ActiveCampaign Manual

While looking at the platform hosting companies that have a higher conversion rate from trial to paid, we have identified that one of the influential factors is the right upgrade campaign.

Instead of just sending a welcome email and then a few emails at the very end of the trial period it is recommended to have an automated campaign that sends various types of tips and promotional messages almost every day during a trial period (obviously with the ability to unsubscribe).

To achieve this, we have created and released integration with the Active Campaign service. This system is automatically available for all cluster administrators.

If you already use another service - you can probably get one of your engineers to adapt our integration scripts.

To configure mailing out in ActiveCampaign use the instructions below and for more information contact Support Team.

ActiveCampaign Sign-up

Navigate to http://www.activecampaign.com/ and register your ActiveCampaign account. As a result you will receive a notification with a link to the ActiveCampaign admin panel and credentials.

Platform Side Initial Configurations

To make some initial configurations of ActiveCampaign on the platform side navigate to JCA > System Settings and expand jactivecampaign list.

You’ll see a number of parameters, which you need to customize first:

• ac.Enabled - default value is false. Set true to enable ActiveCampaign. Note that this enabling doesn’t mean that your users will start getting notifications immediately - that is just the first step of the settings.
• ac.apiurl and ac.apikey - here you should enter API URL and API Key respectively.

To get them log in to ActiveCampaign dashboard, click the Account button and choose Your Settings option in the drop-down menu.

In the opened Settings window choose the API tab. Copy values from API URL and API Key fields and paste them in the appropriate abovementioned parameters in JCA.

• ac.triallist, ac.paidlist and ac.deactivatedlist - these parameters define names of the lists in ActiveCampaign dashboard.
• ac.sender_zip, ac.sender_country, ac.sender_city, ac.sender_addr1 - in these parameters state the appropriate info (ZIP code, your Country, City and Address). This information will be displayed in the footer panel of ActiveCampaign emails.
• ac.From_email and ac.From_company_name - your company name and contact email used for mailing out. This values are displayed in the email header.
• ac.deploy_enabled - set true value to start the script, which checks if all the necessary settings are configured correctly, e.g. lists and fields. If they are not - the script automatically fixes that.

Note: after checking the settings don’t forget to change this value to false. Otherwise the script will run every 15 minutes and user’s synchronization won’t work.

• ac.TotalSpendFor7DaysField, ac.Locale, ac.EnvironmentCreatedField, ac.CurrentBalanceField and ac.BonusField - these parameters define the field names in the user’s info tab of ActiveCampaign dashboard.

ActiveCampaign Side Configurations

Log in to your ActiveCampaign admin panel using your credentials to see the lists of subscribers and a number of campaigns which were generated automatically by scripts configured on the platform side.

• Lists
• Segments
• Campaigns
• Additional Notes

A. Lists

There are three types of lists available:

• Jelastic_trial
• Jelastic_paid
• Jelastic_deactivated

When user signs up, integration script adds him to Jelastic_trial list.

All campaigns (except Day 16, see below) are triggered for users in this Jelastic_trial list.
When user upgrades his status to paid, script moves him from Jelastic_trial to Jelastic_paid list.
When user ends trial and is deactivated, script moves him from Jelastic_trial to Jelastic_deactivated list.

B. Segments

If you use several languages for mailout each list is devided into two segments:

• English Users
• {Custom language} Users

Right now segments are defined based on Language that user selected in the platform dashboard (custom field “Locale” in ActiveCampaign):

You can change the segment definition to be based on customer’s Country or any other predefined field in Active Campaign.

C. Campaigns

Campaigns are set up as following:

• on days 2, 4, 6, 8, 11 and 13 during trial period we send an “incentive” email to Jelastic_trial users,
• on day 16 we send a “follow up” feedback question to the Jelastic_deactivated users.

New campaign

While creating a new campaign you can choose the lists of users to send this campaign to, as well as a particular segment of the selected list.

Multilingual Campaigns

Every campaign can be duplicated for several languages. The initial will be used for English audience and the duplicate for local language(s).

Before translation all copies have the same English template. Every copy is assigned to the respected segment of the list.

Edit campaign

You can change the default campaigns and the duplicated variants for other languages by pressing Edit button next to them. In the opened window you can specify:

• name and type of the chosen campaign email (it’s Auto Responder Campaign by default) lists of users to send this email to You can work in two modes: visual and code editing (html code of the email)

Pay special attention to the following edits:

• Bonuses and Discounts

• Pictures

• Links

• Bonuses and Discounts

In the default campaigns we offer a 50% discount if a user upgrades during the first week of trial. This is maintained by adding a bonus to their PaaS account depending on the initial payment.
If you want to re-design this “50% bonus incentive” process, please follow the instructions in the document Adding Automated Bonuses After Conversion.

• Pictures Every email template has a number of pictures. One is a big banner on the top, which we would strongly recommend to update/replace with your own banner:

• Links There is also a couple of links to Support in every template that you need to replace with your own valid links:

Review and Test

On a Summary & Options screen you can review configuration (segmentation and sending interval) and also send a test email to yourself:

After you’ve applied all the necessary changes, click Finish.

D. Additional Notes

We have created a user with read-only access to ActiveCampaign reports called jelastic.readonly. We will use this account to access ActiveCampaign to do business reporting.

Also, please keep an eye on number of subscribers in the ActiveCampaign and your current plan. We are not deleting any subscribers, as we believe campaigns to revive old trials from time to time can give a good boost to the user base. But you can remove those old trials in Jelastic_deactivated group manually, if you want.

Activate Distribution

When everything is ready and checked you can activate the distribution to your users by following the next steps:

Synchronize the list of users who are going to receive your notifications:

• Navigate to JCA > System settings.

• Expand the jactivecampaign list.

• Find and configure ac.synch_enabled parameter by setting the true value to switch on synchronization of users.

• Make sure that the value of the ac.deploy_enabled parameter is false. After these steps, the ActiveCampaign mailing to your users will be started.

• To check if the synchronization of users works:

• Navigate to your ActiveCampaign admin panel

• Open Contacts tab

• Choose trial list name from the drop-down menu to get the users emails displayed. In this way you can make sure that the users data is synchronized and used for mailing.

Deactivate default trial notifications so as not to spam your users with similar emails:

In the System settings expand the jbilling list.

Find account.trial.send.notification parameter and change its value to 0 (zero) in order to disable usual trial notifications. Then Apply the changes.

Note: after changing this parameter to 0 the notifications about environment creation, stack adding or password resetting will not be disabled.