HubSpot Integration: see if your contact opened your publication in Hubspot

One of the less visible capabilities of FlippingBook Online is that you can integrate it with other online platforms like HubSpot. The key here is Zapier. Zapier is a no-code platform that connects to hundreds of online apps, including FlippingBook Online and HubSpot. In this article, we show you how you can see in HubSpot if your lead opened a FlippingBook publication that you sent them. Top be exact:

• We assume you have a publication in FlippingBook Online that you want to share with your new HubSpot Leads. This can be a product catalog, a welcome guide, an onboarding tutorial, or anything else that you want to share.
• Every time you add a new contact in HubSpot, we
  • check if it's a Lead, and if so, 
  • we automatically create a trackable link in FlippingBook Online.
  • We then send a personalized email to the lead with the trackable link to the flipbook.
• Finally, we update the lead status in HubSpot when your lead opens the flipbook.

Note that the mechanism itself is very flexible! You can decide on the exact conditions: send to new leads, send when leads become clients, or even when you add a specific task to a contact. It is not even restricted to HubSpot. CRMs like Monday, Salesforce, and PipeDrive use almost identical mechanisms! But to keep the article readable, we will restrict ourselves to sending a welcome guide to new leads.

Requirements

• FlippingBook: You will need an Advanced, Team, or Enterprise plan. Check your current plan on your subscription page. If you have FlippingBook Online Optimal and want to try out this feature, reach out to our Customer Support Team. We will be happy to enable this for a few weeks so you can try it out.  
• Zapier: While Zapier has a free plan, it is so limited that realistically, you will need one of their paid plans, but the entry-level Pro plan will do everything you need. If you have no paid plan yet, Zapier offers a two-week trial.  
• HubSpot: All HubSpot plans come with Zapier integration. 
  
  

Preparation

Before we build any integrations, we need to connect FlippingBook and HubSpot to Zapier. You can skip this if you already use FlippingBook and HubSpot with Zapier.

• How to connect FlippingBook and Zapier

• How to connect HubSpot and Zapier  

Finally, you will need a flipbook that you want to send to all your leads.

Create the trackable link in FlippingBook Online

We will start with creating the trackable link : 

1. Go to Zapier and create a new Zap. Name it New Lead in HS -> Send trackable link to Welcome guide
2. For the Trigger action, select HubSpot as the App.
    
3. Use New Contact as the Trigger Event. In the 'Configure' step, add Sales Properties: Contact Owner as an Additional properties to retrieve and click on continue.
   
4. Test the trigger and then select one of the records to continue with. Zapier will use the data in this record as placeholder data in further steps. If no records are found, you can skip the test to use some dummy results and continue. 
5. You are now presented with a pop-up for the app where we want to perform an action. We don't want to create an email for all new contacts, only for leads. Therefore, we create a filter. Select the Filter app; set thefields under Only continue if as follows:
   
   • Choose field → select (1. Contact information: Lifecycle Stage) from Hubspot (you can use the search field to limit the number of results)
   • Choose condition → select (Text) Exactly matches
   • Enter text or insert data...→ type Lead and press Continue
     
     
6. Now we create the Trackable link in FlippingBook Online. Start typing 'flippingbook' in the search bar until you see the FlippingBook app and select it. Then select  Create Trackable Link as the action event.
7. Under Flipbook for which a trackable link will be created, select the flipbook you want to email to your new leads. In our example, this is our Quick Start Guide. 
   
8. As the Trackable Link Name, use the + to select (1. Contact information: Email address). If you want to distinguish this trackable link from other trackable links in your FlippingBook Online account, you can add some text like " (from Hubspot)". Set the When Opened field to First open. When your lead later opens this link, we want to be notified once, but we don't need more notifications if the lead opens our Welcome Guide several times. 
9. Now, click Continue and Test step. In your FlippingBook Online account, you will now see a new Trackable link for your contact.
   
   
   

Optional: Create an email with the trackable link

You can manually create an email now and copy and paste the generated link into that email. This is very well possible, but if you use an email platform that connects to Zapier, you can also automate this step. Zapier integration is supported by platforms like Gmail (Google Workspace), Microsoft Outlook / Office 365, and MailChimp.
Sending emails using your default email service almost certainly requires additional credentials and/or rights in your network. We advise you to consult with your IT department.

