What can I do when sending out mutiple emails each day, to confirm scheduled appointments with AC contacts. Today, I’ve got several contacts who are all scheduled for follow up calls tomorrow, at various different time slots.
I’d like to send them my template email, and have day & time tags for each one, but cannot see how best to do this.
Do I need to rewrite my email for each contact? Is there a way to personalize for each call?
Seems like this is a fairly straight forward thing that I am trying to accomplish.
Just so I’m clear, are you wanting to take a date that looks something like this (6/23/2017) - and have it display in your email so it looks something like this (Friday, June 23, 2017 at 1pm) ?
I’m essentially wanting to send out a group of emails each day, to follow up with phone contacts, regading product info, and confirmation of a next appt I have with them.
It could be like…
“John, I have us on the schedule for Friday (6/30/17), at 2 PM CST”
Could probably be worded a variety of ways. My thought was, that I could automate in the scheduled date/ time by using a tag, but am thinking now that it might work if I had a customized field in the contact record, for: “Next Appt.”
Here is one way you can accomplish this using Zapier (zapier.com).
I’m don’t know how familiar you are with Zapier, so I’ll start with an overview of how this can work.
Basically, the way this works is that any time your appointment field is updated, you use Zapier to format your date and store it in a (different) custom field in ActiveCampaign. Here is an outline of the steps.
In ActiveCampaign (AC)
Create 2 new custom fields, one for the date and one for the time. So, if you have a custom field called NextAppt that stores the appointment date and time you would create something like NextAppt_Day, NextAppt_Time.
Create an automation that is triggered every time the NextAppt field is updated. This automation will call a webhook that Zapier will catch and handle. The result of the webhook is that the NextAppt_Day and NextAppt_Time will be updated with the current info from the NextAppt field.
From here you can use the personalization tags for NextAppt_Day and NextAppt_Time in your emails.
In Zapier (ZP)
Create a Zap that catches a hook. This is a Zapier utility that will give you a URL that you will use in AC to call this “zap”.
Next, use the Zapier Formatter utility to format the data in the NextAppt field to your specs. For example, I selected “Custom Value” and set the format to “ddd, MMMM DD YYYY”. For today, this would result in “Sun, June 25, 2017”.
Use the Create/Update Contact action to update the NextAppt_Day with the result from step 2.
If you want to store the time in a separate field, repeat steps 2 and 3 above. Or, you could just store the complete formatted date and time in one custom field in AC.
Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any questions about this.