Email Marketing - Part 1 - Intro to ActiveCampaign

Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. Welcome back to our Thursday deep dive series where we're taking on AI, automation, local SEO, and all the other cool stuff you guys want to learn more about. If there's a topic you'd like to hear more about on Legal Marketing 101, feel free to shoot me an email at contact@rosenadvertising.com. Today though, we are starting our deep dive on email marketing. We're going to look at a bunch of email marketing tactics I've used over the years, and we're going to look a lot at my current favorite email marketing program, ActiveCampaign. If you're not an ActiveCampaign user though, don't fret. We are going to be talking about a lot of tactics and ideas that are applicable regardless of your email marketing or CRM system. So you're still going to get something out of these episodes even if you're not cool enough to be on the active campaign train. So let's get to it. If you're here, you already know that email marketing is important. Maybe you're doing a great job already, or maybe you know you need to get things in shape. What you might not know though is how deep email marketing can really go. So in this series, we're going to talk about newsletter style email marketing, automated nurturing campaigns, and we're going to talk very briefly about transactional email. But this really is just the tip of the iceberg. Email marketing extends into and it really flourishes in basically every part of the client experience. From the moment that a client comes into contact with our firm all the way up until they wrap up their matter and maybe even become a referral source. It's likely that email is going to be, if not the primary method of contact, it'll be at least one of the top two or three ways that you reach out to this client. And all of that is really just to clarify that what we're going to be talking about is actually a relatively narrow part of our email marketing. And there's so much more that you can learn after this. Of course, we're going to get to some of the cool stuff in the future, but for now, we've got a lot to cover. But before we dive into the tactics, let's quickly talk about ActiveCampaign. There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of email marketing platforms out there. Most of us can name a handful, but the reality is that the bench is stacked quite a few players deeper than you might expect. So when you dive in to figure out what is the best program for your firm, it is likely to get pretty overwhelming. And of course, I'm not really in that marketplace most of the time. I use ActiveCampaign. I love it and I try and get as many of my clients as possible to use it. But if you're using something else, that doesn't mean your platform isn't good. And if your platform isn't good and you're trying to switch, here's how I sort of break down that evaluation. And again, I've definitely drunk the ActiveCampaign Kool-Aid, but I do reevaluate frequently. It's only prudent, really. And I get a lot of exposure to other programs in the legal universe through clients who don't switch over to active campaign. So here's how I break things down. Number one, I'm looking for really great support. Hiring someone to fix a problem with an email system is often more expensive than paying for a month of the system itself. So having Having great support is worth its weight in gold. You're going to need to read reviews and ask other people about their experiences to figure out what works for you, but it is really worth it. It doesn't matter what your email system does or doesn't do. It will break at some point, and you will need to contact support to figure out what's going on. So, having great support is paramount. But the number two thing that I'm looking at is integrations, because I love automation. So does this program integrate with the other parts of my marketing stack? Does it connect to Zapier? Does it maybe have an API in case I want to do some kind of custom integration? At this point in the evolution of SAS programs, having an export to CSV or Excel function, it's not worthless. But if you're working with a lot of data, it's really ideal to be able to move that data automatically and systematically without much fuss and without creating a mess or introducing some kind of error into the data. When I'm looking at really any piece of software, let alone marketing software or email marketing software, what does this integrate is usually one of the questions at the very top of the list. But the number three thing on the list that I'm looking for, and really this is the last major deal breaker that I'm looking for, is does the automation in the system really work? And again, this is a difficult thing to figure out and to quantify because it requires a little bit of testing and because it requires an understanding of what is really going on. But it's important because legal software companies and the companies in the orbit of the legal universe have a bit of a habit of selling "automation" that's not really automation. And I'm not going to name names here because the biggest offender is actually a CRM company that I think does a pretty fine job in the legal space. But their excuse for automation is just pathetic. So personally, I'm looking for something that's really going to do some heavy lifting for me, and often that means looking outside of the legal space. Obviously, ActiveCampaign has extensive automation capabilities, and it'll connect to automation software that will extend that capability to pretty much everything on the internet. But there are a bunch of other programs who do this as well. MailChimp and GetResponse, just to name two that are very high on most people's lists, are both very, very functional. They do a lot of work for us. And then there's an even higher tier of platforms that'll do email that includes things like HubSpot and Salesforce. But beyond these three factors, there's so many different variations of programs that might work better or might be worse for your firm. And it just depends on a million different variables. And I might not be able to talk about every possible option. But in the next few episodes, as we cover all that is included in email marketing and active campaign, I'm going to do my best to talk about things that will work for programs that aren't active campaign as well. And I will make sure to cover strategies not only that you can use to apply to your existing marketing but some new ideas and new programs so that you can make the most out of your email marketing platform. So stay tuned. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out rosenadvertising.com for more. Thanks.