GTM strategies to reach $250M ARR at ActiveCampaign

Marketing Leader Casey Hill unpacks what worked and what didn’t

ActiveCampaign, the marketing automation SaaS company, has grown to $250 million ARR and more than 180,000 customers. The company was founded back in 2003 and quietly became an under-the-radar PLG juggernaut (that is, until they not-so-quietly raised a $240 million Series C in 2021.)

Casey Hill joined last July as Senior Growth Marketing Manager. He’s been building in public on LinkedIn, and is extremely generous with sharing what’s worked and what hasn’t. 

Casey and I unpacked his quarterly review of recent go-to-market strategies. Keep reading for ideas about quick wins and bigger swings to build more pipeline in 2024.

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1. LinkedIn ad experimentation

Grade: B

Running paid ads on LinkedIn is old news for B2B SaaS companies. These tend to be standard click-through ads – the ones you’ve probably noticed while doom scrolling.

But Casey’s team has been experimenting with new types of LinkedIn ads in the hopes of unlocking a better return. Specifically, they’ve tested promoted posts i.e. thought leadership ads. “Instead of an ad being pushed to someone, now an ad could be something that’s actually valuable,” Casey hypothesized.

The click-through rates (CTRs) have been “off the charts,” he said. A recent one drove more than 1,000 clicks from 15,000 impressions in a single day (7% CTR).

How they did it:

1. Generate the social posts: ActiveCampaign identified 30 internal team members and encouraged them to post thought leadership content on LinkedIn. This wasn’t company-specific content; it was industry-oriented content around topics like marketing automation or email deliverability. (They also rallied 150 customers to post about ActiveCampaign; more on that later.)

2. Promote the posts on LinkedIn: They look at the best performing posts and promote them as thought leader ads. LinkedIn allows users to do this for employees; for non-employees, it’s allowed only if the post meets certain requirements. For customers or partners they just need to add the company under work history and set it to active. Usually this looks like adding ActiveCampaign Partner or ActiveCampaign Ambassador.

3. Assess the impact: Casey’s team aims for digital ads to have a <12 month CAC payback period, which means they’re cash neutral within a year’s time. Thus far they’re seeing those results – Casey indicated a ~1.5x return on ad spend (ROAS).

Marketing attribution on social media is always a challenge; for LinkedIn, it’s especially challenging (part of the dreaded “dark social” attribution problem). Casey recommends HockeyStack for attribution, which provides data for paid as well as organic social media efforts. Through HockeyStack, Casey learned that his personal LinkedIn posts contribute around $30,000 in new ARR each month.

HockeyStack’s process is called marketing mix modeling. While they don’t know with 100% certainty whether a customer saw a LinkedIn organic post before purchasing, they are able to run correlation analysis that factors in multiple methods (ex: change in impressions, change in other variables like business ad spend) that correspond in new ARR.

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2. Voice of the customer campaign

Grade: B

Casey hypothesized that his team could activate ActiveCampaign’s large customer base (~180,000 customers) to share their stories on social media and from their own profiles.

He started by looking at the highest advocate customers based on internal NPS surveys. He initially had an “open ask” to these customers with no give whatsoever (you can read Casey’s email outreach below). This attracted about 15-20 people to post about ActiveCampaign, Casey recalled. 

From there he started to refine and scale the campaigns to have a bigger impact. His learnings:

• The more specific the ask, the better. This applies to both the topic as well as the day. For example, this Friday we’re going to do X and we’d love your help.

• Consider what you can offer the customer in return. Casey was careful about not going into a pay-to-play model. But he could offer for ActiveCampaign’s internal team to amplify those customer posts and engage with their assets in a reciprocal way (“pay-it-forward”).

• Systematize the ask around key inflection points in the customer journey. If folks are happy after onboarding, just left a positive review or just expanded their account, these are great fits for outreach. 

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3. Industry-specific content hubs

Grade: B+

ActiveCampaign is a horizontal product, meaning that it can be adopted by customers of (nearly) any industry. Broad horizontal products have an inherent messaging challenge in that they’re not anchored to a specific person in a specific situation, as Anthony Pierri wrote about previously.

Casey’s team wanted to test verticalizing their assets and started with the eCommerce use case. The team built a set of landing pages and content articles that emphasized what eCommerce businesses care about (think: upselling, cross-selling, cart abandonment). “So far the conversion hike on these verticalized pages is substantial,” Casey said.

Example verticalized landing page

The team has since broadened their verticalization initiative to any industry where they have 15,000+ customers including eCommerce, B2B SaaS and content creators. They’ve been able to leverage in-house knowledge from folks who already had deep industry expertise within those domains. 

Having topical language that appeals by industry has led to a conversion lift of over 6% on these verticalized pages. Examples of this topical language are an eCommerce page talking about abandoned cart, promotions, omnichannel, etc. and a SaaS page talking about single source of truth, reporting and forecasting, native integrations, etc. 

Casey mentioned that the team tried a Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) campaign for eCommerce, too. It didn’t work as well, which Casey attributes to starting late and ending early. Next year he plans to start promotion to eCommerce prospects in July.

