New integrations: Thrive Leads, Thrive Apprentice, ConvertKit & Drip

We’re excited to announce the first Uncanny Automator release of 2023, and it’s a big one!

Before we jump in, let’s recap some of Automator’s numbers from 2022, as it was our best year ever. Last year, we:

• Released 48 total Automator updates (32 releases for Automator Free and 16 for Pro, most with dozens of new features).
• Added a whopping 34 new integrations to Automator. We weren’t just churning out simple webhooks-based integrations either; these were deep, comprehensive integrations that opened up a ton of new use cases for our users.
• Had over 3,500 conversations with Automator users, an increase of 30% over 2021. Of those conversations, customers rated 98% of their interactions as “great”.
• Grew to well over 20,000 active installs.
• Earned only 5-star reviews on WordPress.org. Check them out!

While we’re only in January, 2023 promises to be an even bigger year for Uncanny Automator. We can’t wait to show you some of what’s coming to Automator…

So we won’t wait! Let’s jump in to what’s new in Uncanny Automator 4.9, the free version of our #1 no-code automation plugin for WordPress.

Thrive Leads

Yes, by popular request, we’re starting to add some integrations for Thrive products. There’s a loyal fanbase out there and we’re thrilled to start adding support for Thrive. The new Thrive Leads integration adds these triggers to our free version:

• A form is submitted
• A registration form is submitted
• A user submits a form

With those additions, no matter the form type or whether the user is logged in or out, we have you covered. These triggers allow recipes like passing entries over to Google Sheets for reporting, sending a lead a coupon code with WooCommerce, enrolling the user in a sample course, etc.

Thrive Apprentice

At Uncanny Owl we’re still best known for our LMS products, so taking a deep dive into Thrive Apprentice was an interesting challenge for our team. Its approach to learning with WordPress is quite different than the elearning products we typically work with, so we uncovered some interesting use cases for niche training situations. In the free release, the following triggers are now available:

• A user completes a lesson in a course
• A user completes a module in a course

These completion triggers allow options like adding the student to an upcoming webinar, adding a CRM tag, notifying the user’s manager, compiling a list of completions in Airtable, etc.

We know, the list is a little light here, but a LOT has been added for Automator Pro users. There are a few extras coming to our free users in the next release too.

ConvertKit

One of 2 new CRM integrations in today’s release, our ConvertKit integration adds 4 new actions:

• Add a subscriber to a form
• Add a subscriber to a sequence
• Add a tag to a subscriber
• Remove a tag from a subscriber

You could even combine these with our Thrive updates to create recipes where a Thrive Apprentice completion record tags a user or adds them to a sequence in ConvertKit.

Drip

Another popular CRM platform, Drip was a customer request that’s now supported in our free version. The new integration supports a number of new actions, including:

• Add a subscriber to a campaign
• Add a tag to a user
• Create or update a subscriber
• Delete a subscriber
• Remove a subscriber from a campaign
• Remove a tag from a subscriber
• Unsubscribe a subscriber from all mailings

Certainly the list is pretty heavy on campaign management and tagging, which opens up a lot of scenarios for contact management inside WordPress. Want to manage mailing lists and GDPR requests on the WordPress site with your favourite plugin integration? No problem. Add and remove tags based on user behaviour, so maybe when a user joins or leaves a social or learning group in WordPress the associated tag is added or removed from Drip.

Third-party integrations

We’ve had a few third-party developers build their own integrations for Uncanny Automator, whether it’s something public they sell, an add-on for their own plugins, or something custom for a client. Just last week, the Better Messages plugin released their own native Automator integration. We’re always thrilled to see the Automator ecosystem grow and really appreciate the support from the WordPress developer community.

To help with discovery and promote third-party developers, we will be adding integrations developed, released and supported by third party developers to our website in the next week. These integrations will be clearly labelled as third party but the listing should help our users find additional uses for Automator.

Other updates

Automator attracts a pretty surprising amount of abuse, especially from sites trying to exploit our social posting capabilities. The day before this release, we saw one site try to send 200,000 Facebook Group calls. Twitter is also a frequent target for abusers, so in today’s release we’re making it possible for higher-volume users to route Twitter requests through their own Twitter app. This optional setting, which can be exposed by visiting the Twitter settings page and appending “&allow-user-app=1” to the URL, looks like this:

While optional, using this setting is recommended for accounts posting more than 100 tweets to Twitter per day.

Paid Memberships Pro users get over 10 new tokens related to memberships, so if you found token selection insufficient (especially related to subscription and discount details), you’re in for a treat.

For our social media posters, our Facebook, Instagram and LInkedIn actions now all support multiple line-breaks in the body of your messages.

Help Scout users, there are a variety of new additions, including choosing ratings for the “a satisfaction rating is received” trigger and targeting “any conversation” in the “conversation receives a reply from a customer” trigger.

For the full list of updates, make sure to check out the Uncanny Automator changelog.