Time for another installment of our new series, that will soon become a podcast. We’re giving you tips and tools that will compliment FunnelDash and help you run your digital marketing agency successfully.
Charles Kirkland recently interviewed Chris Davis of ActiveCampaign. If you haven’t heard of Chris, he is the marketing automation expert that everyone turns to when they have questions about implementing the best possible strategy for their business. He works with companies of all sizes to get their automation working flawlessly.
Chris and Charles discussed automation strategies for everything from Facebook ads to website visitors at length. This is a really juicy article with lots of phenomenal information. If you’re ready to save yourself a lot of time and stress, make sure you read all the way to the end.
As an agency owner, your goal is to streamline your client acquisition process. That way, you always have a steady stream of leads to convert into high-value clients. However, you may be making one (or more) of 4 critical mistakes that keep your agency struggling to survive and you wondering how you’re going to pay the bills.
Click on the button below to find out what you need to do to avoid these mistakes and boost your agency to 7 figures in the next 12 months.
Now, enjoy the conversation as Charles and Chris take a deep dive into automation...
Charles K.: Hey, hey, hey, this is Charles. I hope everybody is doing great. Well, in case it's day, whether it's evening, it doesn't matter when you're listening to this podcast. It's time to take some notes. I am very, very honored to have Chris Davis from ActiveCampaign. Now, let me tell you, I have known Chris for years. When it comes to a straight shooter, if he tells me the sky is blue, the sky is blue. If he tells me the sky is yellow, the sky is yellow. Chris is one of those guys, no nonsense, he tells like it is. How are you doing?
Chris Davis: Charles, I'm doing well. I'm honored, I'm honored that you value my word and I can assure everybody, even though Charles would believe me if I said the sky was yellow, I will stick to nothing but the truth, so you all are safe. I will not try to convince you the sky is another color.
Charles K.: Sweet, sweet. So, guys, I'm going to tell you this. Chris is a marketing automation expert. He's been on the leading edge of marketing automation before most of us even knew what that word was and he's currently working for what I believe to be ... If you're running a digital marketing agency, I absolutely believe you need to have ActiveCampaign. You know why? I know there are competitors out there. I've used all of the competitors. I've used the cheaper competitors and I've used the very high end competitors and the truth of the matter is, you can't beat ActiveCampaign at any price, I'm just going to make that statement.
As a user myself, you can't beat it at absolutely any price. It works. So, Chris, tell us first of all, what is ActiveCampaign? Why do we need it?
Chris Davis: Good question, Charles. One of the freshest definitions, so it's not been heard often and it's going to sound really weird coming from a marketing automation person, okay? So, when I first found ActiveCampaign, it stood out to me because it was the only platform that had taken a diversion away from the norm, and the norm was all-in-one-platforms. You had your Office Autopilot at the time and Infusionsoft were the two main platforms for small businesses and when it came to agencies it was Hubspot, right?
But Ontraport or Office Autopilot and Infusionsoft took the all-in-one approach and it didn't matter if you believed in the approach or not, that was all that was available. That was it. I mean, you didn't have many other options. So, when I came across ActiveCampaign, the frustration you commonly heard was, "Yeah, these platforms can do everything good but nothing great." Right? Not one thing great, but all of these other things good.
Well, ActiveCampaign, I saw them and they flipped the model. They were like, "Let us do marketing automation and let all of your tools do what they're good at but tie into us easily." And when I sat back, I was like, "That's my problem, that's my gripe with the space." Is that these marketing automation platforms are trying to do everything and they're not doing one thing really well.
So, I just felt like, if there was a platform that was focused purely on marketing automation, that I would be better suited to get on board with that platform because I know that they're going to be focused on marketing automation and that's been the case. So, what brings us now to today, now the scope has changed because our users' needs have matured and shifted and started to grow. And one thing that we're focusing on now, if you think about it Charles, of the word "marketing automation" is really self-explanatory. But if you're not careful, it can be easily misapplied to more of, I would say, the customer journey than it really should be. Marketing automation is the process of employing technology to execute your marketing strategy.
