Role:
Researched and selected checkout app
Set up integrations with CRM
Created onboarding automations
Date:
July 2023
Product Goals
Center Centre implemented a new Customer Relationship Management tool to replace their previous CRM. (More on The Search for the Perfect CRM in my blog.) This change required a onboarding process using new checkout tools and integrations that worked with the latest CRM, ActiveCampaign, and provided customers a seamless enrollment process. Their main product, How to Win Stakeholders & Influence Decisions program, onboards a new cohort each month. Managing these contacts and providing them with the web-based resources requires and efficacious backend. I needed to find the prefect checkout tool for this new system, and build the infrastructure required to manage their customers.
Background
ActiveCampaign has a site builder tool within their dashboard, but it had a number of limitations. It also has a form builder and several integrations, but ActiveCampaign doesn’t provide the ability to build sales forms within its sites. Due to these issues, I suggested we use a WordPress site dedicated to sales landing pages for Center Centre’s products. (Read more about this process in this blog post.) I built a WordPress site and began testing form builder plugins that allowed us to charge our customers through a Stripe integrations and onboard them into ActiveCampaign. I documented the process in Notion.
The Process
I tested several plugins and ActiveCampaign integrations until I arrived at the tool that met all of our needs: Spiffy Checkouts. Spiffy integrates with ActiveCampaign, adding and updating contact information in the CRM. It sends purchase information to Stripe and uses Webhooks that connect with Center Centre’s Zapier account. Using two sales landing pages (How to Win Stakeholders & Influence Decisions Individual and Team), I created checkout pages for five product options:
- Individual Prepaid $2679
- Individual 4 payments of $899
- Individual 8 payments of $499
- Team Prepaid $2397
- Team 4 payments of $799
The checkouts add tags to the contact and adds the customer to the Individual and Team Receipt automations. These automations use the applied tags to filter which receipt the customer receives. The automations assign additional tags and update the contact field for Products Purchased with the product name. Using ActiveCampaign variables, the customer receives a customized receipt and Slack message updates the company Slack channel with information about the purchase. Finally, the customer is added to the cohort list for the purchase month.
Once the customer is added to the cohort list, the onboarding automation is triggered and the customer receives three onboarding emails with information about the program, including joining the program space in the company’s social network, the first week’s curriculum, and the first zoom session link. Dedicated homework automations are established for each cohort that send the customer program information each week.
Using the Webhook integration, the contact is added to Center Centre’s Zendesk account and the last 4 digits of the customer’s card are added to ActiveCampaign for the customized receipt.
Proof of Concept
After several weeks of testing and design adjustments, this onboarding process is currently in use at Center Centre. Using this infrastructure, I applied a similar strategy to building out the Taking Control of Agile UX intensive backend.
