems or get a return on investment in this specific situation. And it’s, to me, that’s an impossible ask of someone. Yeah, it’s not fair. It’s not fair to keep putting people in that decision and asking them to guide the development of the platform. Without having that experience. It’s basically in the trenches, right? You have to get in the trenches to really understand and feel and experience how a platform works in real life for real humans. And yeah, I think putting that handing that burden to me, I’ve been wanting this burden. I’ve been wanting to do this the whole time, I have been with Active Campaign, because as a teacher, I think it’s important. I’m a teacher, that is what I do, I spend my time thinking how can I make this thing easier and click for humans so that they can be able to just do it without crying and swearing and giving up? This is where the Lego and the paper aeroplanes come into it, you’re gonna have things explained in a way that the human brain can understand it. Engineers are not the best people to do that. As much as I love them. They do great work engineers are not teachers. So when you go into a platform, and you see things like a word that’s used in three different ways, and they all have different meanings, I can tell you immediately that is going to cause problems for every single person who sees that, and it’s not fair. Right? And it’s making life and totally, unnecessarily hard for everyone. So I’ve been dying to get to the top table and say to the people who are making the decisions, okay, you need to change this one word, and it will all fall into place. And hallelujah, we’re here. This is really exciting for me. Yeah. And,

Chris Davis 7:30
you know, to your point, there was what I believe, an unofficial advisory board in the very beginning. And it was just by the nature of them really listening to the audience. That’s how I got pulled in. Shout out to Adam Tuttle. But the first time I signed up for Active Campaign, it was accompanied with a personal call with Adam, who walked me through how people are using the platform, and and gave me some examples of some of their top users. And even when I said, Where are the tags that you know, I’m coming from Infusionsoft is nothing but tagline. And this was before active campaign had tags. And before you know it, like two to three weeks later, there’s tags, I was like, Whoa, this is like lightning speed, this platform. They’re listening in, they kept listening. And they kept listening, then at some point, and it always happens when there’s fundraising. And it’s not the money itself. It’s just like the demand of growth and scale and priorities shift. And before you know it, you become tone deaf, to the market that got you to the place that you are without realizing it. And it’s good to see them get back to themselves. Right. I’ve seen other companies K take years more longer than active campaign to really realize, oh, we stopped listening. Thus, we’re out of tune, we’re out of touch. And we need to write this wrong. So it’s unfortunate that it happens. But it’s always good to see a course correction. Tell me this. For the there may be somebody listening, like wait a minute, I’ve got so many good things to say about active. Good it. I’ve got so much good advice, and so many people that I’m helping, how do I get on the advisory board? Not that I’m asking you for active campaigns process, but how was that with you? Was it just a simple reach out like, hey, Kay, would you like to join something special? Was it something that’s been in the works for a while? How did you experience the onboarding of this opportunity?

Kay Peacey 9:32
That’s kind of a hard one for me to answer like I as far as I’m aware, I My understanding is that they will be bringing new people on to the customer advisory board each year. Because it’s really important to have representation from people who are in the different branches of Active Campaign users, if you like so, people who are coming from the partner applications people who are resellers, people who are enterprise level users someone like me who’s like in the head of the small business users, and then just a small business user who’s not like a meta person like me, but who’s in there really experiencing the platform. And I’m not party to the criteria they use. But I see this lovely representation. And I know that there’s a really strong intention to make that better. I think my journey to it has just been completely unique. If I’m honest, I don’t think there’s anyone else who is quite so obsessed with Active Campaign and doesn’t work for them. It’s weird. I don’t know what to tell you. I have been at them this whole time, putting myself in that place of bringing them things that they need to hear, you know, like, the critical friend, sometimes you need to hear stuff from someone who really cares and wants desperately wants really meaningfully wants success, not just for that piece of tech, but for for the people who use that tech, and someone who can bridge that gap. And I’ve always done that, right, from really early on. And, to me, this is the culmination of many years of representing users and advocating and showing that the knowledge that a meta user like me has is really deeply valuable and necessary to the success of a platform like Active Campaign to maintain that closeness with users.