Charles K.: So, ActiveCampaign is really the hub or the brain of a marketing business, correct? Or, really, the brain of your agency.
Chris Davis: That's it, right? Because, you've got marketing automation, but when we talk about the definition and employing technology to automate your marketing strategy, what are we saying? We're saying your marketing strategy. Well, all businesses also have a sales strategy, right? They also have fulfillment strategies. They also have advertising strategies. So, now it becomes this thing where we've realized, you know what? Even though we're a marketing automation platform, we actually do more automation than just your marketing. Right?
Our CRM allows you to do the sales automation and the fulfillment automation.
Charles K.: Now, let me just stop you right there. You just hit on three things that are unbelievably important. Most people are thinking from the concept of, "I'm going to do a broadcast email today to everybody on my list and I'm going to force-feed them whatever I'm talking about. And if they're interested in Facebook marketing, I'm going to send them the latest updates on AdWords, and by gosh, they'd better accept it or else they'll unsubscribe."
I think we don't really realize, we have to treat people as individuals, but just on a mass scale. Is that what ActiveCampaign can do for me?
Chris Davis: That's it. The goal of ActiveCampaign is to scale personalization, whatever that looks like.
And I tell people all the time, personalization is external and internal. If it's just me sending an internal notification to another person on my team, personalized to the lead that I'm talking about. So, when that person gets that notification, they can readily act on exactly what they need to do with minimal flaws.
Right? And that's huge for digital marketing agencies, because what agency does not have the need for all of their employees to talk with each other, synchronously, all around one client?
Charles K.: So, let's talk about, I'm a digital marketing agency, I'm running Facebook ads for my clients. I'm getting started. What would, or how would ActiveCampaign help me? Maybe I've got a client, maybe I've got a couple clients. I've got people who are giving me their emails to contact them, I've got people who have opted in for my, blog or newsletter. How does all this work with ActiveCampaign and how would that help me close more deals and manage my deals?
Chris Davis: At that point, what's critical is to be able to capture all of the information on the contact record, right? From what source, what ad source they came from, what platform they came from. And then really determining their journey. It sounds really complicated, but it's really basic. In ActiveCampaign, you can use a form. So, let's say you have a particular form on one web page for all of your Facebook ad traffic and you have one for another landing page for all your Google ads traffic and now you can have the same automation, but they can enter it through either the Facebook page or the Google page and you can really cater those emails specific to their experience.
It's kind of like a shared experience, to a point. Like maybe, no matter the source, they both get the same first two emails and then from there they branch off into their own path.
And then there's that personalization that we're talking about, right. Now that they're branched off, I can start speaking to them specifically to what they did. If you came from Google, I know what they saw, so let me speak to that. Right? If they came from Facebook, I know what they saw, let me speak to that.
Charles K.: So, literally, let's just say you come to my page and you've come off a free Facebook ads audit. You've come to the page and given me your name and email, you want to get a Facebook ads audit, and somebody else comes from AdWords. Maybe they saw an AdWords offer for a free Facebook ads audit. They're two different people, they opt in on two different pages. As an agency owner, I could look at that record and say, "Bob came from Facebook, Jim came from Google."
Let's just say that I've got five follow-up emails. Literally, I could say, send these emails which are PPC-based to Bob, these to Jim and they're looking at it as like, "Hey, man. Charles just sent me an email."
And I think, often, as marketers, we know everybody gets these emails that are 100% base templates, however you like to look at them. The average user looks at this, "Bob sent me an email."
Chris Davis: Yeah. And remember, the goal, if we're scaling personalization, it has to be to some end result, right? We're scaling personalization to make sure that we have the moment of human touch, that should be the most optimized moment, right? We're not saying you'll never touch a contact, you'll never have to call, right? You'll never have to put in a manual effort. We're just saying, use marketing automation as a facilitator, so that when you do inject the personal touch, it's with the highest qualified lead.
