This post continues my series on automating landing pages. We're building a product highlight landing page where:

The visitor clicks a call-to-action button and fills out a form, indicating their account rep.
After submitting the form, the user receives an email from their account rep with a download link for their quote.
The quote is personalized and dated for the client with the account rep's contact information.
The account rep is BCCed on the quote email so that they know they've got an interested party.

This all takes place without the rep's involvement. All they've got to do is share the landing page with their contacts via email, social media, etc.

In the first post I showed you how to build your landing page with Unbounce. In this post I'll show you how to use WebMerge to create your dynamic document. The final post in this series will show you how I wire things up with Zapier.

What is WebMerge?

WebMerge allows you to easily collect data, populate a document and send it to any contact automatically. WebMerge supports Word, PowerPoint and Excel formats as well as PDF or documents created directly in WebMerge.

Thanks to Zapier, you can feed it information from pretty much anywhere and do many things with the resulting document. We're going to use it to generate a personalized quote for our landing page lead but WebMerge is capable of so much more and is a great automation tool to have in your belt.

1. Setting up your document

Before we log in to WebMerge, we should build our quote document. I'm going to be building this document in Word. This part is super simple. Basically you want to determine what "merge fields" your document will have. In this case I'm going to create fields for:

DATE
COMPANY
AE (account executive)
EMAIL

The DATE field will be the date that the quote is generated, the COMPANY field will be the name of the company specified on our landing page's CTA form, the AE field will be the name of the account executive specified on the same form and the EMAIL field will be the email address of the AE.

To create a merge field in our document, all you do is insert a special tag into your document where you want the merge to happen. For example, where you want the date to appear, type . Notice the opening bracket, dollar sign, tag name and closing bracket. So our merge fields become:

Our finished document looks something like this (note the placement of the merge fields):

That's it. The document is done. Now we're ready to upload it to WebMerge.

2. Upload and configure in WebMerge

Jump over to WebMerge. You can try it for free. Click the New Document button and give your document a name.

When asked to choose your document type, click on Office Document. Now upload the Word document we created in the previous step. Before you click the Create Document button, un-check the option to automatically create an email delivery. Email delivery will be handled in Zapier.

Now you can configure the document's settings. Here you can set:

The document name
The output format (I use PDF)
Set the suffix for the document name (eg. datetime, or one of your merge field values)
The timezone
and Status (I just leave mine active)

On the next screen you can test your document bu giving each merge field a value. Go ahead and fill those fields out with some dummy info and click the Test Document button. If you created your Word document correctly, the resulting file should have all merge fields filled in.

You can disregard the Delivery and Merge tabs. But let's go back to the Settings tab to make some magic happen.

The one thing we have not accounted for in this document is that our Unbounce page does not send the email address of the AE to WebMerge, just the AE's name. So we need to add some logic here so that WebMerge knows what value to give the Email field. In the right sidebar, click on the grey Advanced Settings button and check Use Field Map for custom integrations. Then click the Save Settings button in the main column of the page.

Now you have a new tab up top called Field Map. Click on that tab.

In the Email field you want to type something like:

{if $AE == "Not yet!"}request@robynpromo.com{elseif $AE == "Eric Granata"}eric@robynpromo.com

All this means is, if the AE merge field has the value "Not yet!" then make the value of the email field "request@robynpromo.com" otherwise if the AE field has the value "Eric Granata" then set the email field to "eric@robynpromo.com." If you want to add more AEs to this, just keep adding...

{elseif $AE == "Matt Damon"}matt@robynpromo.com

...between the last elseif statement and the closing tag.

Your Field Map screen should look something like this:

Go ahead and try testing your document again. This time, make sure you use one of the values in your AE field that is included in the little script we wrote for the Email field. If all works correctly, you should see the correct email address rendered for the AE.

At this point you may be wondering where the AE field gets its value from. That value will be set by the user when they submit the form on the Unbounce landing page we made last time.

All will be made clear in the next and final post in this series. It's going to be a doozie so give me some time to write it (I'm also moving this week, so there's that). In it we'll cover:

Where and how the data moves through the workflow.
Building a multi-action Zap with Zapier
Using Mandrill to send our email
And some swell ideas for further building this automation.

I hope this helps you. Thanks for reading!