Artivive is a platform, designed for Augmented Reality art. Until using ActiveCampaign’s technology. They lacked the resources to reach their desired engagement levels, with communication issues arising when booking artists. Sergiu Ardelean and Codin Popescu, Co-founders of Artivive, describe their journey with ActiveCampaign and its impact on their subscriber base/growth.
Imagine an artist who can easily use the digital extension of Augmented Reality to tell how that work was created, from the first stroke until the artwork is done. Or consider the digital artists who are trapped in an Instagram feed and now, through print, can come to a gallery or a museum.
That is the experience that Sergiu Ardelean and Codin Popescu – Co-CEOs and Co-founders of Artivive – embarked on almost five years ago when they gave technology to the artists and creatives of the world, ultimately redefining the art form of the 21st Century.
Founded in 2017, Artivive is a platform for Augmented Reality art. The global Artivive community of artists continues to grow around the platform, embracing its easy-to-use technology to enhance how the art is viewed and created using AR animations. Artivive also works with businesses, museums and educators from around the world to maximise brand experience through Augmented Reality, providing a creative approach to storytelling and keeping their audiences engaged through interactivity.
As the Artivive artist community thrived, the initial challenges of a freemium subscription model required a lot of attention and resources from the marketing team. One of the primary objectives was to keep community members and users engaged in the platform, but the company lacked the resources they needed to create the engagement levels they wanted to reach and communication gaps with booking artists created issues with their clients.
The company needed a low-cost solution that was easy to integrate with its existing tools, remove its communication gaps, keep users coming back to do more and upgrade users to a paid subscription.
Nurturing an artist community
When Andra Coros joined Artivive as a growth marketing consultant, she recommended ActiveCampaign for its ease of use and robust automation tools. So Artivive switched from HubSpot to ActiveCampaign and the community grew from 100 to 100,000 artists in the first four years.
“Our open rate on that initial automation in ActiveCampaign was over 70%,” Coros said. “This automation contributed to its initial growth, and with its artist referral programme activated, an engaged artist community continued to fuel its growth. ActiveCampaign is an amazing tool where you can easily build automation yourself. You can make different blocks conditional based on what the user does in the Artivive app and they receive different messages based on those actions.”
Artivive also leverages the ActiveCampaign API to integrate with the Artivive content manager, passing critical user data between the two platforms. With this deep data integration, the business has been able to create automation that prompts users at particular points in their journey. Each of these prompts is designed to keep the user engaged in the Artivive platform and expand the artist community.
The key driver of growth for both the Artivive community and its revenue has been to keep the users engaged and producing projects, enticing them to upgrade to a paid subscription.
“To start with 100 artists and get to 100,000 with just one community manager shows that ActiveCampaign was the right choice,” added Sergiu Ardelean. “We didn’t have to hire anyone to take care of the communication with our community because it’s been very easy to scale.”
Beyond subscriber growth
Ardelean emphasised the other creative ways his team is using ActiveCampaign. For instance, Artivive has moved its support ticketing into ActiveCampaign. Using ActiveCampaign’s Deals, the company has a pipeline specific for its ticketing workflow.
Using the ActiveCampaign CRM, the sales team has full visibility of the pipeline and can see how many users are close to purchasing and how many deals the sales team closed in the last month. It’s been invaluable in prioritising resources while the organisation grows.
“It’s very easy for our colleagues to follow and see how long a client has been with us, or what the email conversation was until now. It’s everything you need in one system,” said Ardelean. “Sometimes I’m just looking in ActiveCampaign to see what’s happening. It gives me a very good overview. I can see the open rates of the newsletters that we’re sending. We have an open rate of about 30-35% for our newsletter, which I think is amazing!
“People reach out and say, ‘Sergio, we talked two years ago, this is something that is bothering me,’ or ‘this is something that we’re doing.’ I still feel that I’m very connected with the community.”
If the community is creating and working with Artivive artists, Ardelean believes that the company is ‘winning’. He stated: “We have to keep them engaged. We have to understand how they’re creating, what their pain points are and how we can solve this. If they feel that we’re listening and understand them, then they’ll share feedback with us. I think the worst-case scenario is when you have an unhappy client and you don’t know why.
“I couldn’t imagine our product without ActiveCampaign. Without it, we would have to dedicate a lot of hours to developing the automation that we already have. I think everything that we’ve accomplished has been with the help of ActiveCampaign automation and through the relationships that we’ve built with our artist community.
“If ActiveCampaign didn’t exist, we would have to create it ourselves, which we wouldn’t be able to afford.”
Endless possibilities to fuel growth
Since 2017, Artivive has steadily increased its contact and plan level with ActiveCampaign, taking full advantage of the scalability of the platform all along the way. To support that steady growth over the past four years, Artivive has expanded from the Lite plan to Professional, opening up functionality, such as Landing Pages, Predictive Sending, CRM and Attribution.
“I think every start-up should have the chance to use ActiveCampaign and automation,” said Ardelean. “It’s so easy to use, and it takes so much workload off of people who are writing emails. That’s a real win.”
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