How To Trigger Direct Mail From Infusionsoft Keap Automations

Keap/Infusionsoft is a leading small business marketing, sales and e-commerce tool that is used by more than 30,000 businesses. The Postalytics integration with Keap/Infusionsoft enables marketers to quickly connect with Keap Automations to Postalytics Triggered Drip Campaigns.

What Version of Keap/Infusionsoft Do I Need? 

In order to use the integration, you’ll need either the Pro or Max versions of Keap. This integration uses the “HTTP Post” function of the “Advanced Automations” feature available in these versions.

Our Infusionsoft Keap Direct Mail Integration makes it super easy to send automated postcards and letters to your audience with Postalytics. Your sales and marketing team can now trigger personalized direct mail through Infusionsoft, and Postalytics takes care of the printing, mailing and tracking of each mailer you send.

What Infusionsoft Keap Automations Can Trigger Postalytics Mail? 

Using the “Advanced Automations” features from Infusionsoft Keap, there are many ways to trigger personalized postcards or letters. The “Goals” function act as triggers, and the “Sequences” function acts as the sending mechanism.

The “Tag Applied” is the most popular Infusionsoft Goal or trigger due to its versatility. Within your automations, you can set your rules or conditions, then have a tag added to the contact when those conditions are met. You can then connect it to a Sequence that includes the “HTTP Post” function. The HTTP Post will include information you get from your completed Postalytics Triggered Drip Campaign.

Create Postalytics Triggered Drip Campaign In Test Mode

In order to get this automation set up, you’ll need a Postalytics account, with a proofed direct mail template. For more information on setting up and proofing templates, go to our Template Editor Overview.

Before you can begin configuring your Infusionsoft automation, you’ll need to create a Postalytics Triggered Drip Campaign using the “Keap” button.

From the top menu, click Campaigns>New Campaign>Triggered Drip. Then select the Keap button.

A Walk Through The Campaign Wizard 

Basic Information

Enter in the Campaign Name and Return Address that will be printed on the mail piece. The Return Address is populated from your profile but you have the ability to adjust for the specific campaign you are developing. Each campaign can have it’s own return address.

Template

From the proofed templates, you can select the one that you want to utilize for this campaign. If you don’t see the template you want here, then it will need to be proofed. Only proofed templates are available to use in any campaign. You can save your campaign for later, go back into your templates and use The Proofer so that your template will be available in the Campaign Wizard.

If your template is shown here, simply select it and then click Next to continue.

If the previous template chosen was a letter, then you will now have the option to select a standard double window, or a custom single window outer envelope. Follow the same steps above, including Proofing if you do not see your desired envelope template here. If you previously selected a postcard template, then this step will be skipped in the Campaign Wizard.

Note: Your custom envelope order will need to be finalized before you can select it. Orders take 2-3 weeks or longer to process, and made available to use in a campaign. Any pending orders will be listed in the bottom section of the envelope page. Contact Support for current processing times.

For more information on the Custom Envelope order process click here.

Sync

When activity happens, we will sync the delivery and response status codes back to your CRM or Marketing Automation. You can then use those statuses in new workflow decisions.

Note: The Sync step does not apply to “Incoming Webhook” Triggered Drip Campaigns.

From the drop down menu, select your integration. If you do not see your integration here go to Integrations in your profile, or to your Zapier Account to set one up. Triggered Drip Direct Mail Campaigns require an integration, as they will be waiting for a “Trigger” to send the mailpiece out.

When you have finalized your integration sync, click Next to continue.

Audience Tracking

Postalytics Triggered Drip Direct Mail Campaigns can use pURLs and/or QR codes on your mailpieces to redirect your recipients to any landing page you specify. If the template you chose has a pURL or QR code in it, you’ll be brought to this step.

Note: If your template does not include a pURL or QR, you’ll skip this step. 

You need to Choose Your Domain for tracking.  You can use Postalytics shared Free Domain (p.ostal.us) or a Vanity Domain.  If you want to use your own domain you’ll need to add it to your Postalytics Account.  Visit our Domains article for information on how to buy and configure domains to use in your mailings.

You’ll then select a style for the URL string. Postalytics Triggered Drip Direct Mail Campaigns offer two very different pURL formats – Random and Friendly URL strings.

Random strings will generate randomly selected letters, numbers or both. You choose the length of the character string. Use Random Strings when data privacy or fixed domain length are primary concerns.

