Thinkific is one of the most popular platforms for creating and selling online courses. But you need a separate platform to handle the email marketing side of things, and ActiveCampaign is a popular choice for this.
Integrating ActiveCampaign with Thinkific gives you a powerful way to automate your email marketing and sales funnels.
But how exactly do you do it?
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the complete process of setting up the integration between Thinkific and ActiveCampaign. We’ll also discuss some possible use cases and show you how to get the most out of this powerful combination.
Let’s get started.
Introducing Thinkific and ActiveCampaign
Thinkific’s powerful course builder lets you create online courses and engage your learners with ease. The platform includes built-in marketing and sales functionalities, allowing you to promote and sell your courses seamlessly.
While Thinkific also supports some basic email-marketing features, such as bulk emails, it doesn’t offer a full range of email-marketing tools.
This is where ActiveCampaign comes in. With ActiveCampaign, you can build and nurture relationships with your students by crafting targeted, personalized email campaigns. Additionally, you can create various automations to further simplify your email-marketing efforts.
The Thinkific-ActiveCampaign integration enables you to transfer student data from your Thinkific account to your ActiveCampaign account. This data can be used to segment your students and create automated email campaigns.
By integrating these two platforms, you can achieve various tasks:
- Send a welcome email series for new course sign-ups
- Segment users into buyers and non-buyers and send promotional emails to the latter
- Send a congratulatory email (and maybe a special offer) upon course completion
- Broadcast emails to students to share an announcement or for a new launch
Finally, the Thinkific-ActiveCampaign integration is available on all Thinkific plans, including the free plan.
Now, let’s move on to the integration!
Steps to Integrate ActiveCampaign With Thinkific
ActiveCampaign offers a free trial, so you can test its features before deciding on a paid account. To start a free trial, go to the ActiveCampaign website and enter your email address.
Once you’ve created an account, you’ll be taken to your dashboard, and from there, you’ll need your API key and API URL.
To get this data, click on the cog icon near the bottom of the left menu and navigate to the Developers tab. On this page, you’ll find your API URL and key.
Next, head to your Thinkific account, and from the Apps tab, click on Visit App Store to go to Thinkific’s app store. Search for the ActiveCampaign app and install it.
Upon installing the app, you’ll be taken to the app’s settings page, where you’ll see the fields for entering your API key and URL. Paste that information here, go back to ActiveCampaign, and navigate to the Site Tracking tab.
In the Domains Safelisted box, click the Domains Safelisted button and add your Thinkific website here.
Below you’ll see the tracking code section; copy this code.
Now, go back to your Thinkific dashboard, and in the ActiveCampaign app settings window, paste your tracking code.
Once you do that, you’ll need to tweak the code a bit by adding vgo(‘setEmail’, Thinkific.current_user.email); into the Tracking Code box. This line should go right above the vgo(‘process’); line.
For reference, see the image below.
We need two more parameters before moving on to the next section, and these are the event key and ACTID key. These values are located in your ActiveCampaign account in the Site Tracking tab under Event Tracking.
You’ll see your Event Key after switching the status on.
To locate the ACTID key, you need to click on the Event Tracking API link, which will open a pop-up window.
Copy the key and the ID, and head back to your Thinkific account.
Again, go to Apps and click on ActiveCampaign Settings. Scroll down to the Events section, where you’ll see two fields: one for your Event key and the other for your ACTID key.
Once you add this information to the respective fields, you can access the available events. You can pass these events to ActiveCampaign and use them to trigger various actions.
Available events in Thinkific include the following:
- New order: When a student buys a course or a bundle
- New enrollment (full): When a student enrolls in a course
- New enrollment (preview): When a user enrolls in a course with a free preview
- Course completed: When a user completes a course
- New sign-up: When a new user creates an account on your Thinkific website
To add events to ActiveCampaign, you must toggle the event button and click Create Events below each event. Once you do that, you’ll see separate events for each course in your ActiveCampaign account.
When these events take place, they are passed over to ActiveCampaign.
So, for example, if a student buys a course, ActiveCampaign will register that event, and you can send them an onboarding email sequence.
Apart from these events, you can also leverage ActiveCampaign’s site-tracking functionality to learn more about your site visitors and their activity. You can use it in several ways:
- If someone visits your checkout page, you can tag those users in ActiveCampaign. And if they don’t complete their purchase, you can send them an email with a discount offer.
- When someone visits your Thinkific community for the first time, you can send them a welcome email and share some tips on how they can get the best results.
Finally, ActiveCampaign-Thinkific integrations allow you to pass custom fields as well. For this to work, you must create custom fields in both Thinkific and ActiveCampaign and name them identically.
By default, ActiveCampaign has a group of fields called General Details.
You need a separate group for your custom fields from Thinkific, and you can add one by going to the Contacts tab and then Fields.
