TAM 051: Tactical 20 – New ActiveCampaign Form Builder
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This this week's 'Tactical 20' podcast I highlight a few features of the new ActiveCampaign form builder that was just released.
The biggest update to the new ActiveCampaign form builder is the addition of several new form types. There are now four different ActiveCampaign forms to choose from.
In addition, there is also a new From item on the menu bar.
From the you can select the type of form you would like to create.
There are also new actions that can be tied to a form submission. You can now:
- Add a tag
- Create a Deal
- Subscribe to multiple list at once
- Send a notification to someone
Four Types Of Forms In The New ActiveCampaign Form Builder
- Inline Form
- Floating Bar Form
- Floating Box Form
- Modal Form
However, only the inline form is available on the Basic level plan. The other three form types require Plus or Enterprise level accounts.
While the new form builder is a big step forward, I still prefer to use Thrive Leads to handle my optins. If you haven't had a look at Thrive Leads yet, definitely check it out. I think it is the best and most flexible WordPress plugin on the market for creating optin opportunities on your website.
Content Library
ActiveCampaign also introduced a Content Library for their email builder. This will allow you to create and store blocks of content you might want to use over and over, such as a signature block or product description.
Content library
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Links Mentioned In The Show
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Barry: Hi. It's Barry Moore, back with another Tactical 20 Podcast.
Announcer: Welcome to the Active Marketer Podcast, where we talk about how to design, automate, and scale your business to the next level using sales and marketing automation. You can find out all the tips, tactics, and techniques you need to get more customers and sell more stuff over at theactivemarketer.com. Now here's your host, Barry Moore.
Barry: Hi, I'm your host Barry, and this is going to be another Tactical 20 Podcast. The Tactical 20 Podcasts are all about giving you an actionable tip, technique, or tactic that you can take away and implement in your business in less than twenty minutes.
All right, a few new features dropping from Active Campaign this week. The biggest amongst them is the long awaited, much anticipated, new Form Builder for Active Campaign. One of the long time bug bears with Active Campaign is it's such an advanced system, but they really had some old and clunky looking forms and a clunky looking Form Builder. So the new Form Builder is out of beta and in your account hopefully now. If it isn't in there yet, they're rolling out to all the accounts over kind of the next week so you should see it pop up in your account any day now.
If you want to accelerate that process, just head over to the support pages for Active Campaign. Tell them you want the new Form Builder in your account and they'll prioritise putting it into your account.
Let's have a talk about what is in the new Form Builder that might be of interest to you. A radically designed, re-designed Form Builder. Much closer to the new Email Designer, or the current Email Designer inside Active Campaign. It's that same kind of look and feel, that Canva-esque kind of look to it where in the left hand part of the pane you've got the form itself, and in the right hand side you've got all the options you can set for the form or the forms.
Before we talk about all the little options that might be of interest, let's talk about the forms themselves. Now there's four different modes of form, or four different types of opt in forms you can create. There's your standard kind of In Line form, that's like you might want to put in the middle of a blog post or at the end of a blog post that says, "Hey, you like this content? You want more content about x, sign up here and we'll send you regular updates." Anywhere inside the page you want to put it, and that's why it's called an In Line form, you just put it anywhere you want. Typically, it's kind of maybe in the middle of a blog post or at the end of a blog post. Now that form is available across all the different kinds of accounts, basic, plus, and enterprise.
The other three forms I'm about to talk about are only available in the plus level or the enterprise level accounts in Active Campaign. The other three types of forms, there's four in total, there's a Floating Bar form. Typically kind of known as a Hello Bar. It sits across the top of the website or the bottom, depending on where you want to put it. It sits across the top of the website usually across a page or multiple pages and it just provides an opt in opportunity that's right in somebody's face all the time. They put their name and email address in and hit submit and Boom. They've joined the list. You get either a Thank You message or you get redirected to another URL like a Thank You page.
