A couple of weeks ago, ActiveCampaign hosted a webinar interview with Tony Cappaert from Contactually. ActiveCampaign recently added Contactually to our new Automatic Importing feature. As our integration with Contactually is brand new, we wanted to get strong sense of who and what Contactually is and the web interview below will certainly do that. We have provided a video of the interview in which Tony demonstrates their platform, and also answers questions for the ActiveCampaign users about their platform. Below the video, is a text copy of the questions / answers from the interview.

1. What is Contactually and how did it get its start?

Contactually is the best marketing platform to help professionals generate more referrals and direct customers from their existing network.  We’re used by tens of thousands of small business owners, sales people, realtors, freelancers, and more.

We analyze your conversation history with each contact — from email, social media, and phone — and automatically prompt you (via a daily email reminder) to reengage with important people that are slipping off your radar.  You’ll stay top of mind with important contacts, get more referrals, and ultimately close more sales.

We started the company in 2011 and have been growing fast ever since!  Zvi, our co-founder and CEO, was running his own small development shop at the time, and constantly ran into the problem of staying in touch with past clients and partners.  There wasn’t a good solution out there, so we built Contactually.

2. I see you have many integrations with CRM’s. a.)What makes Contactually different than a CRM? b.) How does this add value to the user?

Great question.  CRMs are built to help salespeople manage the pipeline of sales leads.  It’s not very automatic, requires the sales person to enter in all the leads and data, and is overall very time-consuming.

The problem is that — for people in referral-based businesses — there are many many contacts that aren’t leads today, but who are still very important.  For a realtor, people like past clients and referral partners would fall into that category.  For an entrepreneur, that includes advisors, investors, and potential hires.  CRMs are not designed to ensure you follow up with these important contacts.

That’s where Contactually comes in.  We’re focused on helping you engage with the most important people in your network, regardless of whether they’re a lead or not.  Better still, our system is nearly automatic — we’ll pull in contacts from any email or social media account, and automatically prompt you to follow up.  No manual entry required.

Many of our users still use their existing CRM — like Salesforce or Pipedrive — to manage their leads, and we integrate directly with them so all data is synced between Contactually and their CRM.  That allows users to get the best of both worlds.

3. I know you have several metrics you provide to help users tracks success. Can you tell ActiveCampaign users about these?

What kind of tools to you provide your users with to show them how well they are doing?

We provide metrics right on the dashboard so you know how well you’re doing, including how many people you’ve contacted each day and the number of follow ups you’ve completed in a given week.  You can actually set you own goal for weekly follow ups and track your percentage complete!

In addition to the dashboard, we also send a weekly email on Fri afternoon that captures a high-level overview of all the action you’ve taken in Contactually in addition to the info above.  That weekly report includes the number of new people you’ve added to Contactually, the number of email signature we were able to scrape for contact info, etc.

Lastly, we have a four-person team of Customer Gurus that have one goal:  to talk to users and help them get the most benefit out of Contactually.  They consistently monitor how users are doing, and reach out via email or a phone call to suggest ways to improve as needed.

4. a.) Since there is now a foundation laid about Contactually, can you tell me a bit of why integrating with ActiveCampaign as an Email Marketing platform fits into your framework. b.)Where do you see it adding value to your customers?

We have always looked for best of breed integration partners to help provide Contactually users value that we don’t have baked into our platform.   We partned with Salesforce and others for CRM integration, and ActiveCampaign — as one of the best email marketing platforms out there — was a clear additional partner to start working with.

People use Contactually to sync and organize their contacts from every email and social media account, and get reminders to follow up 1-1 with those top contacts.  However, we’re not in the email marketing business; if you want to reach out to hundreds or thousands of contacts at time, that’s not something Contactually really supports.  With our ActiveCampaign integration, users can both organize and follow up 1-1 with contacts in Contactually, and manage email marketing campaigns in AC. 

By tightly integrating both systems, we believe both existing Contactually and AC users will gain access to a more powerful platform!

5. From the technical side of things, what type of processes went into place to build Contactually? Any cool facts our more technical users would appreciate.

We’re a Ruby on Rails shop, and everything in Contactually is built on our own API.  So when we partnered with ActiveCampaign, our APIs were fully built out to read any piece of data from Contactually and write data as well.  It allowed us to move really quickly and finish the integration in a matter of weeks.

