Which is the easier way to connect Active Campaign to a database?

0
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One of my clients needs to connect Active Campaign to their database so that when new fields (mainly name and email address) are added those contacts are automatically imported to either an Active Campaign's list or an automation.

It would be ideal that this migration process was selective. I mean, no all contacts added on the database should be imported to Active Campaign but only those we need. I don't know if that can be done by previously adding some classes to those contacts. Other option would be to add those people into a specific database.

I have found 2 articles from Active Campaign's blog but I am not sure which one is better to follow:

https://help.activecampaign.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000841130-Database-sync-for-importing-contacts

https://help.activecampaign.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000720584-Automatic-import

By following the second one you can connect Active Campaign to a database with Zapier which can simplify the problem but I think the options are more limited.

Can you please advice based on your previous experience?

Thanks!

1
phpmysqldatabaseactivecampaign

1 Answers

0
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I see two possible solutions here:

  1. You can modify your client's code.

In this way what you simply need to do is that after the database insert you just add a line or two to add the new contact and assign it to a list. I imagine there are different fields that get filled so you could also assign custom field values and tags.

  1. You don't have access to the code, but you have access to the database

This way what you could do is add a flag column to your contacts database. The flag would show whether the contact has been processed or no. So after that you create an automatic process / cronjob that runs let's say every 5 minutes and only selects the contacts that have the processed flag = 0. This way you just get the data and do the same thing as in step 1 - create contact, assign to list, add custom field values and tags.

You could also do this step using Node.js (I'm no pro so I would't be very specific on this topic) but you would basically create a process that runs when a new database entry is inserted and does the stuff described in step 2. Basically a webhook on your side.