Integrate ActiveCampaign with Convert Forms

Are you interested in adding users to your ActiveCampaign lists through your Joomla forms? Are you seeking a solution to integrate Convert Forms with ActiveCampaign and automate lead generation effortlessly? With the ActiveCampaign app for Convert Forms, you can easily subscribe users in your ActiveCampaign account each time someone submits your form.

This tutorial will guide you through using and configuring the ActiveCampaign integration in Convert Forms.

Requirements

To use the ActiveCampaign integration, there are a few requirements you need to meet, listed below:

• Ensure you have Convert Forms Pro Development Release 4.4.9-RC6+ installed. You can easily upgrade to Pro if you're currently in the Free version.
• The "Convert Forms - Apps - ActiveCampaign" plugin is enabled.
• Your form includes an Email field.

Setting Up ActiveCampaign Task

To set up the ActiveCampaign task and sync your submissions to the ActiveCampaign service, go into your form, and follow the steps listed below:

Select App

From within your form, click on Tasks > CREATE YOUR FIRST TASK.

On the modal that will open, select the ActiveCampaign task.

Select New Submission under Trigger and Add/Update Subscriber under Action on the next screen, and click CONTINUE.

Create Connection

A connection is essential to connect to a 3rd-party service, such as ActiveCampaign. Let's see how to create a new connection that will allow us to connect to ActiveCampaign.

On the next step, click SIGN IN to create our ActiveCampaign connection.

To create our connection with ActiveCampaign, Click ADD CONNECTION to get started.

Get your ActiveCampaign API URL

Before connecting to ActiveCampaign, you need your ActiveCampaign API URL. To grab your API URL, follow the steps listed below:

Log into your ActiveCampaign Account, click on Settings from the bottom left sidebar > click on the Developer tab > API Access > API URL > Click on "Copy API URL". You can read more here.

Get your ActiveCampaign API Key

Before connecting to ActiveCampaign, you need your ActiveCampaign API Key. To grab your API Key, follow the steps listed below:

Log into your ActiveCampaign Account, click on Settings from the bottom left sidebar > click on the Developer tab > API Access > API Key > Click on "Copy API Key". You can read more here.

Now that we have obtained our ActiveCampaign API URL & API Key, we can continue setting up the connection with ActiveCampaign. Enter a connection name and paste your ActiveCampaign API URL & API Key in the fields Connection Name, ActiveCampaign API URL, and ActiveCampaign API Key, respectively. Then click ADD CONNECTION.

The connection has been added, and you can close the connections window.

If you see the "Connection added" message, your connection with ActiveCampaign has been established, and you can continue with the next step. If you see any error message, please review your API Key.

Select the newly created connection from the list and click CONTINUE.

Ensure that your newly created ActiveCampaign connection is selected in the dropdown.

Setup Action

After you've set up the trigger, action, and connection, it's time to set up the action itself and define what information to send to ActiveCampaign. In this step, you can view all available settings and map each option with a fixed or dynamic value using Smart Tags.

Let's see all available settings:

List

Select the list where your subscribers will be saved in your ActiveCampaign account. A complete list of all your ActiveCampaign lists will be available, and choose from any form field, or Smart Tag.

Update existing subscriber

Enable to update existing subscribers' information on your ActiveCampaign account. Disabling this will result in your users seeing an error message when the form is submitted, which prevents already subscribers from re-subscribing to your lists.

Email Address

Select the email address of the submitter. This is the user that will be subscribed to your ActiveCampaign list. Choose the Email field in your form.

First Name

Select the first name of the submitter.

Last Name

Select the last name of the submitter.

Phone

Select the phone of the submitter.

Custom Fields

ActiveCampaign provides custom fields that helps you store additional information alongside the contact details, such as their age, contact information, and more!

Tags

ActiveCampaign allows you to create tags that you can add to your contacts.

Add Conditional Logic

Conditional logic makes it possible to run tasks only if specific criteria are met, like a user’s email address matching a certain domain, the user being associated with a certain Joomla User Group, or a form submission having a specific value.

While editing the ActiveCampaign task, go to the Setup Action step and scroll down to the Conditional Logic section to set up Conditional Logic. Here's where you define all the rules the task should meet to run.

