Follow the step by step tutorial to learn how to configure a transactional email campaign in Retently, and how to connect it to events triggered in other apps, using Zapier.

To get started follow this short step-by-step tutorial:

To create a new campaign, go to the Campaigns page, choose a survey metric (NPS, CSAT, CES, 5-STAR), next select email as your survey channel, and from the dropdown list with campaign types, select the Transactional option.

In the campaign editor, start with choosing the survey template that your customers, who match this campaign, will receive in their Inbox. You can select an existing email template, or create and customize a new one.

Make sure the survey template has your company’s logo, otherwise you will not be able to select and use it.

When everything looks ok, hit the Assign button to add it as the main survey template in your campaign.

As a rule, your campaign audience will be defined by the events triggered in another app, which you will be tracking using Zapier, and only the customers that trigger the event will be surveyed in this campaign.

However, you can apply an additional layer of filters to narrow down your audience.

Let’s assume that you have configured a Zapier automation with another CRM service and you have set up an event to trigger every time you have a new customer, and you are also storing their country. Using Zapier, you will be able to pass the customer’s country as a tag in Retently, and this would allow you to add some extra filters in your campaign’s audience and survey only customers that live in a particular country.

Your audience filters would look as in the example below:

In most cases, there is no need to adjust the audience filters at all. But, if you have to, we recommend checking our article to learn more about the audience segmentation in campaigns or you can request assistance from our support team.

The first thing to do in the Schedule section is to specify how your surveys will be triggered. Since we are configuring this campaign to be used with Zapier, choose this service from the drop-down menu.

Next, you have three options that will help you configure how and when your surveys will be sent to your campaign’s audience:

Reminders will help increase your survey response rate. For instance, if a customer didn't respond to your survey within three days after opening it, our system will send them a reminder email survey. This way, you will be reaching your customers once more when they might be more likely to answer the survey.

Moreover, you can choose a different survey template for your reminders, with different wording or style, that might be more appealing to your survey respondents. You can create a new email survey template in the Templates section of your campaign or on the Templates page.

In the Alerts section, you can create custom notifications and keep track of your progress.

When creating a new notification you will be asked to choose one or more event types you want to be notified about, the notification frequency (immediately, daily, or weekly digest), and the channel (email or Slack).

Don't forget to save your alerts and make sure they are enabled.

In this section, you can create a set of email auto-responders meant to engage with contacts who did not leave any text feedback, left a Detractor score, or simply ask Promoters to leave their reviews on specific platforms and spread word-of-mouth. Autoresponders will be sent to respondents with a random delay between 5 and 60 minutes from the moment they've answered the survey.

Use webhooks to send requests to web applications every time an event occurs. Webhooks allow you to send HTTP requests to another web application every time an event is triggered, be it new feedback, a bounced survey, or an unsubscribed contact. Don't forget to save each created webhook and make sure they're enabled.

In the Notifications section, you can create custom notifications and keep track of your progress.

When creating a new notification you will be asked to choose one or more event types you want to be notified about, the notification frequency (immediately, daily or weekly digest), and the channel (email or Slack).

Don't forget to save your notifications and make sure they are enabled.

In the Notifications section, you can create custom notifications and keep track of your progress.

When creating a new notification you will be asked to choose one or more event types you want to be notified about, the notification frequency (immediately, daily or weekly digest), and the channel (email or Slack).

Don't forget to save your notifications and make sure they are enabled.

In the Setup section, you will find a short guide to help you get started with Zapier automation, which is basically a shorter version of the tutorial that you are currently reading.

The final step is to activate the transactional email campaign by switching the toggle button ON.

No surveys will be sent just yet because we haven’t connected the campaign to another app’s events using Zapier yet. We will do this next!

Access your Zapier account and create a new zap. Start with choosing a Trigger app where you are tracking your customers’ events. For this tutorial, we will be using Shopify as an example.

Next, you'll have to choose a specific trigger you want to track, such as New paid order.

The next steps will ask you to connect your Shopify account and test your trigger. Once you've done that, move to the Action section and choose Retently as your action app.

You will be given a few possible actions, but the one that you need is "Create customer and send survey".

This action means that every time a contact fires the trigger in the first app, which in our case is New paid order in Shopify, then they will be automatically created in Retently and surveyed. However, if you already have that customer in Retently, then they will simply get surveyed without actually being added the second time.

On the next step, you will be asked to connect your Retently account. Click on Add a new account and a pop-up window will ask you to authorize Retently.

The next step will ask you to map your Zap template.

The first thing you should do is choose an active transactional email campaign from your Retently account (ideally, it would be the campaign that you have configured at the beginning of this tutorial). All the customers that will fire the trigger in the first app, will receive a transactional survey in the selected campaign.

Next, map the email address of your contacts. When clicking the email input field, you will be given a list of properties that were pulled from the first app. Find the Email property and select it.

IMPORTANT: Retently has only one required filed - email address. If your customer doesn't have an email address assigned, then they will not be imported to your Retently account, as the email has the same role as a unique ID. All the other properties are optional.

Feel free to map other properties as well such as name, company, country, etc. You will be able to use them for a further audience and survey data segmentation in Retently.

By default, Zapier will display a list with basic customer properties that you can map. However, if you're missing a particular property (e.g., Subscription, MRR, Signup date), then you can create it as a custom property in Retently.

Read our tutorial on creating custom properties.

Once the custom property is created, back in Zapier, click the "Refresh fields" button and the new properties will be available for mapping.

Assigning and updating properties:

And finally, you'll have to test your Action step to make sure that everything works fine, and enable your Zap so that it runs automatically next time.

Note: In order to perform the test, Zapier will send an actual survey to a test customer from your trigger app. To make sure that no real customers will be surveyed during the test, please filter your audience in your transactional campaign. Learn more about this.