On our back end, Contactually is large network of API integrations and heavy users of data.  We’re currently connected to over 125 million emails that we’re analyzing and importing contacts from.  We connect to APIs from over 30 different social networks to aggregate as much information as possible about each contact in each user’s network.  We’re hosted on Heroku and continuously deploy code every single day (well, sometimes not on Saturdays).

6. Lastly, give me your 30 second elevator pitch as to why users should jump on the Contactually bandwagon.

Contactually is the best marketing platform to help you generate more referrals and direct customers from your existing network.  We’re used by tens of thousands of realtors, small business owners, freelancers, and more.

We analyze your conversation history with each contact — from email, social media, and your phone — and automatically prompt you (via a daily email reminder) to reengage with important people that are slipping off your radar.  You’ll stay top of mind with important contacts, get more referrals, and ultimately close more sales.

If you’re the type of person that wants to strengthen your network to be more successful — personally and professionally — Contactually is the best platform out there.  Sign up today at www.contactually.com for a 30 day trial!

This week’s Marketer’s Spotlight picks the brain of marketing expert Chris Fourgere, owner and creator of Freedom Marketing Coach.

Chris, I see that Freedom Marketing Coach offers a wide range of marketing services. How did you get started in this industry and how has it evolved since you started?

I started helping people with just marketing and sales.  Then it morphed into fixing and creating systems and organization for their businesses so that they can hang onto and handle the sales increases! We use new media or ideas with tried and true methods. ie using Facebook fans to build our databases or client databases.

When it comes to marketing in general, what are the biggest mistakes you see small businesses make?

They do not have a strategy for getting more 1st time clients and then converting them to regular clients. They are constantly looking for a quick fix, without understanding that you can actually get paid to build your database and use automated systems like email to followup with all your prospects!

Do these type of mistakes often come from a lack of marketing strategy, or are there other factors that you see being the major contributors?

For sure a lack of a marketing strategy and the skills to create one, plus they have a hard time understanding how to leverage technology to do most of the work for them. They rarely also have a lifetime value of a customer/client figured out, so they are afraid of “giving stuff away.” ie. one of my other businesses is a restaurant, now I could run a magazine ad all pretty and stuff extolling the virtues of my restaurant, or I can put an email widget on my website giving away FREE appetizers to anyone who will give me their name and email. The money I spend on giving my prospects the Free appetizer drives way more business, and I know it because we track it, then a brand building add in a magazine. This trial run process can be used for ANY business.

Example: We work with a chiropractor who gives his new clients a 65 dollar chiropractic pillow when they come for the initial assessment. The visit happens to be 65 bucks also,  so the net out for the client is zero in essence. So now the chiropractor pays out the cost of the pillow, and time gives out $130 worth of value for $65, but he now can put that person on a care program. I am on it with this particular chiropractor. and will end up paying $1200 this year to have optimum health in regards to my back and neck so easily worth it for me and maybe even more for him!

With the growth of digital marketing, how to you see the landscape of marketing changing over the couple of years?

It is easier then ever to build a database online and two giants, facebook and groupon have continued to prove, the money is in the list. So get in touch with someone who can set you up with at least email marketing to begin, then facebook, then some type of loyalty program for starters, and make a marketing funnel for your prospects and clients to get into and stay in relationship with your business.

Obviously you are involved with email marketing. How do you see this type of platform helping your customers, especially those in the small business arena.

I recently spoke in front of a class of business students at a local college. It was 11 am in the morning and I asked how many of them had been on social media already 75% of the hands went up. Now the cool thing is, I asked how many had been in their email, and 99% of the hands went up. So as hot as social media is email is still king, and will be for a long time. They key is to begin with email which is as common as having a phone and integrate with social media later. But start with email and get out some communication to your prospects to educate them and let your clients know what is new, cool and can help them too!

What are your favorite tools to recommend using when you start people with their email marketing and why?

