Automatically getting direct sales customers onto your email list

Today's tech tip is one I'm nerdy-excited about!

I was having a fun little park/make-up date with my girl Kimberly who sells Younique the other day and she mentioned that it'd be amazing if she could somehow get her customers (for those of you who don't know, Younique is a direct sales make-up company) onto a sequence or welcome email list automatically. My first initial reaction was for her to call her customer support team and ask if there were any integrations for that but then I was like

WAIT!

I know what you can do!

But, of course, I couldn't explain it to her in the middle of a parking lot while my kids were running around – so – it HAD to be my next tech tip.

Now, this is directly related to direct sales companies BUT this can be used for anything that you need to do this for that doesn't integrate with your system (shopify, teachery, teachable, etc are all examples).

Let's get to it.

First, you'll want to create a Zapier account. I've talked about Zapier before but it's basically a “connector” that allows things to work together that don't normally work together.

They have a free account, so just use that.

Now, there are two different ways to go about the next step:

Either — set-up a filter in gmail to find those emails that come with a sale notification (either by subject or email address if it's a different email address than any other emails from the company come from, etc).

OR Just let Zapier filter them for you.

I show both ways in the video (below) but sometimes the filters in gmail go a little wonky if you already have a lot of emails matching that criteria, etc, so that's why I'm showing both ways.

IMPORTANT: If you're setting up a filter in gmail, just make sure you use something that is ONLY present on sales emails. So, if your company sends you notification emails that you got an order from sales@thecompany.com but they also send sale notifications and other things from that, then that won't work. In my example, I use the subject “notification of payment received” because that's the subject on every email I get from payPal when someone pays me by buying a product in my shop (p.s. I don't have to use this method because my shopping cart system natively connects to ConvertKit, but I just used it as an example).

Now, go back to Zapier and create a new Zap, starting with gmail.

This is where you can have Zapier just handle the filtering for you, so you can either select “new email matching search” or “new labeled email”.

In this example, I'm going to use “new email matching search” because I don't want to create a filter in Gmail, or I couldn't get it to work, but, if you did get this to work/do want to use this method, just select “new labeled email”.

From there, just follow the instructions and make sure there's at least one email in your inbox that matches the criteria (either labeled correctly or with the search you select). Note: I used the search criteria that the subject was “notification of payment received”.

It will perform a test and tell you to continue to the next step which is selecting the “action” or the step that happens AFTER Zapier finds an email matching those terms.

So now, select your email service – I use ConvertKit but you can also select MailChimp or any of the other systems they integrate with.

Next, you'll want to follow the instructions for your email provider. With ConvertKit, you'll be able to choose whether you want to add that person to a form (which would then add them to a segment and/or sequence), add a tag to that customer or add them to a sequence. So, if you had a sequence set-up to email someone when they purchase, you'd want to add them to that but if you just want to keep track of them for now (maybe you don't have it set-up yet), you can just add them to a tag.

note: this does not go back and add all previous ones, this will work from this point on with any NEW emails you get.

After that, you'll just follow instructions again and match the fields correctly. You'll want to find the field that matches the email address of the actual customer (not the sender of the email since that's the system usually), etc. Refer to the video tutorial for more on this.

And then, that's it!

Now, Zapier will check for these new emails every so often (the free version of Zapier checks less often than the paid versions) and will add them to the place you selected to add them AUTO-FREAKIN-MATICALLY.

Cool, right?

I know, I know. I'm the best. You can tell me all about it.

For the video version of this post, see below.