After that, make sure to click on the Contacts tab at the top of the page, and then on the right part of the screen, click Add Group.
To create a group, give it a name, and then you can add custom fields to your new group.
That’s all! You’ve connected Thinkific and ActiveCampaign, and you can now create your first Thinkific-ActiveCampaign marketing automation.
Create an Automation in ActiveCampaign
In this section, we’ll quickly show you how to create marketing automation in ActiveCampaign.
Let’s say you want to send an email campaign to the users who enrolled in a free preview of your Thinkific course. To get started, go to the Automations tab from the left sidebar of your ActiveCampaign account, and then in the upper-right corner of the page, select Create an Automation.
On the following screen, select Start from Scratch → Continue.
You’ll then be prompted to select a trigger, and for Thinkific-based automations, you need to select the trigger Event is Recorded.
After that, choose the correct event, and in this case, you’ll choose Enrolled in Free Trial for your course.
Adding the trigger will start the automation, and the next step is to select a follow-up action, which is to send all these students an email. To send users an email, click the plus sign in the automation builder and select Send an Email from the Sending Options tab.
ActiveCampaign has a flexible email builder with pre-built automations and a plethora of customization options, so you can easily create emails. You can repeat this step to create a series of emails.
Now, to complete the user’s journey, you want to add a goal to your automation. A goal is similar to an event, but it’s used to pull the user to that point in the automation, skipping the previous actions.
In our example, the goal will be a user purchasing the course, and this will prevent them from receiving promotional emails.
To add a goal to your automation, click on the plus sign below the last step in your current automation, and from the Conditions and Workflow tab, select Goal.
To select a goal, click on the drop-down menu in the condition box, then Site and Event Data, and select Event: Product Purchased — Your Course.
At this point, you can add more emails to your automation to onboard your course students. These emails can provide details on how to access the course, how to download the Thinkific mobile app and any other information you deem necessary.
And your automation can end after this sequence. To end the automation, go to Conditions and Workflow, and click End This Automation.
The image below shows how the automation looks with all the steps we’ve added.
The final step is to click on the Active button in the top-right corner of the automation builder, and you’re all set.
You can similarly create automations for other use cases:
- Promoting courses to non-students: The trigger for this will be Thinkific User Created, and you can send them emails. However, you must add a goal to move the users forward when they buy a course.
- Send onboarding emails to new course enrollments: The event for this automation will be Product Purchased — Your Course. Then you can send a welcome sequence.
- Tracking course completion: In this case, the event will be Course Completed — Your Course Name, and then you can send them a congratulations email.
- Sending student announcements: Go to your Campaigns tab, click on A One-Time Email Campaign (Standard), select the recipients (you can define the audience based on enrollments), and add the content to your email. You can schedule the email or send it immediately.
Again, these are only some of the many ways to automate tasks and streamline your communication by connecting ActiveCampaign and Thinkific.
How Else Can You Use ActiveCampaign With Thinkific?
ActiveCampaign is more than just an email marketing platform. Rather, it’s a multi-channel marketing platform that also includes CRM functionality, so it has a variety of use cases.
We’ll briefly cover some other things you can accomplish using this platform.
Communicate With Students via SMS and WhatsApp Messages
ActiveCampaign doesn’t just support email communication, but it also lets you send SMS and WhatsApp messages to your subscribers via third-party integrations.
So, you can send a bulk text SMS to students reminding them about an upcoming live class. Or you can welcome your new students with a WhatsApp message.
Create an ActiveCampaign Form to Collect Leads
Another way to use ActiveCampaign is by creating forms on the platform and using them on your Thinkific site. This allows you to collect leads on Thinkific and send data directly to ActiveCampaign.
The form builder is flexible and allows you to add various types of fields, including custom ones. You can also create different types of forms, including in-line forms and pop-ups.
To add a form to Thinkific, click on the Integrate button in the top-right corner of the form builder and copy the code, which you’ll then paste to a Thinkific page.
Use ActiveCampaign’s CRM Functionality
By leveraging ActiveCampaign’s CRM features, you can effectively manage and nurture your student relationships beyond email campaigns. You can capture important contact information, track interactions, and create personalized experiences based on individual student behaviors and preferences.
Whether it’s sending targeted follow-ups, managing lead scoring, or automating personalized sales processes, ActiveCampaign’s CRM functionality will come in handy.
Conclusion
In this guide, we’ve covered how the ActiveCampaign-Thinkific duo works and shown you some practical examples of how your courses can benefit from this integration.
By connecting these two platforms, you can automate your marketing campaigns and student communication, while keeping it targeted and personalized.
We hope you found this guide useful. If you’re not using Thinkific or ActiveCampaign yet, start a free trial using the buttons below.
And if you have any questions, leave us a comment below.
