How I Use Active Campaign to Sell Info Products, Courses & Memberships (On Autopilot)

Well hello there peeps!

Welcome to brand spankin new blog post that's hot off the press and one that I’m super excited to share with you.

For the longest time, I used to think that “making money while you sleep” or stepped away on vacation was impossible.

In fact,

I just thought that I would have to work myself into a tizzy and stay on the grind by selling products and services one by one.

Then one day, I came to the realization that If I wanted to automate a lot of the sales, customer experience, and even follow up tasks in my business, there was a tool that I HAD to invest in to accomplish these tasks.

I needed a powerful email marketing system in place that could help me sell digital products from my online shop, courses and offer access to my membership site around the clock -- after I set it up.

That’s when I discovered Active Campaign - a POWERFUL email marketing and automation platform for business owners.

Active Campaign Dashboard Example

How I Got Started with Email Marketing (Plus the System I Used Initially)

When I started this blog in 2015, I had heard gurus screaming from the mountaintop about the importance of building an email list if you want to run a successful online business.

And so I started reading up and doing some research to figure out what the most popular email marketing services were.

During this time, AWeber and Mailchimp were the most popular email marketing systems in the blogging world.

Now,

When doing the research to figure out what email marketing service to use between these two, I needed something that could do a few things:

Make it easy to create email opt-in forms that I could strategically place throughout my blog to encourage sign ups to my email list

Create email marketing newsletters to send content to my email list in a jiffy

Create email autoresponders that send out messages automatically when someone signed up to my email list.

That wasn’t too expensive...since I was running my website the “lean” way.

After taking some time to do some research, I settled on using AWeber as my email service provider.

AWeber Dashboard

What I Liked About Using AWeber

Now to be truthful, I used AWeber because there were a lotttt of people in the blogging space that were using this system successfully.

I will admit that some of the things that I liked about using AWeber for email marketing were that it:

It’s simple and super easy to use

It is affordable. AWeber only costs around $19/month for up to 500 subscribers.

Setting up simple automations is a breeze. Here again, with AWeber, you can have a simple autoresponder setup in a matter of minutes.

The deliverability rates were off the charts high. This simply means that my email subbies had a greater chance of getting messages that I sent to them into your inbox.

It worked really well for sending out RSS feed broadcasts from my blog to my email list. This just means that anytime I published a new blog post to my site, AWeber did the job of sending out that content directly to my email subbies (automatically).

Why I Chose to Move Away from AWeber and Use Active Campaign

Simply stated, I outgrew AWeber and things like setting up advanced automations were just too overcomplicated.

For example,

If someone signed up for my email list to get a freebie that teaches them “How to Start a WordPress website”, I had no way to segment them and put them into an email nurturing sequence.

This nurturing sequence would be designed to move them deeper into the relationship then offering them an opportunity to enroll in a course or get a workbook that shows them how to set up their WordPress website (because I know they are interested in this topic).

In a nutshell,

My business model shifted from being just a run of the mill biz where I was in constant “launch” mode trying to sell one off courses and info products.

I Needed a Smarter Email Marketing System

I needed a SMARTER email marketing system in place that would allow me to do things like:

Had more powerful and smarter automation capabilities.

Tag new email subscribers based on their interests. Instead of lumping everyone into one gigantic category, I’ve learned over time that it's better to segment and tag your email subbies based on what they are interested in.
Easily integrate with my current shopping cart Thrivecart. I use Thrivecart to accept payments from my website for products that I sell in my online shop, courses and membership.

Send emails to email subbies based on “specific” actions they take. This includes things like abandoned cart automations (to try to recover lost sales), website tracking (basically reach out to subbies that interact with certain pages on your website) and more.

Split testing email subject lines to see which ones perform better

Active Campaign Came to the Rescue

After realizing that AWeber just wasn’t going to work for me, I headed on over and signed up for a free 14-day trial of Active Campaign to test it out.

Guys, I was really blown away by how powerful Active Campaign is. There is just so much that you can do.

For example, take this automation that I setup in Active Campaign a while back for folks that attend a free workshop that teaches you how to use Canva for visual design:

Active Campaign Automation for Free Canva Workshop

This automation is setup to do the following:

Send out an email autoresponder message to folks that leave the free Canva design workshop “early” to let them know that they can either:

Watch the replay of the live full workshop again at a later time or
Grab the Lights Canva Action course on sale for a limited time to attendees

Now:

You may be wondering… well Kim, how would something like this help me and my business.

Well here’s why using automations like this is important:

Once you set them up and get them running correctly, they will continue to work behind the scenes in your business “on autopilot” to do exactly what you need them to do.

This could be things like:

Setting up automations to sell your eBooks after a new email subscriber has been “tagged” and added a specific email sequence that you set up.

