I’m in the mortgage industry. When I receive a referral from a real estate agent, I want to start an automation that nurtures the lead (Johnny Consumer) and sends a thank you email to the agent (Janice Agent).
There doesn’t seem to be a way to associate contacts, or to add an extra email field into a contact and send info to THAT email (in other words I could enter “agent’s email address” as a custom field, and send emails to that merge field (I do this now in Infusionsoft).
Does anyone have a workaround or idea how I could do this?
I work with a lot of professional service providers who’s main source of leads are referrals, so I feel your pain. I’m not sure I have an answer that you will like, but here are a couple of ideas.
If your business relies heavily on referrals, you may want to look at a tool like Contactually or Refer.com to manage your referrals. Contactually integrates nicely with ActiveCampaign (not sure about Refer.com). Both of these tools were built specifically for managing referrals and therefore have some features you won’t find in other programs. For example, they also make it much easier to make introductions between people in your network.
Another approach is to use the Automation in AC to create a task to remind you or someone on your team to send a thank you email (or gift, etc.) to your referral source. You will need to create a Deal to use tasks, but you can set all of that up in one automation. This doesn’t automate the process, but may help keep things from falling through the cracks.
If you go that route, then you will probably want to create a template that for your Thank You email. If you are sending these thank you emails from within AC, you can use a text expander like Auto TextExpander to manage these templates in your browser. Outside of AC you could use GMails canned responses, in Outlook I think they are called Quick Parts, or use a text expander.
Last, I haven’t had a chance to test this yet, but it looks like you may be able to use Zapier to automate this. You would need to create and populate a custom field (text) in AC, something like ReferralSourceEmail, and then use this in your Zap to create an email in your email system.
P.S. - I did a quick test on the Zapier automation above and I was able to get it to work by storing the referral source email in a text field and then using that in the Zap. The other nice thing is you can merge other AC fields into the body of the email. I used Gmail to create/send the email in Zapier.
Bill,
Thank you very much for taking the time to share all of that. I’m going to digest it a bit and see if I can duplicate what you’re discussing. I know what Zapier is, but have never used it before. I will post again if I encounter an issue.
Thank you again for sharing your workaround/solutions!!!