So, we take that same five email sequence, what we're doing now is because we can go beyond just email marketing and sending every email one day apart, right? We can now monitor what pages they're visiting, right? ActiveCampaign has web tracking. We can see what pages they're visiting, what links they're clicking. And beforehand, we've done our due diligence to plan out, when is the perfect time to touch the contact? Maybe the perfect time to touch the contact is after they've seen our pricing page, after they've clicked our scheduling page but haven't scheduled and after they've visited our contact page but haven't submitted anything, right?
So, as soon as those three events happen, an internal notification gets sent off. It says, "Hey, reach out to this lead."
Now, when I reach out, you see what I'm saying? The probability that I'm going to close is going to be extremely high.
Charles K.: We've gone from reactive to proactive, at this point.
So, in the past, let's just ... Now, how about this? What happens if I'm Bob, I come to your site. What happens if I just look at the pricing page, the contact and schedule page, case studies, but I don't opt in. If I come back tomorrow and I opt in, will you be able to retroactively pull that data or is all that data just anonymous at that point?
Chris Davis: That's the thing. So, what we've done is we've got anonymous tracking that's happening all the time. And the minute that that anonymous user becomes known, we tie in, yes, all of that previous visit and activity to the known records, so you didn't lose anything. Even though you didn't know them, right? You didn't lose anything.
Charles K.: Dude, I feel like I'm in some Harry Potter movie. This is magic. I mean really, this truly is magic. So, you're saying, let's just say we've got a cold email coming in. Bob's come to the website, we see what he's doing. When he opts in and at this point, he's raising his hand to say, "You can now have my data. I give you permission for my data." We can look at it and say, "You know what? This guy's been prowling around the site for a week, looking at the pricing page, reading the case studies, it's only a function of, "Let's give him a call."
I mean, you can ask for a phone number in the form if you want to. I mean, there's so much that you could do with it.
Chris Davis: Yeah. And that's another good point, because I know a lot of digital marketing agencies that need to ask for more than just name and email. So, other platforms, they limit the amount of custom fields you can have, right? Some tap out at 100 and then you're like, "Aw, but I needed 101." Now you've got to go back and delete custom fields and make space and potentially lose data. Where as in ActiveCampaign, you can set up as many custom fields as you want.
So, when you're creating that form, you can freely ask for the information that you need without worrying, "Can I afford to create this field?" It's not just that the data is on the contact record, it's also the fact that all of the data is actionable and in multiple ways. So, for instance, we have deep data that ties in to WooCommerce, Shopify or BigCommerce, right? And all of that transaction data gets sent to ActiveCampaign, okay?
So, now I can look and not just see if they purchased this product, I can also say if they've spent over a certain amount of money, do this.
If they bought this many items, regardless of what the items are, if they purchased over or under three items, do this. So, we take that data, we allow you to capture it, but the action behind it is so flexible because it's not just unilateral where it's like, "Okay, if they did this." No, it's a range. It could be, if they're under this, if they're greater than this, right? If they did this, and then start triggering having trigger events, based on that.
Charles K.: From an agency standpoint, I think this is where ActiveCampaign shines above everything else. Most things that you're looking at, they're still based on the concept of, "I'm doing a generic one size fits all broadcast to everybody in my list." Or, even if you did segments. What you're saying, ActiveCampaign will track them anonymously until they opt in and then you're able to lead score them based on things they've done. You can do, name, email, size of company, size of ad spend, or are they using ... Those could be additional fields inside a form or page.
Chris Davis: Exactly.
Charles K.: So, you're literally getting people to tell you the company size, ad spend, what are they using, things of that nature. And all of that data is appended into that record. It's one thing to have data. It's another thing to be able to look at and use the data, and you're saying ActiveCampaign would give us the ability to look at that data and also, let's just say you decided, "You know, Charles, I want to hire you."
As a user, can we go in and append data? You know, "Bob just signed for a $5,000 per month retainer package." So, we can add that additional data in there ourselves.
