Setting Up Incoming Webhooks in Thrive Ultimatum Using ActiveCampaign

Thrive Ultimatum allows you to set the “Incoming Webhook” trigger type when choosing the trigger that should start your evergreen campaign.

You can read more about this trigger type and Incoming Webhooks in this article, if you need more information, or if you just want to see which autoresponders can be used while setting up this option.

This option can be used if you want to trigger a Thrive Ultimatum campaign at a very specific moment. This way, you can very easily create marketing or sales funnels. You can learn more about Incoming Webhooks here.

The way this works is by setting up a Thrive Ultimatum campaign, in which you will have to set some options, and then creating an automation in ActiveCampaign. You can customize the automation as you wish. You can set it up in such a way that the Thrive Ultimatum evergreen campaign can be triggered at a certain point, when the workflow is running.

For example, let’s say that you’ve created a marketing campaign, and you want to send a few emails before sending out an email with a discount code or a free sample of your product.

Your plan might look similar to this:

• Day 1: A user signs up and receives a “Welcome” email;

• Day 2: Another email gets sent, with additional information, and you ask the users if they are interested in a certain topic;

• Day 3: When the user clicks on a certain link/button from the second email, so if they are interested in that topic, the webhook is triggered, so the Thrive Ultimatum campaign will start;

• Day 4: For the users that are interested in that topic, one more email is sent, with a discount and a link to the promotion page. Users will know that they have a limited period of time to get a product for a discounted price.

The campaign will start at a very specific moment in time, when someone answers that they are interested in the topic you asked about via email, which is where the “Incoming Webhooks” trigger time will come in very handy.

The example stated above is a specific one, but please keep in mind that this feature is a rather complex one, and you can use it in many different ways.

Set Up the Thrive Ultimatum Evergreen Campaign

First of all, you will need to create an Evergreen campaign or edit an existing one. Please follow this step-by-step article if you need help configuring an Evergreen campaign from scratch.

After creating the campaign, you will have to choose its type. Click on “Edit”, to do that:

Then, choose the “Evergreen Campaign” type:

You can set up the campaign duration, and then make sure that you switch on the “Activate Lockdown” option:

Next, you will see the three available trigger types. Click on “3rd Party Event”, to get started:

Just as the info note below the option says, using a webhook will start the campaign when an incoming webhook is received from a third party platform (an autoresponder for example).

You will have to choose the autoresponder from the next field and, for this connection, choose “ActiveCampaign Webhook”:

You will then be able to copy the URL of the webhook, which you will be able to see here. Make sure you save everything by clicking on the green “Save” button:

You can continue setting up the Display Options for the campaign.

Choose the Lockdown Settings

Then, in order for the campaign to properly work, you will need to choose the Lockdown Campaign “Promotion”/”Pre-access”/”Expired” pages.

For that, click on “Edit” in the “Lockdown Campaign” card:

First of all, choose the “Pre-access” and ”Expired” pages:

You can read more about these pages here.

Then, in the “Promotion Pages” section, choose the email service, in this case, “ActiveCampaign”:

Next, add the promotion page that you want:

Note: To make sure your search list is always displaying accurate results, try adding the searched content between quotation marks.

Once you add the promotion page, a link will be generated right next to the field. This is the link that you will have to insert into the email that you send to your customers. We will come back in a bit and copy this link:

Then, don’t forget to save these settings:

Then, if you haven’t already, you can finish setting up the campaign, by adding all of the other details for the campaign (display settings, design, etc.).

Now that you have the link to your webhook, you can access your ActiveCampaign account and create a new automation.

Here is the example I want to showcase in this article: when someone signs up on my site, using an opt-in form, they will get a welcome email.

One day after signing up, they will get another email, asking them if they are interested in a certain topic. For example, if I have a cooking blog, this email can ask the subscribers if they prefer cooking sweet or savoury things.

After two more days, I can send out another email, but this time, the email will be received only by the people who answered “Sweet”, and that email will also contain a free dessert cookbook that can be downloaded in a limited period of time.

The webhook is triggered only for the users that click on “Sweet” in the second email. This is when the Evergreen Campaign will start, as well.

To “translate” this in more technical terms, here is what we have to do:

• Create the emails in ActiveCampaign;

• Create an automation that will send out the emails;

• Set up the second email to trigger the webhook;

• Set up a “Lead Generation” element and connect it to ActiveCampaign and, optionally, create an “Email” connection.

Here are the steps to be taken:

Create an Automation in ActiveCampaign

In order to create an automation, you will first have to access your ActiveCampaign account. Then, go to the left sidebar, and click on “Automations”:

Make sure to check out this article, if you need to find out more information about ActiveCampaign automations.

Once the Automations page opens, go to the top right side of the page and click on “Create an automation”:

A pop-up will open, and you can go ahead and set up the automation as you wish. For the purpose of this article, I will choose the “Start from Scratch” option:

Click on “Continue”, and this will take you to the canvas that you will use to create this automation.

Add a Start Trigger

The first step is to set a start trigger. As I’ve said above, when stating the example, I want the entire process to start after someone signs up on my site. This is why I will set the start trigger to be “Submits a Form”:

Then, choose the action options. You can choose this automation to be available for a certain form, or for any form.

Of course, if you choose a specific form here, you will have to choose the same one later, when setting up the “Lead Generation” element.

You can also choose whether you want the automation to run one time only, or multiple times.

After setting up these options, click on “Add Start”:

Add a New Action – “Send an email”

After adding the trigger, another pop-up will appear, where you have to set up a new action.

