How can I send my guest contacts to email marketing platforms?

Without an integration, there are two ways you can import data to a third-party software.

We will use Constant Contact as an example to explore these, but any email marketing or communication automation platform will follow a similar process.

Wherewolf has a direct integration with Mailchimp.

Option One: Import via CSV

If your campaigns aren’t time-sensitive or are just a one-off campaign, then you can simply upload your guests via Excel or CSV.

This gives you the most control over your data – you can use your filters in Wherewolf, as well as the results of the export, to refine your audience as narrowly as required.

How To Export from Wherewolf

• Here’s how you can download your data in Wherewolf. 

Here’s a couple of important steps you can take in Google Sheets or Excel:

If using the Email Opt-in feature in Wherewolf (i.e. a guest needs to check a box below their email address in their waiver to opt into additional marketing communications), you’ll need to remove guests that have chosen to opt-out. This can be achieved by finding the Email Opt-in column and removing the guests with “no'' and blank rows.
Delete any unnecessary columns – details such as the device a guest used to complete their waiver or their medical conditions, are unlikely to be beneficial to your campaign.

How To Import Into Constant Contact

You’ll need to make sure Constant Contact has a corresponding custom field for the data you’re exporting from Wherewolf. For example, if you want to import the date/time a customer last visited you, you’ll need to create a custom field (scroll down to “Manage all custom fields through the Contacts tab”) and title it something like “Last Visit”.

Reformatting your Wherewolf Data:
Constant Contact only accepts birthdays in the format of MM/DD, so we’ll need to reformat the date field.

One way to achieve this is by highlighting the Age column, click Format -> Number -> Date/Time (which tells Sheets/Excel that this is a Date/Time column). Repeat the same steps again, except this time click custom data/time format, and delete everything except the MM/DD including the extra punctuation (e.g. “/”).

Redownload the sheet as an Excel/CSV file, and follow the steps to import data to your email marketing tool.

Option Two: Zapier

Zapier integrates two platforms in real time, which means your guests can instantly be added to your email list for birthday campaigns or automated follow-up emails. 

Zapier acts as a connection point between Wherewolf and email marketing platforms such as Constant Contact.

Zapier charges per number of steps it takes for you to extract, reformat, and import your data. For example, with the connection below between Wherewolf and Constant Contact, there are 5 steps or “zaps' that are required to import a contact.

Steps To Import

Like above, you’ll need to make sure Constant Contact has a corresponding custom field for the data you’re exporting from Wherewolf. For example, if you want to import the date/time a customer last visited you, you’ll need to create a custom field (scroll down to “Manage all custom fields through the Contacts tab”) and title it something like “Last Visit”.

• Create a new Zap in Zapier and follow these setup instructions to start pushing data from Wherewolf. 
• Once Zapier and your Wherewolf account are connected, you’ll need to select an Event under App & Event as a starting point for your Zap. In this case we’re going to select “Guest Created/Updated Webhook”.
• Under Trigger, you’ll need to whitelist the fields which Wherewolf will be sending to Zapier and your email marketing tool. Crucially, you’ll need to make sure the marketing property is whitelisted, as we can use this property to filter out guests who chose not to opt in to your email marketing communications in their waiver. 

By clicking Test and find new records, you can see how a record will be imported to Zapier and make decisions on how to reformat your data (discussed further below).

Filters

The next step in your Zapier chain may be to filter out any guests that chose not to opt in to your email marketing campaigns. You can achieve this by adding a Filter by Zapier step. The filter should only allow the Zap to continue if the Marketing property which you whitelisted above contains the text string “email”. If the field is blank, it means a guest has chosen not to opt in to marketing communications. E.g:

Adding to Constant Contact

The final step is to add an Event which creates a contact in your email marketing tool.

Under Account, you’ll need to sign in to your Constant Contact account and match the properties you whitelisted from Wherewolf to the properties in your email marketing tool. If the properties don’t exist yet, you’ll need to create custom fields (see above).

Reformatting Data

Some data needs to be reformatted using Zapier’s Reformatting. For example, Zapier can only receive a full name from Wherewolf, whereas Contact Contact separates First and Last names.

Under Action on your Create Contact in Constant Contact step, when matching and inserting the whitelisted fields from Wherewolf, you’ll need to click Format Data.

As mentioned above, Zapier can only receive a full name from Wherewolf, whereas Contact Contact separates First and Last names. After clicking "format data", an instruction box will appear – you could simply add the instruction "Extract first word", for the first word to be saved as the customer's first name. 

Continue and repeat this for all of the steps that need to be reformatted. To see how the data comes from Wherewolf, click on the “test” section of your first Zap step:

Then check how Constant Contact wants to receive that data via Zapier under the Create Contact in Constant Contact step on the Action tab.

You can see that birthdays need to be divided into Birthday Month and Birthday Day. Wherewolf can send this birthday field as MM/DD, so your reformatting step for month would look something like “Extract first number before / ”. These reformatting steps are powered by AI, so you literally describe what you’re trying to achieve.

The reformatting steps will then appear in the Zapier string. You can click on each one and Test the Output to make sure what you’ve described to the reformatting steps is what you wanted to achieve.

Click Test in your final step and check your email marketing tool to see if the data has been imported correctly. When you’ve completed your testing, click Publish and your guests will be imported from Wherewolf whenever they complete a waiver!