I recently learned a trick on how to link Acuity and Ontraport without using Zapier. This video will walk you through the steps on how to connect them.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
It is Neil from EMAIL SPLAT. And in this video, I share with you a trick I recently learned about Acuity and Ontraport. I didn’t know you could do this, up until this week. So this is something brand new that I just figured out and put into place for one of my clients. I thought I would share it with you.
So here’s the deal. Usually, if you want to connect Acuity to your Ontraport account, what people will tell you is you must use Zapier. And with Zapier, yes you can definitely connect Acuity to Ontraport. But it’s kind of complicated. And if that’s the only thing you want to do, it would be expensive. If you’ve got some basic simple needs, like really one function you’re trying to get, I’ve got a better way to do this that is completely free. Because you’re already paying for if you’ve got Acuity and Ontraport. You don’t need to add something in the middle. And basically, what I’ve put together, is a way to take people out of reminder sequences or campaigns to schedule a phone call. In the past, if I wanted to have someone schedule a phone call, I’m sending out a series of emails that says, “hey, schedule phone call.” The only way I would know if they had is if I’d used Zapier to push them back into Ontraport and I’d know yes, they scheduled the phone call, we can stop those emails.
But I usually don’t use Ontraport as my reminders for the appointments, because Ontraport doesn’t fire based off a time, it just fires based off a day. If I want an email to go out two hours before the phone call or an hour before the phone call, I’m still using Acuity. Acuity’s got its own built-in emails that will send out to people, so I’m still using Acuity for that. All I’m really trying to get in Ontraport, most of the time, is to just stop the reminder emails. And so I’ve found a way we can do that, and it’s pretty simple. I’ve also found a way that we can push in some basic information into Ontraport, and not really do much automation with it.
So I’ve got two things to show you here and first, we’re going to start with the really basic one. And that is, I discovered (and they’re both based off of one thing) if you’re in your Acuity account; go to the Integrations section, and then Analytics & Conversion Tracking and you will find Custom Conversion Tracking. And in here, I can put HTML code. And guess what code I can put in. I can put in my Ontraport tracking script and it will fire when someone finishes their appointment. And then what that will do is tell Ontraport that somebody’s been to the confirmation page and I can stop the emails to them.
So let’s see, if I went into my Ontraport account and then went to Admin. And Developer Tracking Code. If I get my tracking code, this is the same code that you’d put on your website to track pages people visit there. I can put that code right here and it is going to fire when someone makes an appointment. So, if I go through the appointment process, when I hit that confirmation page, it’s going to fire this code and it’s going to tell Ontraport that someone was at that page. Therefore, I know they’ve scheduled an appointment, they finished the appointment scheduling process and I can stop sending them emails.
So if I had a campaign like this where I just send an email, “hey schedule an appointment,” wait, “hey you haven’t scheduled your appointment,” “oh you still haven’t scheduled your appointment,” I could have a goal down here that would take them out of these emails based on them visiting that confirmation page. And here is the URL – let me share that with you – that you will see come up in your Ontraport account when they visit that page. It’s the Acuity URL, but it’s going to show up there when they visit that page and that will fire this goal and because I have it set “move here when achieved,” it’s going to move them down here and skip any of the remainder “hey schedule your appointment with me” emails.
Now when you do this, Ontraport is not going to be able to find their tracking script on that page and then they’re going to tell you it’s not working. It actually will, so you can ignore that and do it anyway and yes that will fire and move people down there. So that’s a pretty cool trick in and of itself. We can get people out of reminder sequences. And now of course I can’t do anything with this, other than just know that somebody scheduled an appointment. I can’t do any automation based off the date of their appointment or anything like that. I just know to stop the reminder emails.
Now we have to also assume that they’re cookied and that Ontraport knows who they are when they land on that confirmation page. But if they’re clicking a link in an email here and it says, “hey schedule your appointment,” they should be cookied at that point. If they’re clicking on the Acuity link in this email, they would be cookied. Ontraport would know who they were when they hit that confirmation page and fire back and tell us we can stop sending them the rest of these emails.
So that’s a pretty neat trick in and of itself, but it gets better. I can actually change this and instead of using the tracking script, I can use the Ontraport partner pixel in here as well. And that guy looks like this and you’re going to find that in the same place, actually right here, you’re going to find your partner tracking pixel. Now this is intended to be used for shopping carts to push in somebody’s order when they order on a third party shopping cart. We don’t want to use it for an order, so we can modify what it’s pushing in. You would have to find your specific pixel and the only thing that really makes it yours is this little sub domain part right there. And then we would have to have this string of code, which is just Order ID Equals – and I’ve set that to be the ID of the appointment in Acuity – so this will fill in, Email Equals – and I’ve set that to be the email address they used when they signed up in Acuity, when they scheduled in Acuity.
Here I’m pushing in consultation time, which is a custom field I made and I’m pushing in the client’s time and I’ve also pushed in the appointment type and the consultation date. Now the date. I can’t push in as a date field this way because Ontraport is very specific about how the date must go into their system and this is the wrong format. So, this field I made is just a text field, so I can’t do any automation with it but I can use it for reference. And this field is in the client’s time zone, so again, probably not the greatest, but I can get this information in here and I just have a reference in there if I wanted a little more than just “hey they’ve scheduled,” I can get that little bit more.
So let’s say that, and we’re actually going to try this out, because this one happens pretty instantly. That’s something I should mention too about the tracking script that we had in here earlier. Tracking script has a lag on it, so there could be 15 minutes or more where someone has visited that confirmation page but it doesn’t show up in their Ontraport record. Because that is only checked every 15 minutes or so in Ontraport. That won’t be instant, but this other version is instant. Let’s go here. We’re going to refresh this page to make sure we’ve got that new info in there that we just put in. We’re going to make up a date and time here and we’re going to make up a … We’re going to say, [enters name, phone, email on screenshare] we’ll put that in and we’re going to complete.
Now, in the background of this page, that pixel that we just created has fired. And so we should be able to go back into our Ontraport account here. This is my Sandbox account by the way, and there I am. It just came in and if I go in here, you’re going to see that it pushed in consultation time, consultation date and then this, I just use this field. This is the appointment type that it pushed in. So if you have several appointment types, this might be useful. If you have an appointment type field where you could push that in and have rules that run off of “if it equals this, then do that,” if it equals this appointment type, then maybe they do this. So maybe it puts them in some sort of quick follow up sequence about “we’re going to have an appointment.” But we couldn’t run anything based off of this date, because again, this is just a text field, this is not an actual date field, so we can’t do any automation based on date. But we could merge these things into emails.
So it is limited. But it does give you, if you just need some real basics into your Ontraport account, this would work. The other negative to this is, if they come back and they cancel or reschedule, this does not fire. So if they reschedule their appointment, it’s still going to have this original date in there. It does not fire a second time for reschedule. So that’s probably not … Again, it’s kind of limited.
But if all you’re trying to do is get them out of follow up campaigns, putting that tracking script in there works perfect. And that will get them out of follow up campaigns to schedule an appointment, and you can let Acuity take over with all the reminders.
So there you go, a new trick I learned this week that I thought I’d share with you. Hopefully it is useful.