Friendly URL strings are selected from the data fields in the contact list you’ve chosen for the campaign. In order to create uniqueness, you’ll need to choose two data fields. Most clients choose First Name/Last Name, in order to maximize the personalization. The length of the URL will vary based on the data in the contact list. The separator between first and last identifier is optional. If you choose first name and last name as your identifiers, then your pURLs will have the following format:  FirstNameLastName.yourdomain.com

Finally, enter your desired URL end in the URL end box. Using a URL end will prevent you from creating duplicate pURLs if you plan to use the same domain for multiple campaigns. For example, you may choose to use the name of the promotion or the date. Any combination of letters and numbers will work, just don’t use special characters or symbols in your URL name. A preview of the pURL format is displayed to the right, in the blue box.

Once you’ve finalized the domain type and the URL style, click Next to continue.

URLS

pURL and/or QR code campaigns enable you to redirect or “point” your campaign targets to any landing page, after they briefly visit the Postalytics’ server – where we record the “open” and pass along a cookie.  

A Starting URL is where you’d like your audience directed to when they enter their pURL or scan their QR code. This URL can be any site that has the Postalytics tracking code installed.

You may also want to set an optional Goal URL that is referenced in the Campaign Wizard. Once this goal URL is reached it will indicate a conversion. Thank you page URLs are commonly used. Note: the Postalytics tracking code will also need to be installed on this page.

The starting URL and Goal URL must have the complete URL address (e.g. https://postalytics.com).

After your URL is completed, click Next to continue.

Postage

This step lets you choose between First Class or Standard Class postage for your campaign. The exception is the 4×6 postcard, which can only mail with first class postage.

You’ll see an explanation of the pros & cons of each choice on the page — essentially you trade off speed/reliability of First Class for the per piece savings of Standard Class.

Learn more about when to use First Class vs Standard Class postage

Confirmation

This is your final review of the campaign details. From here you can go back to any of the previous steps to make modifications if needed. Click on the Pen and Pad icon next to the item that you want to adjust, or click on the particular step’s icon in the top header to be taken to that step to modify.

If you’ve included a personalized URL (pURL) or QR code on your mailpiece, we will check the domain you’ve chosen to ensure that it is properly pointed to the Postalytics servers. We’ll also check your starting URL to ensure that the Tracking Code is properly installed. You’ll see “Success!” in the green boxes if everything checks out properly.

If either one, or both, of these aren’t configured properly, the box will be red, with an “Error” message. The Next button will also be disabled until they are corrected. If this is the case, please refer to the Domains and Tracking Code help articles for more information.

Once you have reviewed and finalized the campaign details, click Next to continue.

Your Triggered Drip Campaign Is In “Test Mode” By Default 

Postalytics Triggered Drip Campaigns are automatically set to Test Mode.

This is a feature that enables you to test your Workflow to make sure that it is triggering properly and that the connection to the Postalytics Campaign is working the way you want to – without actually sending mail!

Learn More About Triggered Drip Test Mode

As you can see, there will be more information to get from your Postalytics Triggered Drip Campaign “Settings” to drop into your Keap Infusionsoft automation. We’ll come back to that shortly.

Set Up Your Keap Infusionsoft Automation 

Next, we’ll set up a simple Keap automation to illustrate how to configure the automation to send a Postalytics mailer. We’ll use the “Tag Applied” Goal or trigger, and configure a Sequence to use the HTTP Post function.

In this simple example, we’ve created a Goal of New Customer Tag applied, so that each time a new customer is created, the automation will kick off and send a Thank You letter from Postalytics.

Next, we’ll edit the Sequence to add the HTTP Post.

Configure The Keap HTTP Post With Postalytics Triggered Drip Campaign Info 

In order to properly configure the Keap HTTP Post, you’ll need to copy a few items from your Postalytics Triggered Drip Campaign Settings page into the Keap HTTP Post.

Copy Postalytics Campaign Settings

Start by navigating to your Triggered Drip Campaign Settings page. From the top menu, click Campaigns>View Campaigns and then on the “Action Button” of your Triggered Drip Campaign.

Next, you’ll see the important authentication and webhook URL information that you’ll need to copy into your Keap HTTP Post. You’ll need to copy and paste the Webhook URL and the Webhook Authentication Key.

Insert Into Keap HTTP Post

Now, navigate back to your Keap Sequence, and edit your HTTP Post.

First, you’ll copy the Postalytics “Webhook URL” and paste into the Keap “Post URL”.

