Here’s the ActiveCampaign updates you should actually care about
Summer/Fall 2024 review.
ActiveCampaign has been busy this summer - releasing a bunch of features and upgrades to their platform. Having helped my clients with ActiveCampaign for five years, I figured my perspective might be useful to anyone who’s wondering what all these updates mean, and which ones are actually useful. Read on for my thoughts.
Feature key:
🤩 This update is a standout
👍 This update is useful
🤏 This update is useful for specific users
👎 This update is not useful
New Segment Interface 🤩
An improved segmentation experience has been a long time coming, and I’m so happy it’s finally here! The old way of managing segments in ActiveCampaign was clunky, and was so bad that most of my clients ignored or outsourced it.
This upgrade makes sending targeted campaigns (e.g. sending to members-only, VIPs, or engaged subscribers) much faster and more accessible, and my hope is that many more users will now be empowered to implement new and exciting email strategies.
This one’s so important and so useful that I’ve put together a quick video guide on how to use it to easily create targeted emails.
Want to understand the power of segmentation for your email marketing strategy?
Grab a time on my calendar for an intro call
Automation Builder updates 👍
Creating and managing automations has gotten quite a few quality-of-life upgrades. It’s nothing game-changing, but any of you who use the automation builder as much as I do will definitely appreciate these changes.
Changes include better navigation of the automation map, the ability to easily preview and edit some settings for automation emails without having to refresh to a new page, and a streamlined UI for a bunch of automation actions.
Botsense / Unsubscribe protection 👍
This one’s dead simple, good for everyone, and you don’t even need to do anything to benefit from it. ActiveCampaign has enhanced measures for preventing email bots from unsubscribing genuine subscribers, and filtering out the activity of bots from your email results.
Campaign Calendar View 🤏
The new Calendar view gives you a new way to manage your campaign schedule via a calendar rather than a list view.
One extra feature I want to highlight is the “Show best send day” toggle. If you haven’t already done testing to measure which days of the week generate the best open/click rates, this little toggle could be very helpful for doing all the thinking for you. Although, it doesn’t currently show optimal send times.
Notice how some days are highlighted in green and indicate the days ActiveCampaign recommends you send campaigns on
Preference Center 🤏
Basically, the Preference Center is a new form type, that allows your subscribers to easily manage their list subscription preferences by clicking a link in your emails.
If you have lists for different customer preferences (e.g. product or service types), this makes it much easier than it used to be for your subscribers to choose themselves. You simply pick which lists you want to give subscribers the option to subscribe/unsubscribe from, then add the form link to your regular campaigns.
You can also add other custom fields here, for example, a radio button field that enables subscribers to choose how often you email them. Allowing subscribers to update their preferences in this way is a great way to personalize your emails and reduce unsubscribes.
AI Image Generator 🤏
You can now generate AI images from directly within the email designer. How much you get out of this feature will obviously depend on whether you want AI-generated images in your emails, and how much expertise you have with finicking AI prompts.
A disappointing response, albeit from my admittedly very novice AI prompt skills
AI Campaign Follow-Up 👎
Basically, whenever you schedule a campaign, the AI Campaign Follow Up can fully create a follow-up email automation using AI, that will be sent when someone opens your initial campaign.
Based on the couple of tests we ran, this feature either didn’t work, or generated an email that needed a decent amount of design and copy revision to get it to an acceptable standard, so I can’t recommend it yet.
AI Brand Kit 👎
Basically, the AI Brand Kit uses AI to pull brand colors, logos, fonts, and a summary of your business, from your website, and turns it into branded email templates for you to use.
Unless you’re brand new to email marketing, you probably don’t need AI to pull this all together, and even if you do, our testing showed that the email templates it creates aren’t anything noteworthy.
