How to redeem coupons with ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign Redemption

We’re going to talk about how you can use ActiveCampaign to allow people to reduce redeemed coupons once and that’s kind of typically the big challenge is how do you know if somebody’s already or not redeemed a coupon.

Now this is inspired by a podcast of ActiveCampaign someone recently did and also my wife who sells glass art class

She goes to the farmers market in town and she can also offer to her current email subscribers a coupon if they show up on Saturday with their phone that says that they’ve got this coupon. Now to accomplish this, there’s going to be a couple automation we need to collect the email address. Of course, if you collect the phone number even better, we’re going to have some follow up emails and we’re going to set a time so that this expires just naturally whether you do something or not it expire sometime in the future so you don’t have this open ended liability.

We kind of want to make it as friction free as possible.

So for instance any forms that give filled out additionally which will happen will be pre populated with the contacts email address so let’s go ahead and dive right in so inside ActiveCampaign we’re going to have to create to automation originally I tried to do this all in one but because we need to send out a email that checks to see if the coupons been redeemed or not not possible without breaking it up and I’ll tell you why and show you when we get there. Also we want to have a few coupon or a few tags and I call my tags reporting dash redemption dash active dash expired and dash Do Not Disturb secondly we want to have a custom field called redemption expired date because we want to keep track of when their coupon expire so that we have a little bit of the history there.

Then a couple automation is right here. One is basically to send them emails and the other one is to check for their redemption.  To accomplish this, we’re going to need to have a I’ll show you the secret sauce in a moment. But we’re going to go with the start one here is the stop redemption automation. And here is a form that we need to create. So you want to create a third a form that’s going to be for confirmation. And you really just need to whittle it down to just the email field. And what you’re going to want to do is put them on a list and more importantly had the tag reporting dash redemption dash active that’s the important part I would suggest having a message it says confirming. Now please check email because that’s what they really need to do is go check their email, they’ll get a message that says whether their coupon is valid or it’s expired.

So the biggie here is you want to grab this link so you need that link handy. Now going back to this first redemption start doesn’t matter how you start it, I left it open ended because I want the ability to add people over and over I could have simply had it like on form submit and either allowed them to enter more than once or not if you don’t put him in more than once and there’s a lot of things you can actually remove here but I’m playing it kind of paranoid and going to do some checks along the way to make sure people are in the right spot so I’m just going to leave it open ended probably the way you might do it is simply to have a form that puts them in there no tags are added when they get put in here first thing is almost always wait five minutes just just for in case something goes wrong. We need to fix it. Usually it’s in the testing phase that I do that then I can remove it. First thing to do is check.

Do they have a tag called reporting redemption Do Not Disturb tags to keep them out if they’re already there. So if they do have it and wait a few minutes and then go to another action which is basically go to the very ending exit. So in other words they don’t get put into her more than once at a time if they don’t have that tag well apply it so that they do for whatever reason come back while they’re in here they won’t get put down this path next thing to do is check Do they have a phone number and basically I’m you know checking to see phone number is not empty if it’s not empty then send them an SMS message it says thanks for signing up please check your email.

Otherwise don’t do that. But regardless, both of them get a email so the rest of the automation looks like this. You send a welcome email I set this up to expire in 14 days so I did email immediately wait seven days basically the same email again we six days and then a third email so you basically have one day left and then wait a day wait till 11pm that time and

You could send another email I’m just not doing that this case and then if they get the tag active or the goal of redemption What the heck let’s just look at it the reporting dash redemption dash active tag applied or they get the redemption dash expired tags applied that will pull them out now the reason I bring this up is because typically they’re going to be waiting in one of these steps when that goal occurs and when you want to check to see if they are active or if they’ve expired or not. You want to send an email you have to do that basically in a separate automation. I’m going to show that one in a second but that’s kind of a an important point I learned to unite. I had somebody waiting here and then they’re sent out supposed to send out an email because they met that goal. However, they’re sitting here waiting for seven days to expire. So that’s not the way that the way it is right here.

