Zapier Recipe: Send a welcome email to new users

Last updated: April 08, 2024 12:34

The Pendo Platform-Zapier integration is currently in beta and early access is controlled by an invitation link. Detailed instructions on setting up the integration and the invitation link are in the Zapier Integration Overview article.

This recipe is intended to walk through the steps of using Pendo and Zapier to build a very basic welcome email for new users. It can be used as a foundation for building a multi-email onboarding and education campaign.

Configure Pendo

Create a report

To get started, hop into Pendo and navigate to the Visitors section. If you’ve already created visitor reports, your screen will show a list of reports. Click Create Visitor Report.

Give your report a name. Something like Zapier - Welcome Email should work.

Then click on the segment dropdown to reveal the option to create a new segment.

Note: if you want to leverage Zapier with account reports, you can do that too! Create your report using the same process as above and then we’ll configure the Zapier side slightly different. More on that later.

Create a segment

Now you’ll create your segment to define who is considered a new user who should receive the welcome email.

Name your segment something like Welcome Email.

Next you’ll add the following rule: Visitor First Visit - Within Last - 1 - Days

This tells Pendo to grab anyone who logs into your product within the last 24 hours, and throw them in a report for Zapier to pull from.

Click Create Segment to save the segment.

Set your Date Range to Last 30 Days

The last item that needs attention is the report columns. Any columns you include here will be available in Zapier. By default, the visitorID will always be included. If your visitorIDs are in the form of an email, you’re good to go. If not, make sure you add a column that represents the visitor’s email address because you’ll need it when creating the email template in Zapier.

When you’re done, click Create Report.

Tip: Do you segment your paying customers from your trial customers? Should they receive the same welcome email? You can add rules to the segment to create highly targeted cohorts and then build multiple different welcome emails specific to each group.

Configure Zapier

Set up trigger

Log into your Zapier account and then click Make a Zap.

For the trigger step, search and select Pendo.

Next you’ll be asked to select a Pendo trigger. Right now, Pendo only supports one trigger so it should automatically select the default trigger. If it doesn’t auto-select, click Visitor in Report and then click Save + Continue.

Here is where you’ll select the Report ID you want to associate with this zap. You’ll be looking for the report ID with the associated name Zapier - Welcome Email (or whatever you decided to name your report).

IF you want to use an account report here, you’ll select custom value for the report Id, and then copy and paste the associated report ID.

The account report ID can be found at the end of the url when viewing the report. For example, https://app.pendo.io/accountlist/3weNHwX-Kdodkhw3lM83YO8PtqM would have an ID of 3weNHwX-Kdodkhw3lM83YO8PtqM.

To finish up your trigger, you need to test it by fetching a visitor that falls into the report.

Note: In order for this step to work, there needs be at least one visitor on the Pendo report. If you don’t have any visitors eligible for the report, you will be unable to test the zap.

Once Zapier is able to find a visitor, you’ll be able to move onto the action step: in this case, the welcome email.

Action Overview

In Zapier, the action step determines what will happen when a visitor is marked as a new user.

There are a couple things to consider before building this part of the Zap:

Email provider: Does your company you use a certain email provider for your company email? We use Gmail here at Pendo so we would use Gmail as our action app.
Scale: using a solution like Gmail might work short term, but long term you might want to consider integrating Pendo with an email marketing tool or integrating it with the tool that a team at your org is already using (Mailchimp, SendGrid, Mailgun, etc.)

This example will use the native emailing app built into Zapier, but feel free to adjust for the mail client of your choosing.

Set up action

Search and select Email by Zapier.

There is only one supported action for this and it Send Outbound Email. Go ahead and click Save + Continue.

Now you’re at the point where you can build out the email template:

Build Email Template

To (required)

This is the address where you want the email to go.

You can add the dynamic field that represents the visitor’s email address by clicking the small + icon on the righthand side of the form input, then locating and selecting the field that corresponds to the visitor’s email address.

It should look like this when the dynamic Pendo field is added correctly:

Warning: While you’re testing the format of the email, it’s best to input your own email address in the "to:" field. That way, when you test the email, the test will go to you and not to the actual recipient. Just remember to change it back when you’re ready to push it live.

Subject (required)

This is the subject of the email you’ll send

For our welcome emails we use the subject Welcome to Pendo!

Body (Html or Plain)

What should the email say?

That’s all you need to have a functional email. Go ahead and test it to make sure your formatting looks good before flipping it live. If it doesn’t look right the first time around, go back to the template step and make your adjustments. Then simply follow the testing process again in order to generate another test email.

Remember, if you targeted the email to your own email address, don’t forget to change it back after you’re done testing.

When you’re happy with it, toggle the switch and turn it live!

Tip: Do you use a CRM? Most CRMs include the ability to bcc a specific mailing address and it will automatically add the activity to the associated contact (if one exists). You might consider bcc’ing that address so that it shows as activity anytime the zap runs.

Errors and Recommendations

If you are encountering issues with the integration, see Zapier integration with Pendo.