Also, it comes with a little X or exit icon, so you can click on the x and the Hello Bar goes away. You can specify how long it goes away for. If someone has seen the Hello Bar, or the Floating Bar as Active Campaign calls it, and they don't like it, and they click close, and they close the Floating Bar, it disappears. If they come back to your site tomorrow, they won't see it. You can set that delay period so you can say, "Right, if someone closes this Hello Bar or Floating Bar, don't show it to them again for, say, 14 days." If they come back again in two weeks, we won't show it to them. If they come back in three weeks later, Bang, it's going to pop up again. That's the Floating Bar across the top.
The other kind of form, another kind of form we've got now, is the Floating Box form. This is kind of also sometimes known as the Toaster Pop Up. You've probably seen these before, you're reading a blog post, you're scrolling down the page, and then you get to some trigger point on that page, say it's 80%. You scrolled 80% of the way down the page and Pop, up comes a little form from the lower right hand corner like a piece of toast coming out of a toaster. It pops up and it gives you another opt in opportunity to, "Hey, before you leave, get this free guide all about XYZ." They can put their name and email address in there. That's called the Floating Box in Active Campaign parlance.
You can set when that's set to trigger. Is it as soon as you load the page or if they scroll 50% of the way down the page or 80% of the way down the page, you can set what's going to trigger off the appearance of that form. It's not necessarily there all the time.
Finally, the fourth kind of form in the new form builder is a Modal Form. M-O-D-A-L. Which means it pops up over the top of something else. Also kind of called a Pop Over or maybe a Light Box. You're reading the content on the page, again you can trigger when this modal window appears or when this Modal Form appears, it might be 50%. They scroll 50% down the page, boop, there's a little pop over that pop over that pops up over the content and asks them for their name and email address or whatever fields that you want.
Again, similar sort of thing with across the Floating Bar, the Floating Box, and the Modal Form, there'll be a little X there and if you click on the x, Boom, the form goes away. And it will go away for whatever you specify in the settings. If we say 14 days, that opt in opportunity, that Modal Form won't pop up, that little Toaster slide in won't pop up for another 14 days when people come back.
Four different kinds of forms. Unfortunately, only one form, the In Line Form is available in the basic plan. If you have plus level or enterprise level, then all four of those different form types are available to you now that the new Form Builder is in town.
Aside from creating forms, new nicer looking forms, there's a couple of new features that are built into the forms which are really nice. Finally, finally, finally, finally, finally, you can add a tag as somebody submits a form. In the form settings it will ask you what list you want someone to join and you say, "I want them to join my main list or my customer's list or my Product XYZ list." Whatever the case may be, and as they join the list, you can say, "I also want to give them this form as they join." Which is really great because then you can have, inside the Active Campaign you can have automations that are triggered by the appearance of a form or the act of- Sorry, the appearance of a tag. The act of getting a tag assigned to that contact will fire off a particular automation.
The way you normally had to do it before was you had to create a form. Then you created an automation that was triggered by Form Submit, and that automation would then add the tag, whatever tag that might be. You basically had to have a different automation for each tag you kind of wanted to add. Now you can add the tag as part of the form submission so you don't have to add that a separate step later.
One of the other cool things is you can use a form to actually submit to multiple lists. Let's say they have bought Product XYZ from you, they're going to go on to the product XYZ list, if you're having multiple lists for each product, for example. When they submit the form signing up for Product XYZ, that form can actually submit them to two lists or three lists or however many lists you want. You could actually say, "Right, add them to the Product XYZ list, but actually add them to our main house list as well." The one form submission can add people to multiple lists which is a pretty nice feature as well.
Then lastly, you can do a notification straight from the form submit. If someone submits a form, you might want to send a notification to your cell for a notification to one of your admin staff that the form's just been submitted. Especially if it's a very important form, they're signing up to some sort of programme or something and you want to know straight away. As the form submits, it can also send out an alert or a notification to whoever you specify on the form submit as well.
It can add a tag, subscribe to multiple lists, notify somebody, all as part of the form which all used to have to be done as a separate automation inside an automation that you built. Also, which is a nice little feature, is you can create custom fields straight from within the Form Builder. If you're building a from and you decide you want it to gather another piece of information, let's say their age or their height or their weight. Maybe you're a personal trainer or something, and you want to know somebody's weight for an intake form or something, and you want to have that as a custom field in your list and you forgot to create it before you started the form. You can now create the custom field straight from the form page.
