How ActiveCampaign CEO Milos Srdjevic grew to $290.5M revenue and 145K customers in 2024.

guys active campaign pay pasted 165 million bucks of Revenue in 2021 they're hopefully now much larger than that brought in Casey to lead a bunch of growth his number three his top three tactics are LinkedIn earn media and influencers broke it down how voice of customer is critical on LinkedIn how earned media how to get on the right podcast and make sure the host respond to you and lastly how to incentivize influencers so they bring you good customers not ones that churn in two days and then you go what did I just spend the money on hey folks my guest today is Casey Hill he's got a deep background in growth currently leading uh 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 Kora back on the cor days and SAS before that strategic adviser 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 our CMO on uh on on growth Sprints talk about 250 million bucks of AR and uh Shay did a great interview there you know 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 voice over the last confirm sort of Revenue metric that active campaign sort of corporate has put out was that the The Firm broke 165 million bucks in AR in 2021 and so folks can obviously make assumptions about growth sens 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 active campaign 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 opportunity 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 um and we're also pretty deep now into influencers which we operate from a number of a number of different Vantage points okay great is there a third one or really just LinkedIn earn media those are the big two U the third one would be influencers ah that would be the third okay got it great let's jump into LinkedIn first so you say team voice of customer and paid to amplify let me just quantify paid to amplify I mean can you give us a general sense there are you guys spending know 10 grand a month on thought leader ads paying to amplify or like a 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 anding Le 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 you seeing a customer with a 10,000 you know person on their email ascended thing and get a 60% open rate and a 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 another 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 active campaign if you would share it you know y ya y 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 post and the keys there were a couple fold number one is to give them an exact day number two to give them an exact scope so would love to know why you came from MailChimp or why you came from brevo or convertkit to active campaign 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 okay so there's nothing sort of the $100 Amazon gift card I mean is there anything that's like hard compensation like that or or what would you say is the most effective trade you're doing with these users to get them to actually post and activate yeah we were actually very purposeful to not have any monetary component whatsoever so all of this is about reciprocity and US using our team to essentially engage um and a lot of people are on LinkedIn they obviously want exposure so if we can get 50 people from our team to hop in and engage maybe listen to their podcast um that's something that was you know well received by their team okay and then so we talked about voice of customer we talked about paid to amplify talk to me a little bit about your own team so so what do you mean by your team in LinkedIn yeah so we created a channel called operation LinkedIn and essentially we have everyone share the post that they're doing we try to have it be tend to be topical Focus so talking about marketing automation talking about owned assets talking about AI anything that kind of ties back or relates to our product and we tried to gamify it a little bit we had what we call the 10K club which means you got at least 10,000 views that week and we tried to show what the top performing content was each week to give people specific examples of how they could uplevel and so we continued to grow that our first goal was as a team to have 150,000 views a week and then 200,000 then 250,000 and I think we're a little bit north of 300,000 a week Impressions is what I'm talking about right now U right now so we're continuing to try to iterate and improve and just have many different known faces on channels like LinkedIn that can help spread and distribute topical leadership I think again the key here is we're not just sitting here talking about active campaign we're talking about the category so we're talking about email best practices we're talking about the Tactical layer um not just company or product Focus content let's move to earned media here for a second so I think with earned media one of the things that people struggle with is they they see someone that's successful with the YouTube channel podcast and an email list and they go let me go do all those things and what they what they don't realiz is you have to study the history of how that company built those assets there's a sequencing that's important to that when you came into active campaign what was the first priority on earned media and then what did you stack on second and third yeah for sure so the first thing is I found that guesting on podcast has been a really powerful way to get yourself in front of large audiences and to do it relatively quickly starting a podcast is great but it's slow and it takes a long build to get to meaningful results but if you hop on 20 podcasts that are say top 5% you can very quickly accumulate hundreds of thousands of Impressions from those viewers so my process very specifically is this in the early days I would go to a platform called listen notes listen notes is a large database and on listen notes you can search any podcast and you can see it's ranking you can also get email contact information you can also use filters so you can look very specifically at different topical clusters or even look at at other people who are similar like