Heap CRM’s recent announcement that you can now fire off Event templates from an email got me jizzing a little.
Here’s why:
I’ve played a lot with the CForms wordpress plugin and knew that it allowed for 2 interesting things to happen after a form submission.
1. Cforms will show a custom thank you message directly after form submission and this message will take html.
2. Cforms will fire off a custom message to any admin email address of your choosing.
So, starting with the latter…
Knowing that Heap allows a series of events to be scheduled based on some code inserted into an email, I created a CFORM and got to tweaking a custom email message that would be sent to my heap dropbox address for creating a new lead.
You’ll see in the example below that the Subject of the admin email is configured to display the “Name” field entered by the visitor. And the body of the email is configured to include Heap’s code for firing off an event template (along with some other variables, of which there are delightfully many to choose from!)
So in this example, a new lead is created in Heap and a follow up series of events that I’ve pre-configured is kicked off, along with the scheduling of any number of email messages.
The lead could have also been auto assigned to a teammate based on the short code, which might be a nice feature for any broker considering building a multi agent contributor, multi niche focused blogsite. (Imagine embedding a different agent branded cform for on pages created for each neighborhood in your market area. Then consider reaching out to a prospective recruit and promising them that all leads from that page will be routed into the custom CRM solution you’re going to be giving them. [at the whopping cost of an additional $5/month!]
And Then… the Lead Gets Subscribed to an RSS Based Blog Broadcast!
At this point there were already excitement streaks in my undies, but then I realized that I’d also want all of these “leads” to be subscribed to the RSS based newsletter I had set up in Aweber…
Enter CFORM’s silky smoove ajaxy custom HTML thank you message! Simply embed the script for your Aweber form as your form submission thank you message with a little trickery and you’re good to go. What trickery? Here’s an image of the custom thank you message displaying the aweber form.
Summing It Up In Terms of Cost
- Subscription to Heap = $9/Month for First User, $5/Month for Each Additional.
- Heap is way more user friendly, flexible, and affordable than industry standards like Top Producer.
- Aweber = $19/month. You can add multiple rss based broadcasts (one for each niche within your site).
- CFORMS = Free! (download from DeliciousDays.Com)
Wanna See It In Action?
CLICK HERE and scroll to the bottom of the page for a glimpse at the user experience. As a bonus, [and because I’m too lazy to build another example ] you’ll also get a peak at retechulous mortgage lead generation approach. 🙂
Greg Swann says:
Breeizucking freeizilliant, Mr. Hartman. We do some of this in a different way on the front end, but we haven’t worked out the back end at this level of slicktitude. Bravo.
February 24, 2010 — 11:30 am
Ben Smith says:
hi Ryan –
You realize that you can also do this with the webhook, when using WuFoo forms or Google Forms:
http://blog.wbpsystems.com/2010/02/20/wufoo-and-others-form-remapping-support-in-heap-crm/
http://developer.wbpsystems.com/index.php?parent=heapjson&sub=jsonpost
The advantage of the webhook is that it is instantaneous and highly customizable.
February 24, 2010 — 12:02 pm
ryan hartman says:
Thanks Ben,
I was having a little bit of trouble with the wuforms the other day… but is good to know the hook can handle all the same stuff as the email commands?
I wonder if you guys might be able to throw up some more examples of the webhooks in action… still not clear if all the customization happens within the url or what?
Also… I know you’ve got a nice integration with mailchimp… any chance these hooks, etc play well with aweber somehow?
February 24, 2010 — 3:49 pm
Ben Smith says:
First, there is one webhook for all applications. So anything that WuFoo or MailChimp can do over the webhook is something that anyone can do.
Second, the webhook changes how it behaves based on what variables it receives. So, for instance if it receives the variables “title” and “body” it will create a message and parse the body for e-mail commands. But a different set of variabels will result in creating a prospect, person, or sending you back data in JSON format.
As for what variables are available, there are bunches of them available. The best place to look is at the docs here:
http://developer.wbpsystems.com/index.php?parent=heapjson
Heap doesn’t care how you store the variable. It will look in the JSON post, then in the POST variables and finally in the GET variables (the URL line).
Please email me the specifics of your problem with WuFoo, I probably can help.
February 24, 2010 — 5:08 pm