This lesson walks through the creation of your first author automation using Pabbly Connect from start to finish, with tips on how to manage your automations to make it easier on yourself in the future.
Even if you’ve created an automated workflow before, you should pick up something from this lesson.
We’ll start with a simple example.
There’s a form on our website that people fill out when they want to sign up to the Writers Building Websites newsletter.
I’ve used the Breakdance page builder to create this form. The form asks for the first name and email address.
The native form builder inside Breakdance comes with integration options for most of the popular email marketing platforms except the two that I use, Moosend and Mautic. Without any integration I would have to check the website every moring and manually add the new subscrber to the WBW mailing list.
That’s a huge pain and I don’t want to do that.
Instead I’m going to use an automated workflow on Pabbly Connect to do it for me.
Creating the Workflow
From the account dashboard on Pabbly Connect I’ll click the ‘Create Workflow’ button.
A popup will ask what I want to call this workflow and if I have folders set up which one I’d like to place it into.
It brings us to this screen. We start with a trigger – this is what “triggers” the automated workflow to run.
Adding a trigger
We want to trigger this workflow when the Newsletter sign up form is filled out. So lets look for Breakdance on the list of apps.
And there it is.
The Breakdance app on Pabbly Connect uses a webhook for integration. We’ll cover webhooks later but for now let’s follow the guide on Pabbly COnnect.
I’ll go back to the form set up in Breakdance.
Saving
When I’m done I’ll save the form on Breakdance, go back to Pabbly Connect, and click on CAPTURE WEBHOOK RESPONSE.
We’ve just told Pabbly to look out for the first packet of data and it’ll also save the workflow we’ve built so far albeit just setting up the trigger.
Testing the trigger
With Pabbly waiting for data I’ll go back to the updated form on the WBW website and submit a test subscriber.
Because I added the Webhook url to the form on Breakdance it will securely send that data to the workflow on Pabbly, remember that Webhook URL is unique and no other automation will use it.
It’s picked it up!
Before we look at the data see the drop down field called SELECT RESPONSE?
If we wanted to we could submit more entries to the trigger. This is useful for tweaking a new workflow, like for example if I went back to to the Breakdance form and mapped the fields then wanted to check how they looked on a new submission.
I’m not going to do that now because I want to focus on the RESPONSE RECEIVED section.
In this section we see all the data the form submission sent to the Webhook.
There’s a lot!
We don’t need most of this data right now but it’s good to know it’s there as it may come in useful in later lessons.
Right now we only need two pieces of data
This is where Pabbly COnnect makes it so easy to not only find the data we need BUT also identify the fields we need to map in the action step.
Pabbly Connect splits incoming data into two columns
The field LABEL is what we’ll use in the action step we’ll set up AFTER we’re happy with the trigger. The field VALUE is the submitted data.
So when I scroll down the RESPONSE RECIEVED coloumns I can see that beside the ‘Fields First Name’ label is the VALUE Stephen I submitted on the form. Beside ‘Fields Email’ is the email address I submitted. This confirms the trigger step is working as expected.
High five!
Rename step
It’s a good habit to rename each step as you build it so you know exactly what it is doing. Sure you’ll remember it now but what about in a few months time? Especially as you build more and more automations.
Probably not, so let’s name it “New Contact Form Entry”.
This also helps you find it again later as when you search for Zaps on your dashboard, these are included.
Zap Name & Notes
On that note, what if we forget what this Zap is for?
Let’s name the Zap as well. “Send contact form to Active Campaign”.
I always try to describe what is happening in the Zap and start with a verb.
Then under that click on Zap Settings. Here you can add more detailed notes for your “future self”, as they put it.
Adding an action
Now let’s add an action to add a new subscriber in Active Campaign.
Add a step. Click Action. Like last time, search for the app.
This time there are lots more options. You can even view more using this link.
We want to add someone to the CRM. So the one we are looking for is Create/Update Contact.
This time I already have some accounts connected. So I could choose one, or add another.
I’ll add one. This time the instructions are different.
We need to go to our Developer settings to copy in the URL and API key.
Don’t forget to name it!
Action Template
The template is where we choose what data to send to Active Campaign.
You can see some fields are required.
For the list, it automatically pulls in my lists from AC.
If I forgot to make a new list before creating this Zap, I could go back to AC and create it now. Then you can force it to refresh by clicking here. Or clear the value here.
Now we need to send the Email Address to Active Campaign.
We need to use the email that came from the Contact Form.
That’s what this button is for. It allows you to access data from previous Zap steps.
This is a list of all the data that came in from the contact form. You can call each line a field. Or a variable. The name of the field is on the left, and the sample value is on the right.
If there are multiple samples, you can go back to the trigger step and choose which sample you would like to view.
If there are too many to scroll through, you can search here. If you know the field value – like the email address – you can search for that and it will show you which field has that data in it. Or search for the field name like ‘email’.
So let’s add the email.
This green box shows that the field is coming from step 1, and this is the value from our sample.
Let’s follow the same process to add the name of the person. Thankfully, Active Campaign allows us to add the full name, because the contact form doesn’t provide first and last.
Again you can see our sample value.
Preview Mode
There is a preview switch at the top which changes the green bubbles to grey. Now it shows the field name instead of the value. We can switch between whenever we like.
You can copy and paste fields if you need. Say you want to put the person’s name as the organisation. Instead of finding it in the list again you can copy it.
But in this case we want to put their company name here.
Tags are a way of identifying contacts in the CRM. In this case we want to know that this person came from our contact form, so I can type “Contact Form” in here. Notice this doesn’t have to be a field – you can type whatever you like as well as add fields.
This tag will be added to everyone that is added to Active Campaign by this Zap.
Finishing up
If we continue, it will ask us to test the Zap. This will actually create the contact in Active Campaign using the sample that we chose.
If you didn’t want to add this person and are very confident this will just work, you can Skip the test with this button. This will allow you to finish the Zap and turn it on. But while you are learning, I would advise to test every time to check everything is working correctly.
Awesome, it worked.
Now we continue on to the final step.
We’ve already named the Zap so don’t need to change it. But here we can add it to a folder.
Folders are used to organise your Zaps, and we’ll look at those in another lesson.
That’s it, your first Zap done!