For example, let's say we need to sync submissions to ActiveCampaign, only if the email is coming from a specific domain: @domain.com.

1. Click to enable the Run this task when certain conditions are met.
2. Click Add Your First Condition.
3. Select the Email field in the Trigger dropdown.
4. Select Contains in the Operator dropdown.
5. Enter @domain.com in the value. Replace this with your domain name.

The condition should look like this:

You can read more on Conditional Logic on the Working with Tasks documentation page.

Activate Task

The final step is to enable our task. To do so, click the toggle on the dialog’s top right corner, as shown in the screenshot below.

Finally, click Save to save the task, close the dialog, and then click Save from the top right corner of the form builder to save the changes on the form.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully created a form that syncs new submissions to ActiveCampaign!

Setting Up ActiveCampaign Campaign (Deprecated)

This method uses the soon-to-be deprecated Convert Forms Campaigns, which requires you to create an ActiveCampaign campaign, configure it and assign it to your form. We suggest you use the new tasks way of integrating ActiveCampaign with Convert Forms by clicking here.

To get started follow the steps below:

• Navigate to Components > Convert Forms > Addons
• Click the Cog button for the ActiveCampaign Addon. A popup will appear where you can enable the addon.

• Click on the Status and select Enabled.
• Now you can click on Save & Close button to save the enabled addon.

Campaign Setup

To setup a Campaign with ActiveCampaign, follow the steps below.

• Navigate to Components > Convert Forms > Campaigns
• Create a new Campaign by clicking New
• Type a name for your Campaign. This name can not be seen by anyone else but you.
• For the Sync Leads > Choose Service selectbox choose ActiveCampaign. If you can not find the ActiveCampaign option then you do not have the ActiveCampaign Addon installed and activated. In that case, please go back to the top of the article and see how to install the mandatory addon.
• Save the Campaign for the special ActiveCampaign fields to show up.
• ActiveCampaign needs:
  • An API URL & An API Key: How to find them both
  • A List ID: To get your List ID, go to the Lists tab on ActiveCampaign and hover the mouse over the number of subscribers (next to the list name), then look at the link in the status bar. It should have a segment like this &listid=1.
• Click Save & Close

Email & Name Fields

Email

For a Convert Form to successfully store an email address to your ActiveCampaign account it needs to have an email field. This field is already set up at the time of creating the form and you don't have to change its input value as it is already configured for you.

Name

If you want to store the contact's fullname you should create a field named name. See the screenshot below to understand where to set it up.

First Name

If you don't have a Name field as seen above and desire to have the first name and last name separately, you should create a field named first_name. See the screenshot below to understand where to set it up.

Last Name

To store the last name of your contact, you should create a field named last_name. See the screenshot below to understand where to set it up.

Tags

ActiveCampaign offers you the ability to tag your contacts. In order for you to use tags with Convert Forms first you have to create the tags in ActiveCampaign's Tag Manager. To open the Tag Manager while in your ActiveCampaign Dashboard, click the "Contacts" tab in the top menu and then click the down arrow next to "Manage Scoring" to display a dropdown menu of various options. As you can see in the screenshot below, click "Manage Tags" to go to your Tag Manager and add any new tags you'd like.

Now that you have created your tags, the next step is to go to your Convert Form, create a hidden field named tags and set the tags in a comma separated list as its value. See the screenshow below to understand where to set it up.

Custom Fields

ActiveCampaign offers custom fields to collect more types of data for each of your contacts. We can also use these custom fields in a Convert Form for a more efficient data gathering and by extension, a more efficient campaign. Let's see how.

First you need to navigate to your ActiveCampaign Dashboard, choose "Lists" in the menu and click "Manage Fields" to to be able to create, update or delete your list's custom fields. As an example in the screenshot below we have created an Address custom field and an Age custom field.

With the custom fields you have configured on your ActiveCampaign Account, you can now proceed and use the same ones in your Convert Form. For example, we used our Address and Age custom fields in our Convert Form in the screenshow below.

Assign form to Campaign

Of course don't forget to assign the form to our newly created Campaign! See the screenshot below to understand where to assign it.