Chris Davis: Right, you can manually enter it in. You could manually enter it in, or the user can submit it. And here's the good thing, like, there's a lot of simple, powerful use cases. Like, I'm thinking of a medium-sized digital marketing agency. Perhaps you have a certain person that handles the higher accounts and another one that handles the lower accounts. So, you can have a simple automation that when that form is submitted, it's looking at the ad spend budget, right? And if your ad spend is under 10k, you can assign them to rep A in the CRM to manage their entire opportunity or deal.
If they're over 10k, you can automatically assign them to rep B to handle the account.
Charles K.: First of all, what is a CRM? Does ActiveCampaign have one built in, and how can it help me?
Chris Davis: Yeah, CRM, the official definition is Customer Relationship Management software and they exist to enable you to handle a customer's journey, right? Everybody is not just going to come to your site and buy. Sometimes there are stages to that process. So, that's what a CRM is and it's really for companies who have a sales team, right? Or they require more than one touch to close the sale. This is very often seen in service-based businesses like a CPA, which you have to do a preliminary input form for them to gather some basic information, maybe to a phone consultation and then come into the office and maybe close and then collect your fees later.
That's an entire process, so we need to manage that, right? We need to manage it in stages. So, that's what a CRM is, and you really can't have marketing automation without a CRM. So, there's many platforms out there that claim marketing automation but you can't really be true to it without a CRM, because there needs to be some way of handling, in an automated fashion, or using automation to aid you in handling that relationship with the customer. That's where a CRM comes into play.
And yes, ActiveCampaign has one. Ours is the most flexible on the market. We're starting to see a lot of other platforms model theirs after ours. We were the first to take the Trello approach, where you have all of your stages visually from left to right and then there's cards within those stages. Those cards (we call them deals) you can move them, right? From stage to stage. And I'll tell you this, Charles, if any Salesforce users are on here or PipeDrive or any other CRM, you'll know that it's very common to move contacts from stage to stage manually.
Meaning you log into their account, you look at the contact record and then you say, "Okay, move them from this stage to the next." Well, what a lot of people are just blown away with in ActiveCampaign is, you can use an automation to move cards from stage to stage.
Charles K.: Dude, this is one sexy beast.
Chris Davis: And a lot of people are like, "Wait a minute, you can do that?"
Charles K.: I cannot tell you, and I'm not going to call the names of any of the CRMs I've used, but I grabbed the little file and I drag it and then I go back in Gmail, drag the file, then I've got to drag the file over.
Chris Davis: Right.
Charles K.: And honestly, I love PipeDrive. I hate that I've got to enter information from Gmail into PipeDrive or even CloseIO. I think they're great products and I'm sure they've got a way to do this, but then the data is separate from our marketing automation. Then, my CRM, because it's so disconnected, all it really becomes is a glorified Excel file.
Chris Davis: That's it, right? I mean, to me, it's ridiculous. It seriously is. It's a sign up for a platform that claims they're marketing automation and then you have to integrate with an external CRM. The amount of synchronization that you have to do to keep the data in your marketing automation platform, because that's the only platform that can really take action on it, is ridiculous. And that's one of the reasons why we're continuing to build out our CRM and focus on it, because we were almost making that mistake.
We were like, "Let's just give a basic CRM and if they need something bigger, they can integrate somewhere else." And then we were like, "Whoa, wait a minute, that's a huge no-no and a huge opportunity to add value by just enhancing the CRM." And ever since we did it, people have loved it. Digital marketing agencies love it.
It's really two fold with an agency, right? You have your lead gen, where you're always prospecting new clients to bring on but they have your internal processes, when you have those clients. How do you manage those client relationships? Essentially, you use a CRM to move them through the process. Maybe they're in the getting-started stage, right? And then maybe there's another stage where you have collected all information and you’re ready to start implementing. And then they go into the implementation stage and then they go into the completion stage and then lastly they go into the stage which is signing up for ongoing maintenance or whatnot.
Whatever the case is, agencies are going to have stages that all of their clients go through, so it's critical to have a platform that can help you manage the relationship across all of those stages, as well as aid you in some back end processes and tasks that need to be automated.
