How ActiveCampaign Drives 50,000 Monthly Trials With a Three-Channel Growth Engine (Interview with Senior Growth Marketing Manager Casey Hill)

Intro and ActiveCampaign Revenue Context

Nathan Latka

00:00Guys, ActiveCampaign paying past a $165,000,000

00:03>> 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 LinkedIn, how earned media, how to get on the right podcast and make sure the hosts respond to you, and lastly, how to incentivize influencers so they bring you good customers, not ones that churn in two

Guest Introduction: Casey Hill, Senior Growth Marketing Manager

Nathan Latka

00:22>> 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 as the senior growth marketing manager at ActiveCampaign. He joined in July 2023. Before that, doing some time at Stanford, was an expert on Quora back on the Quora days and SaaS Before that strategic adviser at BlackRock where he cut his teeth early on. Today, we're gonna focus on

00:43>> how he's driving growth at ActiveCampaign. Casey, you ready to take us

00:47>> to the top?

Casey Hill

00:48Yeah. Thanks for having me, Nathan.

Top Three Growth Channels Overview

Nathan Latka

00:49>> 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 of 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 on on growth spreads talk about $250,000,000 of ARR, and Shay did a great interview there. You know, we weren't

01:09>> able to confirm, and I know you can't comment on this, so I'm just gonna give my audience the voice over. The last confirm sort of revenue metric that ActiveCampaign sort of corporate has put out was that the the firm broke a $165,000,000 in ARR in 2021. And so 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

01:31>> 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 we'll dive into each one.

LinkedIn Strategy: Team, Voice of Customer, and Paid

Casey Hill

01:41Yeah. 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 ActiveCampaign, 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. We

02:08hop 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 a number of different vantage points.

Nathan Latka

02:22>> Okay. Great. Is there a third one or really just LinkedIn or in media? Those are the big two.

Casey Hill

02:26The third one would be influencers. Ah, that would be

Nathan Latka

02:29>> the third. Okay. Got it. Great. Let's jump into LinkedIn So you say TeamVoice customer and paid to Amplify. Let me just quantify paid to Amplify. Mean, can you give us a general sense there? Are you guys spending, you know, $10 a month on thought leader ads paying to Amplify or, like, a $100, 1,000,000 a month? Can you give quantify that a bit?

Voice of Customer Campaign Mechanics

Casey Hill

02:43Yeah. So I don't have a exact budget ary 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

03:06our 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.

Nathan Latka

03:18>> Tell me about voice of customer. You know, you you seeing a customer with a 10,000, you know, person on their email, send it thing and get a 60% open rate and 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

03:38>> you make that happen?

Casey Hill

03:39Yeah. For sure. So we've gone through a lot of iterations. In the 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 kinda fast forward to the final version where we had think it was like our

03:57last one got 60 different customers to 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 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

04:21can 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

04:42LinkedIn.

Team LinkedIn Program and Operation LinkedIn

Nathan Latka

04:43>> Okay. So there's nothing sort of a $100 Amazon gift card. I mean, 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?

Casey Hill

04:54Yeah. 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. And a lot of people are on LinkedIn. They obviously want exposure. So we can get 50 people from our team to hop in and engage, maybe listen to their podcast, that's something that was well received by their team.

Nathan Latka

05:15>> 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 what do you mean by your team in LinkedIn?

Casey Hill

05:23Yeah. 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 focused. So talking about marketing automation, talking about owned assets, talking about AI, anything that ties back or relates to our product. And we tried to gamify it a little bit. We had what we call the 10 ks Club, which means you got at least 10,000 views that week.

05:43And we tried to show what the top performing content was each week to give people specific examples of how they could up level. And so we continued to grow that. Our first goal was as a team to have 150,000 views a week and then 200,250. And I think we're a little bit north of 300,000 a week impressions is what I'm talking about right now. So we're continuing to try to iterate and improve and just have many

06:06different 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 ActiveCampaign, we're talking about the category. We're talking about email best practices. We're talking about the tactical layer, not just company or product focused content.

Earned Media: Podcast Guesting Strategy

Nathan Latka

06:24>> Mhmm. Let's move to earned media here for a second. 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 realize 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

06:43>> into ActiveCampaign, what was the first priority on earned media? And then what did you stack on second and third?

Casey Hill

06:49Yeah. 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

07:11process very specifically is this in the early days. I would go to a platform called ListenNotes. ListenNotes is a large database. And on ListenNotes, you can search any podcast and you can see its 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 other people who are similar thought leaders in the space who you wanna see what podcasts have they

07:34been on to give you a list of which ones might make sense. And then I

Nathan Latka

07:37>> would say search for that? Did you search CEOs of of competitors ActiveCampaign, for example?

