ActiveTrail

Active trail offers a great many benefits, including user friendliness, feature richness, flexibility and more. Above all, it is effective, allowing you to masterfully orchestrate all of your email campaigns on a single platform.

Not much on the down side, perhaps one or two relatively unimportant issues, such as not being able to hide a URL on a landing page.

We (my spouse and I) own an art gallery in Canada and initiated online sales about a year ago. Not long after we setup our first email campaign on ActiveTrail to offer customers registered to our loyalty program a 15% discount on online purchases. I quickly became enamored with the software. First, the campaign editor’s user interface is easy to maneuvre and highly intuitive, subtly guiding you through the steps for creating a campaign. Beyond that, the system is feature rich, offering functionality such as: - an extraordinary selection of templates and designs (we used such a template) - storing uploaded pictures for reuse with other campaigns - a variety of actions that can be activated by users when they click on buttons - a SPAM score that tells you how likely it is that your mail will be marked as SPAM - add-on tools, e.g. a photo editor - an integrated connection to Bigstock Photo, allowing you to purchase stock images without exiting the ActiveTrail application - perhaps most important, everything is responsive, letting you fit your emails to mobile screens. As part of this first campaign, we also created a landing page using ActiveTrail’s Landing Page tool to collect additional member information. Also here, the options were endless but easy to access and use. We selected a template matching the email, added a YouTube video, put in SEO keywords, added a link for smartphones to automatically call our number when clicked, and had an email sent to our marketing manager upon submission. Moreover, the system stored a list of all customers who clicked through on our page. Our only reservation was that we couldn’t figure out how to hide the URL (we didn’t want people to know that the landing page was not hosted under our own domain) The campaign was a major coup, with a large number of customers taking advantage of the discount while supplying us with information on themselves and their preferences. We have run a few more campaigns since then with good responses. Then came “Automation”. ActiveTrail recently introduced “triggers” and “segmentation”, that allow you to have something done, e.g. send a follow up mail, for specific groups of people, in response to a user action. Here’s how we made use of this feature (with tremendous success): The vast majority of our clients, nearly 90%, are women between 25 and 60 who buy art for the companies they work for. Our few male patrons, on the other hand, are impulse buyers and have a propensity to make large purchases of original art within a few days of registering. We setup a variety of scenarios in ActiveTrail for our next campaign (which is still running) such as: - “Corporate women” who register online or via our in-store kiosk receive a welcome mail with upcoming events and images of a few works of art based on their designated preferences. If they click on an event, they are sent an invitation to the event. If they click on a picture an email is sent to a sales person to follow up. - When men register, private or corporate, an email is triggered to our art director so she can make personal contact. All of this is setup once, and then handled by ActiveTrail automatically. Summing it up, we couldn’t be more satisfied with ActiveTrail and you will be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t check it out.