My Raw First-Hand Look At ActiveCampaign Pages

Hey, I hope you're having a great day. It's Shaun here with Blue Cow Marketing, and today we're going to be looking at ActiveCampaign. They have released a pages builder that allows you to build landing pages, essentially. Uh, you know, if you're familiar with ActiveCampaign and their ability for, for doing a lot of marketing automation, you know, prior to this, it was up to you to build your landing pages on your site. Uh, or if you had something like Thrive or Elementor, you could do it real easy, uh, and then integrate it with ActiveCampaign. But now they have the ability to create these pages. So what I want to do in this video is take a first look at this. Complete transparency, I have not touched their landing page builder at all. Now I have built landing pages in various WordPress sites, other CRM systems, so I'm familiar with what, you know, some of the, I guess, downfalls of CRM-based landing pages could be, especially when something is newly released. So I'm going to take this look, or this deep look in here with you guys in this video, and just show you what I think about it as we get going into it. So here I am in my ActiveCampaign account, and, uh, where you find it is under Site and then Pages. And this is what the page comes up here, uh, and Start Building. So we're going to click Start Building and we're going to see what this is all about. So you're seeing it for the first time with me. So here we go. So obviously it's going into to be loaded, and, uh, what we see, I got Pages, Templates, and Files. So obviously, you know, as you build your pages, I'm assuming they're here. Let's See what's under templates. Okay, we don't have any saved. We have no files, right? Completely brand new, fresh section. So we're gonna go add a new page and we'll see what we got. Okay, so looks like there are several pre-made templates here, just like ActiveCampaign is in their emails. So really liking this, a lot of variety in here for what you can do. So, you know, as you mouse over them, you got preview options. So let me just go ahead and pick one that's gonna kind of jump out at me here. Let's just see here. So many to choose from. I don't really know which one to, to pick on or pick up and check. So let's do this one here. We're gonna click Preview and see what happens. So I think it's just gonna load into a preview mode. Alright, so this one's called Conference. We got a countdown timer, we got some information here about a conference. Okay, perfect. Let's go ahead and click Use This Template and see what the builder is all about. Alright, we're gonna give it a name. We're gonna call this Test landing page build, and we'll click save. All right, so here we are, we're in our editing experience. We've got obviously the standard ActiveCampaign menu on the left-hand side, we got the main builder in the middle, and then we got all the different tools for the blocks on the right-hand side. So let's go ahead and we're going to go ahead and upload or replace a logo here. So I'm going to click replace. And I'm going to use an image. So I'm going to click, let's see what happens. Okay, nothing happened there. Oh, I see, we're going to click replace, we have to click upload. So now I'm going to go and upload a logo. So let's just see here, I don't think I have my logo available easy here. So what I'm going to do quickly, just bear with me here, we're just going to go pull our logo off the old interweb. We'll see what we can do. There we go. Okay, let's just take our square logo. Just gonna save that down here to my downloads so we have something to work with. Okay, let's quickly upload this. It's kind of fun where the internet becomes like your own little repository of images once your site's been around long enough. So we're gonna go use image Okay, that puts the logo in. And I think I can pull in, look at that, I can resize pretty decently easy there for that. So kudos to them for that one there. So here's the headline. If I wanted to edit this, can I do it right on? I can, look at that. So this is our awesome event. And we've got other options, our headers in here. Bolding, can I just bold one word? Let's check that out. And I can. Awesome. Let's see, does it give me any kind of color options? What's that? That's spacing. I can put links on them. I've got font size. So no color options there initially, but let's just see on the right-hand side, do we have anything? Um, I don't see color options initially here. Okay, so that's one thing that, uh, you know, not too fond of with it. Now —break, make or break kind of deal. Then we get down here to the countdown timer, which we can go make a fixed date or a future date. So that's fine. So a fixed date would be like an evergreen type of model where it's like, oh, you know, 1 hour and 30 minutes in the future. So when you hit the page, it's going to count down from that. So very common, you would do that if you are building out some kind of landing page with a timed offer, or if you have an event coming up, you can pick a future date and put in that date and we'll count down from there. So really cool, liking that feature. So good job with that, guys. We got here, we got, oh, we got some colors. So I can change the background color here. That's pretty awesome. I just want to check one thing here. If I come back to this, no, okay, there wasn't any text options. And then a button here. Now let's say we want to get rid of this button. So how do we go about removing an option? Let's see here. It's