How to assign tags in ActiveCampaign on purchase in ThriveCart

Introduction

Do you use ThriveCart for your shopping cart and ActiveCampaign for your email marketing?

So do we!

In this article you’ll learn how to integrate ThriveCart and ActiveCampaign and configure some useful tagging and automation rules to automate actions in your customer’s lifecycle.

What you will need

1 – ActiveCampaign

2 – ThriveCart

Video Tutorial

Connecting ThriveCart with ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is our email marketing tool of choice.

It gives you the ability to create various automation and email campaigns.

It lets you tag subscriber records, create filtered contact lists, send email campaigns and more.

Thrive Cart is an amazing shopping cart software that lets you set up and sell products.

In fact, we use both apps in our business. 🙂

So what if you could join their powers together?

For example, let’s say that you would like to maintain a list of your active members to send them marketing materials and other news.

And what if you need to send onboarding instructions to every new subscriber without also annoying your returning subscribers with this same message?

Now you’ll learn exactly how to set that up.

Setting up an automation that runs on purchase

Goal #1: Tag ThriveCart buyers in ActiveCampaign by product

You can tag customers in lots of creative ways based on the kinds of products you sell and your marketing approach.

Here at MemberFix we sell two main things:

1 – A membership site and WordPress support service called MemberFix

2 – Various niche plugins

So we want to make sure that we tag our buyers appropriately inside of ActiveCampaign.

Having our subscribers all neatly tagged allows us to get a quick snapshot of various segments of our customer base.

It also enables us to target our email marketing to the right people.

And more importantly, it helps us to AVOID sending messages that are irrelevant to certain segments of our list.

Example: Once somebody purchases our MemberFix subscription product we need to do the following:

• assign a tag that indicates which product they purchased (Lite plan, Mid Plan, or Pro plan)
• assign a status tag (Active / Cancelled) to know whether a particular customer is currently paying us or taking a break
• assign a special tag that indicates if this is a new or returning customer (if this is a new customer we need to send an onboarding email)
• subscribe customer to the main email list for general info and updates
• subscribe customer to the email list for active customers for customer-only broadcasts
• tag customers to whom we issue a refund

Here’s how to do it:

1 – Login to your ActiveCampaign

2 – Navigate to Contacts > Manage Tags

3 – Add the tags you want to add/remove on purchase/cancel/refund product in your ThriveCart

NOTE: You can enter multiple tags at a time separating them by comma, or start each one at a new line. Once you finish hit ‘Add tags‘

5 – Now navigate to Automations > Create an automation

6 – Select an option ‘Start from Scratch‘

7 – On the next step select ‘Start without a trigger‘

8 – On the next screen navigate to Conditions and Workflow, select ‘If/Else‘

9 – Setup required Condition check (in our case we will check if ‘MF Customer’ tag exists):

At this point you are checking if this is a new or returning customer.

New customer will not have this tag because it will be assigned later in this automation.

After you hit ‘Add‘ you will see the following:

Left branch (Yes) is a logical TRUE (‘MF Customer’ tag IS PRESENT for this contact), right branch (No) is a logical FALSE (‘MF Customer’ tag IS NOT PRESENT for this contact).

10 – Hit a plus on the left branch to add one more action

11 – In ‘Contacts‘ select ‘Remove a tag‘

12 – Specify the tags you would like to remove on the popup that will open and hit Save.

In our case we are going to remove ‘MF Cancelled’ tag. If this tag exists it will be removed since this customer became active.

NOTE: If there is nothing to remove ActiveCampaign won’t give you any error, that’s why we do not need to use a conditional logic to check if tags exist before removal.

13 – Add next action to this branch repeating Step 10

12 – Select ‘Add a tag‘ action and add a status tag of your choice (in our case that would be ‘MF Active’)

14 – Add one more action

15 – Select Conditions and Workflow > End this automation

Your screen should look like close to this example after above steps taken:

This part updates records for returning customers.

It replaces the “Cancelled” status tag to the “Active” status tag.

