Tracking No. of Purchases/Visits with ActiveCampaign automation

I recently started working with a brand new client that's a museum and I'm helping to set up them with #ActiveCampaign as their CRM and marketing automation tool.

Similar to other clients that I have worked with in the attractions industry (as well as some others), not all the source data we are working with comes from other tools that play well with others. In this case, their ticketing software is a nightmare that doesn't integrate with ActiveCampaign (and not even Zapier!).

My mantra in these situations is don't let perfect be the enemy of good. So we ended up uploading a monthly CSV file from the ticketing platform. While some may see this a poor alternative compared to building a custom API between the two platforms, it's a huge step forward for a business that was not using any form of visitor/purchase data when it came to their email marketing previously and was sending email campaigns to their entire list without any segmentation.

One tricky bit was to tie a number of visits/purchases number to a single contact/customer and making sure it accumulates over time. This is where ActiveCampaign's flexibility shine through.

They have an Automation action called "Perform Math". With some simple workarounds, we are now able to add one additional visit to a custom field in the contact profile every time we do the monthly CSV upload (which honestly takes less than 10 minutes). Next up is segmenting the VIP customers from this information!

Working with many different SMEs over the years have taught me a simple but manual approach is sometimes the best solution. And often the easiest way to convince a client to try something. When the value of doing it becomes clear later, you can always then think about automating and scaling it.

#ActiveCampaign #CRM #MarketingAutomation #EmailMarketing #AttractionsIndustry