Chris Davis 11:33
Yeah, so So key takeaway, everyone, there’s a advisory board that is hand selected, and very diverse. These are all words that you’re listening for, to be excited about, whenever there’s a company that wants representation of the marketplace, or access to that, to better improve the product. So this is this is great again, congratulations, Kay. The second, I caught wind from you. I was extreme, it made perfect sense. I was like, this is a no brainer. It, you know, should have happened a year ago or you know, but whatever things happen when they happen. But so glad that you’re you’re on there. And in that is there, is there anything that you can share with us that not release dates or anything, but maybe priorities focused conversations that we can be privy to in terms of things that may be coming down the pipe, as well as some some of the newest, newer things that are being have been released.

Kay Peacey 12:38
So I can definitely talk about things that have recently come out that a very, very user centered, and the thing I’m excited about going forward from there is that the things that I’m party to as part of the CIB process are very intentionally user focused. Yeah, that’s the bit that most makes a difference for me. And that I know, I’m 100% confident that things are going to improve for users regularly going into the rest of 2023. And that’s amazing. So things like things that have changed already, we’ve got multi select on tags, when we’re, and this is gonna sound really obscure. But when you’re looking for a segment of people who have this tag, and this tag, and this tag, and this tag, he used to have to put them in one at a time, that can get really tiresome. But now we’ve got if you can just take the tags. And that’s like a revolution.

Chris Davis 13:35
So simple was so effective. I haven’t used it yet, because I rarely use it. Okay, because I can only look at one tag. So I always go into the segment builder. So that’s a list drop down, right? Very rarely you

Kay Peacey 13:47
it’s been actively these restraints have been actively preventing users from doing more complex and ambitious things, because it was just too painful to do them. And I’m the same this stuff, I just don’t go near it, because I’m just like, I just cannot deal with that interface. It’s gonna take me half an hour, and I have not got the patience. I’m just gonna find some other way to do it. Yeah, so I know where all these holes are, right. And what’s really interesting and exciting is seeing Active Campaign fixing those things. And not only that, but going a step further and making them much much better than than even we would have hoped for. There’s a really trivial example I’m going to throw in there which is alphabetize ation, just having a drop down when it comes out. And it’s in like the order these things were made. That does not help the humans who are trying to work with Active Campaign and are squishy idiot brains who need to scroll through stuff and find it alphabetize stuff and magically, a whole load of stress and problem goes away. So this and this comes back to what we were saying before, which is the engineers and salespeople and technicians and company development people who are amazing strategists and brilliant grown neck company that if they’re not in there using that platform every day, they’re not feeling that pain in the same way. You got to feel the pain, identify the facts, tell someone you can fix it. Fix gone. Yeah, that’s the magic that’s play here.

Chris Davis 15:13
That’s perfect, because they’re strategizing from that technical vantage point. And then because they’re strategizing the developers and product folks, because they’re strategizing, and building from that perspective, they know, they’re like, Oh, well just do this. It’s like, no, the end user, by the time that feature reaches the end user, they don’t know that that’s what went behind it in all of this coding. And that’s how it’s supposed to display. They’re just confused, because they just created a tag, it started with a W. And all of a sudden, they don’t know where it’s at, they can’t find it. Because it’s by some method of date created or, you know, whatever the case may be, we’re now I, alphabetically I can say, oh, W, let me just take this little bar, and just drag it all the way to the bottom, because I know w is at the end of the alphabet,

Kay Peacey 16:06
you know, yeah. And what’s really lovely is seeing the there’s an uplift in feeling, you can feel it in the Active Campaign communities. So there’s the big Active Campaign official Facebook community, where you see that there’s definitely less grumbling already, this sort of cranky, downward emotion is lifting, I feel like a cloud is moving on. And I’m certainly feeling that in my community on Facebook and in replies, I’m getting my emails is different, it feels like we have an optimism. And we’re now able to start thinking about our wishlist items, which is where we go even another notch up from there. So something brand new, that’s just come out. And I know I tagged you in the post on this, because I knew he’d be interested in this is list status. Yeah. So just to go into a little bit of background for the non active campaign people lists of weird in Active Campaign in some ways, it’s historically it’s been a bad idea to have a lot of lists for all sorts of reasons. But one of them was that we weren’t able to search easily to check someone’s status on any given list, like, are they hard bounced? Have they? Are they actively subscribed to it? Have they unsubscribed from it? What else have they never been added to it in the first place. And these are subtle things that a lot of people inside Active Campaign, I think, did not, we’re not aware that users really needed to know, they needed to be able to search on this stuff. And this week, just this week, we have now got a really thorough, well worded set of list conditions. And it has revolutionized how, how we can clean up contacts who should not be there or recognize contacts who should be there and are valuable to us and check where they’re at in terms of at least subscribe, can we send them emails or not? What’s going on? We can search on all that stuff. And that happened this week. Hallelujah. Yeah, this

