ActiveCampaign helps online vendors improve customer experience when shopping. Try it out and you’ll be supporting Irish jobs, writes Doug Casey

The Covid pandemic proved to be a great persuader in turning more SMEs into e-commerce and digital marketing. Finding, keeping and communicating with customers is a time-consuming process with many moving parts. Helping to bring it all together is ActiveCampaign, which promises to optimise the customer experience.

That’s the pitch from John Lamphiere (pictured), the company’s  regional vice president.

Founded in 2003 in Chicago, ActiveCampaign’s cloud platform helps online vendors tailor and automate core CX elements such as e-mail marketing, customer relationship management, sales automation, website messaging and customer service.

Though the venture has been on the go for 18 years, customer experience automation has only gone into overdrive in the past five years. ActiveCampaign started 2016 with 15 staff and now the headcount is up to 850. Annual recurring revenue currently runs to $160m, and the company recently raised $240m in a Series C financing round. This brought total financing raised to date to $360m.

Operating from Chicago, Indianapolis, Sydney and Dublin, ActiveCampaign says its platform handles four billion weekly automated ‘experiences’ and 150 million monthly automated campaigns.

In Association with

Integration is a key selling point for ActiveCampaign. The platform can integrate with Shopify, WordPress and Facebook and draw on customer data from these apps for better CX automation. The company’s price plans range from c.€10 per month to c.€200 per month, depending on the size of customer contact database.

EU Headquarters

Lamphiere is based in ActiveCampaign’s European headquarters in Dublin, which opened in 2019 and now employs 100 people. Adoption of the platform seems to be going well, as the company recently announced plans to triple its headcount in Ireland by 2023.

“We have 145,000 customers globally and we’ve added about 50,000 new customers since the start of the pandemic,” says Lamphiere. “A lot of the new customer acquisitions is down to small businesses having to scramble to figure out how to work in a digital environment and include personalisation. Our expertise lies in helping SMEs automate the entire customer lifecycle, with customisation at every touch point.”

According to Lamphiere, a common mistake seen among SMEs trying to embrace digital marketing is ‘e-mail blasting’, where generic e-mails promoting a product or service are sent out to the customer base without personalisation. Another common error is to use several different software platforms for digital marketing.

Marketing Stack

Lamphiere adds. “Your marketing stack might include Facebook and Shopify. ActiveCampaign sits in the centre, so that everything can become integrated into our platform. You now have a 360-degree view of the customer journey throughout every transaction. The business needs to figure out what their marketing engine room is, and we can help to simplify this process.

“For example, if you operate an online shoe shop, perhaps people are visiting your site from Facebook or Instagram ads. They come to the store, look at a pair of shoes but don’t purchase them. You might want to communicate with them at this point to persuade them to come back.

“Maybe they do, and add the shoes to their cart but do not complete the purchase. So you might want to try to bring them back to the cart. If they purchase the shoes, you might want to have conversations with them after that about customer service or further purchases.”