Table of Contents:
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.
Trail is able to pass a wide variety of information to ActiveCampaign allowing you to rely on it to keep your marketing information up to date and ensure that your clients are receiving relevant, powerful emails designed by you.
How it Works
A contact in ActiveCampaign is identified by their email address, so if you have more than one person in Trail with the same email they will be grouped together as one.
In addition to these default fields in ActiveCampaign:
First Name
Last Name
Phone
Email
Trail's Custom Fields:
(you can read more details about each of these at the bottom the article):
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
This integration will send contacts to an existing list in your ActiveCampaign account, so at least one list needs to be prepared 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:
Them within Trail, 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.
Note: The rest of this article is more technical, read it if you are going to make use of Trail's custom fields, feel free to always get in touch with Trail's support team if you have questions.
Field Definitions
Partners
If there are multiple contacts sharing the same email address, the first is considered the Client, the second is considered as the Partner.
Products
Insurance policies and products are arranged according to their review date or fixed rate expiry date. The first product that is found outside of the product offset range is the one which has its details passed to ActiveCampaign.
Partner First Name
The preferred name of the Partner, or the first name if no preferred name is given.
Joint Greeting
The preferred name, or first name of the Client followed by the preferred or first names of all other contacts sharing the same email address separated by an ‘&’.
Client Entity Id
The id of the Client in Trail.
Partner Entity id
The id of the Partner in Trail.
Client Category
The rating of the Profile the Client is a part of (options: ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’, ‘D’).
City
The city component of the address where the Client lives.
Mobile Phone
If the Client has a specific mobile number this is used, if not then any phone number they have recorded is taken.
BCC Email
An email address used to link emails directly to the Clients timeline in Trail.
Annual Review Month
The name of the month of the client’s annual review date. This is only passed to ActiveCampaign if the ‘Contact Type’ field is set, and is not ‘Prospect’.
Annual Review Date
The date of the client’s annual review. This is only passed to ActiveCampaign if the ‘Contact Type’ field is set, and is not ‘Prospect’.
Client DOB
The date of birth of the Client.
Partner DOB
The date of birth of the Partner.
Gender
The Gender of the Client.
Adviser Name
The name of the adviser who is in charge of the profile the Client belongs to.
Stage
The pipeline stage that the client reached most recently (this will appear in ActiveCampaign as 'Pipeline - Stage Name' e.g: Mortgage Advice - New Lead)
Active or Archived
Whether the Clients profile is active or not in Trail.
Insurance Provider
The provider of the next upcoming insurance policy that the Client is an owner or a beneficiary of.
Mortgage Provider
The lender of the next upcoming mortgage that the Client is a borrower of.
Insurance Policy Number
The policy number of the next upcoming insurance policy that the Client is an owner or a beneficiary of.
Insurance Renewal Date
The renewal date of the next upcoming insurance policy that the Client is an owner or a beneficiary of.
Mortgage Interest Rate Type
The type of loans the Client is a borrower of, if they only have fixed loans, only floating loans or a mixture (options: ‘Fixed Rate’, ‘Floating Rate’, ‘Mixed Rate’).
Mortgage Interest Rate
The interest rate of the next upcoming mortgage that the Client is a borrower of.
Fixed Rate Expiry Date
The fixed rate expiry date of the next upcoming mortgage that the Client is a borrower of.
Fixed Rate Term
The full fixed term of the next upcoming mortgage that the Client is a borrower of.
Contact Type
The status of the profile the Client belongs to (options: ‘Prospect’, ‘Active Client’, ‘Former Client’).
Profile Source
The specified source of the profile (options: can be customised in your organisation settings).
Tag definitions
Provider Tags
If the client has any mortgages the tag ‘Mortgage’ will be added.
If the client has any policies the tag ‘Insurance’ will be added.
The names of every insurance provider and mortgage lender providing products to the Client will be added as a tag.
Profile Tags
The name of the adviser who is in charge of the profile the Client belongs to will be added.
If the profile the Client belongs to is marked as a ‘Prospect’ the tag ‘Prospect’ will be added.
If the Client has completed a mortgage application and specified that they are intending on buying a first home the tag 'First Home Buyer' will be added. this tag will be removed once this application has been completed.
Contact Tags
Each contact in Trail may have different relationships to profiles, for example an existing client may also be a real estate agent who refers you business, these set of tags will record the different relationships so it is easy for you to segment your list for newsletters to referral partners or other service providers.
Special Conditions
Beyond simply passing the data into ActiveCampaign, Trail also performs some smart actions to make sure that your contacts in ActiveCampaign remain up to date throughout time.
Winning Opportunities
When an Opportunity is won in Trail and the contacts are prospects, the contacts are automatically changed from ‘Prospect’ Status to ‘Existing Client’. This then triggers an update in ActiveCampaign where the tag ‘New Client’ is added to the contacts as their ‘Contact Type’ field changes from ‘Prospect’ to ‘Active Client’.
Unsubscribing
When a profile in Trail is set to be ‘Unsubscribed’ the contacts in ActiveCampaign have their ‘Contact Type’ field changed to be ‘Former Client’.
Deceased Contacts
If a contact is deceased they will always have their ‘Contact Type’ field marked as ‘Former Client’ in ActiveCampaign.
Tags
When Trail updates tags in ActiveCampaign it will automatically remove any existing tags to update them with new ones, this is done to insure things like the list of mortgage or insurance providers for the client remain up to date, however there are a list of tags that are permanent and are not removed by Trail:
Unsubscribed All
Unsubscribed Newsletter
No Newsletter
Engaged
Disengaged
Reporting - Annual Review Opened
Reporting - Annual Review Not Opened
Recent Activity
Gone Idle
Test
Active Client
Ex Client
Prospect
New Client
Tracking emails in Trail
As a financial adviser, keeping a record of all your communication with your clients is important, ActiveCampaign can record all activity, such as email sending, opens and clicks. In addition to this you can sync certain emails to your Trail client timelines too.
Note: if you have a premium ActiveCampaign licence you can send these emails though the 1:1 email feature, the below steps are for users with a lite or plus licence.
Setup
From your automation add a new step beside the email you are planning on sending, the example below is for a client's birthday message.
From the side bar click on Send a notification email
Within the popup that appears under the Send to heading add %BCC_EMAIL%, this will only work if you have the BCC email merge field added to your list.
Set the subject and message to be the same as the email being sent to the client.
Once this is set up a copy of the email will be sent to Trail and will appear on your client's timeline.
Note: these notification emails can take some time to send, it may be 20 minutes or more before you can see the copy of the email in Trail.
How do I manually add or remove a contact(s) from an automation?
We found an article in ActiveCampaign's Help Center that we feel would be quite useful for our users' workflow 😄 Please check this out if you're looking to tweak your automation to just the right users 👍