Chris Davis 18:07
this is this is huge. And I feel like the people who really appreciate this are the people who appreciate it clean list. Right? If you don’t appreciate in the appreciation of the clean list comes from knowing how much better your deliverability is, how much sharper your marketing is, when you’re marketing to people who actually are engaging. I think that’s where this really hits home, right? Because now, when I’m going to clean up my list, or even identify what my true list size is, you know, there’s still people that look at the all list, they don’t even know on the dashboard, you can hit that little drop down and select from all the active. Now we’ve got even more granularity that says, okay, within that active bunch, who has been on this list, who’s bounced who’s never been added to this list. So you can just start to identify holes for me when we were engaging on LinkedIn. And I was just asking for use cases, it was a little harder for my mind to go around it. And I’m, I’m a little unicorn in this right low bias because I used to be the Director of Education at active campaigns. So I had to know all of the rules. And one of them was, every contact must exist on at least one list. That was one of the first statements I was saying, onboarding when new employees would start so that they would understand. So I didn’t have a lot of use cases where contacts were in my database and not on a list. Because I had this rule of thumb ringing, every contact must exist on at least one list. So even if the integration didn’t do it, the automation did it. However, when you’re out in the wild, and these automation, or these integrations are just tagging context. That’s it. They don’t add them. You know, you brought this To my awareness que and I was like, Oh, wow. So now you can go and do your maintenance and in short and find those holes. Those are those integrations that you need to couple of automation that subscribes them to a list, or just holes. Wait a minute, they should have been on this list. After they did this, what happened? Now you can go troubleshoot.

Kay Peacey 20:22
Yeah. And it’s it’s so massively important. And I know you touched on deliverability, which is critical, we need our emails to actually get to the inbox or what the heck is the point of all that effort, that’s important. We need our people to be engaged, read them to click on the emails, that’s really important, too. And it’s more rewarding to us if our audience is engaged, because then we feel great. Like, yeah, everyone loves me and my business, I’m great. But as well as that, we need to keep an eye on the cost of our Active Campaign accounts, and your counts of contacts who are actively subscribed to at least one list. That’s the defining thing to the cost of your active campaign account. So you need to be able to keep a very tight handle on that, especially since all the pricing changes, that’s become dramatically more important to Active Campaign people to do that. And this change just makes all of that possible in a way that it wasn’t and I have come across. So many accounts have come in either when I was doing before when I was doing consulting, but also into my Active Campaign Academy. People come in, because they know they’ve got some issues like they’ve discovered, they’ve looked under a rock, they’ve hit that show me all contacts, and they’ve found 40,000 contacts who are not subscribed to any list. And they’re like, Whoa, where did they come from? What are they doing here? How did they get here? Were they ever on the list? Or did they unsubscribe from a list? Now we can tell the difference? That’s the first time we’ve had that ability inside Active Campaign.

Chris Davis 21:56
Yeah, that’s good. I mean, just a simple is not on lists, and has never been added to lists, just those has never be possible.

Kay Peacey 22:07
And I’m, you know, I am happy. I am proud to say that I was involved in the conversation that got that wording pinned down and made that happen, because we’ve lobbied hard for that for a very long time. And that shift in in intention, from Active Campaign to listen to, and to respect and value the experience of users is a palpable change.

Chris Davis 22:31
Yeah, yeah, they’re very, very well, you know, there’s another feature that I wanted to just bring up and make sure that everybody is privy to I try to use the so everybody, we bring K on at least quarterly. And if you all want to hear more from K, feel free to email us and let us know. But we try to bring on at least quarterly to make sure that you are up to speed with all things Active Campaign. And an A one of the features that I realized maybe a month ago was automating one to one emails. So I know this has more of a sales trend to it. But it’s it’s using an automation you. So historically, everybody automations are one too many emails. But now within an automation, you can have a one to one conversation, which in my mind for sales, prospecting is probably the most applicable use case for it. But I wanted to highlight that, that feature, just so people know what’s available and give you the floor k and if if you’ve seen people use it, or if that’s opened up any other opportunities or possibilities?