Now we need to take care of new customers:

16 – Add an action to the right branch

17 – Select Sending Options > Send an email

18 – Select the required email if you already have one in your ActiveCampaign, otherwise hit ‘Create new email‘

19 – Give this message a name (this isn’t visible to your contacts; it’s just to help you remember what this message is for / about).

20 – Select a template you would like to use for your email, specify sender’s name, address and Subject in a popup window:

21 – Now design your email and hit ‘Save and Exit‘ once done

22 – Add another action to this branch

23 – Select ‘Add a tag‘ action and add a status tag of your choice (in our case that would be ‘MF Active’ and ‘MF Customer’)

NOTE: At this point we are adding a tag called ‘MF Customer’ that tells us this is a returning customer if they re-subscribe.

This is the only place where it is being added and it never gets removed.

24 – Add one more action

25 – Select Conditions and Workflow > End this automation

The complete automation map will look like:

Step 2: Adding contact to the list of Active subscribers

1 – Navigate to Lists > Manage lists and create a list that you will be adding your active customers to.

2 – Navigate to Automations > Create an automation

3 – Select an option ‘Start from Scratch‘

4 – Select a trigger ‘Tag is added‘

5 – Specify a tag that will trigger an automation when added (in our case it is ‘MF Active’ that is being added in previous automation), leave other options as is.

6 – On the next screen (Add an Action) navigate to Conditions and Workflow, select If/Else

7 – Setup required Condition check (in our case we will check if ‘MF Activer’ tag exists):

8 – Hit an ‘Add a new trigger‘ option and add a trigger ‘Tag is removed‘, specify the tag you will be using for the customers who have cancelled (In our case it is ‘MF Cancelled’):

9 – Add an action to ‘Yes‘ branch, navigate to Contacts > Subscribe and select a required list from a dropdown menu:

10 – Add an Unsubscribe action to ‘No’ branch in the same way like you did in previous step.

11 – Add an ‘End this Automation‘ for each branch

12 – Now you need to activate your automations, to do so navigate to Automations and select ‘Make active‘ from dropdown list on the right side of each automation row:

Congratulations, you’ve completed an automations setup in ActiveCampaign!

Now we need to connect them with ThriveCart.

Step 3: Connecting ActiveCampaign with ThriveCart

1 – Login to your ThriveCart account

NOTE: You will need to authorize ActiveCampaign in your ThriveCart, to do so go to Settings > View Integrations > Autoresponders > ActiveCampaign and follow instructions.

2 – Navigate to Products and select ‘Edit‘ for required product

3 – Go to Behavior tab

4 – Hit ‘Add rule‘ and setup the following options:

• When: the main product is purchased
• Use: ActiveCampaign
• add them to this automation
• Select your automation you have created in Step 1 from the list

5 – Save your product

NOTE: You might want to create one more automation for those who will cancel their subscription in order to remove them from the “active subscribers” list (this will NOT remove them from ActiveCampaign altogether, only from that particular list).

To do so just repeat Step 1 but in ‘Yes‘ branch remove ‘Active’ tag and then add ‘Cancelled’ tag:

NOTE: Do not forget to add an ‘End this automation‘ action to each branch.

Then add another behavior rule to your ThriveCart product that will trigger this automation by ‘a subscription is cancelled‘ event:

You are now fully set with an automation that will manage your customers’ basic lifecycle in ActiveCampaign after they purchase products via your ThriveCart!

Conclusion

In this tutorial you have created a few simple ActiveCampaign automations to manage your email marketing lists and tags for contacts based on their purchases in ThriveCart.

You might be curious why we didn’t connect the automation created in Step 2 with ThriveCart?

The reason is that it we set it up to get triggered by the another automation in ActiveCampaign.

So for that reason we don’t need a special trigger for it; ActiveCampaign will manage it by itself. 🙂

Now let’s hear from you!

What way are you using to followup with your customers?

How are you automating your marketing with ThriveCart and ActiveCampaign?

Tell us your experience in the comments section below!