Introduction

In this tutorial we explain how you can automatically transfer your buyer data from vivenu to almost any newsletter tool without any programming knowledge. This saves you time on the manual transfer of your buyer data into your newsletter tool and costs for expensive interface programming because vivenu offers all the tools to accomplish this.

Nice to know

Programming expertise needed: none

Duration: 1h

Conclusion

After this tutorial you will be able to build a data exchange between your vivenu account and your newsletter tool without any programming knowledge.

This data exchange ensures that as soon as a new customer is created in your vivenu account, the email address as well as the first and last name of the customer is transferred directly to a newsletter tool of your choice.

Preparations

What you need:

• A Zapier premium account
• Webhooks
• A newsletter tool, e.g. MailChimp
  

Let’s start from the beginning: What is Zapier – and what does it do?

Zapier is a tool that allows you to automate repetitive tasks between two or more applications – all without any prior programming knowledge.

Once an event occurs in one app (in this case, the 'creation' of a new customer in vivenu), Zapier can instruct another app to perform a specific action (in this case, adding the new customer record to your newsletter tool). We will now walk you through every step to automate a data exchange.

Step 1: Set up your Zapier account

To start, you will need a Zapier account. If you don’t have one yet, you can create one under this link for free.

After following the registration steps, Zapier will ask you which apps you want to use. Let’s skip this step for the moment by clicking “Skip” on the bottom right (marked red).

Congratulations, you have successfully created your Zapier account. With that out of the way, you are already halfway there. Now you are automatically forwarded to the Zapier dashboard.

Right in the dashboard is where you can create your first automations. Before we start, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

Automations you build in Zapier are called “Zaps”. On the free account, you can build as many Zaps as you want. Zaps include a number of “tasks” to execute. On the free account, the number of tasks you can execute per month is capped to 1,000 per month. The goal, then, is to build a Zap that uses as few tasks as possible to accomplish an action. The Zap we are going to create will end up executing two tasks.  

In case you need more tasks, you can always upgrade your Zapier plan.

Step 2: Create a Zap

Now for the nitty gritty: creating the Zap for the transfer of your customer data from vivenu to your newsletter provider. To do this, click on the black button "Create Zap" in the top left corner of your Zapier account:

You will be redirected to a new area, where we will start to define the logic of our Zap. Before we start, we will give our Zap a name. You can do this at the top left (marked red). In our case, we call the Zap 'Newsletter Zap':

After you have given your 'Zap' a name we can define and tinker with our logics in the middle section.

First, we need to figure out what exactly should be processed when a certain action occurs. In this case, as soon as a new customer record is created or updated in your vivenu account, this customer record should also be created directly in your newsletter tool.

When a new customer is created through a purchase, the customer's record is created in vivenu and directly automatically created in the newsletter tool as well.

Now that we know exactly what our goal is, we need to think about how to achieve our goal.

Step 3: Create Webhooks

Servers and services need to find a way to communicate with each other so that they know how to process a particular set of data when it is transferred from A to B. This means that we need to find a way to inform a service when a new customer is created in your vivenu account.

To accomplish this, we work with so-called 'webhooks'. Webhooks are a method of communication between servers: they allow to inform another server that a certain event has occurred in its own server, which in turn triggers a certain reaction from the other server.

The above diagram illustrates what webhooks do in our project: When a new customer is created in vivenu, the vivenu server should inform the newsletter server that a new customer has been created and tell the newsletter server the data from that customer. The newsletter server will listen to what the vivenu server has to say and then process this information - so it will also create the customer.

So we know what tool we need at Zapier: Webhooks. In the search field of our first trigger we search for "Webhooks" and select it:

Now Zapier asks what type of webhook we want to use. Let’s select “Catch Hook”:

Then click on “continue”.

Now Zapier displays a URL address where the information should be sent when an action occurs (in this case, when a new customer is created in vivenu). Copy this URL.

Now log into your vivenu account. In the menu bar on the left of the screen, find and click on “Webhooks”. Alternatively, use this link.


Tip: If the Webhooks module is not visible in the menu bar, the module is not yet activated for your account. Please contact your customer experience specialist and ask them to activate the module for you.

Now click on 'open actions' and create a new webhook. A sidebar will open where you will make the following settings:

• Give the webhook a name
• Copy the link you received from Zapier into the field provided and click on 'create webhook'.

After the webhook has been created, click on it to make further settings. First you activate the webhook via the toggle. Now there are different 'events' you can click on. Here you select the events 'customer.created' and 'customer.updated'. This means that when a customer is created or updated in your account, our server should communicate this to an external server.

Don’t forget to click “Save”. Congratulations, you have successfully integrated your vivenu customer data with your newsletter tool.