This will work properly this way 15 days is actually kind of important especially in the stop version of this because we want to do a little housecleaning want to remove the Do Not Disturb remove the active and apply the expired tag. Now these two tags get used for conditional content in email. So if you change those too early which is reason we have this in here and you might even push this out to a day if you were to remove those two earlier would impact the message it gets it so this is basically a seems that they don’t do anything I we’re just going to keep sending emails and tell it expires.

However, anytime that they do an action will show you that in a minute. They will get pulled through here automatically.

And the biggie is actually inside this email. I’m going to come back in just a minute to that. Now this automation is basically stopping the redemption process. It’s actually checking. So what it does is look Do you have this tag applied and you’re here recall this form right here applies that tags let me show you again there’s the dash tag so once that takes applied into without forms filled out you want to send out an email and this is what the email looks like nothing fancy but there’s some conditional content in here and it depends on tag so this first little block here no conditions doesn’t matter this definitely get sent this one gets sent if they have the reporting dash redemption dash active tag applied, but they don’t have the reporting dash redemption dash expired tag. This occurs if they don’t have the dash active tag and I’ll be honest, this this one right here. The conditions are a little overkill. I’m just being paranoid. So they should either have one or the other tag. But what if for some reason they have both tags. I just want to play it safe.

So once that email send, it’s going to say either one.

Those two things, whether the offers are expired or not, the next thing we do is we update a custom field called redemption expired date to the current time. And if we go back here, you know, what I could do and I should do is change the message to reflect that. And I’m just going to put it in right here. I’m going to personalize it.

So I’m going to put in the redemption expired day. So if that’s filled that way, at least we know when the expiration occurred. So we can know that somebody did this a week, a month a year ago. So that’s kind of a nice way to keep track of it. should somebody come back and try and sneak in the first thing is going to say this is expired, but it will also give a date that expired and then and the reason again, we wait 15 minutes because I don’t want to change these tags until after this email is probably even better to set it for like a day just to be absolutely certain and then also we pull them out of this automation, the start automation.

We basically clean up the tags. And we also remove them. Now, going back here, I’ll show you the secret sauce in this whole thing is the emails, they look pretty plain. And they are. But there’s an important part in here. That’s kind of key to the whole thing from a usability point of view. So this might be the typical message. Hey, thanks for your interest, please visit us within the next 14 days redoing this offer at giving the location and so you must show this email. Thank you. Now you look here, this is a plain text block. We’ve got these terms and conditions down here. But if you look closely, this is a custom HTML block. And if I go look inside the code here, this last line is the kicker and I’ve copied it over here.

And this is what it looks like.

You just want to copy and paste that in there. And then this part right here this HTTPS is actually a link to the form that has just the email because we want somebody to go to their put in their email, basically to update their tags. We want to pre populate the email field with this. In other words, if we put a question mark, email equals percent capital email percent that will get replaced with the customers email.

Now there’s one little thing that can go wrong if somebody has an email address that has a plus sign in it. So for instance, Dave plus test at gmail, that plus signs going to get removed, doubtful that’s going to happen. doubtful. anybody’s going to have that email but that’s actually a great way to test emails using the same email over and over but that’s just one little thing to keep in mind.

The second part here is designed to make it such that it’s very discreet. So the text decoration none removes the underlying in the link so it doesn’t look like a link a color sets the color to like a dim gray. You can of course, change that hex color an instance designed to change it so that it doesn’t have that mouse like cursor when you open hand when it goes over. Now one thing about that Gmail will actually strip this out so that it does show by hand now that’s on the desktop in general, people are going to be using their mobile devices for this to work. So for instance, if you look at a mobile device, this is what it looks like. You know, there’s no apparently looks like there’s no links but there’s actually this little secret link at the bottom so when somebody comes to visit and wants to redeem the coupon, you or they tap on that word at the very bottom that will open up a new browser with a form field with their email address pre populated you click Submit and then their contact will go through the automation that

We’ll send them back and email almost immediate says whether they’re confirmed or not. But let me just show you that little mouse thing. So I am going to just cancel this and show you what it could do. If I run my mouse over IntegratePro, I don’t see that little do that. Notice I don’t see the hand that I would expect to see.

