PreviewMe Sees Growth with ActiveCampaign

PreviewMe originated as a company in 2016 to connect job seekers with potential employers. The New Zealand company has since evolved into an organization that also provides video-led business development and sales solutions.

As the company evolved, it added sales employees, making management of the sales pipeline more cumbersome, recalls Johnny Farquhar, PreviewMe’s founder and CEO. “As we started to grow the sales team, the manual and repetitive tasks came to a point where we needed to make sure that sales and marketing were feeding each other.”

PreviewMe had been using a combination of Excel spreadsheets, a legacy CRM system, and other technology, but none of it interacted together. So late last year the company started looking for a solution that would check all the boxes for everything PreviewMe planned to accomplish for marketing and sales.

“We needed the marketing and sales technologies to talk to each other in a way they hadn’t before,” Farquhar says. “It was frustrating to be sending out bulk email marketing and not truly knowing who was engaging in it. We didn’t have any way to track any of these efforts.”

In searching for a solution, PreviewMe relied heavily on online referrals and recommendations, says Sarah Worthington, the company’s head of growth. An email sequencing partner had worked with and strongly recommended ActiveCampaign. “We wound up choosing ActiveCampaign because it enabled both sales and marketing to do what they needed to do,” Worthington says.

Another selling point for ActiveCampaign was its excellent support and the fact that its technology provided room to scale as PreviewMe continues to grow, according to Farquhar.

Implementation of ActiveCampaign began in April, and PreviewMe was quickly able to begin pulling data from several platforms and importing it into ActiveCampaign. To ensure everything was working correctly, PreviewMe ran its legacy system and ActiveCampaign side-by-side through May, then shut down the legacy system in June.

“We have our sales and marketing running ActiveCampaign,” Farquhar says.

PreviewMe has separate sales and account management pipelines, each with their own unique tasks and workflows. “We have automations that prompt our team to progress deals as quickly as possible through the sales cycle. We have built email marketing behind each stage. We set up triggers that help us to remove the manual tasks, which has been a life saver for our team,” Farquhar says.

It has also been a huge time saver, Farquhar says, noting that sales reps have each gained back about one day a week when they can perform more value-added tasks.

“That’s huge,” Farquhar says.

PreviewMe also uses ActiveCampaign to map marketing campaigns and to test engagement across customer segments, Farquhar adds. “This allows us to target leads that engage with our content.”

With messages to specific audiences now more relevant, the open rate has increased from 9 percent to about 38 percent.

An unexpected benefit was a 7.5 percent click-through rate for video email signatures, according to Farquhar. "That's relevant because in several instances we didn't create the campaigns for people to actually watch our video email signatures; we created the campaign for people to read our content," he says. " It showed us unequivocally that people are curious about who is behind the email."

PreviewMe followed up by developing automated promotions specifically designed for those who watched the videos, something that was impossible with the legacy system. The old system also didn’t provide full visibility into click-through rates.

The company uses lead scoring to engage with warm leads who have clicked on the videos.

PreviewMe has seen churn drop month over month. Every new customer is captured in an ActiveCampaign account manager funnel, receiving regular and relevant communications. Additionally, PreviewMe has seen an increase in demo bookings from the first point of engagement.

Farquhar expects to find more expected and unexpected benefits as PreviewMe delves deeper into ActiveCampaign’s capabilities. “We’ve only just scratched the surface.” 

The Payoff

Since implementing the ActiveCampaign solution, PreviewMe has been able to do the following:

• saved one day a week per salesperson due to the automation of repetitive tasks;
• increased the open rate for marketing messages from 9 percent to about 38 percent; and
• achieved a click-through rate of 7.5 percent for video email signatures.