How to Pitch Podcast Hosts Effectively

Casey Hill

07:43Normally, I would actually start on the topical layer. So I would start about like anything email marketing, marketing automation, email marketing, onboarding, even like vertical specific. So stuff around SaaS, stuff around ecommerce, stuff around online creators, any of the core markets that ActiveCampaign serves, I would essentially search those out. That would usually be my layer one. And then if I knew anyone who was talking about these topics or talking about similar clusters, I could also look

08:10that up. So where where is Mailchimp or HubSpot? Where are they? What podcasts are they getting on? And I could hop on and have those conversations.

Nathan Latka

08:19>> Okay. So I'm on listenotes.com. I searched email marketing. I clicked on podcast. I see one called Email Einstein by Vera Sadlik and Andre. The 194 episodes since July 2020. Regardless if you've been on this one or not, if you did wanna get on this one, it said listen notes are saying it's a top 1.5% show for this topical category. What's the next step? What are you emailing the the the the host? What are you saying?

Casey Hill

08:41Yeah. Great great question. So I I divide it into three parts. So the first part is the hook. So you wanna 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

09:00experience 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 of a five star review you left them, that never hurts. The second middle section is the authority

09:23of 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 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. That's gonna be boring. No one's gonna pick that up. But if I say

09:47something like, 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 gonna say something interesting or meaningful about that. 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,

10:10you'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 wanna do at least 20 to 30 podcasts in one month in a focused niche. So like 20

10:32to 30 ecommerce podcasts in one month. If you're not able to commit to that, you're not gonna 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 I'm just be, you know, knowledgeable of that coming into the approach.

Nathan Latka

10:50>> Hey, folks. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nathan Latka. 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 on to create founderpath.com. I raised a large fund to do non dilutive deals with B2B software founders. So far,

Email Newsletter: SaaS Steps Launch

Nathan Latka

11:17>> we've invested in over 400 software founders totaling $150,000,000. Here in 2024, we're doing three to four new deals per week. So if you're looking for capital and don't wanna give up equity, go sign up at founderpath.com for free to get your offer. Alright. Let's jump into the interview. Okay. And then, lastly, on the second, on the second section here of Earned Media is email as a channel. Now are you guys building your own email? I know

11:42>> this is sort of very, very meta meta meta, but are you building your own email list and are you running that?

Casey Hill

11:46Yeah. 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 SaaS Steps, which profiles the growth journey of ActiveCampaign, Typeforms, Thinkific. So I sit down with those founders and we actually look at every single stage of growth. So I say,

12:07what did zero to one look like? What did one to 10 look like? What did 10 to 25, 25 to a 100, a 100 to two fifty, two fifty to, you know, a billion, whatever it is for the individual company. And we break it down by each stage of growth. And so that's when we launched recently that's kind of a SaaS focused one. And we have others that are verticalized in other industries. So we absolutely also

12:27build email lists and we have our core product update focused ones as well as topical ones.

Nathan Latka

12:32>> Just to be clear, that's

12:33>> called SaaS Sprints?

Casey Hill

12:34SaaS Steps.

Nathan Latka

12:36>> Okay. Why do I see your name also on another one called SaaS Sprints? Okay. So SaaS Steps, just to be clear, is is the one.

Casey Hill

12:42Yeah. Correct. SaaS Sprints is run by Brendan Hufford. That's an outside party, not affiliated with us, but we've done interviews with them before. So it's a different SaaS newsletter.

Nathan Latka

12:51>> I see. Okay.

12:52>> So SaaS Steps. 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 sixty, thirty, sixty days?

Podcast: Angles and Insights Debut

Casey Hill

12:59Yeah. 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 because we sent it to 800, 900,000 folks. But right now in terms of like fresh new subs, it's still at I think two, three thousand. It's a small newsletter. We launched My bad.

Nathan Latka

13:14>> Sorry, Casey. I was thinking this was a podcast. Sorry. This is an email list that you've built called SaaS Steps, not a podcast.

Casey Hill

13:20Yeah, I apologize. I'm happy to talk about the podcast as well, but 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 Lampkin. And so basically the format is you get on two prominent billionaire essentially founders. We had them debate different issues around AI, around remote work, around their top performing marketing

13:49channels. 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 kinda be at ease in that. So we've actually only had that one episode so far. We have some really exciting guests coming up. We're gonna keep that on the DL till it's released. But that's a really exciting podcast and format. And that's gotten, I think, 4,000 plus downloads on the first episode,

14:14but also hundreds of thousands of impressions if you count the LinkedIn content that is talking about it. So it's been awesome.

