Zapier is a very useful service that we see a lot of our customers use to connect various tools to Cistomer.io. We even use it ourselves for certain tasks!
When a customer wrote in recently highlighting some confusion in the setup between Zapier and Customer.io, we wanted to open our advice up to the entire Community.
Here’s a summary of the customer’s question, and our advice.
Question:
My task is simple - once someone replies to the email campaign set on customer.io, I want to exclude that person from the said email flow (by updating an existing manual segment).
I see there are 3 things you can do in Zapier + customer.io.
1)Create or Update Customer - Creates a new customer. If the customer already exists, it will be updated.
2) Create Event - Creates an event for a specific customer.
My question here - how can I update the person AND add it to a manual existing segment to exclude it from further email flow? I cannot understand what really "update the person means" and where does this "update" goes to? I still believe it's a question about customer.io more than zapier here.
Solution:
Jumping right in, The "Create or Update person" action in Zapier is similar to the "Create or Update person" action in the campaign. As you already know, if a person does not exist, a new person will be created. If the person already exists, the action will update the person's attributes. You can see the updates on the profile attributes.
I believe you are using Zapier to notify Customer.io when someone replies to your email. Is that correct? If so, you may want to use the "Create Event" item instead of "Create or Update Customer" in Zapier. This is because "Create or Update Customer" adds or removes a person from a data-driven segment, not a manual segment.
In Customer.io, you will need to create an event-triggered campaign using the event name you send from Zapier as the trigger event. Then, in your campaign, you can use the "Manual Segment Update" action to add a profile to that manual segment every time they perform the event.
And to ensure that only profiles that are not in the manual segment receive emails from your original campaign, you can set the campaign's trigger to "NOT IN manual_segment" if your campaign is a segment-triggered campaign. If the campaign is event-triggered, you can set this as the filter. You will also want to set the campaign's exit condition to "They stop matching the trigger segment or filters" or "They achieve the goal or they stop matching the filters", depending on the type of campaign. This will ensure that profiles are removed from the campaign once they are added to the manual segment.
We hope that this helps more people now that it’s available to everyone!