Before you'd have to get out of the Form Builder, you'd have to go back to the list, create a custom field in the list, and then come back to your Form Builder later. You can now create custom fields on the fly from within the Form Builder.
Lots of cool features there. I guess so the pros or the pluses to this new Form Builder is that it's dramatically better than the old one, right? The old one was quite clunky, and let's be honest, pretty ugly. This one is much prettier. Much more modern. Much more in line with, as I said, the Email Designer. Gives you more flexibility if you're on the plus level plans, you've got now four different types of opt ins you can do.
The cons are while you can do some basic form adding, you can't really get the forms terrible pretty. You can't really customise the fonts a lot or the colours a lot. I want a different colour for the headline than I do in the body text, for example. With the normal Form Builder, you can't really customise much about the appearance of the form from within the Form Builder. However, the good news is you can kind of use your own CSS styling as well.
If you know CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, you can put some CSS in there to kind of tweak the appearance of the form, but if you're not a coder, if you've never been exposed to CSS before, that might be a little outside your reach so you're stuck with the basic options which, while much better than the existing Form Builder, not quite there as far as the flexibility in styling that I would like to see so that it can match the rest of my brand.
If you're just starting out, and you just need some basic forms to add people into your list, these will do. They're okay. They're a good start. Not enough for me to want me to abandon Thrive Leads. I still think Thrive Leads is dramatically further ahead when it comes to the opt in game or some of the other opt ins like Opt In Monster, for example, I think are probably still better options for you as far as styling and having it match your brand and flexibility.
I'm still not going to give up Thrive Leads just yet. If you haven't checked out Thrive Leads yet, I urge you to do that. It's easily kind of the best opt in plug in for WordPress that I've come across. There'll be a link in the show notes if you want to head over to theactivemarketer.com/51 for podcast episode number 51 they'll be a couple of little graphics there to how you what the new forms look like and also a link off to Thrive Leads if you want to have a play with that.
I'd appreciate it if you do decide to buy, if you buy it through my affiliate link I would really appreciate that.
That's the new Form Builder inside Active Campaign. It's a good start. If you're just getting started those forms should probably be enough to get you started. If you want to do some more advanced stuff, I'd still suggest some sort of other third party opt in plug in. Opt In Monster, Elite Pages, Thrive Leads, something like that.
There is another interesting feature that dropped with this update and that's content blocks or basically customised pieces of content that you can use in Email Builder now. For example, if you wanted to have a signature block that's got your picture and your address and your phone number and your Skype address or whatever, rather than having to put that into every email each time, you can save that as a little piece of content, a little content block.
Then from within the Email Builder, you'll be a library over time, you'll build up a library of these content blocks and you can just drag them in. It might be a product description you can drag in and drop on to your email. It might be a signature block. It might be some sort of special promotion, for example. You can save all those in the content library as little content pieces or little content blocks and then you can drag those content blocks across into your Email Builder. A good way to save time if your frequently reusing pieces of content in your email.
Those are the two big updates that just came out from Active Campaign, the Form Builder and the new content blocks with the content library inside the Email Builder as well.
Again, if you want a little bit more information on this and links out to more stuff, head over to theactivemarketer.com/51 and there'll be everything we mentioned in the show notes will be there. Until next time everybody get out there and design, automate, and scale your business to the next level with sales and marketing automation. See you everybody.
All right, that's our Tactical 20 Podcast for this week. If you have any questions or any topics you'd like to see covered on future Tactical 20 Podcasts, you can always send me an email at barry@theactivemarketer.com and let us know what you'd like to see. Also, if you head over to the show notes for this episode and just leave a comment or leave a comment in any of the episode show notes tell us what you'd like to see and we'll make sure we cover it on an upcoming episode. Get out there and design, automate, and scale your business to the next level using sales and marketing automation.
See you next week everybody.
Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Active Marketer Podcast. You can find the show notes and all the latest marketing automation news over at theactivemarketer.com