If you have a brick and mortar business where people come you must go to staples and get a drawbox and starting giving something away for a monthly draw in exchange for the email addresses of your visitors. This way you can build your list and followup with everyone automatically!! You can also use a tablet to help with the signups if you want. Android le pan on Amazon is what I use,  and short cut the entering in of all the written ballots. But either way get going today. I have 15,000 people on my database and this is the method I use. Otherwise, get going with ActiveCampaign right away and you don’ t even need a website as they can host a form for you. Just get started and use the inexpensive tools like ActiveCampaign and a $35 draw box and a gift basket or gift card to giveaway to build your list online (your website or Facebook and instore if you have a physical location).

What are top 3  pointers you can give for those who are still in transition mode from pure traditional marketing to digital platforms?

1. Get started today.
2. If you don’t know how to do it hire someone who does it will be one of your best investments
3. Remember traditional marketing to digital marketing is still marketing the delivery system is the only thing that is changed. So embrace change and profit!!

(If you haven’t watched our first preview video I would suggest watching that first)

When creating a custom template you need to think about 3 different things:

1. Editable Regions = These are the regions that content can go into. Users will be able to add and move content blocks within these regions.
2. Style Regions = These are the style regions that your users will see when they click “style options” in the campaign designer.  They can adjust the background, font, etc… on whatever region you set.  Regions can be set on any block such as a td, div, etc..
3. Content Blocks = These are the actual blocks of content.  Think of it as your filler content.  Content blocks can be edited (or deleted) by your users.

A couple of things worth knowing:

• Subscribers are from now known as Contacts
• Opted-in subscribers will now be “confirmed contacts”
• If a contact does not have a name we will refer to them as “Recipient” for any personalized content
• The API has changed to reflect this update. Old API calls will continue to work as they did before.
• Your existing Web Hooks will still work as expected.

Today we released a new version of our subscriber list page (which we will be referring to as “Contacts” in the near future)

In our on-going mission to help you know your subscribers at a deeper personal level, we are now including personal details about them right in the list view.  This includes:

• A photo of your contact is shown when available
• The location of the contact is shown when available
• Social profiles (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) are shown when available.  (currently requires you to subscribe to ERJA)
• You are able to email a single contact directly form the contact list page
• Custom fields (that you choose to show on the list page) are now shown under the contact.  This allows you to show many more fields in a clean & easy to read format.

The ActiveCampaign API is a great way to interact with the software through your own interface, providing you full access to data and functionality to use in any way you can imagine.

Even though our API is well documented and we provide examples and language-specific wrappers, often times you’ll run into an issue that you can’t find a solution for and need to contact ActiveCampaign support.

We welcome all support requests so you should never feel embarrassed or silly for contacting us. In fact, a lot of times there might be an issue that we are not aware of until someone points it out. We want developers to feel comfortable using our product and API, and that includes finding answers when you need them. You can reach us through our community forum, Twitter profile, or standard support email address.

That being said, the most common things we’ll ask for when troubleshooting your API issue are as follows:

1. The full API request URL (including all parameters)
2. If it’s a POST request, your POST data (pretty-printed JSON if possible)
3. The expected response/action (what do you think should happen after making this request?)
4. The actual response received from the server, and action performed (if any)

This gives us a great idea of what you are attempting to do, and the important interface pieces that you are using. With this information we can typically narrow down the issue and provide an accurate response in a timely manner.

In general, be as detailed as possible. This ensures that 1) the support rep understands what you are attempting to do with the API, and 2) can effectively replicate the issue (in order to troubleshoot it).

In other (more rare) cases it can be much harder to isolate what the problem could be. Read on to learn why.

The challenge with API troubleshooting

The API is especially hard to troubleshoot because there is no visible interface that ActiveCampaign support can go to in order to see what the issue is. The interface is being created by you, so support can’t possibly know what is happening within your own application, script, or environment.

Consider this analogy: You’re building a large project made up of several components/materials purchased from a home improvement store, each of which have detailed instructions on how to use. You run into a problem with one component – despite the instructions it’s just not working properly within the scope of your entire project. You go back to the home improvement store and tell them the individual component is not working.

The staff at the store won’t know the entire scope of what you’re building and therefore can only test that the individual component is working unto itself. If there’s some other aspect of your project that is affecting this one component, the staff won’t know what that is.

This is similar to how an API works. An API is made up of individual instructions that, when connected to your application code, make up the functionality for an application. An API is just a set of instructions. How you execute those instructions in your application environment is entirely up to your system and skill level.

