The global campaign management software market was valued at approximately $1.85 billion in 2017 and is anticipated to grow at 15.65% from 2018 to 2025. This has undoubtedly benefited Jason F. VandeBoom’s ActiveCampaign, a customer experience automation platform founded in 2003 to help businesses automate email marketing, customer relationship management, and ad campaign processes. Its mission resonated with investors, a few of which today poured $100 million into the startup as part of a series B investment.
The round, which was led by Susquehanna Growth Equity, comes after four years in which ActiveCampign boosted annual recurring revenue sevenfold and opened offices in Indianapolis, Dublin, and Sydney while “significantly” expanding its presence in Brazil. In that period, its workforce grew from 65 to over 550 employees, with almost 300 of those joining in the past year alone.
As VandeBoom explained, ActiveCampaign’s automations are powered in part by AI and machine learning algorithms. They’re customized, with flows that inform hundreds of unique experiences generated dynamically for each person. And they live within a visual automation map that reveals which are connected to each other, active, or in need of adjustment. It also exposes their status while suggesting any new automations that might be deployed.
ActiveCampagin’s suite of products enables customers to broadcast emails to anyone in a contact list or configure triggers that send messages based on purchase intent, site visits, or engagement. Segmenting tools let managers group audiences and orchestrate email autoresponders, funnels, and scheduled emails correspondingly, while an integrated drag-and-drop email designer makes available features like revision histories, geotracking, analytics, image hosting, and social sharing.
Above: The ActiveCampaign dashboard.
Image Credit: ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampagin supports split testing — up to five emails with different subject lines, content, images, and calls to action can be tested at once — and records metrics like conversion rate, opens, and more to bubble to the top those that perform best. A split actions feature allows customers with a certain number of products to make offers until they sell out, for instance, before sending other contacts down a different automation path. And extensive event tracking records logins, plays, clicks, video views, orders, and more across apps, membership sites, and online portals.
Beyond email, ActiveCampaign boasts a robust text message marketing platform– one that supports the scheduling, notifying, and automating — and social media audience targeting and segmenting. Companies can target people with Facebook Ads and draw on data to automatically retarget based on visits to websites, product interests, form submissions, custom fields, and other collected information.
A customer can set up a welcome series and other automations and view them from within a single dashboard. Or they can tap migration services that move emails, forms, and contacts from other platforms to ActiveCampaign’s own. They’re also able to implement site tracking that follows up customer interactions with triggered messages and that tracks goals and conversions to evaluate the effectiveness of ongoing campaigns. And they can employ lead scoring to pick out the most engaged contacts and offer exactly what they want.
ActiveCampaign automatically updates contact details and exposes leads’ entire histories, and it notes interactions across sales teams so that conversations can be picked up where they were left off. On the managerial side, it tracks the performance of individual team members and predicts how likely each is to close deals, and it assigns tasks to individual salespeople either manually or within automations.
ActiveCampaign integrates with a number of existing tools, including Gmail, Outlook, PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Facebook, Zapier, WordPress, and over 250 others. And it boasts a marketplace with over 300 predefined automations from 200 tech partners.
Competitors in this market segment abound. There’s Pyze, which raised $4.6 million in July 2019 for its AI-driven analytics and marketing campaign orchestration tool, and Clari, which recently nabbed $60 million to further develop its AI sales pipeline toolset. That’s not to mention TapClicks, which raised $10 million in August 2019; Boomtrain; Albert Technologies; 6Sense; Appier; Highspot; and Panoramic.
But VandeBoom notes that ActiveCampaign’s client list is swiftly growing, with over 90,000 customers in 161 countries. “Customer experience makes or breaks a business, and we’re proud to be the critical piece that helps growing companies find success … as they scale,” he said. “We became open to funding to give us optionality, ensuring we can continue to deliver during this time of rapid growth.”
As part of this latest round, Susquehanna Growth Equity partner Martin Angert will join ActiveCampaign’s board of directors.