SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How ActiveCampaign hit $100m ARR on way to $300m
27 Aug 2024
Chapter 1: How did ActiveCampaign achieve $100 million ARR?
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check it out right now at get latke.com hey folks my guest today is casey hill he's got a deep background in growth currently leading as the senior growth marketing manager at active campaign he joined in july of 2023 before that doing some time at stanford was an expert on cora back on the core days and sas before that strategic advisor at black rock where he cut his teeth early on today we're going to focus on how he's driving growth at active campaign casey you ready to take us to the top
yeah thanks for having me nathan well hey i appreciate you jumping on you know i put out a post a while ago on sort of our best estimate on what most the mainstream sort of email marketing tools are doing in terms of revenue and you jumped in the comments and said wait a second you you didn't hear our our cmo on uh on on growth sprints talk about 250 million bucks of arr and
Shay did a great interview there. We weren't able to confirm, and I know you can't comment on this, so I'm just going to give my audience the voiceover. The last confirmed revenue metric that ActiveCampaign corporate has put out was that the firm broke $165 million in ARR in 2021.
Folks can obviously make assumptions about growth since then, but it's fair to say, Casey, you're in a competitive space. There's a bunch of these new AI tools, waterfall enrichment that are not just email marketing, but everything else. You're coming in and driving growth.
Walk us through sort of the top three growth activities you're focused on today at ActiveCampaign, and then we'll dive into each one.
Yeah, sounds great. So the first one I would say is LinkedIn and LinkedIn happens from three different angles. This is our team mobilization. So us posting lots of topical organic content. This is voice of the customer campaign. So getting customers activated to post about what they're doing and how they're using active campaign and then paid to amplify the best of those first two categories.
So that's one bucket. We also do a ton of earned media opportunities. So we hop on a lot of podcasts. We talk about the importance of owned assets and email as a channel in 2024 and beyond. And we're also pretty deep now into influencers, which we operate from a number of different vantage points. Okay, great.
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Chapter 2: What are the top three growth strategies at ActiveCampaign?
Let me just quantify paid to amplify. I mean, can you give us a general sense there? Are you guys spending, you know, 10 grand a month on thought leader ads paying to amplify or like 100 grand a million a month? Can you give a quantify that a bit?
Yeah. So I don't have a exact budgetary numbers to give you, but what I can tell you is that the CPM is pretty efficient on our thought leader ads around $50 CPM. So we're essentially driving pretty good brand awareness and exposure through those campaigns. What we do is we run, we do run some single image ads and single video ads.
But typically, we actually promote the best performing organic content, either from our team or from our customers. Because on LinkedIn, you can promote anyone's content, whether they are an employee or outside. So that's been our strategy is to have content that actually educates on the paid front. And that's been really effective for us.
Tell me about voice of customer. You know, you seeing a customer with a 10,000, you know, person on their email list, send it thing and get a 60% open rate and a 10% open to click through rate, you know, that's world class.
But to get them excited about screenshotting that active campaign report, putting it up on LinkedIn and giving sort of, you know, your brand additional love is a whole nother activation channel, right? How do you make that happen?
Yeah, for sure. So we've gone through a lot of iterations and in the early days we grabbed our highest NPS folks, we sent out an email to them and I essentially just evoked like, I'd love to know what do you love about ActiveCampaign? If you would share it, you know, yada, yada, yada. That obviously worked only for the best advocates.
I'll kind of fast forward to the final version where we had, I think it was like our last one got 60 different customers to post and the keys there were a couple of fold. Number one is to give them an exact day. Number two, to give them an exact scope. So we'd love to know why you came from MailChimp or why you came from Brevo or ConvertKit to ActiveCampaign.
So specific day, specific scope, and then some amount of reciprocity. So how can we help them? We're a big team. We have big socials, so we can help repost their content. We can help have 50 members of our team jump in and engage on that content. If they have an asset like a podcast, we can get our team to follow and engage in that asset as well.
So I think having reciprocity and also having a defined scope of exactly when and what, that is what got the most buy-in to get customers to all post and weigh in on a channel like LinkedIn.
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Chapter 3: How does LinkedIn contribute to ActiveCampaign's growth?
or talking about similar clusters, I could also look that up. So where is MailChimp or HubSpot? Where are they? What podcasts are they getting on? And I could hop on and have those conversations.