An application is also made up of different components – one of which may be the ActiveCampaign API, others could be several different company API’s. Combine all that with server processing, interface elements, client viewports and devices, and your own application logic – and you have many variables involved with how the application behaves. It’s easy to think that one component is causing a problem when it could be something else entirely.

Whereas we can’t possibly know what every application is doing, we can try to provide helpful examples and pointers to provide you with a good starting point so you can focus on other areas of your application. Combine that with a friendly, helpful support staff, and quite often the answer will reveal itself by simply having more than one person involved and listening to your situation. This is what we strive to provide, so if there’s anything we can do to improve our support or API, always let us know.

Recently, I had the opportunity to ask Lila from panties.com a few questions about her experience with email marketing, while being a customer of ActiveCampaign. She provided incredibly insightful answers, and more than obliged us to give many tips and tricks she has learned while developing their email marketing.

1. What provided the inspiration to create panties.com?

We had been in business since 1985 when internet domain names became available to civilians. We purchased panties.com in 1994, and created our first website a couple months later. We chose panties.com because lingerie was already taken. In retrospect, it was a much better choice. It is shorter and no one can even spell lingerie.

2. Is your business 100% online or do you also have retail? What is the benefit of having your specific business model?

We have always been mail order type business model and we have never had a store front. The down side of not having a store front is that many lingerie businesses will not sell to web based businesses. Mail order has always been the dark sheep of retail lingerie. The upside to is that a web based business can be less costly to create. Some of them actually carry next to no inventory. I believe this is why there is such distrust of web-based businesses.

3. What types of advice can  you give any readers who might just be getting started in a web based business?

We specialize in gifts that men order for their sweethearts for Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Anniversary, and Birthday. Unlike many of our competitors, we still do print ads. Google Ad words has become so expensive with such a low conversion rate, that it has simply become a Google cash register. We’d make more money going to the casino.

Our email campaigns have become an unanticipated revenue producer. It has only been as the years have gone by that the the value of our list is has become so evident.

We first started with Vertical Response – a service that emails on the client’s our behalf. But it ended up costing us a minimum of $70 for each campaign – even years ago when our list was smaller. Plus there was a delay because they had to verify each and every campaign we sent. I think they were afraid we were going to start sending pornography, or do some type of bait and switch. They’d ask us to retouch photos and change our landing pages, the demands were unending. It was exhausting and frustrating. We dumped them in favor of an email program developed by the shopping cart company we used, DigiShop.

4. With a niche product like yours, is the demographic limited, or are you able to successfully reach people of all ages and genders? Do you have any different approaches to sales and marketing based on demographics?

Our customers are surprisingly mature. Our medium customer is a male in his 50′s. Our list is not big enough to segment according to area of the country, nor would it be useful. But if we sold plants and trees, it might.  

5. In regards to your email marketing. Have you found a frequency of sending (i.e. everyday, once a week, etc) that works well for you?

I researched this question extensively because I had the same question myself. Turns out that about three times a week is good for our product. Morning usually get more response than evenings. Friday and Saturday nights get the least response.

6. What type of tools do you use with your email marketing and how do they help your business.

Subsequently we have been devoting a good portion of our development efforts on a new email designer.  Having gone through many iterations of our new designer we have ended up with quite a beautiful designer and framework that offers up some pretty exciting capabilities for what we can do within an email.

We have designed the new email designer in a way that focuses on usability and saving you time.

• Editing is all inline.  As you type you see how it will look to your subscribers.
• We don’t break your work flow or your time by forcing you to edit all your content in a side bar or use gimmicky tactics of dragging/dropping items from the side bar to add in content.
• The ability to change layouts of a single block of content is just one click away (no digging deep into side menus/options)
• It is full of dynamic content features.  From RSS, direction connections to eCommerce platforms, and more…
• Tons of new & beautiful email designs with multiple themes per design
• Never worry about image resizing.  We automatically resize according to where you put the image.
• Mobile friendly.  You can edit emails with mobile devices and your emails that you send will be optimized for mobile devices.

The Short Version

As of late last week, we noticed some problems when people were visiting the Subscriber Import page. Many times, things would work fine; sometimes, you might be shown a server error. That’s pretty confusing (and frustrating!) for anyone; the worst part was, though we could reproduce it, we couldn’t make any sense of it.