KPIs: Revenue Impact, Impressions, and HockeyStack

Nathan Latka

14:21>> 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? What do what do how do you know if you're winning or not?

Casey Hill

14:31Yeah. For sure. So it it it kinda 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. 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 a report last month, they can show 27,000

14:55in direct revenue impacted by Casey's LinkedIn, just my LinkedIn and obviously 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 HockeyStack 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

15:22well 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. You know, 10,000,000 impressions over the last year between LinkedIn, 6,000,000 impressions, Reddit, 3,000,000 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. So if anyone follows my LinkedIn, you'll

15:47see 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 ActiveCampaign 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 ActiveCampaign, you know, does north of 50,000 trials a month. I don't know exactly how many leads feed into that at

Free Trials and Funnel Role of Content

Casey Hill

16:09the top end.

Nathan Latka

16:11>> Okay. 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 at the top of the funnel, the impression from LinkedIn to sign up for the free trial in the first place?

Casey Hill

16:24So it's so it's both. As as I noted, it's revenue impacted directly. So it's tracked revenue through multi touch attribution software in HockeyStack 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.

Nathan Latka

16:41>> Alright. Let's wrap up here. Influencers. What should we know about influencers? How you're doing it?

Influencer Marketing: Performance Deal Structure

Casey Hill

16:45Yeah. 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, in the next quarter, our target accounts is 20 paid

17:05accounts. 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 fiftyfifty. So let's just say the average customer pays $2,000 a year. And they have a target account of 10. So that's $20,000 So I would pay that influencer $10,000 upfront. They would get the remaining $10,000 if they hit that specific target. And they'd have a whole set of deliverables, social posts, videos

17:30they'd made, mentioning us at conferences, all these different kind of activatables would be in that contract. And what I liked about that model specifically is you're very much in the trenches and you both have the same incentives. Because they wanna get the renewal, they wanna get their second 50%, and they also wanna get it renewed for next quarter. And it's very tangible, the outcome. The challenge with influencer marketing is often someone does a post to get

17:52some views, but what's the actual revenue impact of it? Performance model solves for that.

Nathan Latka

17:56>> The Can challenge you list

17:58>> a specific name on that? Who are your top one or two influencers over the last thirty days?

Casey Hill

18:03Raj from Startup Heightman has definitely been one that has been really successful. Ashley Stahl has been another influencer who's done well with us. Belagi is new, just kinda starting out, but he's he's doing

Nathan Latka

18:15>> well. What's Ashley's brand?

Named Influencers and Video CPM Targets

Casey Hill

18:17Ashley Stahl, 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 ICP. And what's Beloji? Beloji, he's kinda more focused in the SaaS vertical. So he does a lot of, like, content. He's kind of, like, a deep b two b marketer, been doing that for more than a decade.

Nathan Latka

18:36>> Very cool. Alright. Do you know how much you paid influencers over the past thirty days just on rewards?

Casey Hill

18:41Yes. Yeah. I'm not gonna get into, like, specific numbers, but what I will say is that the contracts are essentially, like, cash based split in a fifty fifty 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 30 to $60, if you're going for long form video content, that number can get pushed up

19:06quite a bit, a 100 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, etcetera. 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

19:26content. And so that has been a major push for us across all those channels.

Nathan Latka

19:32>> Casey, understand you can't share the revenue number, but can you share how many influencers you paid at least a dollar over the past thirty days so we get a sense of how big the program is? You know, is it 10 influencers, a thousand influencers?

Casey Hill

19:41Yeah. It's probably up between thirty and fifty right now in terms of number and focused. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It's about 30 to 50, and and it's it's a blend between micro and mid tier. We don't have, like, a ton of macro macro being kinda defined as people that would be, you know, 6 figure plus contract in a given quarter period.

Wrap-Up and Where to Find Casey

Nathan Latka

20:00>> Understood. Hey. Where can people find you online if they wanna follow you?

Casey Hill

20:03Yeah. Casey Hill is is my tag on LinkedIn, and this is where I post a lot of just kinda 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, ActiveCampaign paying past a $165,000,000

Nathan Latka

20:17>> 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 LinkedIn, how earned media, how to get on the right podcast and make sure the hosts respond to you, and lastly, how to incentivize influencers so they bring you good customers, not one that churn in two

20:37days and then you go, what did I just spend the money on?

20:38>> Go learn from him. Check him out. Casey Hill, thanks for taking

20:41us to the top.

Casey Hill

20:42>> Thanks.