I do a lot of digital marketing and email automation in my job. The link between ActiveCampaign and WooCommerce is essential to our business. Something that’s taken me a while to implement is how to add product specific tags in ActiveCampaign when purchased, so for anyone else struggling with it, I’ll detail below.
ActiveCampaign and WooCommerce
WooCommerce is the shopping cart software that runs on WordPress sites when you want to sell products. ActiveCampaign is, in my opinion, the best email marketing software for the mix of performance and price.
ActiveCampaign connects with WordPress, and therefore WooCommerce, via its own dedicated free plugin. ActiveCampaign uses ‘deep data‘ to push information from your website over to ActiveCampaign to add richer information into your ActiveCampaign contacts.
This allows ActiveCampaign to add information against your contacts when they purchase something, and also logs what they purchase.
The problem though, is the lack of intelligent TAGGING. First thought what are TAGS and why are they important.
ActiveCampaign Tags
You can user ActiveCampaign to send out one-off emails – known as Campaigns. But its real power is in Automations. Automations are just that – things that happen automatically for you. Send a welcome email sequence when a contact signs up to your newsletter. Send a thanks for buying email when a contact buys something. Notify a contact when you are schedule a live webinar.
All of these can be setup to happen automatically, without you doing a thing. 24/7, while you sleep. Very powerful.
Tags are a key part of Automations. They are granular pieces of information that allow you to communicate with more precision to your contacts. Got an offer on Pineapples? Email it to all your contacts tagged with pineapple, while leaving those who only want details on the sales of apples or oranges alone. Less unwanted emails. Higher percentage of open and read rates.
Win. Win.
ActiveCampaign automatically adds the tag ‘woocommerce-customer‘ to any contact that makes a purchase on your website.
Product Specific Tagging
So what’s the problem?
ActiveCampaign automatically adds only the tag ‘woocommerce-customer‘ to any contact that makes a purchase on your website.
That’s it. While it does track against the contact what products have been bought, it doesn’t let you configure a tag per product to enable more sophisticated automation running.
I have quite a long complicated automation that new contacts to our Free Alignment Test work through. They receive some free information during this sequence and also offers to buy some of our digital training. I don’t want to offer a product to someone that has already purchased it obviously. It reduces their experience. It doesn’t make us look good!
I’ve looked for ages for a solution, before finding it. It’s not perfect, but its currently (at time of writing) the best ActiveCampaign has to offer!
How to Add Product Specific Tags in ActiveCampaign
Here is what you need to do. Start with a new blank automation. Start Trigger is “Contact makes a purchase” from your website.
I then perform a few blanket actions, adding them to a specific ‘Customers” list etc.
Then you need to add an IF Statement for each product you want to check and identify. (Did I mention this wasn’t perfect? But it’s the only solution available currently!)
Use the “Product ID in any order” check, and enter the WooCommerce ProductID. In my case the first product I wanted to check for was ‘6809’
The WooCommerce product ID can be found by hovering over the individual product in your list of products.
Then, under the “Yes” branch of the IF Statement, add the Tag you require. Then add the “Go To” action lining to the next IF Statement. This allows the Automation to cycle through checking all products and adding a defined TAG if it find a qualifying purchase.
You end up with a massive nest of IF statements – I prefer this to a separate Automation for each product. But it works. You have to have one IF Statement loop for each product you want to check. If you have 100 products its going to be a massive pain.
Here is how mine looks, and this is checking for just 4 products!
I add a Notify action in the final “No” loop to let me know if a product has been purchased that I don’t have configured. That way I can add additional ones in the order of most frequently purchased products.
I WISH ActiveCampaign would just build in the ability to add a logical product name tag automatically for any product purchased into their Plugin. But it doesn’t exist. I hope this article on add product specific tags in ActiveCampaign has helped you. Got any feedback? Got a better solution?! Get in touch.
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This post was written by Rob Gordon, an IT geek, gadget lover and blogger. Rob has been using the internets since 1994 when the only streaming video was that coffee pot in Cambridge (rip)….
Follow Rob on Twitter – @robgordon – about.me/robgordonuk
