How To Add RocketBolt To An Email Marketing Or Email Prospecting Campaign

The following article explains how to incorporate RocketBolt into an email campaign sent using an email marketing or sales tool like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Hubspot, or SalesLoft. By adding RocketBolt, you'll be able to track the website activity of any campaign recipient who clicks one of your emailed links.

While the specific steps you’ll need to take will vary slightly depending on your tool, the concepts are identical regardless of the platform.

In case you’re wondering if RocketBolt will integrate with your emailing tool, here’s a list of the ones our customers are currently using in conjunction with RocketBolt:

-    Mailchimp

-    Constant Contact

-    Vertical Response

-    Marketo

-    Hubspot

-    Eloqua (Oracle Sales Cloud)

-    Reply

-    ToutApp

-    SalesLoft

-    ReplyUp

-    Outreach

-    SendWithUs

-    Mailgun

-    Sendgrid

-    Outlook Mail Merge

-    Yesware

This list ins't exhaustive, so don’t worry if the tool you use isn’t here, RocketBolt should still work.

Concept Overview

In order to track the activity of someone on your website who was sent there from your email campaign, RocketBolt needs that person to click a link with some unique identification information included in its query string.

A query string, for those who might not know, is information that can be appended to the end of a URL without affecting what your web browser recognizes as the web address.

Feel free to “geek out” and learn more about query strings, but all you really need to know for RocketBolt is that they get added at the end of a URL after a question mark, and they look something like this: name=value.

Here are a couple example URLs with query strings demonstrating the different ways they can appear:

http://example.com?user=frank

http://example.com/blog?first_name=frank&last_name=smith&age=32

A query string can be added to any URL, so it's how we add the unique information that RocketBolt needs in order to track who clicked a link.

The specific piece of unique information RocketBolt requires is something we call the “lead ID” number. A lead ID is a number generated by RocketBolt that our system associates with a specific person in your contacts list. We represent the lead ID as rblid in your query string. For example, a link with a RocketBolt query string will look like this:

http://example.com/white_papers/how_to_be_awesome?rblid=123456789

When you send an email to a large list of people using a bulk emailing tool, all you need in order to add RocketBolt and track your leads is to customize the links so they’re slightly different depending on the recipient.

Customizing links is easy. If you’re already personalizing bulk emails by adding variables for things like the recipient’s name, the steps are the same.

Step 0: Import contacts into RocketBolt

We’re calling this “Step 0” because it may not be necessary depending on where you have your contacts saved.

If your contacts are already in RocketBolt, you can skip this step. If they’re not, you’ll need to import contacts into your RocketBolt account.

PRO TIP: You can avoid this step and the next step by using our Zapier integration to keep contacts synced between your email platform, your CRM (if you’re using one), and RocketBolt.

Step 1: Export contacts from RocketBolt

Choose the contacts you’ll be emailing from the contacts page and export the list. If you need help with this step, read more about exporting lists.

PRO TIP: Keep contact lists organized using RocketBolt projects so they’ll already be grouped together and easy to export.

Step 2: Import contacts and create new data type 

Import the list of contacts you downloaded from RocketBolt into your emailing tool. Every emailing tool handles the import process using the same basic approach. It will process your uploaded CSV and then ask you to associate each column with a specific data type.

During this process, create a new data type called “rblid” and associate it with the rblid column from your uploaded CSV.

Here’s what that looks like inside Mailchimp:

Step 3: Add the rblid to the end of all links to your website 

Prepare your bulk email template just as you normally would inside your mailing platform. Be sure to include at least one link to your website or to content on your website (e.g. blogs, whitepapers, case studies).

Wherever your links are, edit the actual hyperlink to include a “?” at the end and then the appropriate variable representing the rblid data type you created during the previous step.

In Mailchimp, these data variables are called “merge tags” and they look like this: *|merge tag|*.

So inserting RocketBolt-tracked link in Mailchimp will look like this:

Remember, the question mark (?) is critical and must be included, so don’t forget it.

By the way, if, for some reason, your link already has a query string -- meaning it already contains a question mark (?) -- you can still add the rblid data variable. Just replace the question mark (?) with an ampersand (&). Your link will look something like this:

And that’s it! You’re ready to start incorporating RocketBolt into your bulk emailing campaigns.