Arbor Realty Capital Advisors

From zero to sixty in one web site.

The problem: Arbor needed revolutionary marketing automation. They asked for a proof of concept for a system that would support nurture (“drip”) campaigns, autoresponders, intelligent tracking, audience segmentation, and analytics to increase the engagement of their target audience.

The solution: To accomplish these goals, we first had to build them a new web site. We did this because they needed a site that would not only provide relatively easy backend tools for rapid deployment of new landing pages and other content (not to mention great SEO), but that would also easily connect to the marketing automation platform we chose for them: ActiveCampaign. This is a pretty awesome mid-market marketing automation tool, providing about 85% of the functionality that the big enterprise players do, but for about 1/10 the cost.

So first we recreated their existing site under a Pro WordPress.com account (which allows the installation of plugins and other customizations), added the tracking code, and installed the plugins that would connect the website data with ActiveCampaign.

Then we built connectors. Using a combination of API tools on the back end, we got ActiveCampaign to talk with their existing Salesforce.com instance. This meant that leads who register on the web site via forms 1) get an account on the web site, 2) are added to ActiveCampaign with the data the client needs for audience segmentation, and 3) are added to Salesforce.com so the sales team can work their magic. All three systems are integrated in such a way that any change to data in one system is reflected in the others, with Salesforce.com being the authoritative database.

The results: Before we even created the connection between the web site and ActiveCampaign, we already began recording lift in engagement, and email engagement rates at around two times the standard benchmarks for this industry. Calls to prospects included comments like “Oh, yeah, I know you! I get your weekly newsletter!”, and users have voluntarily updated their profile information so that we can send them highly targeted and relevant content — just because we asked them to!