a no. Maybe that little trash can up here. Let's see. Boom, easy peasy lemon squeezy. All right, coming down here. Okay, so let's just say we want to rearrange a section. We wanna put this section up between this section. So I would say that the easiest way to do that would be click and drag and drop. Look at that. You know what, I'm impressed so far. You know, I've been through a lot of iterations of other page builders initially. Especially in CRM systems, and they haven't been as easy as this so far. Okay, so let's go ahead and say we're going to add something into this. So on the right-hand side, what can we put in? We've got blocks, and this is where they got sections, rows, navigation, headers, buttons, subscribe forms, all that kind of stuff. PayPal. Okay, that's pretty cool. And video. So let's go ahead and let's go see what they got for sections first. I'm going to drop that in there. This is gonna make a little— okay, that's what their section means. And then we can drop a component into that. So let's go and let's say we're gonna put in a form. So where was that form? Subscribe form. So we're gonna click and drop that in there. All right, so now we just got an email and a submit button here. And then the right-hand side, what do we got for options? We got subscribe theme. So there's— oh, there's only one theme there showing up. Styles. So we could do what? We can round the corners, the boxes. Okay, pretty cool. Now can I add in other fields? Can I request other fields other than just email? Let's just see here. To use the tag below to identify the standard form, placeholder styles, outline, bubbly. What we got? Flat. Okay, that's pretty cool. And then on submit, open a link. Okay, so not really too much. That's there. Now it says, tip: use the tag below to identify the contacts and submit. So where do I see a tag below? I don't see anything here initially with a tag. So I could click and learn about forms, but I'm just going after the first impression with this. Hasn't been quite easy for me to initially figure this part out, so I think they could do a bit more to make that a little more user-friendly. What do we got up here when we drop that down? Okay, nothing. All right, so we're gonna just kind of check that one up for now, leave that there, uh, and we'll figure something else. Oh, that was a subscribe form, um, but then we got an actual form. So let's go ahead and throw a form down below this, see what happens. So form, probably the same thing. So we got form fields, click to add ID, ID, label. There's that. Oh, here's a plus sign, so I can add in first name here, phone. Okay, so I can do that. That's, that works. Click to add IDs. So if you want to put in any IDs or placeholders required, hide label, all that kind of stuff. Do you want to rearrange these? You can do that. That's pretty easy. And then the button theme on submit in the background, inner Okay, so I still, I don't see the actions on this for what we want to have happen when they go ahead and submit that form. So we're going to kind of just let that one be for now. Let's now take a look at putting in a video. So we're going to come back here. Let's just click on this section we got here. We're going to scroll down. I think the video is here. We're going to drag it in, see if it makes the two columns. It does, pretty easy. Now we click on video, what are our options? Okay, so we've got iframe videos. So, okay, I think this could use some work. This is relying on you to go and get the YouTube iframe video. So let's go pick one of our videos from our website here, or from our YouTube channel, sorry, not from our website. So we're gonna hop on here. Hey everyone, it's just Shaun here with Blue Cow Mark here about paid traffic. And we'll go share, embed, take this code, copy it. Hopefully I got that before that popped up. That's one thing that's happening lately, I'm not sure why. You don't really get the embed code, it's kind of like missing. Let's just see if it takes it in there, and it did. Okay, so put that in there. Perfect. Um, now we've got different options up here. For the section row column. So we were able to click back a little further. Let's see if we can add in some padding. How does this all work? So the whole box, and we'll see if we can increase— okay, I see. So you add a little padding to the video so it doesn't bump up against this. Okay, I can work with that. That's working for me. Um, now PayPal. What do we got? Some options. We throw in PayPal here. PayPal blocks through the sidebar. So go to the— go to your PayPal buttons. By now, okay, so you got to add in some stuff here. Okay, so we're not going to go in and really dive into that part a bit more, but you got to go in and get kind of the setup elements from PayPal. Now, knowing what I just did with that, let me just go back to here and see subscribe form columns, row. Okay, so just some options in there. Okay, so let's go ahead and delete some stuff here. Let's see if it automatically re— um, look at that! So restretches out and spaces everything out here. So, so far so good, guys, on here. Um, now let's see what happens if I click on Forms. If I was to click off that, okay, so it's going to leave the, the page. Now I want to come back and see if it auto-saved. That. I'd be impressed if it did. I don't have my hopes up. Um, and it didn't. Oh wait, no, there it is right there. And it— let's see here, did it remember everything I did? Look at that! Okay, impressive, it did. Perfect. Um, now we got all our blocks like you saw, and