Whoops. Let’s go ahead and edit this. And I’m going to remove that and I will put it back before we now this time when I run my mouse over. Notice it’s got that little hand it’s kind of gives it away that it’s a link. I’m going to put that back in there because I really don’t want anyone to think I’ve got a link in there. I know a little sneaky.

So let’s go ahead and give this a test. I’m going to add myself as a contact into this automation. I would normally use a form together but I’m simply going to apply this myself.

So here I am, I got this contact, which is me I don’t have a redemption expired date no tags I want to list I’m going to go ahead and manually add myself to that automation the start automation.

So there’s really no reason for me to sit here and wait for five minutes to go by. So I’m going to skip that. So I did not meet this condition I did not have the Do Not Disturb. I do now I don’t have a phone number. So I skipped here. Now I’m sitting here and this first email was sent one second ago so I’m going to go check my email to see if I received that. Okay. So I did receive the email obviously want to put in something or appropriate that’s just kind of a placeholder. Here’s my terms and conditions with my sneaky little link and notice I can run my hand does show up at gmail and Yahoo. I don’t think it shows up but that’s unfortunate, but however on a on a mobile device it’s just going to look like this and you can’t mouse over so this is good let’s go take a look at where I’m at in here I’m going to go ahead and actually click the link which should been pushed me through this automation fairly quickly and let’s just go back to see what I look like here so no redemption expired we’ve got the Do Not Disturb tag. Perfect now I’m actually going to go ahead and if I was to come show up at like my wife show she would come and say let me see your email and then she would tap on this and it’s going to pre populate the email field and all you have to do is click Submit. Now however, notice the plus sign is missing that’s a pain so I had to put that in there but again, most people will not have that plus sign in there but once I go ahead and do that confirm me now.

Please check your email. So many momentarily I should receive another email with which tells me whether the coupons valid or is expired now let’s go in here and see what’s changed at all. So I should be inside looks like the redemption stop. So the redemption expired date was set today I’ve got the active tag and I’ve got the Do Not Disturb tag those are going to change in about 15 minutes. So if I go look, I’ve been through 33% of this and I’ve been through 28% of this so let’s go take a look this one so it went and checked it sent that email updated the expiration date and now I’m going to sit here for 15 minutes I’m going to go ahead and actually skip all this and hopefully the email that may have been a dangerous thing Yeah, I may have screwed things up by doing that.

Take a look and see what happens. Yep. So I did botch it up. So I did get a message. It says the offers expired and it gave me the date and now it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to. It was my mistake for finishing that off way too quick. So let’s go back and look at my tags. And it will make sense why that happened because I have the expired tech so what the heck Let’s do one more time here and see if I could get a ride.

Okay, so I’m going to go check my email Actually, I need to skip this step. So the email does get sent immediately.

Okay, there’s the welcome email that I received for the second time zero minutes ago and I’m just going to go straight to here and again I need to put it in a plus sign between the username the test the word test, because Gmail or because it needs it, but normally you wouldn’t need to do that I’m going to go ahead and submit.

Now this time I’m going to be a little more careful and I’m going to make sure that I don’t Ford myself through I’m just going to let it happen in 15 minutes but I will receive an email almost immediately let’s double check to see that I’m in the stop the redemption stop right there about 33% through okay so I did get an email so I’m not going to move here yet but while we’re waiting let’s make sure that redemption Expiration Date field was there it is and looks like I received an email and this time it does it still valid so that is how you can use ActiveCampaign to redeem coupons.