How ActiveCampaign CEO Milos Srdjevic grew ActiveCampaign 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...