Kay Peacey 23:46
Great question. And it is a brilliant feature. It the first thing I want to say about that is it’s only available on Pro and above plans, it’s only Pro and Enterprise, you have access to this. And that’s really important to know. Because on the lower level plans, you can still send personal one to one emails. But it’s a much more manual process, we have a feature called Saved responses where you can do pretty much the equivalent thing where you’re going to put some copy into an email, it’s there and you can was saved responses, you can tweak it for every send, but you can’t automate that you can you can have it like you can respond, but then you have to go send it for that specific content, that contact sorry, what’s different with the what they call a one to one personal emails is that you can put them inside an automation. So it creates this wonderful process of a one to one very personalized email conversation, but it’s much more automated meaning you can scale it up a lot better. Now, I’m not seeing a lot of people using this because in my world right now the majority of my Active Campaign Academy members are typically using plus, the plus level of campaigns don’t have access to that feature. The ones I do see using it on pro one of the major wins with it is the the replies the conversation is now threaded. So that’s a big improvement because it’s made it fit. I’m trying to think, what’s the quantity, the qualitative change, being able to do this in automations is that it now feels like what it is, which is a real conversation in a real inbox. And we can automate it without that showing on the surface. So we can scale up while still being and appearing authentically, completely human and one to one, you can even take it further, if you get really swishy, you can start to use custom contact fields, to put in a paragraph of text that’s specific to that one, contact. So if you want to take it a level up, you can go up from there and all there is some power under that hood.

Chris Davis 26:02
Yeah, so So those of you who often have this statement, Oh, I see other people doing automation. But But I can’t do that, because I have to be personal. With my outreach, my marketing has to be personalized, you’re starting to be equipped with more and more tools and tactics to be able to achieve that at scale. So now you can have one to one at scale, not one too many. But you can have multiple one to one threads going now. And let the automation do the heavy lifting for you. So that was that was a good one to see. Anything else? Kay, any small UI changes or interface tweaks or like you said, alphabetizing, things of that nature that we should be mindful that you know, sometimes they just drop it in there. And you got to kind of stumble upon it and be like, hey, wait a minute, I think I can now do this.

Kay Peacey 27:00
I hate I hate and sometimes this happens to me live. So we’ve run Office Hours calls twice a week in the ActiveCampaign. Academy. And you can you can they can bring anything and often we’re screen sharing, and someone will be doing something, I’ll be like, wait, what? Put go back? What was that? What was that? One of the ones I saw recently? Was a segmentation condition for text fields. And the condition, there’s an option in the middle one where you can choose contains any of Yeah, I was like, wait, what that? How does that work? Because I had never seen it before. That a complete double take, and then had to get back in the thread of the conversation. But afterwards, I followed it up and you can put in a list of comma separated values. And it will return with a yes. If the text value contains any of your common separated items. Oh,

Chris Davis 27:58
let me What can we do with that we could look for oh my gosh,

Kay Peacey 28:02
yeah. Anything from a selection of postcodes, or yeah, there’s Yeah,

Chris Davis 28:07
I had one use case, there was a company very large database. That just seems to be, you know, I, people don’t know it by looking in, I guess by following me. But I tend to attract big databases, right? Like, Hey, Chris, I’ve got a million you. And it’s like, how, how did you? I would you know,

Kay Peacey 28:30
but it’s because it’s so trustworthy crew, right.

Chris Davis 28:34
So I had this database, and it had deliverability issues. And what we wanted to do was isolate the sending to particular email addresses to understand our domains to understand which one of these were the culprit of driving down the deliverability. And it was your usual outlook.com. I clouds, sometimes Yahoo. And Hotmail is like any Microsoft email usually drives it down, and Gmail within like, out of 90 days, tight timeframe, windows, they get really, really restrictive. Gmail is like, hey, look, they haven’t opened one of your emails in the last two months. No more. So Gmail, it has better deliverability. But they get strict quick not to turn this into a deliverability episode. But I bring that up to say, can you imagine Kay, my segmentation off every email extension if they have this or this because you think of the main ones, but then all of a sudden, there’s like people still use aol.com. Who, and you start seeing all of these extensions? Well, now instead of having all of these and in or clauses which by the way, every one year, you’ve only got so many of those in the segmentation builder in the segment builder. Now I can have that comma separated has a and just have Gmail, Yahoo, this, this and that. And then have that be my segment.