thought leaders in the space who you want to see what podcasts have they been on to give you a list of which ones might make sense and then I would so what did you search for that did you search like CEOs of of competitor active campaign for example normally I would actually start on the topical layer so I would start about like anything email marketing marketing automation email marketing onboarding um even like vertical specific so stuff around SAS stuff around e-commerce stuff around online creators any of the core markets that active campaign serves I would essentially search those out that would usually be my like layer one and then if I knew anyone who was talking about these topics um we talking about similar clusters I could also look that up so where where is you know 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 decom I searched email marketing I clicked on podcast I see one called email Einstein by Vera sadli and Andre the 194 episodes since July of 20 20 uh regardless if you've been on this one or not if you did want to get on this one it said listen notes is saying it's a top 1.5% show for this topical category what's the next step what are you emailing the the the host what are you saying yeah great great question so I 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 breath of kind of experience or knowledge I would just watch an episode and 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 ad every podcast host wants more quality reviews so attach a screenshot of 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 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 peek 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 podcast in one month in a focused Niche so like 20 to 30 e-commerce podcasts in one month if you're not able to commit to that you're not going to see a big enough signal it's very much a I heard about them here and here and here all in a close period of time that drives the actual intent signal so just be you know knowledgeable of that coming into the approach hey folks if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan lka I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with BB software Founders so far we've invested in over 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four New Deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer all right let's jump into the interview okay and then uh lastly on the second on the second section here of earn media is email as a channel now are you guys building your own email I this is sort of very very Meta Meta Meta but are you building your own email list and are you running that yeah absolutely so we build a ton of different email newsletters we have someone on our team who handles some of the kind of product oriented content and then I do a lot of the topical so like I just launched one like a month or so ago called SAS steps which profiles the grow growth journey of active campaign type forms think ific so I sit down with those Founders and we actually look at every single stage of growth so I say what did zero to one look like what did 1 to 10 look like what did 10 to 25 25 to 100 100 to 250 250 to mean a billion whatever it is for the individual company and we break it down by each stage of growth and so that's one we launched recently that's kind of a SAS focused one and we have others that are verticalized in in other Industries so we absolutely also build email list and we have our core product update focused ones as well as topical ones just to be clear that's called SAS Sprints SAS steps okay why do I see your name also on another one called SAS Sprints okay so SAS steps just to be clear is is the one yeah correct SAS Sprints is run by Brendan Huffer that's an outside party um not affiliated with us but we've done interviews with them before so it's a different newsletter I see okay so SAS so what's the Frequency over there how many episodes Have You published and what does each episode get in terms of total downloads the first 60 30 60 days yeah so it's a brand new one we cross promoted it to our initial our full list so when we first sent it out we got a lot more cuz we sent it to 800 900,000 folks but right now in terms of like fresh new Subs it's still at I think 2 3,000 it's a small newsletter we launched oh my bad sorry Casey I was thinking this was a podcast sorry this is the an email list that you've built called SAS steps not a podcast yeah I apologize yeah I'm happy to talk about the podcast as well um 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 Zap year and Jason Lumin um and so basically the format is you get on two you know prominent billionaire uh essentially Founders and we had them debate different issues like around AI around remote work um around their top performing marketing channels and so that EP that uh 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 um but going to keep that on the DL till it's released but um yeah that's a really exciting podcast and format um 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 um so yeah it's been awesome now before we W up with the third big growth Channel you're operating on which is influences and we've got about four more minutes left here what are you measured by in your role is it is it number of New Leads number of mql what do you what do you how do you know if you're winning or not yeah for sure so it it kind of depends there's a couple different metrics and a couple different core kpis that I am essentially measured on so one is on Revenue impacted um and we actually use a tool called hockey stack so hockey stack looks across all these different channels and looks at the revenue uh impact and we use things like marketing mix modeling to actually track things like LinkedIn like they did a a report the last month they can show 27,000 in direct Revenue impacted by Casey's link just my LinkedIn obviously 27,000 what customers 27,000 in ARR impacted so in terms of new in new Revenue so 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 you know active campaign has a substantial market share in the marketing automation mix