Charles K.: I think at the end of the day, it's like the marketing brain for my business. So now, let's just say I'm going to be your average Joe Customer on the customer journey. I come to the site from Facebook or Google or I clicked an email link or something and I'm at the site, I'm looking around. Maybe I'm going to opt in, maybe I don't. Maybe I see the Facebook ad tomorrow and I come back and you know what? It's a great article, so I'm going to give you my name and email. I opt in.
At that point, you can see Bob's been to the site, he's looked at your case studies, he's looked at your blog. He's spent a fairly decent amount of time on your site, he's got a lead score. Now we've got name and email. Maybe he doesn't give a phone number. Maybe he doesn't fill out a free consultation. But he comes back to the site, looks at the consultation page, doesn't pull the trigger.
We now have the ability ... And because we've got his name and email, he can now be automatically moved into the CRM. So, the CRM's built into it, so this is not a third party program where I've got to copy-paste the name, paste this lead score, call him and then try to use something like PieSync to sync between two things, which is an additional expense and more things I have to deal with. So, all of this is in the CRM, so now I can go somewhere, find that lead. I can look it up in LinkedIn, get his phone number.
"Hey, Bob. This is Charles from so and so agency, just wanted to touch base as I've see you've opted in, I want to thank you for that. Can I help you or do you have any questions or what are your challenges?" So, all of this is happening in the CRM. And at this point, if Bob says, "Yeah, you know, let's talk later." You can actually set a date to talk later. You know, call, "Remind me to call Bob in two weeks."
We can set those in the CRM. We can get a pop-up, "Hey, you need to call Bob in two weeks, give him a proposal." You can move him along and even when he purchases, you can move him from a prospect into a customer. Is this where the CRM ends or can we track his workflow and his progress in that? In ActiveCampaign’s system?
Chris Davis: Absolutely. You can do it all. The most critical point is capturing the data in ActiveCampaign, right? But once you have the data in, I mean, we have people that have platforms that do. They send web hooks, when a proposal is sent out, it can send a web hook back to ActiveCampaign and say, "Hey, proposal sent." As long as we can capture that information, we can then set automation rules or triggers or actions to say, "Hey, we received the proposal. Move them to the next stage." Right?
I mean, the possibilities are unlimited, truly.
Charles K.: So, literally, we have the ability to make more money from the same leads, way more money from the same leads, by being personal using automation.
Chris Davis: There you go. And that's the key really, right? I mean, everybody talks about the easiest customer is the one you already have, right? It's easier to close people who have already given you money than it is to find people with new money. And that is true, but that also assumes you have a system in place to do that, okay?
And most people have a lead generation system in place.
Charles K.: They don't have a follow-up system.
Chris Davis: There you go, right? Because in the CRM, just think about it, we have all of our data. We know exactly where they're at in the process, we've collected all of the information on them, we've scored their actions. So, at any point we can start to identify which offer, which service or which next step to place in front of them to make that statement be true. Without ... It's not like it happens automatically. It's not like, just because someone gave you money you can ask for another sale and they'll just give it to you. That would be letting you off the hook to being a smart marketer.
But since we know that to be true, what we're saying is I just need a platform that's going to keep track of everything they've done and quickly give me an accurate assessment of exactly where people are at so that I can make the intelligent decision based on people who have given me money. If I'm going to spend my time, let me spend my time on these next 10 leads who have been happy and going through all of the processes extremely fast.
Charles K.: Okay, I've got a confession to make. This is probably like, confession time with ActiveCampaign. When a lead signs up to ActiveCampaign, ActiveCampaign pulls in the Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles.
I know that people have said, "Charles, you're nothing more than a spammer." The minute I get a lead that comes in that I think, if you opt in with Gmail, I'm not very excited. But if you opt in with Bob at such and such million dollar e-commerce platform, Amazon top seller dot com, because ActiveCampaign pulls in additional data, it enriches the data.
I can literally go to Facebook and like them, I can tweet them in Twitter. I can check out a LinkedIn profile and I can send them messages, "Hey, just wanted to say, really excited you've opted in." You know?
