ActiveTrail

Despite rumors to the contrary, email marketing is still a very effective way to reach your customers and potential customers. ActiveTrail is a cloud-based, email marketing service provider. That means you can use their service to not only create your email and newsletter marketing campaigns, but to send them too. With ActiveTrail, you can create beautiful campaigns that are responsive. That is, you will generate messages that automatically adapt to whatever device the recipient uses to view them. This is crucial in a world where 50% or more of people read their email on a mobile device.

Reach Your Target Whichever Device They Use With ActiveTrail

ActiveTrail is an SaaS (Software as a Service) product. SaaS (cloud-based) products offer some real benefits for their users. Because ActiveTrail is hosted on the RealCommerce group's (their parent company) servers, you don't need to buy any special hardware or install any software. Just log in with your web browser and start working.

Another major advantage of using an SaaS product like ActiveTrail is that they are responsible for keeping the software up to date. They can fix bugs or roll out updates whenever they are ready. You automatically receive those updates the next time you log in. You will always be using the latest version of ActiveTrail.

To get an understanding of what ActiveTrail can do for you, we will look at the process of creating an email campaign with the service. I've divided the process into three broad phases:

• Preparing Your Mailings

• Sending Your Mailings

• Analyzing the Results

Are you ready to see what ActiveTrail can do for you? Let's start.

Preparing Your Mailings

ActiveTrail gives you a comprehensive set of tools for planning your email marketing campaigns. These include design tools for creating beautiful, responsive messages. They also include tools for adding and managing recipients. After all, what good is a beautiful mailing if you don't have a list or it gets blocked due to poor management of drops and bounces?

Here are some of the most important ActiveTrail tools for planning your mailings.

Integration with CRM Systems, Databases, and SalesForce

Thanks to its Restful API, you can connect ActiveTrail to your company's other customer-related systems or databases. This allows you to automatically import and export changes to your customer list. Imagine the amount of time you will save by making these systems work together and eliminating error-prone manual changes.

Add Dynamic Sign-Up Forms to Your Websites

When someone visits your website, you need to make it easy for them to join your mailing list. ActiveTrail provides a set of professional-looking sign-up forms you can easily add to your site or landing page. We're talking about features like animations, pop-ups, and other timed features that increase the chance someone will sign up.

ActiveTrail Sign-Up Forms that Inspire People to Join Your List

Complete List ManagementCreating a mailing list is only part of the job. Managing it is even more important. ActiveTrail's list management tools let you organize you lists into groups and subgroups. Targeted emails get much higher response rates while costing you less to send and reducing the chance of drops or bounces.

Tough anti-spam laws mean it is imperative to maintain a clean list. ActiveTrail can help you do this automatically. It can deactivate bad (non-existent or erroneous) addresses for you. It can also manage removal from lists for you by adding an unsubscribe link to every message you send.

The Campaign Editor

ActiveTrail's mobile-aware campaign editor helps you create an attractive, effective campaign every time. The editor supports images and includes a complete set of buttons you can use to get recipients to take action. The editor also handles annoying details such as making sure everything in your message is aligned properly.

But you don't have to do all the work yourself. The campaign editor includes a set of mobile-ready templates you can choose from. Select a design, add your own art and content and you are ready to send a good-looking message in minutes.

The Image Editor

The campaign editor makes it easy to insert images into your mailings. But what if the image needs to be edited? You could use a third-party tool, but why bother. ActiveTrail has a built-in image editor that can do the trick. The image editor offers more than a dozen tools to trim, tweak, and transform your raw image into the perfect piece of art for your mailing.

Add Dynamic Personalized Content

Personal messages are always better received than bulk mail. ActiveTrail lets you insert dynamic personalized content into your messages. This personalized text and images will increase the recipient's interest and likely lead to higher response rates.

Sending Your Mailings

Once your campaign is ready, ActiveTrail will send it out for you. Thanks to their relationships with many of the top ISPs (Internet Service Providers) around the world, you can expect a high delivery rate. In most cases, ActiveTrail says they get near 100% delivery. And this is just one benefit of having them send your mailings.