Next, under Name/Value Pairs, on the left hand box, you’ll type in “api_key” over the default value, and copy the “Webhook Authentication Key” and paste into the right hand box.

Now, you’ve got your Triggered Drip Campaign connected to your HTTP Post. Next, you’ll need to add more “Name/Value Pair” rows and map the data fields from the Keap Infusionsoft Contacts to the Postalytics Contacts.

Mapping Keap Infusionsoft Fields To Postalytics Fields – Important

In order to send direct mail, there must be a minimum of name and address information that is being passed from Keap to Postalytics. You can also include additional “Variable Data” information that you can use to personalize your mailpieces. You’ll need to create a mapping of this data in the Name/Value Pair rows.

It is very important that you use the precise nomenclature of both Keap and Postalytics in the Name/Value Pair rows. To access the Keap Contact field information, you can click the “Merge” button to get the exact field names.

Required And Optional Postalytics Fields With Proper Nomenclature

Here’s a lists of the Postalytics required and optional fields, their Keap counterpart fields and their proper nomenclature that you must use in the mapping (the order does not matter).

In this example, we used the “Contact Shipping Address” data in Keap:

Required Postalytics Fields

Optional Postalytics Fields For Personalization

Note: We recommend mapping the Keap “Contact.ID” field to a Postalytics Variable Data field, like we’ve shown here. This will give you the option to later consume the Postalytics delivery and response data in Keap.

Here’s what a fully filled out set of Name/Value Pairs between Postalytics and Keap might look like:

After you’ve set up your Name/Value Pairs, you can click “Ready” and navigate back to the automation. You can connect the “New Customer Tag” to the “Send HTTP Post” Sequence and “Publish” the automation to start testing.

Test Your Automation Before “Going Live” 

Testing is a very important step in the Triggered Drip Campaign process. Please make sure to complete this step before setting the campaign to live.

You should always send test contacts through your automation to the campaign in Test Mode. The software will generate PDF’s, rather than physical hard copies.

Learn More About Triggered Drip Test Mode

It’s important to note that Triggered Drip Campaigns use Direct Mail Credits, which you’ll purchase before your campaign is set to live mode. Testing can now be done without pre-purchasing credits.

Ordering Credits And Going Live 

Once you’ve completed the integration and tested your workflow for your Triggered Drip Campaign, you’re ready to go live! Triggered Drip Campaigns require a pre-purchase of a minimum of 100 Direct Mail Credits, which are held on account and used as mail is triggered through the campaign. These never expire and can also be used for Smart Send Campaigns.

Direct Mail Credits can be purchased two ways. Either through the campaign on the Campaign Dashboard, or by selecting the Direct Mail Credit option in the drop down menu under your user name.

If purchasing through the campaign, you can either click on the Direct Mail Credit Alert box – this will be red when Direct Mail Credits are needed – see below:

Or, when you toggle the Triggered Drip Campaign to Live Mode, the following popup will appear if Direct Mail Credits are needed, click “Purchase Credits Now”:

Either way, you’ll be directed to the Buy/Manage Direct Mail Credits page for that particular mailer format. Here you can review your balance, and purchase credits.

Automatic Or Manual Credit Reloading 

You can also choose to have your credits reload automatically once the balance reaches 10%, or manually. If you choose the manual option, you will be notified by email when the balance is at 50%, 20%, 10%, and 5%.

It’s important to know that if your credit balance hits zero, your Triggered Drip Campaign will automatically stop sending your mail. We’ll queue the requests for a few days to give you a chance to respond to your emails and manually reload. If no action is taken, your campaign will automatically be reset to “Test Mode” and your trigger requests will not be accepted.

Many customers choose to automatically reorder credits so that there’s no delay in processing their campaigns.

Select your preferred reload option, enter the number of credits you’d like to purchase (minimum of 100), and click “Update and Buy New Credits Now”.

Or, if you’d like you can purchase through the Direct Mail Credit option under your username.

Scroll down, if needed, to select the correct format and postage option for the campaign you are purchasing credits for, and click “buy / manage credits”.

Once the order page is completed, you’ll be directed to the Checkout page, where you can review the order and billing information. Once confirmed, click Continue.

On the next page, confirm payment with the credit card on file, or enter a different card, and select Submit Order.

Nice Work! Now, back in the Campaign Dashboard, you’ll see that the credits remaining has been updated and is no longer in a red box. You’re now ready to proceed and flip your campaign live!