Managing Events with Concep Send InterAction Integration

(If you are confident with the Concep side of things setting up an email invite, confirmation email and survey but are unsure about connecting it to InterAction, you can skip down the page by clicking here.)

1. Creating your event campaigns

When managing an event within Concep Send and the InterAction integration, you'll first want to create your invitation.

Create email campaign with all necessary content, following basic email campaign creation steps here. Your RSVP button/link will be linked to a survey later on, once that is complete.

If you plan on sending a confirmation email to registrants, and would like the confirmation to auto-send each time a respondent RSVPs, create your Confirmation email campaign as well (new campaign, same steps as above). This campaign can be a copy of your Invitation, but with RSVP link removed and content amended to fit your confirmed registration message.

*Note: We suggest putting an 'Add to Calendar' link in the Confirmation only, and not in the initial Invitation. If there is an 'Add to Calendar' link in the invitation, recipients may add the event to their calendar without responding to the RSVP form. 

Once you have finalized your Confirmation email, send it to yourself as a live campaign. This is a required step for when we will later link that sent Confirmation campaign to your Survey. Only Sent campaigns can be linked to a Survey, as it's possible for In Progress campaigns to be deleted.

2. Creating your event survey

Create your Survey as usual with all necessary fields for your registration - for example, First Name, Last Name, Email, Company, Will you be attending, etc. Our guide to creating a survey form can be found here. 

To setup an auto triggered Confirmation email, you will want to add a Survey Action to your registration page. Steps to adding Survey Actions can be found here. You will use the 'Send a Campaign' action as outlined in this link, having the Confirmation trigger out to anyone who responds Yes. *Note, you do not need to add your contacts to a Send Group as noted in the Send Campaign action steps, as your InterAction integration will update your contacts in your CRM list instead.

Once your survey content, theme, and settings are finalized, you can save and begin process of mapping the survey to InterAction. 

*Survey Settings Tip:In the “Edit responses” Setting of your survey we recommend you to select either "Yes, Until Completed" or "No". If  selecting "Yes (default)" this means that respondents can click back to previous pages. However if they do click back and fill in the form again, it will override their initial response in the Concep platform. Setting to "Yes, Until Completed" or "No" will prevent them overriding their response.

3. Mapping your survey to InterAction:

In the dropdown at the top of your survey form, all of your available InterAction marketing folders will be available. You can search in this field to locate your event folder and map it to this survey. All responses to the survey will map back to that folder - meaning, existing contacts in your event list will show an updated RSVP response, and also any new contacts who were forwarded the invitation will be added to this list.

 You can set the Survey Type for an RSVP form to Registration form, which would then indicate in the survey completed InterAction activity what the survey type is.

After the Folder has been mapped, the backend of our platform will connect this survey to that InterAction folder and load up all available folder fields. Edit a survey question to continue on with the mappings.

Each survey question will have an InterAction field dropdown to map to IA. Choose the InterAction field you would like that survey question to map to. You can search in this dropdown as well. Update your question to save.

Repeat this mapping step for all free text fields.

For the RSVP question, map it to the RSVP additional field in InterAction.

Once you have mapped the field, additional answer mappings will pop up under your Answer values. Here you can map your survey answers to the list values for the RSVP field in IA (ie; Yes/No, Attending/Not Attending).

Additionally, if you would like to enable Accepted and Declined survey activities - in addition to updating the RSVP field - select to Show the settings in your RSVP question. There will be an 'Is RSVP' checkbox in the question setting. Select this, and it will enable the option to add Accepted and Declined activities which will sync to a contact when they respond.

4. Linking your survey to the Invitation

After your survey has been created and saved, you can go back to your In Progress invitation campaign and insert an RSVP link to the survey. Highlight your text or button and create Link, then choose your survey from the Survey tab and insert the link:

 

Your survey is now created and mapped, and linked to your Invitation campaign.

5. Preparing your marketing list

Before sending, ensure your marketing list for the event is prepared in InterAction.

To ensure an easy follow up/reminder process, set all of the contacts in your event list to a default RSVP status of No Response. To do this, mark all contacts in your list and choose 'Set Additional Field' from the Mark menu dropdown.

Choose the RSVP field from the selection form:

And set the New Additional Field value to No Response. This will mark all RSVPs as No Response instead of blank.

You can then import your list into your contact Group in Concep Send using List Management.

In your Invitation email campaign, continue to Recipients and choose the Group you exported from InterAction. Complete the steps to send your campaign to your list.

6. Reminders to Register and Attend

As recipients receive your invitation and respond to the survey, your InterAction integration will sync those RSVPs into the folder you have mapped your survey to. In your event folder in IA, you will see the RSVP response updated in each Contact's Additional Information:

Along with RSVP activities logged:

If you would like to send a Reminder to Register, you can create a Copy of your sent invitation - if desired, change the Subject Line to indicate this is a reminder to register. The link to your survey can remain the same. 

To identify who should be sent the reminder, you can bring all contacts who are still marked as No Response to Send.

Within InterAction, you can run an advanced search in your event folder to find all people who's RSVP field is equal to No Response.

These results can then be added to a Reminder list which you can import into Concep. 

Back in Send, when choosing the recipient group for your reminder email, you can simply select your Reminder to Register list of non responders to send the campaign to.

The same thing can also be done for a Reminder to Attend - complete a search in InterAction to push all Yes RSVPs into a Send group. You can then create a Reminder to Attend email campaign and send it out to this list.