Let's see how else ActiveTrail can help you with this part of the process. As with preparing your mailings, this will be only a partial list of what they have to offer:

Automatic Email Send and Response System

ActiveTrail gives you flexible autoresponder software. Autoresponder software (a.k.a. an autoresponder) is software that has two distinct functions.

First, it allows you to set up an entire email campaign ahead of time. You can tell the autoresponder what day and time to send each message in your campaign, freeing you from that manual chore. You aren't limited to using these autoresponders for mailing campaigns either. They are smart and flexible enough to do things like sending holiday greetings on a specific day, or birthday greetings on each person's actual birthday.

Second, autoresponders can respond to what recipients do. You can configure them to do things like responding when someone clicks a link in one of your messages or visits a page on your website.

Send SMS Messages

While email is a great way to communicate with, and market to, people sometimes you want something faster and more immediate. ActiveTrail's Active SMS is the tool for sending messages right to someone's phone. These messages are simple to create, simple to send, and have high impact. According to ActiveTrail, over 90% of SMS messages are viewed within three minutes of being received, and campaigns that include SMS messaging are 325% more effective.

Analyzing the Results

Once you've sent your campaign out into the world, you will want to judge its effectiveness. This is where ActiveTrail's analytic tools come into the picture. Here are some of the highlights of their analysis system:

Google Analytics Integration

By integration Google Analytics into the ActiveTrail system, you gain access to complete statistics about the results of your campaigns. These can include clicks, time spent on your site and/or specific pages of your site, success rate (did they buy the product or sign up for the newsletter) and many other details that will help you plan more thoroughly in the future.

Automatic Goal Tracking

Define goals for your campaigns and let ActiveTrail track the activities of recipients along the path to your goal.

Mobile Reports

Discover how open rates and other characteristics of your campaigns vary between desktop and mobile devices, as well as among different types of mobile devices.

Hotspot Reports

It is useful to know that 12% of the people who received a particular message clicked one of the links within it. It is even more useful to know which of those links they clicked. Hotspot reports can give you this information. You'll not only know which messages are appealing to your recipients. You'll know which part of the message is motivating them to take action.

Additional Resources

The RealCommerce group isn't letting ActiveTrail stagnate. As the company says, this is a cloud-based product. That allows them to easily and continually update it with fixes and new features. These three resources: the blog, the newsletter, and the FAQ can help you keep up with the changes.

The Blog

The blog has a ton of useful information. While it isn't keyword searchable, it is categorized. You can choose the category you are interested in by selecting it from a list in the right column. You can also click the name of the author of a post to see a list of all that person's contributions to the blog.

The Newsletter

If you would rather be notified of changes as the occur, you can sign up for the free ActiveTrail newsletter. The newsletter runs under the ActiveTrail service. So, in addition to being an information source, it is a good way to see how your newsletter will function if you publish it through ActiveTrail.

The FAQ

The FAQ holds the answers to a dozen of the most common questions about ActiveTrail.

Pricing

The pricing for ActiveTrail is a little bit confusing. But that's only because they offer you so many options. You can sign up for:

• Monthly plans, which let you send a specific number of emails per month (you can also pay for these yearly and get a 15% discount).

• Email Packages, where you are buying the ability to send a certain number of emails, making this a pay-as-you-go approach

• SMS Packages, where you are buying the ability to send a certain number of text messages, making this a pay-as-you-go approach

ActiveTrail Sign-Up Forms that Inspire People to Join Your List

Conclusion 

As you've seen, ActiveTrail is a complete cloud-based solution for creating, sending, and analyzing email and SMS marketing campaigns. The company has been around since 2004, so you know they have staying power. And the capabilities they give you should help you boost the results of your email marketing campaigns.

So what's the next step? ActiveTrail offers a free 30-day trial of their service. Running a few test campaigns using ActiveTrail would give you a real feel for their service as well as a sense of how they can help you improve your own campaigns.

To see what ActiveTrail can do for you, sign up today for your free trial.