After a lot of investigation, we were able to track down the problem to some new code we added around that time. Our intention was to set the locale, useful for those with languages that may format dates a bit differently than English, but it turns out our cache system (which helps us serve pages as fast as we do) had some problems working with different locales.

You might be thinking that doesn’t make any sense. We think you’re right, and we were pretty confused; this was not the most straightforward debugging session, to say the least. But our testing confirms that code was the culprit.

If you’re worried about the locale not being set, don’t fret; we have some plans to reintroduce that feature, but in another form. From here on, your visits to the import page should be error-free.

The Long and Technical Version

As a programmer, I like bugs that make sense: the page isn’t loading, and there’s a typo? That would do it. Oh, we forgot to save this color change to the database; that’s why it’s not reflected when I refresh the page.

I don’t like bugs that make no sense, so the bug here was pretty frustrating not only for me but everyone in the office. It began happening in a third-party library for connecting to Google Contacts: one of the interfaces there (apiIO) was not defined. What an odd thing, particularly for some code we’d been using for a while; the bug nevertheless corresponded with a new feature we released, and we were pretty wary that something with that feature wasn’t interacting well with the rest of our software.

Not soon after we began looking, we had disabled APC, which is the cache system we use for PHP, and the error magically disappeared. That’s stranger, and told us right away that whatever we were looking for wasn’t going to make a lot of sense. (We were right about that in the end.) It also told us that we needed to be a bit less conventional in our thought process.

The interface in question is, of course, present in one of the code files of Google’s library. We thought perhaps the way those files are included doesn’t work well with APC, so we stopped what Google was doing (setting the system’s include path) and changed the library to include files using an absolute path. It seemed like it was working! — but then we saw server errors again. Back to the drawing board.

The apiIO interface is really the only one in the library, and we don’t tend to use that particular feature of PHP ourselves. What’s an interface but a class with empty methods, right? So we changed apiIO to actually be a class. It seemed like it was working! — but no.

Sigh. Well, APC is turned off for now, and in the meantime another error popped up in which some methods in a class our sending engine uses seemed not to exist, so we turned our attention to that (since sending is important). (It should be pointed out that this problem was only affecting one of our users — everyone else was able to send just fine.) Turns out the class has all the methods it should; if you run the PHP function to grab all of the class methods, they’re all there. But it turns out a few of them are missing from the object.

Let’s make it weirder. The methods that were missing all had a capital letter ‘I’. They should be there, but they weren’t, and by this time we were thinking this was more like magic than programming. We knew by the time the error happens that the methods are gone; we also knew, through testing, that when we start to send with this example, the methods are there. Sometime in the middle, they go away — which is weirder still.

So we did divide and conquer; pick some code that runs half-way through the error case and the beginning. Are the methods there or not? On and on we went, brute-force, until we tracked it down to — PHP’s setlocale function. Huh?

This particular user had been using our Turkish language support. Setting the locale for that turns out to have a longstanding bug in PHP, one in which our version was still susceptible. It seems that setting the locale has a somewhat illogical but nevertheless destructive impact on class methods (in particular, with the capital letter ‘I’). When we stopped setting the locale, sending was fixed.

And then we thought, hey — that error with Google’s library when APC was turned on? Didn’t that interface have a capital letter ‘I’ in it? It did! But the people getting the error weren’t using Turkish; they were, in many cases, using only English. Still, we had a theory, and it sort of made twisted sense. So we turned off setting the locale for everyone, and turned on APC, and…

It worked. The import page; everything worked. It shouldn’t have mattered, and it still doesn’t make any sense, but setting the locale made methods, classes and interfaces disappear, in particular those with a capital letter ‘I’. Thus ended one of the most bizarre debugging sessions our developers have ever had.

In this weeks “Marketers Spotlight,” I interviewed John Makras, an Account Manager with Informatix in Queensland, Austrailia. John provides insight into how digital marketing is a multi-faceted tool which should be well rounded and versatile in order to optimize success.