Chris Davis: I mean, Charles, just think about this, right? We set up an automation that whenever someone is added to our database, the first thing we do is check for Gmail.com, Yahoo.com, AOL.com, iCloud.com, AOL.com, you know, the normal dot coms that show that you don't have a branded email address, right? And we say, everybody that has those type of emails, go down this path. But everybody that doesn't, send me an internal notification so I, just a reminder to in and check their email.
Now, it could be some other addresses that we missed, but for the most part, we've got a quick filter for branded emails. And then at that point, I'm on the phone, right? I get a notification to say, "Hey, we just got so and so, they may have a branded email, check it out." And in that notification, I've merged the email so I can see, like you said, Bob@BillionDollarBusiness.com, let me view the contact. So, right there in my email client, I click "View contact," and you're absolutely right, I can see their social media.
So, imagine this from the other end. If I'm Bob at Billion Dollar Business, there's a reason why I opted in. There's something I was curious about. And then lo and behold, when I logged into LinkedIn, I see that the same person that I was trying to reach has checked me out.
Charles K.: And guys, from a marketing standpoint, people judge ... As a digital marketing agency, people judge you based on how good your marketing is. I mean, that's a case study in and of itself, the fact that you contacted them and said, "Hey, just want to say I noticed you opted in. Really excited. What have you been working on or how can we help you?" And also, this by the way, takes you out of the normal stuff most people get in their inbox. They do their inbox business, but when they go to their Facebook, Twitter and social media, that's a totally different animal. That is where they're spending more time, and you're saying we have the ability to do that.
Plus, we haven't even gotten into this ability ... Can ActiveCampaign do SMS text messaging for me?
Chris Davis: Absolutely. That's another feature that a lot of people overlook. And what I like about our SMS is that you can fire it off at any point in an automation, right, like. Any time, you can fire off an SMS. It's not just limited to, "Okay, you can only send an SMS after they opt in or register." So, in ActiveCampaign you can do it by them texting a number that we provide for you and they text that number, whatever keyword that you create, they text the number, it says, "Hey, great. Got your information. Tell me your email address, where to send it and whatnot." And then we've captured them.
But ongoing, you can also send continual SMS, so it's great for event reminders, right? Service expirations, invoices that need to be paid, things of that nature. They're great because, think about this, Charles. When I first found out about SMS I was just like, "Oh, that's cool." And I just kind of blew it off to the side, right, it was just like, "Yeah, there's other platforms out there that do that."
But I missed it. I didn't realize, again, we've been talking about the CRM and collecting data. In the SMS, I can merge any contact information that I want.
So, I can say, "Hey, Bob. I see that you're looking to spend over 10k for an ad budget, just reply to this text and let me know when to call." Or something like that, right? So, my SMS can be personalized, which is not common.
Normally, you're limited to like, first name, last name and that's it. But I can send any information I've captured, I can merge that into an SMS.
Charles K.: Now, the last thing before we wrap this up, does ActiveCampaign ... I mean, I've bought platforms before that integrated with nothing but themselves and themselves. ActiveCampaign, what does it integrate with? I mean, am I going to be stuck not being able to collect leads with Exit Pops and memberships, I mean, what all do you integrate with?
Chris Davis: Yeah, so, at ActiveCampaign, we're on version three of our API and that's important because we're continually working with the development community to make sure that sending data to and getting data from our application is as easy as possible. Because we want you to use the best of breed tools for your business, and if we're going to be the central hub, the brain of your automation, then you need to be able to easily tie in and send that information to us. I haven't found many applications that we don't integrate with. And we support it.
In fact, we're so pro-integration, it's really called the marketing stack approach. We're so pro for it that we're starting to build our own integrations, our native integrations with tools so you don't have to wait on other tools, you can log right into ActiveCampaign and just click, "I want to integrate with that net." And now the integration is set, no third party needed, you can send data back and forth.
