ActiveCampaign - How To Fire An Automation From An Outbound Email Link

I had a question from a follower of the blog about how to fire an ActiveCampaign automation from a link in one of your outbound emails. I'll answer that question here and take it up one more level on top of that.

First of all I will say that I think it is a fantastic idea to track the links that your readers click on, but don't just track them, do something with that information.

you want to deliver the most relevant message to that person at the time they most need it

One of the great things about marketing automation is your ability to customise the messages you send to your leads and customers. You want to do this, because you want to deliver the most relevant message to that person at the time they most need it.

One of the ways to do this is to track the links they click on and the pages they view, so that you can see what things they are the most interested in.

In my business, and the work we do with clients, we use 'Topic' tags. These are tags the system gives people based on what they have expressed an interest in. For example, if they have visited a page on our website to do with nutrition, I might set ActiveCampaign up to give them the tag 'Topic: Nutrition'. Then I can customise future messages to contain more information and offers about nutrition.

This is easy enough to do with ActiveCampaign site tracking and you can find out more here in this post. Once they click on a page on our website, we can fire an automation using the "contact visits page" trigger, to give them the appropriate tags.

However, what if we want to fire an automation/tag based on a visit to a page that is not on our website? For example, let's say I want to tag person with a 'Topic: Podcast' tag if they follow a link in my email off our show page on iTunes.

Well that page is not on our website, it is on somebody elses' website. So how does that work?

First create your outbound email which includes the link off to the external site.

When you get to the end of the campaign setup, go to the link tracking settings. Give that link an easy to remember name and click on the '0 Automations' link to create an automation that will fire when this link is clicked.

Name that automation and then simply set up the automation to tag the contact and include any other steps you would like.

That is all there is to it.

If you would like to have a chat about how you could be using marketing automation to grow your business join us in the Automation Nation private Facebook group.