New integrations: Facebook Groups & Advanced Coupons

As we approach the 9th anniversary of Uncanny Owl and 1 year since the release of Uncanny Automator 3.0, we’re excited to introduce version 4.0 of the free Uncanny Automator plugin. This release isn’t just exciting because of the new integrations, triggers and actions, but also because of what it will allow us to do in the next Pro release. (More on that later.)

Uncanny Automator 4.0 also adds 2 very important integrations to our product list: Advanced Coupons and Facebook Groups.

Advanced Coupons

Advanced Coupons is the premium plugin for extending coupon capabilities for WooCommerce, boasting a 4.7 average rating on WordPress.org and over 15,000 active installs. With it, you can add capabilities like store credit, cart conditions, role restrictions, scheduling and more to improve product sales and conversions.

We met Josh (who leads the Advanced Coupons team) for the first time in March, and we were blown away by what the product offers and by what’s coming. The new triggers we’re adding in our free 4.0 release are just the beginning of some amazing new use cases for WooCommerce discounts and store credit. Here’s what we’re including today:

• A user spends greater than, less than, or equal to a specific amount of store credit
• A user receives greater than, less than, or equal to a specific amount of store credit

Maybe if a user receives a certain amount of credit you send them a special offer, or perhaps if they spend a certain amount they’re tagged in a CRM and added to a membership level or group. These free additions are an exciting start, but wait until you see what we have lined up in Pro.

Facebook Groups

Yes, support for Facebook Groups is officially here! Complementing our existing integration with Facebook Pages, the new Facebook Groups support allows WordPress sites to post images and messages to Facebook Groups.

Here are the new actions available for Facebook Groups:

• Publish a post to a Facebook group
• Publish a post with an image to a Facebook group
• Share a link with a message to a Facebook group

These are incredibly powerful actions. Now you can do things like share course completions in your private group as your students finish them, share new blog posts as they’re published, introduce new members in a social group as they join a site, etc.

Setting up the Facebook Groups integration is a bit more involved than Facebook pages. It’s a separate app (so if you already have Facebook Pages set up, you’ll need to connect Facebook Groups independently) and you need to add the Uncanny Automator app to any Facebook Groups that you want to publish to. It’s pretty straightforward, but you’ll want to review our Knowledge Base article before jumping in.

OptinMonster Campaigns

Okay, it’s just one new action, but this new action is incredible for OptinMonster:

• Show a campaign

Why lots of fanfare around a single action? While OptinMonster offers a huge number of ways to show pop-ups and engage users, Automator extends their already powerful targeting with even more triggers and control with recipes. Maybe you want to show a popup after course completion to users with a certain CRM tag only. Or maybe when a user pays for an order, you show an upsell offer and next steps for using the product they purchased.

Whatever you might want to do with pop-ups and optins, you can now do it with Automator and OptinMonster. Check out the knowledge base article for more info.

In-plugin notifications

We know not everyone is reading our Twitter, Facebook and blog posts, and we don’t often send email communications out to Automator users. That means some of the Automator tips and news we share is often seen by a limited audience. To make it easier to get updates about Uncanny Automator, and so you don’t have to chase down our social and blog feeds, the 4.0 release includes a new notification system that brings Automator news right inside the plugin on your site. Messages will be displayed inside our plugin only (certainly no site-wide admin notices here!).

Mailchimp triggers

This is a big change for Mailchimp users, because instead of our integration being relegated to running actions in Mailchimp, now changes in Mailchimp can trigger things in Automator.

Making this work does require setting up Automator to receive data from Mailchimp via webhooks, so to support this, there are some changes to Mailchimp settings to facilitate this. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like when enabling triggers:

Once set up, the following triggers will be available in your Automator recipes:

• A contact is added to an audience
• A contact email is changed

These activities, when they occur in Mailchimp, can now fire Automator recipes automatically.

Events Manager

We had feedback from several Events Manager users that our existing triggers for attendees and users registering for events were misleading because they had dependencies on bookings being approved. We agreed with that feedback, and the existing triggers related to event registration were renamed for more clarity to cover bookings being approved. That left a gap in our triggers, so 2 new ones have been added:

• An attendee registers for an event
• A user registers for an event

These triggers fire on registration regardless of approval. Our Events Manager integration also gains several new tokens in this release.

PeepSo

There’s one new trigger in PeepSo:

• A user updates a specific field in their profile

We spent a lot of time here making sure that when any field for a user is updated, so any biographical or activity data in their profile, we can parse it properly and run recipes based on that.

Why 4.0 and not 3.10?

With the updates so far, you may be thinking that this update is amazing, but maybe not significantly more amazing than our usual 3.x updates. That’s where some architecture changes that set the stage for Uncanny Automator Pro 4.0 will shine in a few days.

We’ll share more details when we release the Pro upgrade, but that release will include a brand new feature we call “integration-specific conditions”. But actions already have conditions, right? And you can choose those conditions based on your triggers and some common elements when you set up actions. So what’s different?

Where we had a gap was with conditions related to our integrations that weren’t part of a recipe. Here are some examples:

• Only enroll this user if they have a certain membership
• Only show an offer pop-up if a user has a tag in a CRM
• Only send the user an email if they’re enrolled in a certain course
• Only issue a certificate if the user is in a specific group

In the examples above, we’re checking data about a user that’s not otherwise related to the recipe and then assessing what actions to run. This opens up all types of new workflows for ecommerce, elearning, membership and marketing solutions. Here’s a MemberPress membership example:

We’ll share more details and the first set of available integration-specific conditions very shortly. Stay tuned!

For the complete list of changes in Uncanny Automator 4.0, visit our changelog.