Using automations to “win back” customers that added a product or service to a shopping cart, but did not complete their purchase.

Creating sales sequences to upsell subscribers that purchased a lower priced product and clicked on a link that automatically adds them into a different automation to offer them a chance to purchase your premium product.

How I’m Using Active Campaign for Product Sales

To be honest, once you have all of your automations set up correctly in Active Campaign there is not much you will have to do afterwards.

Everything will pretty much run on it’s on.

Now let's dive off into the more in depth stuff with how I'm using Active Campaign to sell info products, courses and memberships on autopilot.

Leveraging Active Campaign to Sell Courses

The online courses that I sell are hosted on Teachable.

Since Active Campaign integrates nicely with Thrivecart, I’m using it to do the following as it relates to course sales:

1. Customer Service: Whenever someone enrolls in a course, I have Active Campaign automations setup to send out a series of “Welcome” emails to new students. These emails have important links to information in them as well as information that they can use to do things like “Join a community” that is included with their course subscription and more.

2. To get feedback: for course students, Active Campaign is also set up to send out emails to check the progress of my students after a certain number of days. Active Campaign honestly acts like a mini virtual assistant that does the follow up for you. And believe me...students appreciate it.

Here’s a screenshot of an email automation that I use to sell the Lights Canva Action course on autopilot with Active Campaign

Active Campaign Automation Designed to Sell The Lights Canva Action Courses

Using Active Campaign for Selling Info Products

In my onine shop I sell things like workbook templates, eBook templates and graphics kits.

To sell these templates on autopilot I have several automations setup in Active Campaign that are connected to ThriveCart (my current shopping cart).

Basically what happens is that when someone buys a product from the shop, an automation in Active Campaign is triggered to send that product to them.

Here's an example of the email that gets sent out when someone purchases the Blazing Workbook Bundle:

Blazing Workbook Bundle Email Sequence

In this email, they will get links to their product and support information and other important resources they may need access to.

Here's the best part:

This process runs completely on autopilot and in the background of my website.

So even when I'm sleeping, and someone decides to purchase a product from my online store, Active Campaign will do the heavy lifting by sending that product to them.

How I'm Using Active Campaign for Membership Site Access and Sales

In addition to selling info products and courses, I also run a small membership site called the Blazing Branding Academy that gives peeps access to a ton of training and templates that help with visual design and tech.

I'm currently using Active Campaign to send out a series of automations inviting peeps to get a free trial of the Membership for a limited amount of time.

Here's what one of the emails in this sequence looks like:

Now the way this is setup works pretty cool because here again, AC is set up to automatically send these emails out to anyone that has purchased a product from me.

Here again, this is the magic of using smart marketing automations. They work even when you don’t.

How Much Does Active Campaign Cost?

It depends.

There are different plans available with Active Campaign so you will just need to find the right plan for your business.

I'm currently paying around $40 dollars a month on the AC Lite plan. But believe me, it's well worth it for all of the features and automations that you get.

Who is Active Campaign the Perfect Fit For?

In my opinion Active Campaign is the perfect marketing and automation system for anyone that needs access to a smarter system that works -- even when you don’t.

This could mean:

Solopreneurs that work alone that want to leverage the power of marketing automation to “automate” repetitive processes (selling products via evergreen funnels versus launches, etc)

Bloggers that to personalize their email marketing campaigns and send follow up emails to subscribers based on (actions they take or don’t take) -- or use emails to get feedback from folks that have purchased from you.

Service based business owners that want to use automation to set up “automated intake” sequences or onboarding sequences for new clients.

Advanced marketers that want to segment new subscribers based on their interests...and behavior

Anyone that wants a powerful yet reasonably priced marketing and automation platform that will help you save TIME by “automating” business processes -- without a hefty price tag.

Who Active Campaign May Not Be a Good Fit For

If you just need a simple email system that you can use to send out basic emails to your email list and not a lot of extras, then I wouldn't recommend using Active Campaign.

I would honestly advise you to use a system like AWeber as it is easier to get started with. For folks getting started with email marketing, Active Campaign can be a little confusing and frustrating to use.

Conclusion

If you’re on the hunt for an email marketing and automation system and have still not settled on one yet, I would highly recommend taking Active Campaign for a free-14-day trial.

This tool is hands down one of the BEST tech investments that I’ve made in a long time.

I love the fact that this system integrates easily with a lot of the tech tools that I use to run my online store like WooCommerce and Thrivecart, Teachables course platform, plus the fact that it does a great job of taking care of some of the repetitive business tasks that I would have to “hire” someone to do.

So forge ahead, take Active Campaign for a test run and let me know what you think about it.

Cheers and thanks for reading!