Okay, so I'm on ListenNotes.com. I searched email marketing. I clicked on podcast. I see one called Email Einstein by Vera Sadlick and Andre. 194 episodes since July of 2020. Regardless if you've been on this one or not, if you did want to get on this one, ListenNotes is saying it's a top 1.5% show for this topical category. What's the next step? What are you emailing the hosts?
What are you saying?
Yeah, great, great question. So I divide it into three parts. So the first part is the hook. So you want to watch at least one episode of the show and have something topical and relevant to the actual show. Because I've done a lot of podcasts, my process is I almost always would recognize at least one of the guests and I would use that personal relationship as a hook.
If you don't have that breadth of kind of experience or knowledge, I would just watch an episode that looks topically interesting and try to pull out something in that hook. So that's stage one. I also recommend that everyone leaves a five-star review for the podcast. It's a great way to lead with an actual value add. Every podcast host wants more quality reviews.
So attach a screenshot of a five-star review you left them. That never hurts. The second middle section is the authority of like, why you? Why are you relevant to their audience? And so I think thinking very intentionally about why you're helpful to their audience, not just like your credentials, is important. So the middle part is you build authority.
The third part, this is very important, suggest very specific topics. Don't come in and just give something general like, I'd love to talk about email marketing. Right? That's going to be boring. No one's going to pick that up. But if I say something like, you know, newsletters are broken. 99% of newsletters drive almost no ROI. And here's what the 1% are doing.
That might peak up some years and people are like, oh, I wonder if he's going to say something interesting or meaningful about that. Right. And have two or three topics. That way, if they've already gone through one of the topics, they might go, no, no. Actually, that third one's interesting. My audience hasn't heard about that. If you follow that format, you'll get the best buy in.
And the final thing I'll say about this is super important. If you plan on only doing two or three podcasts, just don't even do it. You will not, I have very, very rarely seen ROI. I've not only implemented this at two organizations, but I've also helped hundreds of brands get into this motion. You want to do at least 20 to 30 podcasts in one month in a focused niche.
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Chapter 4: What is the voice of the customer campaign and how is it executed?
This is an email list that you've built called SaaS Steps, not a podcast.
Yeah, I apologize. Yeah, I'm happy to talk about the podcast as well. But that's that I'm specifically talking about a newsletter right now. The podcast, which is a top three podcast is called Angles and Insights. Our first episode was a debate between Wade Foster, the founder of Zapier and Jason Lumpkin. And so basically the format is you get on to
you know, prominent billionaire, essentially founders, and we had them debate different issues like around AI, around remote work, around their top performing marketing channels. And so, that format takes a lot of time and a lot of curation to get people into that format and to get them to kind of be at ease in that. So, we've actually only had that one episode so far.
We have some really exciting guests coming up, but I'm going to keep that on the DL till it's released. But yeah, that's a really exciting podcast and format. And that's gotten, I think, 4,000 plus downloads on the first episode, but also hundreds of thousands of impressions if you count the LinkedIn content that is talking about it. So yeah, it's been awesome.
Now, before we wrap up with the third big growth channel you're operating on, which is influencers, and we've got about four more minutes left here, what are you measured by in your role? Is it number of new leads, number of MQLs? How do you know if you're winning or not?
Yeah, for sure. So it kind of depends. There's a couple of different metrics and a couple of different core KPIs that I am essentially measured on. So one is on revenue impacted. And we actually use a tool called HockeyStack. So HockeyStack looks across all these different channels and looks at the revenue impact.
And we use things like marketing mix modeling to actually track things like LinkedIn. Like they did a report last month, they can show 27,000 in direct revenue impacted by Casey's LinkedIn, just my LinkedIn. 27,000. 27,000 what, customers? 27,000 in ARR impacted. So in terms of new revenue. So one bucket is actually revenue.
And we look at that both through hockey stack as well as direct attribution. If we say, hey, nine people signed up this month and became paid users and they put podcasts as how they heard about us, that's something that we can use as part of that calculation. As well as that, there's a brand awareness layer too. ActiveCampaign has a substantial market share in the marketing automation mix.
And so because of that, we also do look at impressions. 10 million impressions over the last year between LinkedIn, 6 million impressions, Reddit, 3 million impressions, and the rest coming from Quora. And so that's another factor that I'm essentially measured on. And also doing more and more work on the video space.
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