As I’ve said, once someone subscribes to my list, I want them to receive a “Welcome” email first. To achieve this, I will choose “Send an email” as the next action:

If you have not set up any emails yet, you will see this notification, and you can click on the “create an email” link to customize the email that will be sent to your users:

Start by entering a name for this email, so that you can find it easier if you create multiple emails:

Then, another page will open, where you will be able to choose an email template and customize it as you wish, or you can start from scratch. Make sure you choose the sender and subject for the email:

Customize the email as you wish, and then click on “Save and exit”:

After saving the email, you will automatically return to the automation and, this time, you will be able to preview the email. Click on “Save”:

Add a New Action – “Wait”

Because I want the next email to be sent one day after the “Welcome” email, I will add another action, that will tell the automation to wait for a certain amount of time before performing the next action.

To do this, click on the plus sign, to add a new action:

Go to the “Conditions and Workflow” section, and choose the option called “Wait”:

Choose “Wait for a specific period of time”:

Next, choose the exact period of time before the automation should move on to the next step. In this case, I will set it for one day:

It’s time to set up the next email. This step will be similar to the one with the “Welcome” email.

Add a New Action – “Send an email”

Choose the same action again, the “Send an email” one, and create the new email to be sent:

This is the email where I will ask the subscribers if they prefer sweet or savory food.

If they prefer sweet food and choose that option, the webhook for the Thrive Ultimatum campaign will be triggered, and they will get access to the free cookbook.

For that, I need to create two links/buttons in this email, and then create a condition, that if someone clicks on one of the links, the webhook is triggered.

In the email, I’ve added these two buttons:

I will link each button to a separate “Thank you page”, each of them related to the “Sweet”/”Savory” topic.

Then, click on “Save and Exit” to go back to the automation. Click on “Save”, to save this email, as well:

Add a New Action – Condition

It’s time to trigger the webhook and start the campaign. The outcome that we want is that the subscribers that click on “Sweet” will get an email with a free cookbook.

For that, we have to add a condition in our automation. Click on the plus sign:

From the “Conditions and Workflow” section, choose “If/Else”:

This will let us create a specific condition. Here is how you can set it up:

• In the first field, choose “Actions” -> “Has clicked on a link”:

• In the second field, choose the email where the link was added. In this case, it’s the “Sweet or Savory” email:

• Finally, choose the link that should trigger the webhook, when clicked on (in our case, the one we’ve linked to the “Sweet” button, in the email):

When finished, click on “Add”.

The “If/Else” condition will split into two different branches: “Yes” and “No’.

Add a New Action – “Webhook”

Next, we’ll work with the “Yes” branch of the condition, and this is where the webhook will be triggered. Click on the plus sign below “Yes”:

Go to the “Conditions and Workflow” section and, from the list of actions, click on “Webhook”:

Now, you will have to add the URL of the webhook in this pop-up:

This is the URL that you have copied earlier, when choosing the “Incoming Webhook” trigger type, in the process of setting up the Evergreen Campaign. After you add it, click on “Save”:

Now, each user that clicks on the “Sweet” button will trigger this webhook, and the campaign will start.

You can add one more “Wait” action, to wait one more day, for example, and then send one more mail to the subscribers and offer them the free or discounted product:

Add a New Action – “Send an email”

In this email, we’re letting the subscribers know that, because they prefer sweet snacks, they get a free cookbook, for a limited time only:

The “Buy Now” button will be linked to the promotion page that was generated earlier, in the Thrive Ultimatum Lockdown settings.

For example, I will link a button from this email to the URL that has been generated after I’ve added the promotion page:

Then, save everything and the automation should look like this:

As the last step here, make sure that the automation is active, by clicking on this button, from the top right side of the screen:

Create the necessary settings on your site

You will now have to access your site again, and open the page/post where the form is placed, or where you want to insert it (where you want the subscribers to sign up). Launch the Thrive Architect editor for that post/page:

Then, add a “Lead Generation” element to your page/post, if you have not already added one.

What you have to do next is configure the element and add a connection to ActiveCampaign. If you want, you can also add the “Email Connection”, so that you will get notified each time someone fills in the form.

Connect the element to ActiveCampaign

Naturally, to connect the element to your ActiveCampaign account, you will first have to access the API dashboard and configure the settings from there.

We have created this article that is a step-by-step tutorial on how to create this connection (including how to set up the “Lead Generation” element).

Here is how to set up the connection for this form:

• 1: Choose “ActiveCampaign” from the dropdown with all the connections;

• 2: Choose the desired mailing list;

• 3: Choose the form from this section, the one also used in the automation as a start trigger;

• 4: Optionally, you can add tags.

Click on “Apply” to save the connection.

Create an “Email” Connection

This step is optional, but you can also create an “Email” connection here, so that you get notified each time someone submits a form:

You can read more about setting up an email connection here.

The setup is now complete. The campaign has started from the moment one of the new subscribers has chosen “Sweet” as an option in the second email they received after signing up.

Here is an example of what emails were received by someone who has selected “Sweet” in the second email, therefore triggered the campaign:

• 1: The confirmation email

• 2: The “Welcome” email

• 3: The “Sweet or savory?” email

• 4: Because they’ve chosen “Sweet”, the webhook was triggered, so the campaign has started. This is why they got the “Free Cookbook” email, and they found a link to the limited offer inside that email:

This is how you can set up the “Incoming Webhook” for a Thrive Ultimatum Evergreen Campaign. Please remember that this article contains just one example out of the many situations in which you can use this option.

I really hope this article was useful to you. If so, don’t forget to rate it, by leaving a smile below 😃