ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign are both effective pieces of social media marketing with a well-rounded suite of functionality, but business owners and marketing professionals can save quite a bit of money when they choose to integrate the two services, rather than use them separately.
How to integrate ClickFunnels with ActiveCompaign? Integrating ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign via Zapier allows you to connect your ActiveCampaign service directly to ClickFunnels, creating a connected system of user analytics and limitless ways to customize copy between email marketing campaigns and your landing pages.
ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign are both paid subscription services, so if you don’t watch out, you can end up spending more for advertising than its worth. Integrating the two platforms, in this case, can be worth the cost though, and in many cases, can even be more economical. Read on to find out why.
Why Integrate ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign?
The main reason that it’s a good idea to integrate ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign into one social media marketing campaign is that the two services are fundamentally designed for very different things.
It’s also cheaper to get email marketing as an integrated add-on to ClickFunnels rather than paying the significantly higher price of a monthly upgrade for email marketing capacity directly in ClickFunnels software through Actionetics.
What Is ClickFunnels?
ClickFunnels is a social marketing platform that allows you to create sales funnels for your business website. A sales funnel (also known as a revenue funnel or sales process) is a way for you to set up your business website in a way that allows it to generate sales.
One of the most important parts of a business website is the landing page–this is typically the homepage of the site, and the page that potential buyers will see when they first click on a search engine hyperlink. Because of this, it’s important for a landing page to be great.
This is where ClickFunnels steps in. ClickFunnels’ main function is as a sophisticated, heavy-hitting landing page builder, letting business owners set up a custom homepage for their business that gives potential buyers and clients ways to start buying things right off the bat.
But ClickFunnels doesn’t just create spectacular landing pages for every kind of business with a digital component (and there are few out there these days that don’t have an online market).
Here are some of the other features included with ClickFunnels:
- Ability to set up membership groups/subscription systems
- Custom checkout options for services like PayPal
- Payment integration with Stripe, PayPal, and other processors
- Ability to set up webinars and sell informational courses
- Split-testing tool to use analytics on competing test landing pages
- Conversion tracking stats so you can see how many of your site visits actually result in sales or subscriptions
One of the biggest advantages of ClickFunnels is its customization features. a , it is possible to make any number of sales-positive website pages or business documents such as the following:
- Sales letters. One successful aspect of
an online marketing campaign is sales letters, which are emails designed to
generate sales leads. The difference between good sales letters and bad sales
letters is the difference between sales and spam folders.
- Video sales letters. A video sales letter
is a web page with a video illustrating your product
and selling it. For products that require demonstration, video sales letters are a great landing page option.
- List building pages. These are web pages that allow you to collect opt-in contact data on potential buyers and keep a database of potential leads for email marketing.
- Safe and secure checkout pages. For direct sales on your website, you’re going to need a payment system that doesn’t make people leery of fraud. ClickFunnels legitimizes your online payment system by using established systems like PayPal.
- Upsell pages. Upselling is when you offer a buyer potential upgrades or additional items for sale once they’ve committed to a different sale.
- Downsell pages. Downselling is when a potential buyer declines a sale, and this triggers your sales system to offer them a discounted item of similar value to try and salvage at least part of the sale.
- Webinar funnels. Many kinds of digital services can offer webinars and other online courses as supplemental income. Offering expert knowledge is seen as generosity on the part of a business, and getting paid for it makes it beneficial for both parties.
- Thank you/download pages. These pages trigger when a buyer purchases product from your website. These kinds of small web design touches can make your site look much more professional and generate you more business as a result.
- Gated subscription areas. If you want to block part of your business website off to people who pay a subscription, ClickFunnels can do it. Gated subscription pages are also good for setting up a hub to brief outsourced remote workers with a log-in area.
What is ActiveCampaign?
While ClickFunnels is focused on building landing pages and business websites, ActiveCampaign is more focused on the email marketing side of the equation, allowing you to use machine learning and automation to generate sales effortlessly through email connections.
Email marketing is important because when you have a digital business, it’s a little more difficult to develop a bond with consumers like you can if you have a physical storefront.
To compensate for this, email marketing through platforms like ActiveCampaign has become so target-specific that you can make people feel like you’re speaking directly to them.
Using email marketing campaigns with persuasive, compelling copy, this allows emails to connect potential buyers emotionally with you and your product, developing brand loyalty and making a customer more likely to be a repeat customer or a subscriber to your services.