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4. Study halls

Grade: B+

The next area that the team tested was around in-person gatherings and education for customers. ActiveCampaign created a series of training workshops (branded as study halls) in different cities where customers were concentrated.

ActiveCampaign’s hypothesis was that customers attending these workshops would be more likely to expand (adopting more of the platform, engaging with additional resources) and less likely to churn. The early data has been looking positive. As of January 2024, the cohort of customers who have attended a Study Hall saw a 20% NRR bump compared to those who did not. 

These are run as two-day intensive sessions priced at $250 per attendee (with 50% off early bird tickets) and are cost-neutral or slightly cash-positive. They are hosted and run by different members of the ActiveCampaign team who travel all over the world. The team has ramped up velocity and is hosting about 20 per quarter.

A sensible next step would be for partners to run these, Casey ideated. Other changes he envisions are “after hours” sessions around more in-depth functionality along with verticalized versions.

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5. Affiliates / influencers

Grade: C

Another area ActiveCampaign explored was recruiting new affiliates and influencers, i.e. third parties who would promote ActiveCampaign via their audience and content. The team had historical success with affiliates — they make up 20% of current revenue — and was looking to create a new scalable model for the next stage of growth.

The team reached out to different content sites in three areas: (a) those ranked highly for relevant search terms, (b) those in the affiliate networks of competitors/peers, (c) those with a large following in newer affiliate channels like TikTok and YouTube.

Casey admitted that this campaign hasn’t proved to be particularly scalable so far. That’s because there’s a small addressable market for affiliates who have sufficient reach to be effective, yet aren’t already committed to other partners. The team has signed up between 50-100 who can push business, but not a system to further extend the program. Casey connects this with the Pareto principle: 20% of affiliates drive 80% of traffic.

Open questions to consider:

• Should you prioritize those with a large audience (but minimal influence) or those who run smaller, tight-knit communities where there’s more built-in trust with their audience?

• Is the affiliate program purely transactional (driven by financial incentives) or are there other things that could be offered to affiliates to get them more engaged (ex: discounts for their customers)?

A slight pivot to conventional affiliates has been a push around influencer relationships, which Casey and the team started piloting in February. For more color, take a look at their collaboration with influencer Rajiv Nathan who announced he “ended a 12-year toxic relationship” with Mailchimp and switched to ActiveCampaign.

Unlike most of these that tend to be very transactional, where a brand pays for a few posts, the ActiveCampaign team is looking at a different model. This includes exclusively working with influencers who use the product and having a performance oriented plan. In this model, the influencer is both getting paid upfront and getting affiliate commissions; they also have a target account goal, so the company and influencer have paired incentives. The ActiveCampaign team is looking at quarterly or even annual influencer contracts to give more time for these relationships to develop.

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6. Conversion rate optimization

Grade: A

ActiveCampaign gets tens of thousands of trials per month. Even small improvements in subject lines, automations and email drips could lead to millions in incremental ARR.

While running conversion experiments is by no means a novel concept, Casey has found a few things to be working particularly well:

• More personalized content blocks that are directly related to an industry (which dovetails with having more verticalized collateral)

• More dynamic paths for different users based on lead scoring 

• Quickly identifying changes that are materially beating the baseline and bringing these in as the new baseline rather than continuing to test/optimize (there’s also a risk that additional tests lead to worse performance) 

ActiveCampaign also has gotten much better at partner-oriented growth motions like email swaps (where ActiveCampaign will post about a partner and the partner will post about ActiveCampaign). These used to get a few hundred clicks, but now that they are leveraging a more story-led approach, those numbers are in the thousands with hundreds of folks making it the second step to demo or pricing pages.

Example results from a recent email swap

A specific area of note has been better leveraging email for bottom-of-funnel rather than just building pipeline. Examples:

• Using third-party authority by sending outside research, assets or reviews (ex: G2 reviews). An example that has driven good traffic for ActiveCampaign  is something like the email deliverability test from January 2024, which shows an in-depth methodology and positively ranks ActiveCampaign without being promotional for any company.

• Pushing annual plans and focusing the language around making an “investment” in the product. ActiveCampaign pushes these emails at month two and month 10 in the customer journey and personalizes the emails to reference the exact $ saved. 

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Reflecting on ActiveCampaign’s GTM journey

Looking back on the past six months, there are three themes where Casey wants to continue to double down:

• Organic layering where ActiveCampaign chooses a channel (like LinkedIn) and combines organic thought leadership from the team, nudging customers and partners to post on social media in a more promotional capacity and thought leader ads to put paid dollars behind the best content.

• Industry-specific campaigns to speak directly to particular verticals with messaging that resonates with what they care about. 

• Optimizing what they already have rather than over-orienting toward what’s new.

Curious to hear how it goes? Make sure to follow Casey for the latest. In the meantime, check out related GTM resources:

Your guide to quick wins in SaaS marketing

Your guide to growth marketing & PLG

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