The #1 Email Marketing Hack That Can Skyrocket Your Sales

Email Marketing is alive and kicking in 2024. Don’t let naysayers sway you into believing otherwise. What makes it even more effective than it was a few years ago is automation. In the last few years, there has been a deluge of quality automation tools that reduce effort and increase the efficiency of your email marketing campaigns.

We have been using a whole bunch of these tools ourselves. But a combo that never fails to make our list of recommendations is WPForms with ActiveCampaign integration.

This simple bundle can turn any WordPress website into a lead capturing magnet by allowing you to integrate highly attractive and equally functional signup forms. Each one of these form fields is fully customizable. You can set conditional logic, embed CTAs, capture data, and integrate payment gateways, to name a few.

Even that’s just scraping the surface of what you can achieve with WPForms.

Today, we are going to show you how we use it to amplify the results of our email marketing campaigns. So strap in.

Table of Contents

What is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is an automated marketing and sales process CRM tool that allows you to set up multiple automated processes for sales and marketing. You can use it to know more about the customer, send targeted marketing messages, and amplify the ROI for your marketing channels.

As of 2021, more than 80000 businesses across industries use ActiveCampaign. It’s a very powerful sales automation tool on its own. But when you integrate it with WPForms, you just cut out the technical bit, which can be overwhelming for some people.

Why WPForms & ActiveCampaign is so effective

First things first, why did we pick this over other tools? Here are our two cents.

Drag & Drop Interface – No Code? No Sweat! WPForms makes it a cinch to design custom forms with its drag & drop interface. No need to mess around with code or hire a developer either. Want to make it even simpler? Use one of the premade templates. Takes the guesswork out of design.

Multipage forms with media embedding – If the form is tediously long, split it into multiple pages. You can also allow customers to embed media while submitting forms.

Multiple Integrations – From Payment gateways like PayPal & Stripe to marketing channels like MailChimp and CRM like Salesforce, it features one-click integrations galore.

Customer Insights – From form abandonment data to customer journey through the funnel, you can get in-depth insights into customer behavior once they land on your site.

Now that you have a fair idea of what’s possible with ActiveCampaigns and WPForms let’s quickly check how to set up and use this combo.

How to set up and use ActiveCampaign forms in WordPress

Here’s a quick guide.

Step 1: Install WPForms & Sign up for the Elite Plan

ActiveCampaign integration is unavailable in the basic version. Some businesses may find it a tad pricey. But trust us when we tell you this. It will be completely worth every dime you spend on it.

Step 2: Activate the ActiveCampaign addon

Once you sign up for WPForms Elite, head to your plugin dashboard. Click on WPForms & look for Addons. Click on it and find the ActiveCampaign addon. Click on Install Addon. That’s it.

Step 3: Let’s design some forms

Time to set up your first form. Click on WPForms and then on Add New. You can name it depending on your campaign goal. For instance, ‘Lead Capture – Blog Post Name’. That’s just an example, though.

Now WPForms shows you almost 100 premade templates that you can select and customize. Some of the options are Event Planner, Event Registration, Mortgage application, Newsletter signup, and so on.

For this article, we will use the Newsletter Signup template as an example. You have the option to select any one of these and use them verbatim. Alternatively, you can drag more elements from the left-hand panel and drop them to the form on the right. Click on any field and make changes as necessary.

Step 4: Integrating ActiveCampaign

Now it’s time to connect the form to your ActiveCampaign account. Once again, everything is pretty straightforward. Click on Marketing on the WPForms dashboard. Now select ActiveCampaign and then click on Add New Account.

A Pop Up Window will ask you for your ActiveCampaign Account details. There are two critical fields that you have to fill.

One is an ActiveCampaign API URL & the second one is an ActiveCampaign API Key. These are unique to your ActiveCampaign account. You will find them under Developer Settings in your ActiveCampaign dashboard.

The Account Name & Event Tracking are optional additions. Event Tracking is a tracking feature that lets you track every single action on the form field. However, it requires some manual copy-pasting, which is beyond the scope of this article.

Do check out ActiveCampaign Tutorial videos to know how to activate tracking in case you wish to use this feature.

Step 5: Configure the Form

Let’s quickly configure the form. Firstly, you need to give it a nickname. Nicknames make it easy to integrate this form into multiple pages on your website. So, give it something campaign-specific that makes it easier to recall.

Now select the ActiveCampaign account that you just connected with WPForms.

Lastly, set the desired action that you want once the user will fill out the form and hit submit. The action that you select will also determine the options that you are shown. There are many preset actions available for different form types. But let’s hypothetically assume that we are talking about a Newsletter Form here.

Click on Subscriber and then click on Create/Update. The moment you click on this, the form will auto-populate with different fields. Here are some details on each one.

ActiveCampaign List – If you have a preset mailing list, you can select it from this dropdown. Else, you can easily set up one with ActiveCampaign.
Subscriber Email – The user will have to enter their email id. If you are updating an existing subscriber, this will be auto-populated.
New Subscriber Email – Only to be used while updating an existing subscriber’s email id.
Subscriber Status – The auto-assigned status to each subscriber
Tags To Add – You can assign a tag to every subscriber.
Tags to delete – Remove or update existing tags as the subscriber’s journey through the funnel changes
Note – Add a custom note to the subscriber

Step 6: Add the form to your WordPress Site

Congratulations. You have just set up an ActiveCampaigns enabled WPForm. That wasn’t too hard, was it? You can add this form just about anywhere on the WordPress site. You can embed it in a blog post, on a widget-enabled sidebar, or the footer.