The transactional email campaign gives you the possibility to survey your contacts based on events triggered in your Chargebee account.
One of the most common scenarios is to send a survey after a new subscription is created, or activated.
Follow the step-by-step tutorial to learn how to configure a transactional email campaign in Retently, and how to connect it to Chargebee events using a webhook link.
Set up a transactional email campaign in Retently
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.
Assign a survey template
In the campaign editor, start with choosing the survey template that your contacts, 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.
Filter your audience
As a rule, your campaign audience will be defined by the Chargebee event and only the contacts that trigger the event will be surveyed in this campaign.
However, you can apply an additional layer of filters to narrow down your audience by adding some extra filters in Retently and survey only the contacts that match a specific segment.
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.
Edit the survey schedule
The first thing to do in the Trigger section is to specify how your surveys will be triggered. Since we are configuring this campaign for Chargebee, choose this service from the drop-down menu.
NOTE: It’s important to select the needed service because the content on the Setup page will adjust based on your choice. For our goal, we will need a webhook link that will be automatically generated and available for you to copy in the Setup section.
Next, you have three options that will help you configure how and when your surveys will be sent to your campaign’s audience:
Sample audience: Choose what percentage of the triggered events will result in a survey being sent. When switched off, all triggered events will result in a survey.
Delay survey: Send the survey at a later date from the triggered event. When switched off, the survey will be sent immediately.
Throttle survey: Throttle helps avoid over-surveying customers. If a customer has been surveyed recently in this campaign, then any new triggered surveys will be discarded until a specific number of days have passed since the last survey was received. When switched off, customers will be surveyed in this campaign every time they trigger an event. This option won’t affect the schedule of other campaigns.
Reminders
Reminders will help increase your survey response rate. For instance, if a contact 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 contacts 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.
Alerts
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.
Autoreplies
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.
Export
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.
Setup
In the Setup section, you will find a unique webhook link that will be used to receive contact data from Chargebee and trigger the transactional survey. Make sure to keep this link handy because you will need it soon when configuring the Chargebee event.
NOTE: If the webhook link is not displayed, then go back to the Trigger section and make sure that Chargebee is selected in your services drop-down menu.
Activating your campaign
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 a Chargebee event. We will do this next!
Set up Chargebee webhook notifications to trigger your survey in Retently
Chargebee webhook notifications let you notify external systems about an event that occurs in Chargebee. ticket's status change.
To create a new webhook notification, you will need to access the Settings > Configure Chargebee page in your account.
On the settings page, find the "API Keys and Webhooks" section, and access the "Webhooks" page.
On the "Webhooks" page, click the "Add Webhook" button and a modal window will appear.
In the webhook notification builder configure the fields as described below:
Webhook Name: Give your notification a name that will make it easily identifiable later on.
Webhook URL: Add the Retently webhook link from the campaign's Trigger or Setup section.
Protect webhook URL with basic authentication: Keep this option OFF.
API version: Choose "Version 2".
Events to Send: Choose one or more events. Check below in this articles the list of supported events.
Set this as primary: Keep this option OFF.
Exclude card information from webhook call: Set this option ON.
Basically, your setup should look similar to this:
Retently's Chargebee integration supports all Chargebee webhook events that include the "customer" object (which means the customer's Chargebee details).
You can check Chargebee's official documentation on webhook events, and if an event returns the "customer" object, then you can definitely use it. Here's an example of a supported event as it's displayed in Chargebee's documentation:
Or you can simply choose an event from the list below:
Subscription Created
Subscription Created With Backdating
Subscription Activated
Subscription Activated With Backdating
Subscription Reactivated
Subscription Reactivated With Backdating
Subscription Cancelled
Subscription Cancelled With Backdating
The next part is important as it's related to choosing what contact data you will send to Retently when a ticket is updated. We will cover this in the next chapter.
Manage contact properties
When one or more selected events will be triggered in Chargebee, by default, Retently will accept and automatically map the following data:
Contact's email address
Contact's first and last names
Contact's company name
Additionally, there's a set of other properties that you can import to Retently along with your contact when an event is fired in Chargebee, specifically:
Plan ID
Billing period unit
Plan amount
Subscription status
MRR
NOTE: Please keep in mind that you will be able to import these additional properties only if the Chargebee event that you have selected returns the "subscription" object (information about the customer's subscription). You can check Chargebee's official documentation on webhook events, and see if the event that you're planning to use returns the "subscription" object.
If you need to send one or more of these properties to Retently, you will need to create them in Retently first, based on the instructions below:
In your Retently account, access the Attributes page, To create a new one, click the "Create property" button.
A popup will ask you to write the name of the new property and choose the type of value that will be stored in the new property. Use the property names and property types as follows:
cb_plan_id (property type: text)
cb_billing_period_unit (property type: text)
cb_plan_amount (property type: number)
cb_status (property type: text)
cb_mrr (property type: number)
Assign a property to a customer
After you have created the property or properties, they will be imported automatically along with your contact when a new event is triggered in Chargebee.
Update the value of an assigned customer property
The values in a property that is already assigned to a contact will be updated automatically the next time your event will be triggered.
Unassign customer property
Every time an event is triggered, the contact's properties will be updated with the new values that will be sent via the Retently webhook. However, if no value is available for a particular property, then the property will be unassigned from the contact's record in Retently.
Note: If you want to create more transactional campaigns, you have to add the new webhooks to the Chargebee events.