Kay Peacey 30:06
Yeah. And you can roll that out really, really easily. And you can also roll out variations of that really easily. Because if you throw in something like air table to create your list of comma separated values, that’s like a two minute job, where before, it would have been horribly painful. And we would have been trying to find some admin or system that we could pull it off on and say, Please do this, because I just can’t face it. Yep. Yep. though. Yeah, the power is, is more in our hands to solve the real business problems. And I’m seeing a consistent flow of often improvements to existing features, not new features, but rock solid, and very much wanted improvements to existing features in a way that matters to the users.

Chris Davis 31:01
End users. Hey, everybody, this is what we’re looking for, okay, you have two approaches to building software, one, you should be adverse to and go the other way, one you should embrace. And the first is just doing everything at you look at all of these features. And it looks good on the surface. But usually it’s poorly executed. And then on. So those are the type of companies you want to stay away from. They make great app sumo products, they make great shiny object syndrome, satisfiers, they’re all of that. But they they have no substance, they look good, no substance, then you have the other side where it’s minor thing, apparently minor things. But they’re extremely useful. So like that checkbox of being able to have multiple tags, that’s not something that you would put on LinkedIn, or social and be like, Look, you can select multiple tags now and everybody’s like, Oh, my gosh, I have to have that, that’s more of once you’ve used the tool, you understand the power of such a feature. So when a company is able to start to have that type of precision, with executing on their features, that’s what you want to pay attention to, because they can’t get there by themselves. Hence, what we started out talking about is they have an ear for the market. And they know the precise update. So like you mentioned K, it doesn’t always have to be a feature release. It could be an existing feature update or improvement. It’s all the same in terms of the value that that is received. And as you said, also, there’s a collective sighing happening in the industry, like, finally, you know that that’s like, if there’s a product if the product owner is listening to this podcast, that’s the biggest accolade you’re ever going to get is the collective sigh of Ah, right. That’s your job well done.

Kay Peacey 33:07
Yeah, I gotta say, it feels good, it feels really good. I’m very happy to be where we are with Active Campaign. Because, you know, realistically, I’ve spent seven years now immersed in this platform, which means you come to know it in a way that’s so intimate and deep. And I certainly would not choose to jump to another platform, unless I really, really had to, because that’s not knowledge that you can let go of easily. It’s a bit like the London taxi drivers. They study for years, until they know every back road, every shortcut every one way, where the traffic lights are slow. They know it. And it’s called done knowledge. And it’s an you have to pass an exam. We don’t have an exam for Active Campaign, I would pass it I’m just saying. But you don’t want to be letting go of the people who have the knowledge. You don’t want to be letting them move away from your tech. You want to be keeping them there by showing them that you care enough about their daily experience. And that is what we have with ActiveCampaign

Chris Davis 34:13
yep, yep. Love it. Kay, I can’t have you on and let you go without asking probably the most, the biggest elephant in the room. Right. At this point. It’s multiple elephants in the room. And you are in no way responsible or on the hook for any insight. However, yes, no, to keep it easy and protect your confidentiality if there is some. Have you seen any thing to be excited about in terms of a new segmentation handling process?

Kay Peacey 34:53
I saw that coming about halfway through what you were saying and I should have to end early because we’ve had this conversation every single time with you So I am excited for the year ahead. I’m really excited for what’s coming from Active Campaign because I know that they are listening, and that things are coming that are going to serve our needs. On the segmentation front. Yeah, yeah, I’m 100% confident that things are getting better.

Chris Davis 35:21
Yeah, I’m gonna double down on this because I’ve got a little insight. I have some resellers in my community, as well as just connection with resellers. And some of the conversations that they have been telling me that they’re having make me smile, like the Joker, ear to ear. And I can the fact my consolation is the fact that these conversations are taking place. So active campaign did release a video, maybe a month and a half or so ago, I don’t know if it just went to people in the certified or reseller community. But it was sent to me, I can’t even remember how I got my hands on it. But it was, I think two of the product owners talking about their upcoming approach to the features and everything that they wanted to add into it. And it was kind of like bittersweet, it was sweet to see like, oh, man segmentation, done in measurable, they’re thinking about being able to measure segments and growth of segments, things of that nature. So that was the sweet part. And the bitter part was like, there were no screenshots, there was nothing to actually show that this thing is taking place. So it seemed kind of half baked to like, try to hurry up and get out. But since then, in my community, I’ve been talking to the partners, the partner, I said, resellers are actually partner certified partners in my community, as well as outside, and without them knowing each other, the collective conversations have been very similar. And the things that are being focused on are very exciting. So I’m gonna keep keep pushing that, that that button for this to be launched, because I, if there’s anything holding the platform back from reaching that next level of it, marketing enablement for their users, is segmentation. And once that is in place, Kay, I think that we’re going to see, you know, it’s almost like you can only dream so far right now. Your your your ideas can only go so far right now. But when the segmentation is opened up, it’s going to unlock a whole nother way to use and leverage automation within the platform. And that’s what I’m excited about what what is about to unlock that we can’t see right now. Right?