you got your themes here so you can actually pick your global colors. So if you want to be able to just kind of change it up All the buttons change. That's pretty sweet. Good job there, ActiveCampaign. But I'm still kind of stuck on these forms. I'm gonna get rid of this one here. How do we actually submit that? So let's go ahead here. Let me just look one more time when I go down here. On submit, default or open link. Okay, What's the plus sign here? Duplicate, trash, all right. So let's go and, oh, we duplicated that, didn't we? Let's go ahead and click Learn About Forms. It's gonna open in another tab anyway. Well, it was supposed to. It didn't, but. Come back to the page. And we page available in plus, okay, that's fine. Add a form, add fields to your form block, style, duplicate the form, and tags added to contacts from the form block. Okay, let's look at this part of it. Let's see what they're going to tell us here. Is the article gonna do it? Okay, there we go. So once a visitor submits the form through the block, a contact record will be created for them your ActiveCampaign, two tags will be applied who submit the form: the ActiveCampaign pages and the ActiveCampaign pages page name. So that's what happens. Doesn't allow you to actually create your own tag. It's going to append the name of that page to this here. So this test landing page build will be appended to the end of ActiveCampaign pages. That's good to know. You can work with that when you're building your campaigns, just knowing that in your naming of of your page that it's going to, to be that. So let's go ahead and click Publish This Page. Let's take a look at what our options are. So in here, before you publish, I recommend adding analytics. So let's just see what we got for settings here. So on the page, we can go in and we can actually put in a favicon, the title of the page, description, keywords. So we can see what it would look like here. We can put social images on this. We can check for compliance, GDPR. We got custom code so we can put in some tracking here from Google Analytics or any other stuff that you're doing. So that's pretty sweet. And then awesome. So let's go ahead here and we'll go back to edit design. We'll click publish that page, and we could save it as a template at this point, but we've got options here in this dropdown. That's where this Blue Cow, which is the name of my account, that AC page.com is, and then we can give it the URL here. So I'm gonna go ahead and click publish. Let's see how long this takes. And apparently it's that. So never— it didn't pop up and give me the URL. So let's just go back to the page list here, see if we can easily grab these page URLs. From the main section. Is there any more actions? Yeah, okay, so we can view live. Let's, let's do that. Let's view live. All right, so that's the page. Very nice, very clean page. I'm impressed, um, they did a great job with it. And of course it will be mobile, so we can actually— oh, we don't want to do that one. We want to— here's a little tip: if you want to go to inspect and then you can click up here and then you'll get the mobile version. And that's for any page. So if you want to check your site in mobile, it allows you to actually click and drag just like anybody would on their phone and see what, what happens when they click on things. Okay, so one last thing, um, I'm just going to check. I want to see how this all works with their system. So I'm going to go into not conversations, I'm going to go into automations, and we're going to create a quick automation here. I'm going to start from scratch. Let's see if the landing page shows up as one of the initial triggers. So abandoned carts, deals, tags, events, forwards, web page visited, subscribe, submits a form. Okay, so there was a form on there. Let's try that one. And let's see, any form, ActiveCampaign free trial. So this is the test form. I don't think that's the one that I created. So basically what you would have to do to fire off any automation that was submitted from that would be to have it be fired when a tag is added. So the tag would be— I don't know if it's going to bring up the list of them. Yeah, so there it is right there. So it's the ActiveCampaign Pages Test Landing Page Build tag. That would be the one that would fire off this automation once that form is submitted. So overall, my synopsis of all this after seeing it is On a scale of 1 to 10 from landing page builders that are out there, I'm going to give this about an 8. It's pretty high. I love the design. The usability is fairly clean, fairly easy to use. A lot of fluid movement that you're able to do with it. You're not really locked into a lot of the, the designs that are there, uh, to be, you know, exactly pretty much cookie cutter. You can actually maximize your creativity in it. And even with the limitation of those tags, even though they're submitting and it's creating its own tag for you, I think that's very usable for anybody building automations within ActiveCampaign. So there's my ranking on the page builder for ActiveCampaign, an 8 out of 10. So if you're interested in that, check them out at ActiveCampaign.com. And if you wanna get some help with your campaigns, by all means, reach out to me, put a comment here. I'd love to have a chat with you and help you out with your marketing automation and even the building of your, your landing pages. So, uh, have fun growing your business, and if you haven't done so already, please subscribe. Help us push over that 1,000 subscriber limit.