Integrating Trail with Active Campaign

Learn how to set up your Trail integration with ActiveCampaign to use their marketing automations and keep your clients informed!

Angel Chessum avatar
Written by Angel Chessum
Updated over a week ago

Trail's powerful integration with ActiveCampaign provides the marketing functions you need while carrying over the bulk client information you have stored in Trail as your CRM!

We provide multiple tagging to the contact information Trail sends to ActiveCampaign to allow you to set up intentional marketing and bulk emailing campaigns πŸ‘

Read on to learn about how to set up your Trail integration with ActiveCampaign below!

In this article you will learn:


What is ActiveCampaign?

ActiveCampaign is a marketing automation platform that can create powerful email communication chains, leveraging the different stages of your sales process, information to personalise the emails for your clients as well as actions your clients take.

Note: ActiveCampaign, and other email platforms are very conscious of having spam or scams sent through their systems, be careful about the content of your emails, especially when talking about loans or mortgages, read their acceptable use policy for more.

How it Works

Trail's integration with ActiveCampaign works in one direction - Trail passes information over to ActiveCampaign. After the initial setup, the integration is kept updated in regular intervals (3 to 4 times an hour we do a sweep of Trail and update it to AC).

Trail is able to pass a variety of information to ActiveCampaign allowing you to use this integration to keep your marketing information up to date and ensure that your clients are receiving relevant, powerful emails designed by you.

Quick Note on Contacts πŸ’‘

A contact in ActiveCampaign is identified by their unique email address.

Therefore in Trail, it is best to have one contact with their one unique email; if you have more than one contact with the same email address, they will be grouped together as one when they get synced to ActiveCampaign.

In addition to the default fields in ActiveCampaign below, Trail has some Custom Fields of information that syncs to Active Campaign.

  • First Name

  • Last Name

  • Phone

  • Email

Trail's Custom Fields

Field name

Input/ Field Type

Client Entity ID

Text Input

Partner Entity ID

Text Input

BCC Email

Text Input

first_name

Text Input

last_name

Text Input

Partner First Name

Text Input

Partner Last Name

Text Input

Joint Greeting

Text Input

Client Category

Text Input

City

Text Input

Mobile Phone

Text Input

Annual Review Month

Text Input

Annual Review Date

Date

Client DOB

Date

Partner DOB

Date

Gender

Text Input

Adviser Name

Text Input

Contact Type

Text Input

Stage

Text Input

Active or Archived

Text Input

Insurance Provider

Text Input

Insurance Renewal Date

Date

Insurance Policy Number

Text Input

Mortgage Provider

Text Input

Fixed Rate Expiry Date

Date

Mortgage Interest Rate Type

Text Input

Mortgage Interest Rate

Text Input

Fixed Rate Term

Text Input

How to set up the integration

1.) Set up a Contact List

Let's start in your Active Campaign account. This integration will send your Trail contacts to an existing list in your ActiveCampaign account, so at least one list needs to be prepared in Active Campaign with the correct fields and automations.

2.) Add in Fields

Trail will try to pass information to all the available fields in each contact, so before using the integration these should be added to the ActiveCampaign account. It is important to make sure the name of the field matches the ones specified in Trail - please see Trail's Custom Fields specified above.

When adding each field, copy and paste the Custom Field names, which are listed above in the Trails Custom Fields table, and make sure it is added with the correct corresponding "Input/Field Type".

3.) Setting up the automation connection in Trail

In Trail, the ActiveCampaign API URL and API Key need to be specified first for setting up the connection.

These details can be found here in ActiveCampaign, and copied:

Jumping into Trail (in a separate tab on your browser), go to your Settings - Organisation Settings - Integrations - ActiveCampaign, this is where to paste the corresponding API Key and URL information:

Once this is set up, you also need to set an offset range for both mortgage and insurance products, if applicable, which is the number of days before the review date or expiry date the communications are sent out to the client, and is used to ensure that the correct product details are being passed into ActiveCampaign.

You will also need to specify which Contact List you want the Trail contacts to be put into. And lastly, whether you would like contact tags to be turned on:

4.) Complete an Initial Contact Export

Once all this is set up, you will need export a list of your current contacts so that you can upload this file to bulk import of all your contacts into ActiveCampaign.

To export your contacts, use the below button located on the ActiveCampaign integration page!

When you have downloaded the initial export file, here is where to import it:

During this import, if you are going to be needing the custom fields that Trail supports, you will need to match these up here:

(i.e. "The Column to Import" has to match the "Map Into Field")

After this initial upload, all your contacts will be automatically synced

every 30 minutes as they are modified in Trail.


What's Next?

Learn more about your ActiveCampaign integration with these articles here:


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