Alert! HubSpot itself also allows sending emails, but if you use Zapier to create a new Email activity in HubSpot, it will only create a record of an email, but it won't actually send the email. Basically, you’re telling HubSpot ‘this email was sent’ rather than ‘send this email. Therefore, we need to use the email service that you use in HubSpot for the email channel. In our example, this is an Office 365 account, but you may use a different service.

1. Get the Lead Owner Data from HubSpot
   Edit your Zap and add a fourth step: in HubSpot, use the Get Owner by ID event.
   In the Configure step, set the Owner Id to (1. Sales properties: Contact Owner). If you do not see this field, then you probably forgot to add it as an additional field in the first step of the Zap (point 3 of this instruction). We need this data because we want to send an email that looks like it comes from the Account Manager themselves.
2. Send the email from Outlook 
   Add a fifth step to your Zap to send the actual email. In the example, we use an Office 365 account, so in Zapier, we use Microsoft Outlook as the App and Send Email as the Action Event.
   
   We configure the email as follows:
   • In To Emails, we use (1.Contact Information: Email)
   • As Subject, we use "Welcome on board!"
   • As Body, we use something like: "Hi  (1. Contact Information: First name), Great to see that you signed up! Have a look at our Welcome Guide(3. Trackable Link URL). Thanks, (4. First Name) (4.Last Name)".
     You can, of course, tune this minimalistic Subject and Body to your taste later. But if you test this, you should receive an email like the one below.
     
3. Register the email in HubSpot
   Next, we add the registration of this email in HubSpot as well. Add a sixth step to your Zap for HubSpot and use Create Engagement as the Action event.
   
   Configure it as follows:
   • As Engagement Type, select Email
   • As Sender Email Address, use the email address that is associated with your email channel in HubSpot.
   • As Sender First Name, use (4. First Name)
   • As Sender Last Name, use (4.Last Name)
   • As Recipient Email Address, use (1. Contact Information email)
   • As Email Subject, use (5. Subject)
   • As Email Text, use (5. Body)
   • As Emails of the contact objects that should be associated with engagement, use (1.Contact Information: Email)

Test the step, and you will see that the email also shows up in HubSpot. 

That's it. You can now publish the Zap. Remember, if, for some reason, you cannot automate such emails, you can still send them manually from HubSpot. This doesn't stop you from using the final part below: updating HubSpot if your contact opened your flipbook.

Update your HubSpot contact if the link is opened

All our new leads now get our welcome email with a trackable link to our welcome guide. The final step is to add a note in HubSpot when our lead opens that link. This is done by creating a new Zap, which we call "Trackable Link opened > Add note in HubSpot"

1. Monitor when trackable links are opened in FlippingBook.
   We use FlippingBook as the App and set the Trigger event to New Trackable Link Event.
   

   

   Then we only react to events that are caused by the Flipbook with our 'Welcome Guide', and only When Opened.
   

   

2. Extract the email address from the link's name.
   When our link is opened, Zapier returns the link name, which we set to the contact's email address, and we added ' (HubSpot)' to it, so that in FlippingBook, we could see which links were created by HubSpot, and which we created manually. We now need to split this. To do so, we select the Zapier Formatter, with Text as the Action Event. 
   We now split the <1. Trackable Link Name> using the space as a separator, and take the first segment, which contains our email address.
   
3. Find the contact in HubSpot.
   In the next step, we use the Find Contact in HubSpot. Our First search property name will be <2. Output> 
   
4. Encode the email address.
   Before we create a note in HubSpot, we 'URL encode' the lead's email address. This is a technical trick that is required for the final step: we want to be able to quickly open our lead's detailed viewing profile in FlippingBook to see how they interacted with our book. To do so, we need to pass the email in the URL, but that requires it to be URL encoded!
   Add another Formatter step with Text as Action Event. When you configure it, use URL Encode as the Transform, and transform <1.Trackable Link Name> 
   
5. Create a note for the contact in HubSpot.
   Now we can create our note in HubSpot. Add a step in HubSpot and use the Create Engagement action. When you configure the step, set
   1. Engagement Type:  Note
   2. Note Body: "<3. Contact information: First Name> opened the Welcome guide on {{zap_meta_human_now}} - View details in  FlippingBook https://flippingbook.com/account/online/links?query=<4.Output>"
   3. Emails of the contact objects that should be associated with the engagement: <2.Output>  

This now creates a note in HubSpot that looks like this:

When you click on the link, you will see the detailed interaction that the lead had with your Welcome Guide: