Isaac shows how to build automated renewal reminders using ThriveCart, Zapier, and ActiveCampaign to reduce churn. He sets up workflows that track renewal dates and send emails before subscriptions expire, with filters to skip customers who've already canceled.
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In this video, I'll show you how to automatically remind your members of their upcoming subscription bill so that you can avoid refund requests and opted customers. If you want to know more, stay tuned. If you're new to this channel, my name is Isaac from Opter.co, where we've helped over 50 companies automate more than 500,000 tasks using low-code tools like Zapier. And I started this YouTube channel to share the work that we do and help education and service-based businesses focus on what they're good at while letting automation do the rest. I'll be using ThriveCart and ActiveCampaign as the tools for this example, but know that the same concepts can be applied to other shopping cart software or email marketing software. With that said, let's get right into the video. Okay, so here we are. And within ThriveCart, we've already created a testing product and we've added both a monthly and an annual subscription. The reason I do that is because we're going to want to separate and segment those groups of people to only send reminders to the annual. Most of the clients we work with don't send renewal reminders to monthly subscribers just because it's not That's not enough time and it becomes more of an annoyance than helpful. But for example, if you have quarterly subscriptions, if you have subscriptions that renew every 6 months or every year, that's when it comes in very handy to send those reminders because that's a long enough period of time for people to forget. Let's go into Zapier and let's start creating this Zap. This should be a quick one, a lot quicker than the other ones we've built. Let's name it accordingly. Let's call it Workflow 6. Renewal reminders. And in this case, we're going to use ThriveCart as a trigger. We're going to look for rebill payment. This triggers every time a rebill is paid. Okay. And here's where the pricing options come in handy because you're going to select the specific product that we are in this case testing with and the specific pricing option that you want to use for the renewal reminders. In this case, we already said we're not going to use monthly. We're going to email monthly subscribers. us about the renewal on the annual. Of course, you would pick yours depending on your particular situation. Let's click on test this trigger and some sample data will come in. We'll click on continue. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to ActiveCampaign, create an update contact. And here we're going to select the specific email address of this particular member. And within renewal date, very importantly, There is a next payment date that came from that ThriveCart trigger that we're going to put right here. Let's click on continue and let's test that particular action. We can see here the contact has been updated and that's essentially everything we will be doing within Zapier. I'll tell you, this was going to be a lot simpler. All right. So just to verify that that contact was actually updated, we can see the renewal date right here. And in case you don't have this renewal date already in place, the only thing you have to do is to go on manage fields within any contact within your ActiveCampaign account. You will add a field and you will add that renewal date. That's like a date type of field. And that would allow you to see that field that came up in Zapier and fill it out as we did just right now. What we're going to want to do now is create the automation within ActiveCampaign that's going to use this as the base to send people the renewal reminders. So let's do that now. We're going to click here on create an automation. We're going to start from scratch and click on continue. Okay, so here we're going to select a trigger, which as we said is the date-based trigger. As you can see here, it's going to show you all of the custom fields that are dates from contacts. And here is where we'll be able to find the renewal date. We're going to select that. And rather than on, we're going to say before. What we're telling the system here is that when to current date it's X days before the renewal date, we want you to start this automation. Most of our clients like to use 7 or 14 days. So essentially giving people 1 or 2 weeks of a heads up so that they know that upcoming subscription bill is almost due. Here you would select year, month, and day and click on Add Start. Now from here, technically you would add emails and stuff like that, but something I do recommend is that you add some sort of filter because here's the thing, there's probably a segment of people that even though the renewal date is, say, next week or in 2 weeks, they might have already canceled. Okay, so what you're gonna wanna do is to select a tag similar to the following. And I already did this in advance, but it's a tag where you'll specify that this person's cancellation, it's pending, meaning their cancellation is coming soon. So I'm gonna go ahead and save that. And actually, that leads me to the fact that we will have to create another SAP to tag those people. Accordingly, this will be another step we have to do that should be relatively short. So let's go ahead and do that real quick. Let's just call it Workflow 6B. Here you select Recurring Payments Cancelled, and you'll simply select the specific product and the specific pricing option. That it's relevant for this. So similar to what we did in the last step here, I'll click test the trigger. And similar to the other workflow, we'll simply have an action that's related to ActiveCampaign. We're going to update that contact and we're going to add that specific tag that we just that we just saw. Here we're gonna select the email address of the person, and here we're gonna add the tag, continue, and test action. Gonna head and publish that tab. So just as a summary, here's what's happening. Whenever people pay successfully, we are going to add that renewal date to the contact. But if at any point they cancel, we are gonna add a specific tag that's gonna allow us to not email them about the renewal reminders because their cancellation is pending. Okay. So at this point, the only thing you would have to do from here is that if those people are not, have not canceled, then you would go ahead and send the particular emails that is going to tell those people, hey, your subscription is coming. Make sure that, you know, just giving you a heads up, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, I'm not, I don't have authority to tell you what to write about in that email. But just essentially tell people that that's coming. I also encourage you to suggest to them, like, if they want to cancel, make sure to reply or to go ahead and cancel manually so that if they intended to cancel, they don't bother your support team later on. That's essentially it about this particular workflow. So thanks for watching. If you found this information helpful, consider subscribing to our channel for more tips and tutorials on how to automate business processes and how to use Zapier. And if you want more right now, check out the playlist in the description. for all the key automations that your subscription business needs, because we've covered about 5 of them, including this one. So thanks everyone for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.
