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Automate your Marketing with Webhooks
Today’s sophisticated customers interact with your company in many different ways: over the phone, on your website, through social networks, and using email. Keeping up with these sophisticated customers is difficult, especially for marketers on small teams or those with lots of customers.
At Performable we’re trying to solve this problem with our automated marketing feature called Engage. Engage allows you to market to your customers based on what they have actually done on your website and channels. Say, for example, a customer has added items to a shopping cart but then abandoned their purchase. You might email them a 10% off coupon to use if they return to complete their purchase. Or perhaps a customer has mentioned you on Twitter…you might want to respond in kind and send a message back.
We first created Engage to work with email: you can create rules based on any site activity you want and send emails to those folks who fit the criteria. (see examples of email automation) But emails aren’t the only thing you can trigger with Engage…we recently added the ability to trigger webhooks.
Think of webhooks as a simple message. When you submit a webhook, all you’re doing is sending a message somewhere…but instead of sending a message to a person, you’re sending it to a web site or application. In other words, when you send a webhook you’re telling a software program to do something. Automating webhooks is therefore extremely powerful…lots of work can be done by software on your behalf.
Webhooks are a really powerful way to automate your marketing, but it’s not always easy to know how to use them or what to use them for. So we’ve compiled a list of some really cool webhooks that our customers here at Performable have created.
- Push In-app Notifications: When someone does something interesting on your website, send a push notification to them through an iOS native app. (This is what happens when you request a free sample chapter on the Amazon website…they send the chapter to your portable device)
- Send SMS Alerts: When a hot lead returns to your pricing page, send a text message to a sales team member.
- Auto-Follow: Auto-follow users who follow your account on Twitter (uses Performable pre-integration with Twitter)
- Trigger Offers: Trigger a special on-site offer for qualified returning customers.
- Follow Up: When someone leaves a support ticket (Performable integrates with Zendesk, Assistly, and Tender) leave them a voicemail saying that their support ticket has been received.
- Twitter to Facebook Posting: Post to someone’s Facebook Wall thanking them for mentioning you on Twitter.
- Internal Chat Alerts: Send alerts to your company’s internal chat stream that lets employees know something interesting/important has happened.
Those are just some of the ways you can use webhooks in your marketing. They are extremely flexible. In fact, most of the ways people are using webhooks are unique to their situation. We’re looking forward to all the interesting ways to use webhooks that you’ll dream up next!