and so because of that we also do look at Impressions you know 10 million impressions over the last year between LinkedIn 6 million impressions Reddit three million impressions and the rest coming from Kora and so that's another um factor that I'm essentially measured on and also doing more and more work on the video space so if anyone follows my LinkedIn you'll see I'm producing a ton of video content and we're testing and experimenting with that Medium right now and when you add all this up last month how many total New Leads did active campaign get yeah I don't know the total number of like you know the total number of leads I can tell you that as a brand active campaign you know does north of 50,000 trials a month um I don't know exactly how many leads feed into that at the top end okay uh trials per month do you is any of the content you're working on purposely built for that part of the funnel getting the trial convert to convert or is it just to get the person in the top of the funnel the impression from LinkedIn to sign up for the free trial in the first place so so it's both as as I noted it's Revenue impacted directly so it's tracked Revenue through multi-touch attribution software in hockey stack as well as the impression layer and the overall awareness so those are the two spots that it serves on but I'm not I'm not focused on mqls and I'm not focused on leads generated in my role all right let's wrap up here influencers what should we know about influencers how you're doing it yeah for sure so it's a much it's a large conversation I know we don't have a ton of time so what I'll say is at a very high level there's kind of like three buckets there's performance oriented deals that's what we started with with performance oriented deals you have a certain amount of Target accounts so I would sit down with a brand and I would say hey we in the next quarter our Target accounts is 20 paid accounts I would then take the average amount that a customer would pay through one year and that would be the cash that I would split 50/50 so let's just say the average customer pays $2,000 a year right and they have a Target account of 10 so that's $220,000 so I would pay that influencer $10,000 up front they would get the remaining $10,000 if they hit that specific Target and they'd have a whole set of deliverables social po posts uh videos they'd made mentioning us at conferences all these different kind of activates would be in that contract and what I liked about that model specifically is you're very much in the trenches and you have you know you both have the same incentives because they want to get the renewal they want to get their second 50% and they also want to get it renewed for next quarter and it's very tangible the outcome the challenge with influencer marketing is often someone does a post it gets some views but what's the actual Revenue impact of it performance model solves for that the CH can you list a spefic name on that like who are your top one or two influencers over the last 30 days uh yeah Raj from startup hyp man has definitely been uh one that has been really successful Ashley stall has been another influencer who's done well with us um BAGI is is new just kind of starting out but he's he's doing well what's Ashley's brand um Ashley stall she serves like she she handles a number of different markets but essentially like works in the Creator space I would say like in terms of like her iccp and what's BAGI BAGI he's kind of more focused in the SAS vertical so he does a lot of like content he's kind of like a deep B2B marketer been doing that for more than a decade very cool all right do you know how much you paid influencers over the past 30 days just on rewards uh yes yeah I'm not going to get into like specific numbers but what I will say is that the contracts are essentially like cash-based split in a 5050 based on target accounts is like the standardized model we're going more into video inside of the video realm what I'd recommend is if you're looking at short form content targeting a CPM of $3 to $60 if you're going for long form video content that number can get pushed up quite a bit 100 to even $200 CPM for long form content because obviously it sticks around and you can leverage it in a lot of other places like sales enablement Etc so that's actually kind of the area that we're currently moving through again for the sake of time we won't go through all the stuff that we did on the first phase but the phase we're at right now is to focus a lot more intentionally on video content and so that has been major push for us across all those channels understand you can't share the revenue number but can you share how many influencers you paid at least a dollar over the past 30 days so we get a sense of how big the program is you know is it 10 influencers a thousand influencers yeah it's probably at between 30 and 50 right now in terms of number still pretty Focus yep yeah yeah it's about 30 to 50 and and it's it's a blend between micro and mid-tier um we don't have like a ton of macro macro being kind of defined as people that would be you know six figureure plus contract in a given quarter period understood hey where can people find you online if they want to follow you yeah Casey Hill is is my tag on LinkedIn and this is where I post a lot of just kind of firsthand like what we're doing today just sharing what we're doing what the results are so if you're looking for growth insights that's a great place to find me guys active campaign pay P 165 million bucks of Revenue in 2021 they're hopefully now much larger than that brought in Casey to lead a bunch of growth his number three his top three tactics are LinkedIn earned media and influencers broke it down how voice of customer is critical on link in how earn media how to get on the right podcast and make sure the host respond to you and lastly how to incentivize influencers so they bring you good customers not ones that churn in two days and then you go what did I just spend the money on go learn from him check him out Casey Hill thanks for taking us to the top thanks