An email marketing campaign involves more than just sending out email newsletters, however. ActiveCampaign offers a more complex solution to the digital market, giving you several options for monitoring and automating your sales activities as well.
Some of the other features included with ActiveCampaign:
- Website/event tracking
- Automaton goals
- Attribution
- Split actions
- Analytics on upsells, downsells, cross sells, order bumps, and sales funnels
- Manage and grow contacts
- Smartphone app capability
- Rating leads
- Generating new leads through social media analytics
The customization that ActiveCampaign brings to the table takes your voice and lets you project it exactly where and how you want, letting you refine your brand through persuasive sales copy delivered right to the customer’s inbox, and help your product stand out.
Here are a few ways you can use ActiveCampaign to customize your email marketing:
- Broadcast emails. These are one-time emails that allow you to showcase new products, initialize flash sales, or send newsletters to a large group of contacts at once.
- Client/contact segmentation. ActiveCampaign allows you to segment your clientele/potential leads by a variety of tags and lists, and fields. Segmentation allows you to further customize your sales papers to individual contacts and group analytics.
- Drip campaigns. Drip email campaigns are a good way to generate sales for your website because mass emails are cheap advertisement. Drip campaigns let you send messages gradually to persuade customers instead of pestering them, keeping you out of the spam folder.
- Automated workflows. If you run a small business, automating the minutiae of day-to-day digital marketing and sales can save you a fortune in labor, not to mention a bunch of lost energy you could otherwise be spending on more profitable ideas.
Why Use ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign Together?
Besides the fact that ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign are directed at completely different aspects of the social media marketing campaign (despite trying to integrate more well-rounded services in their higher tiers) the two platforms are complementary services in many ways.
The advantage of setting up sales funnels through ClickFunnels (while integrating ActiveCampaign email marketing) is that you can create a seamless customer experience, letting them easily purchase products and services directly from their inbox.
The sales analytics and conversions of ActiveCampaign also allow you to tighten your marketing focus with every sale you make since social media marketing is only as effective as its precision in identifying a buyer demographic.
If you send advertising papers to potential customers who are not receptive because they aren’t interested in your products to begin with, you’re just going to end up in a lot of spam folders. That’s not going to generate sales for anyone.
Software like ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign use customer interface tools that not only help you find customers that already want you and your products, they help you track the customers you already have to figure out what they want and how to keep them loyal.
How to Use ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign Together
Even though they come at the problem of social media marketing from different angles, when the software of both are integrated together, they automate aspects of the business that would otherwise take up a lot of human time and energy, things such as:
- Lead generation to build new sales
- Customer analytics to track current customers
and refine your business to attract
new customers - Email marketing that links seamlessly back into your landing pages, allowing you to guide user traffic directly from inbox to checkout
- Machine learning to gain pinpoint analysis of your market
- Add advanced features to your landing pages and
email campaigns, like abandoned cart
follow-ups - Live messaging platform to provide the utmost
quality in customer service directly from
your website
How to Technically Integrate ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign
The technical method for integrating ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign is simple. ClickFunnels now allows you to pass tags directly from ClickFunnels into ActiveCampaign, making integration of the two platforms much less complicated than it used to be.
However, how you decide to integrate the two platforms depends on how you’re wanting to use them. One way to integrate the two platforms is by creating squeeze pages.
Squeeze Pages
Squeeze pages are landing pages that are designed specifically to encourage potential customers to opt-in to email subscriptions, allowing you to market directly to them via automated email marketing campaigns.
It is simple to use ClickFunnels to create slick, user-friendly landing pages with an email subscription feature embedded, then use emails generated by that subscription feature to then build your contacts in ActiveCampaign for broadcast emails and other promotional materials.
Here’s the technical process for linking ClickFunnels-built landing pages to your ActiveCampaign platform to merge your contacts:
- Create a new form in ActiveCampaign. Link your On Submit option to your Thank You page. Optionally, you can turn off double opt-in at this point.
- Take the full embed code from your
ActiveCampaign form, then copy and paste it into a
text document. - Copy from the open <form> tag through the closing </form> tag.
- Edit your squeeze page in ClickFunnels and go to Integrations under Settings.
- Select an HTML integration.
- Paste in your code and hit the Parse & Save Web Form button.
- Sync your fields. Then save everything and do a thorough test before you go live. Now you have a squeeze page!
