I’m an attorney, and frequently have to make referrals to people. I’d like to figure out how AC can automate the emails I send out to those people.
For the purposes of this examples, let’s say potential client calls me. I can’t help them, but want to give them referrals to two people in my contact list.
I want an email to go to the potential client with the name, contact information, email address, and website (i.e., certain custom field information) of the referral partner. If there’s more than one referral partner, I’m ok with sending more than one email.
I’d also like the referral partner to receive an email stating that I’m sending them a referral, with that person’s name and phone number.
Has anyone built something like this within AC? Any suggestions?
I’m thinking there might be a way to do it by using Zapier to create a new “Task Type” for each person I want to refer something to. Then, from that contact’s page, I can add the task to the contact, and again use Zapier to send out those two emails. My concern here is two-fold:
I’d have to somehow link that specific task type to a contact (maybe in a Google sheet database?) to fetch the contact information.
I could wind up with 100 or so task types, and not an easy way to search. Yikes!
Another option is to create a custom field that asks me to enter the referral partner’s email address, and use that as the trigger. Then if I want to refer two people, I just change the field again with the second email address. I could use an automate to create a note to track that transaction. Problem here is that I have to have the referral partner’s email address handy. Would be much easier if there was a “contact select” custom field.
The approaches you mentioned would definitely work. A simpler approach might be to have an automation with two actions and no trigger. The first action sends an email recommending the partner and the second action is the “notify someone” action that sends an email to the partner with a note that you recommended them to someone (this could also include the contact information of the referral you made… so that’s perfect).
With an automation for each referral partner set up, you could add the contact to the appropriate automations from their contact record.
Let me know if you have any questions about this or need clarification.
I like that idea because of the ability to search for the referral partner’s name in the add to automation section. That’s useful. The only concern I have is duplicating the automation for each and every referral partner seems like it could be a good bit of work. But then again, I only have to do it once, and I can copy automations. So maybe not too bad.
Yeah, it probably will be quite a few automations but I can’t think of a way to avoid that right now. Definitely create a label to stick them in to help keep your account organized.
Hm. I’m not sure that the automation route is going to work because the “notify someone” action has a button link to “View Contact,” which the person receiving the email won’t have access to. If I could hide that, I think this could work. I will say that it does seem a bit cumbersome to setup each and every automation for each referral partner, too.
Ok, so some good news. I was able to do this easier by creating an automation which triggers when I had the referral partner’s email address to a custom field. The automation kicks a webhook to Zapier, which uses the referral partner’s email to retrieve their name and phone number from ActiveCampaign, and then spits out emails to the referral partner, and my contact.
I’ll probably tweak it a bit further to use ActiveCampaign’s API directly, but seems to be working well for now. I find that it’s easier to do this than it will be for me to create a new automation for each referral partner.