1. Let’s start with a basic get to know you question. What is Informatix and what need is the business trying to meet?

Informatix is an online marketing agency that offers a variety of services and support for businesses of all sizes, across multiple industries. We work to increase visibility, strengthen branding, and help companies reach more customers, more effectively, in an ever-expanding digital world. We are a full-service agency, and our services are available both a la carte and in the form of customized marketing packages. We’re proud to offer a wide range of digital opportunities for all types of businesses looking to grow through online marketing. Our services are versatile and beneficial for any company. We can help startups and businesses establish an Internet presence and build a global customer base, even without technical knowledge. We also save companies time and money by taking both routine and specialty marketing tasks for them, and applying our skills and experience
to improve platforms, unify presentations, and boost profits.

2. I see that you have many different types of services you offer. Have you always offered all of these services or have your offerings been evolving as the digital marketing world expands?

At Informatix, we strive to keep our services—and our clients—on the cutting edge of technology. We are constantly evolving in order to stay ahead of the latest developments, and to deliver the digital advantage to our customers. We understand the importance of keeping pace with the fast-moving online world, from updated design strategies to new avenues for connecting with customers and prospects, like mobile phones. A company that isn’t up-to-date will lose opportunities and risk falling behind the competition.

3. To continue with the theme of the last questions, how important do you think it is for businesses to engage in multiple forms of online marketing like the ones you offer?

We believe it’s essential. Successful online marketing is about exposure through diversification and repetition. The more often a potential customer sees a business online, the more likely they are to remember that business and either look them up, or click through the next ad or communication they receive. A combination of several different online marketing methods, a strong email marketing platform to ensure continued engagement with customers and prospects, and analytics to help determine what’s working and what’s not, is the most effective strategy in the crowded digital marketplace.

4. When did you start offering email marketing and how do you see it helping your customers?

Email marketing is a core offering for Informatix. We’ve specialized in this service since the beginning, and we’ve evolved the technology, analytics, and strategies incorporated with our email marketing platform to ensure continued effectiveness. Even with all the buzz surrounding new online marketing avenues like social media, email marketing is still the most effective method by far. Studies have shown that email has higher open rates, engagement, and ROI than any other digital communication. A reliable, attractive email marketing platform should be at the center of any online marketing strategy.

5. I see that you have a 5-step process when working with your customers. Why do you feel this is important when it comes to digital marketing?

The biggest challenge with digital marketing is finding a solution that works for a particular company. No two businesses are the same, and the best strategies are tailored for each individual company. Our five-step process—Discover, Strategize, Execute, Analyze, Apply—ensures that each of our clients receives an online marketing package that is customized to suit the specific needs of their business. We work with clients before, during, and after projects and campaigns to make sure that everything runs smoothly, and to help them leverage the results of their marketing efforts for further gain.

6. When a business is first getting started with serious digital marketing (i.e. not just updating Facebook once a month), what are a few of the top metrics people should look for to measure success and why?

When it comes to digital marketing, success can be measured in several ways. One of the top metrics companies should analyze is their email open rates, as well as the clickto-open rate. These metrics reveal which campaigns are the most effective in terms of content, delivery time and frequency, and more. When combined with A/B split testing, the metric is even more valuable. Another important metric is website traffic—not just volume, but also first-time versus repeat visitors, most frequently visited pages, and average length of time for visits. Analyzing traffic can reveal a great deal of information about the efficiency of a website in converting visitors to paying customers. Live chat services are a great way to improve this metric.

7. In regards to email marketing, what are the tools (automations, split testing, etc.) that you see consistently helping your users? Why do you feel they are so beneficial?

Automation comes in high on our list of effective tools for email marketing. It saves so much time for a busy company—and in business, time is money. Many of our clients couldn’t believe how much easier automation made their working lives. The ROI for automation is extremely impressive, too. Companies can reach more of their customers and prospects faster, and with reliable frequency. This in turn builds awareness and brand recognition, and boosts click-through rates and conversions. Live chat is another high-impact tool that’s packed with benefits, from a reduction in customer service workloads and expenses to further automation, all leading to greater engagement and increased revenues. One of the more powerful and most underused, or improperly used, email marketing tools is the online survey. There is so much valuable information that companies can gain from a well-written, implemented, and tracked survey, but many businesses simply don’t have the time or the knowledge about what makes a survey effective. Our survey offerings have delivered fantastic, consistent ROI for our clients.