Kay Peacey 37:57
Yeah, I do you know, what, Chris, we should schedule in a party, right? When this when this when we get a segment, a segment Manager, which we have been talking about? I think it was on one of the podcasts from you way back in the day that I first listened to when I was baby Active Campaign. Yeah, we know, we want this, we are going to throw a party when this comes out. I agree. And I’m confident that we’re headed in that direction. Bring it on Active Campaign, because I’m so with you, once segments, as a thing are surfaced in that platform and visible and intuitive. It is going to blow the lid off how people use that platform. Not just new users coming in, but people who’ve been using the platform for years, and have not been able to get their head around it. Because at the moment, it’s varied. It’s buried under a ton of difficulty that doesn’t, in my opinion, need to be there. But I understand from an engineering point of view, things are more complicated than that. You can’t turn it around on a sixpence but the intention is there.

Chris Davis 39:03
Yeah. Yeah. And just to get get you all excited, I’m gonna say something real basic. What can you imagine a day in Active Campaign, where you can duplicate a segment all of those if else and conditions go over. You could just change one or two, and have a brand new segment waiting there instead of having to rebuild it from scratch, with two windows open to make sure you’re matching all your if

Kay Peacey 39:34
I’m just gonna have a little Daydream now. Just having a nap and dream. My little Daydream is true with us. It’s on my wish list. It’s on my wish list. And I get to share my wish list with people who are making decisions are active campaign via the customer advisory board.

Chris Davis 39:51
Yep, yep. Well, great. Kay, we appreciate you here in the automation bridge community. And it looks like they’re pretty Jason is definitely there in the Active Campaign community as well. People should know by now where to connect with you, you’ve got the top Active Campaign community online, I think we can confidently confidently say this, okay, I’m in the space agnostically. So I go across all these communities, I have not found one greater. So if people have not heard, or don’t know how to connect, how can they connect with you go deeper with Active Campaign stay in the know.

Kay Peacey 40:33
Oh, bless you. That’s, that’s such a lovely thing for you to say, Chris. My Facebook group free community is called automate your business with Active Campaign. And it’s got my picture big at the top, so you can’t miss it. You can find it by going if you type in slick business.co forward slash group that will take you direct to the Facebook group. We’ve got a free training called accelerated Active Campaign, which you can find on our website at slick business.co. And when you want to go a notch up from that, come find me in the Active Campaign Academy because that’s where you get the direct access to me, we do the strategy, the technical stuff, we do the hand holding the gross cheerleading, the whole works. And it’s like, micro consultancy on tap, as many times a week as you need it for as long as you need it.

Chris Davis 41:26
Yep, so we’ll have everyone the show notes will have those links. In the show notes. For those of you who couldn’t wait, you typed it on your phone while you’re listening? Slick business.co forward slash group, and you may be in it by the time I finished the outro. So, Kay, I can’t thank you enough for your time, your free giving and sharing. We look forward to the next recording that we have the updates that we’ll be able to talk about the new possibilities we’ll be able to leverage with with Active Campaign, but more so just knowing we’ve got one of the most stable and consistent human beings that no active campaign in you. And we’ve got that access. So that that makes me happy. So So thank you, just for being uk. Thank you for being you know,

Kay Peacey 42:20
Chris, you making me blushing. Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s always a pleasure to be here and to share that with the wider automation community and come out of my little Active Campaign niche and talk to the wider audience. It’s always a pleasure. Yes, yes,

Chris Davis 42:34
greatly appreciated. listeners. You are also greatly appreciated for your time to tune in to this episode. So thank you all. And everybody collectively continue to automate responsibly, my friends.

Chris Davis 42:50
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 podcast, Google podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday, so make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out and while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly. And you can access them all at all systems go podcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly, my friends