Two-Step Orders
Two-step orders are great for gathering potential customer information even if they don’t actually go through with a sale. Even if someone doesn’t buy something the first time they visit your website, they might be thinking through their purchase.
Thoughtful customers can sometimes become some of your most loyal customers, so it’s worth putting measures into practice to catch the contact information of these potential buyers, even if they temporarily back out of a sale.
As one of its more advanced features, ClickFunnels offers its users “abandoned cart” contact captures along with upsell and downsell capability.
This ClickFunnels feature can be seamlessly integrated into ActiveCampaign so that even if your buyer leaves your website to consider the purchase, they can still get an email reminder about your product that might change their mind.
Note: It’s important to note that this level of integration requires a third-party tool called Zapier to make a seamless connection between ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign. It is a free service up to a point, but you can purchase additional services through Zapier starting at $20/mo.
Here’s the technical process for linking ClickFunnels-generated abandoned carts to your ActiveCampaign platform to gain contacts even when you don’t gain immediate sales:
- Submit a test order (this is required by Zapier)
- Go to Zapier and Make A Zap
- Select ClickFunnels as the Trigger app and watch for New Contact Activity. Select the correct funnel and funnel step with the two-step order form.
- Select ActiveCampaign as your Action app and select Create/Update Contact.
- Map the ClickFunnels data you want to integrate into the fields you want updated in ActiveCampaign (assigning tags is probably a good idea at this stage).
- Turn on your Zap.
- Test everything before you go live. Enjoy your two-step orders!
Merging Customer Purchase Information
One advantage of integrating ClickFunnels and ActiveCampaign is being able to track customer purchase histories. ClickFunnels does not send this information to third parties naturally, but you can work within the system to create that functionality manually.
This means that you if a customer purchases something through one of your sales pages or listings on your main website, you can export that information into ActiveCampaign in order to take advantage of ActiveCampaign’s user analytics.
Like two-step orders, integrating customer purchase information from ClickFunnels into ActiveCampaign requires Zapier.
Here’s the technical process for gathering customer purchase information from your website and exporting it into your ActiveCampaign platform to monitor exactly what you’re selling (and to whom) on a unit-by-unit basis:
- Submit a test order to use Zapier.
- Go to Zapier and Make A Zap.
- Select ClickFunnels as the Trigger app and watch for New Purchase
- Select All Funnel Steps
- Select ActiveCampaign as the Action app and select Create/Update Contact.
- Map your ClickFunnels fields to your ActiveCampaign fields.
- Select fields that start with Contact Contact.
- Use dynamic tags to track what people purchase via the Products Statement Descriptor field. When you create a product in ClickFunnels, this value is assigned to it.
- Turn on your Zap.
- Test your systems before going live. Enjoy your new customer purchase history!
Why ActiveCampaign Is Preferable to Actionetics
ClickFunnels has its own email marketing features under the umbrella Actionetics. This would lead some people to believe they can use ClickFunnels alone without ActiveCampaign, and they’d be right to a point. However, there are a lot of capabilities ActiveCampaign brings:
- ActiveCampaign allows you to use one list with tags and segments versus just a ton of lists, which can get visually confusing and difficult to manage.
- ActiveCampaign has the ability to pause a contact in an automated workflow through their wait action. Actionetics does not.
- Actionetics has no visual builder, but ActiveCampaign does. It is a lot easier to lay out automated workflows when you can see where users are potentially going to land.
- ActiveCampaign has a goal feature which can be used to get in-depth information on your sales and how effective your marketing is at converting views to purchases.
- ActiveCampaign integrates with over 250 third party tools such as Evernote, Facebook, and more. ClickFunnels does not integrate with third-party tools as easily, and usually requires Zapier or a similar porting system.
Final Thoughts
There are many different factors you need to keep in mind when trying to run a comprehensive social media marketing campaign. With all the services and platforms available, the options can become overwhelming.
ClickFunnels can handle a lot of the landing page and web design aspect of running your business on a digital site, and even though it does have Actionetics, it doesn’t have quite the email marketing punch that ActiveCampaign does.
Gathering customer data and doing drip marketing via email mailings is just as important as developing refined sales funnels for your website. Getting repeat customers is one of the ways to ensure that your digital business continues to grow and thrive.
When you have the right tools to accomplish both tasks, you’ll be able to generate new customers and keep the ones you have. Integrating ActiveCampaign into ClickFunnels is one way to make sure you have a seamless sales funnel from inbox to checkout.