ActiveCampaign's Chicago headquarters
In the heart of the Midwest, a new wave of business leaders is leading the way in adopting cutting-edge AI strategies. I have demonstrated this through conversations with a variety of leaders attending Omaxn*, a Midwest AI forum. From proofs of concept to customer-facing solutions, these visionaries are transforming the business landscape.
I recently had the opportunity to meet with Jason VandeBoom, the innovative founder and CEO of ActiveCampaign*, a Chicago-based startup that's garnering industry attention with its incredible journey to becoming a unicorn.
For those of you who aren't familiar with ActiveCampaign, they're a company that helps small teams empower large businesses with intelligent marketing automation. Their platform does everything from automatically sending welcome emails to customers who fill out forms on your website to automatically engaging with prospects at the right stage in the sales process.
Through email and marketing automation, ActiveCampaign customers can send personalized messages to each customer through automation and improve communication with their own customers at scale. ActiveCampaign's CRM and sales engagement automation handles lead prioritization and contact management so your sales team can spend their time doing what they do best: closing deals. Some companies use ActiveCampaign as their only sales and marketing team and 100% of their monthly revenue growth is directly influenced by ActiveCampaign automation.
VandeBoom knows the power of automation platforms, so the topic of evolution and use of AI naturally came up during the discussion. VandeBoom quickly explained that most of the technical and product people at ActiveCampaign would say that AI is not new, it is more than ChatGPT or large language models, and it is important to evaluate the right model for the right problem. He also said that models like Gemini, Anthropic, Open AI, etc. are not distinctive enough. They all have similar merits and are quite competitive, so it is important to use what works best for your business. He further explained that they use cutting edge open source technologies like LangChain to interact with their models to speed up the delivery of new features.
At ActiveCampaign, we don't force AI into experiences where it doesn't work. Rather, we try it out to determine what our customers find useful and what they don't, and we iterate as necessary. For example, for several months, ActiveCampaign was testing AI onboarding for its customers. This means that the AI is in charge of onboarding new customers and getting them started on the platform. VandeBoom candidly explained that customers were having a hard time engaging with the AI. While they thought that open-ended questions would help customers better explain their needs, customers wanted to avoid explaining themselves to a robot. So ActiveCampaign stopped asking AI questions and went back to what customers were already interested in. The key to success is to talk to customers, understand their preferences, and work with them to fulfill their needs.
“When we consider implementing an AI-driven customer experience, the first thing we think about is always whether it provides real value,” says VandeBoom. “A lot of companies put a lot of effort into giving their customers the next flashy AI feature, but often the flashy thing doesn't actually solve the problem the customer has. We don't do things that sound impressive on paper because it doesn't serve the customer best. That's not what we've set out to do.”
ActiveCampaign’s AI features fall into three main buckets: personalization, suggestions, and validation.
ActiveCampaign's platform hyper-personalizes the experience for end customers. For example, with predictive sending, customers simply check a box and the ActiveCampaign platform sends emails to each recipient at the time they are most likely to respond to that email. AI analyzes past engagement data and sends communications based on the best time for each person. The AI content generator allows marketers to generate content and iterate based on feedback. There are also options to make content shorter, more interesting, or change the tone of the entire piece of content. The generator uses this feedback to make smarter recommendations based on what resonates with your brand and each segmented audience.
The platform suggests opportunities and inspires marketers to achieve results never before thought possible. If a marketer wants to send an email, ActiveCampaign's platform suggests automation recipes already built to ensure that email marketing is part of the overall customer journey and that messages are sent when key actions are taken. ActiveCampaign's AI automation builder translates customers' business goals into automated customer journeys. This AI tool helps understand customer objectives and desired outcomes and translates them into actionable automations.
AI is also used to validate business decisions and provide insight into the efforts and success of peers. ActiveCampaign customers receive automated emails with data analytics to show them what automations their peers are using and how successful their campaigns are compared to others of a similar size, helping them continually increase revenue and grow.
I was curious to know how AI helps their business internally at ActiveCampaign, and the answer was they use AI to better support their customers. At ActiveCampaign, we use AI internally to predict customer churn and issues before they happen. Using data analytics, we can see how people are using our platform. For example, customers are given a product adoption score that shows how often they use the platform, what features they use, if they have issues, etc. If the churn prediction tool flags a customer as at high risk of churn, our team will reach out to that customer to see if they have issues with their setup or are struggling to figure something out. Instead of sitting around frustrated, AI identifies the issues and our team at ActiveCampaign can proactively address these issues.
What I found really interesting is that ActiveCampaign's entire executive leadership team reads all the customer reviews that come in every day. VandeBoom speaks passionately about the importance of being close to the customer and how companies often lose touch with customer feedback, but this is something he and his team have done since day one and won't change. Even though he reads all the customer reviews, there are still support conversations and chat conversations with customers that the team doesn't see. So they use AI to generate summaries of support conversations to help them identify issues, refine processes, and identify gaps where customers need support. To do this, they use Anthropic's Claude model.
ActiveCampaign is committed to protecting its customers' privacy. VandeBoom explained that all information customers input into these models is anonymized, so no personal information is shared or stored. “We want to enable innovation and growth through our product, but we would never put our customers at risk,” VandeBoom said. “The way we build AI into our platform is all done in a very privacy-sensitive way.”
In the rapidly evolving field of AI-driven business solutions, ActiveCampaign has emerged as a leading example of an organization that balances technological innovation with a focus on delivering real customer value.