Charles K.: Because I've looked at stuff before where it's like, "Hey, do you integrate with this or that or the other?" "Well, no. We're waiting on them." And even things as basic as memberships.
I'm not going to call a name, but I bought a membership product especially because it integrates with ActiveCampaign. And it's like, such a native integration, I'm like, "Man, that rocks." And literally, the membership is triggered by the tags inside of ActiveCampaign. To me, that makes a difference.
Chris Davis: Yeah, and one last thing, and this is because at most digital marketing agencies, you're going to have a developer on hand. This is for your developer. We have web hooks in ActiveCampaign, and I'm no developer, so I don't know personally, I've just heard from developers. The way that we send out our web hooks, the data is so clean and easy to grab that developers love it, they love it. Because now, if there's not a direct integration, then you can use a web hook and build out and send that information, and as long as you know what you're doing as far as the API, you don't need to wait on that platform to say, "Okay, we've got it built."
All of the data is packaged and formatted so easy that it allows you to easily do what you need to do as far as if your developer needs to take a native integration further or you just need a little more granularity as far as integrating with other applications, or you have your own proprietary software. We hear that a lot. People are like, "Look, I built my own software and I want to send contact information to my software at a certain point." And we're like, "Hey, use a web hook."
They find the web hook and they're like, "Oh my gosh, this is it, this is exactly what I needed, thank you."
Charles K.: It's super clean, it's universally accepted. Everybody will accept a web hook, virtually everybody that I'm aware of. Dude, that rocks. So, first of all, how much is ActiveCampaign? It sounds like I'm going to be dropping a few hundred dollars a month, easily. What is the price point, how do we get started and go from there?
Chris Davis: Yeah, ActiveCampaign.com/Pricing is where you can see everything and keep me honest here, but most people, a thousand contacts is a good starting point. And I'm not saying start point as far as you're getting started in business. I'm talking about getting started with true automation across your business. For a thousand contacts, the best plan is our plus plan, that's $49 a month, that gives you everything. SMS, CRM, automation, unlimited everything. Just $49 a month. A lot of people will look at that and they're like, "Oh my gosh, why is it so cheap?" Right?
And then for those that may say, "Well, you know what, I like the automation, I don't think I'm ready for the CRM." Right? Like, "Let me grow into that." We do have a light plan. We have a light plan that starts at $17 a month. Still under the $20 threshold that we most commonly see out here, so we still are competitive on that price. And for the people that are like, "Look, I need the CRM, SMS and more. What else do you have?" Then we have our pro plan, that's $99 a month. And that's all of the advanced features that you need are in the pro plan, so, those are the three plans that we have available.
Charles K.: I'll tell you this, guys. If you're looking at getting started, it's a 14 day free trial. Sign up for it, go to ActiveCampaign.com, click on sign up. One thing that I did not mention, inside the Members' Area or inside the ActiveCampaign area, you actually have a lot of built in ... Kind of the we were talking about, a lot of built-in automation's already built in to the platform. You click a button and import it into your account.
And there are tons of other people who have made these and guys, I'm just going to tell you, you can go to the ActiveCampaign blog. You guys have been giving out automations, probably for a year or two. Some really high-end automations that I, personally, would have charged for.
You've got an automation marketplace, so if you want to do lead scoring but you don't know how to do it, go to the marketplace. If somebody goes to your pricing page and doesn't finish their checkout, you can send them emails, "Hey, noticed you didn't finish your checkout." There are so many different things in there, it's unbelievable. Onboarding, so, when you get a client, "Hey, we need access to your tag manager, your Facebook stuff." Here's how to do it. You actually have automations on how to qualify and schedule sales calls. It's just really, really exciting to see all these calls, these segments, these automations in there.
It really is a huge time saver, guys. So, go to ActiveCampaign. I've used everything on the planet. ActiveCampaign is where you want to be at. And it integrates with everything. So, guys, I've enjoyed it. Chris, thank you so much. Guys, check out ActiveCampaign. This is Charles, have a good one, talk to you later.
Chris Davis: Thanks, Charles.