SaaS Business

How to Create a Marketing Automation Flow with Twitter Leads and Drip

September 02, 2016

In this week’s (traditional) Friday off topic blog post, I wanted to share how we created a powerful, completely automated lead generation solution using Twitter lead generation ads and a Drip email campaign.

'Leads on Twitter' ads have worked fairly well for us in the past, producing leads at a cost of between £5 and £10. If you’re not familiar with the product, you can read up on it here — essentially, normal Twitter Ads are extended with a card containing a call-to-action which delivers your Twitter-registered email address direct to the advertiser.

Here’s an example of how it looks on my phone (courtesy of @enzymico):

However, by default the leads generated are delivered into the advertiser's Twitter Ads dashboard, where businesses can then export them to your tool of choice. Some CRM solutions already have prebuilt integrations, but as far as I could see, none existed for our drip marketing tool, Drip – so we decided to set one up.

Fortunately it was a fairly painless process, with just a few gotchas along the way. Follow the guide below to replicate for your lead generation campaigns, and let us know in the comments if you have any issues!

Step 1: Create your Promoted Tweets and card

To get started, you’ll want to create a new Twitter campaign at https://ads.twitter.com – ensure that the type of campaign you create is ‘Leads on Twitter’.

Fill out your campaign details and create one promoted Tweet:

You’ll need an 800x200px image to create your first Twitter ‘card’, which can be uploaded using the interface. After this step, you’ll need to enter your call to action and a short description which will be displayed on the desktop:

Save your first Tweet and ignore the warning about requiring 3-4 creatives. We’ll come back later and create more promoted Tweets, but first we’ll set up the Twitter card so we can just select it when we’re adding them later.

Step 2: Create your Drip form to receive the data

Next, head to Drip and create a new form inside your account (click Forms, then ’New Opt-In Form’). Name it something like ‘Twitter Form’. You don’t need to create a campaign or link it to a campaign for now:

Once that’s done, select the ‘Embedded' tab in the design pane on the right hand side of the page. See that HTML code? Copy all that into your favorite text editor – you’ll need it later:

Now, head to the bottom of the page where you’ll find a Fields pane. In here, we need to enter a couple of new fields, which capture the parameters that are included with the Twitter leads we’re being sent.

Add two new fields – one for name and one for screen name. Drip should automatically fill the identifier for you, so you should end up with a list of fields that looks something like this:

If you’re already using Drip on your site, disable the Widget to ensure this form doesn’t trigger anywhere (in the Design pane). Then save.

Step 4: Decide what needs to happen when you receive a lead

The next piece of configuration in Drip depends on your business logic and what you want to happen when a form is submitted with your new lead. In our case, we wanted to send an automated email with a link to an eBook and do nothing else until we could manually review the email address. However, in some cases you may want to push the lead straight into a preconfigured Drip campaign.

Either way, we set this up in the Rules tab of the new form. Select what you want to occur from the drop-down menu and configure the next step as instructed:

Finally, set the form live:

Step 5: Configure Twitter to POST the leads to your Drip form

With your form created, we can go back to Twitter and configure our Twitter Ads card to send the data direct to Drip, and because it’s live, we can test the setup straight away from our own Twitter account.

Head back to Twitter Ads and click ‘Creative’ at the top, followed by ‘Cards’:

Find your new card and click on the ‘Edit’ icon to open the card’s options.

Scroll to the bottom and find the Data Settings dropdown:

This is the area where we’ll configure the card to send lead data directly to Drip.

Start by filling out the submit URL. Remember the code which you pasted into a text editor earlier? Find it and select just the URL inside the speechmarks directly after ‘form action”. It should look something like this:

Copy that URL and paste it into the Submit URL field in Twitter Ads:

Below the HTTP method, you’ll see three boxes which contain the user information which Twitter submits with every lead. We’ll need to customise these slightly for Drip so that they match the inputs expected from our new form.

In the 'Custom key name’ boxes, enter your corresponding Drip fields, enclosed in square brackets and preceded by the world ‘fields’. They should look something like this:

fields[name] 
fields[email] 
fields[screen_name]

Hit save, and Twitter will attempt to test the values that you’ve given it. If it’s successful, you’ll be redirected to a page with the successfully sent data and asked whether it worked:

At the same time, you should head on over to Drip to check that the data was received.

Note: If you have double-opt in enabled for users, the submission won’t show up in the Drip dashboard until you’ve confirmed the address. Additionally, Drip won’t send multiple confirmations by default, so you’ll need to change that setting (in form settings) if you want to test multiple times.

Step 5: Sit back and enjoy your new marketing automation solution

Congratulations! If your form submission worked, you can now set your campaign live on Twitter and watch the leads roll in, before being transferred seamlessly to your marketing automation flow.

We hope this guide was useful – if you have any problems or comments (or, god forbid, something we’ve forgotten), please let us know in the comments or by reaching us at @nickelledapp on Twitter.