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 the second post, we used WebMerge to create a personalized quote. In this epic post, I'll show you how to use Zapier to make magic – specifically to:

Capture the lead from Unbounce
Send it to WebMerge to create our quote
Email your lead with the quote and BCC the rep

Finally, we'll dream a little about how to take this workflow to greater heights. Let's go!

I'm not going to go into great detail about how to use Zapier or the concepts of triggers and actions. They do a fine enough job of that here. That said, this is a pretty simple Zap (workflow) so if you want to point-and-click along, you'll do just fine. Let's go!

1. Set up your trigger

Every Zap begins with a trigger. What action needs to happen before we start slinging data around? In this case, the trigger is a new submission on our Unbounce landing page. I should mention, using Unbounce and Zapier together requires a Premium Zapier subscription. Those start at $13.75/mo and it's well worth it.

After selecting Unbounce as your trigger, you'll be guided through a couple of more steps. If this is your first time using Unbounce with Zapier, you'll be asked to connect the two accounts. Don't worry, Zapier walks you through the whole thing.

The most important part of setting up your trigger is to make sure that you select the correct landing page. In this case, our MiniTunes page.

2. Format the date

By now you've likely made a test submission on your landing page and seen how it will appear to Zapier.

2018-02-14T22:04:36.894Z

That's not going to look right in a quote, so before we start passing the Unbounce submission to WebMerge, we'll use Formatter by Zapier in our second step to make it more readable.

When you get to the Choose Action step in configuring Formatter, choose Date/Time and continue. The next screen is going to look a little hairy, but don't panic. We're only going to make a couple of selections here.

Under Transform select Format
Under Values > Input click icon at the right end of the field and choose the Created At value from Unbounce.
Under To Format choose MMMM DD YYYY. You should see a preview of what the formatted date will look like.

You can skip the rest of the options and click through the next couple of steps in Zapier to test. Then it's time to add our next action in the Zap.

3. Merge the document

To add a new action in the Zap, click the big + icon below the Formatter step in the left column of the page. This time, choose WebMerge as the Action app.

On the next screen choose the Create Document Merge action and click continue. Like the Unbounce step, you'll be asked to connect Zapier and your WebMerge account at this time. At the next screen, do the following:

Choose your WebMerge document from the list of document.
Set Download File to Yes.
Set Date to the value we created in the Formatter step by clicking the icon at the far right of that field and selecting Date/Time > Created At.
Similarly, set the AE and Email fields to the appropriate values. These will come from the New Form Submissionstep from Unbounce. You'll notice that Zapier will preview the value from the test submission which makes it easy to ensure you're selecting the right value.

Also, you'll see that your Rep's email address has it's own value. That's the magic of WebMerge's Field Map feature from our last post. Cool, huh?

4. Send merged document to your lead and rep

Now to insert the final action in our Zap. We need to email our generated quote to the lead and BCC their rep. There are a number of services that you can use to accomplish this:

Gmail
Email by Zapier
SendGrid
Mandrill
a bunch of others...

I like to use Mandrill (by MailChimp) to send transactional emails so that's what I'll be using below. Click the big + icon underneath the WebMerge step and choose Mandrill.

Choose Send Email for the action and set up your template like so:

Here's the idea behind each of these settings:

From Name - Use your rep's name from the Unbounce step. It's a good idea to include the name to help ensure your email makes it to the lead's inbox instead of a junk folder.
From Email - Use the rep's email address from the WebMerge step. That's the only step where we create that email address.
Reply-To - Again, we'll use the rep's email from the WebMerge step.
To Email - Use the email address of the lead captured from the Unbounce page.
Bcc Address - Use your rep's email. This way, when a lead receives a quote your rep will be aware of it. I've included myself as well so that I can keep tabs.
Subject - You'll see I've included the lead's first name in the subject line. Also helps with email delivery and open rate.

Finally, you need to create your email. The most important field to add to the email is the URL from the WebMerge step. This is a link to the generated file.

You can also put any other information from further up the workflow into this email. In my case I use the lead's first name. The HTML that I use for the email is below along with how it looks in my inbox:

<p>Hello {{32277769__form_data__first_name}},</p><p>Thank you for your interest in the MiniTunes wireless speaker! It's a clever little device that you have to see to believe and the build quality is great!</p><p>If you'd like to see what your brand would look like on this product, send me your logo and we'll create a free virtual mockup for you. If you'd like to see a sample in person, I can get you one for $13.95 and free shipping. Let me know if  you want one and I'll shoot you an invoice.</p><p><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr><td style="text-align:center;"><table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tr><td bgcolor="#6699cc" style="padding: 12px 18px 12px 18px; -webkit-border-radius:3px; border-radius:3px" align="center" class="mobile-button"><a href="{{32277771__url}}" target="_blank" style="font-size: 16px; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-weight: normal; color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none; display: inline-block;">Download Quote</a></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></p>

That's it!

Step through the rest of the steps, test and everything should work well. The last step is to Turn your Zap on and start sharing your landing page. Nice work!

Bonus Actions

This is a pretty simple workflow. But what if you wanted to do more? You can easily chain more actions below your Email step using one or many of the 1,100+ apps that Zapier supports. Here's some ideas to get you started:

Add/Update Your Email List
Use the information collected on your landing page to add new contacts to your mailing list or update old ones. You could even create a list segment for each Account Executive at your company and, based on the lead's selection on the landing page, assign them to that segment. NOTE: Please be aware of email best practices and spam regulations.

Update Your CRM
Create or update a record in your CRM. Make a task to follow-up on the quote. Heck, you could even automate the followup with Zapier.

Add an Event on Your Calendar
Make a reminder to follow up on your favorite calendar app.

Generate a Sales Order or PO
Use WebMerge again to generate a sales order or PO to have on-hand when when this quote converts into a sale!

Have a Party
Use IFTTT and a webhook to make your lights flash every time a new lead comes in.

I hope you enjoyed this series as much as I did writing it. Stay tuned for more content like this in 2018.