Manage and take motion on the information that issues most to your online business

It’s no surprise that data is at the heart of every growing business. After all, this is the information your business uses to make decisions, streamline operations, and develop winning ideas that accelerate your growth. Storing, organizing, and tracking information about your customers, prospects, and sales leads is what powers every other area of ​​your business. That’s why ActiveCampaign makes it easy to manage and automate data associated with your Contacts, Deals and Accounts.

But what happens when the data you use to run your business doesn’t directly fit into those categories? Enter custom objects.

What are custom objects?

To best explain custom objects, let’s start with standard objects like Contacts, Deals, and Accounts. These are the categories of your database where you can store, track, and manage related information. For example, you would use a Contact object to store your customers name and email address. These objects provide a great deal of support for executing marketing and sales strategies but there’s some instances where you may need other data to effectively run your business.

As the name implies, custom objects are customizable data structures that let you store information specific to your company or industry. These templates offer the flexibility to model, manage, and automate your data in a way that reflects your unique business processes and workflows.

Let’s say your business requires in-person installation and repair services. In this case, you might want to have a custom object for “Service Calls” to track service call statuses for each contact. You could use this same Service Call record status to trigger an automated follow-up email to request feedback.

How to use ActiveCampaign custom objects

There are a number of ways you could leverage custom objects. Aside from wanting to see and take action on data specific to the needs of your business operations, you may want to associate a contact with multiple data points to paint a complete historical view of your relationship with them. With a complete record of how every customer has engaged with your business, you can automate the most relevant experience possible.

Custom objects also help businesses overcome common limitations of databases and CRMs like creating multiple relationships between data. For example, one contact could be associated with multiple locations, certifications, invoices, courses, etc.

Finally, custom objects let you sync data between multiple tools and platforms. When you have a unified view of all your data you can create powerful workflows and automate new, 1:1 customer experiences that make your business stand out — and accelerate your growth.

Use custom objects with your favorite integrations

All ActiveCampaign customers can import custom objects from supported app integrations. As your favorite apps are enhanced with custom objects, integrations will become even better. You’ll be able to build more powerful and unique automations across your entire technology stack using data specific to your business. If you use Salesforce, Zendesk Support, or Calendly you can already experience the enhanced power custom objects bring to these integrations.

Build your own integrations that leverage custom objects

In addition to the custom objects already built into apps, customers on the Enterprise plan tier get the exclusive benefit of being able to create their own custom objects directly within the ActiveCampaign platform – no coding expertise required.

The custom object builder lets you develop, automate and integrate data in your ActiveCampaign app without any direct developer involvement. When you have access to intuitive, self-service tools, you can independently build solutions to solve your business challenges.

If you’re looking to set up a more complex data connection, you can build and host your own integration using our custom objects API or develop an app and natively connect to ActiveCampaign directly within our platform.

Aside from creating and managing custom objects data, there are also several ActiveCampaign tools that will work directly with custom objects.

Use custom objects in forms

When someone completes a form that includes a custom object field, that information will populate within the contact record. Creating custom object records through lead generation form submissions is just one more way we’re making it easier for you to bring the right data into ActiveCampaign.

Personalize emails

Once a custom object syncs to your account, you can use the synced custom object fields to personalize any campaign sent from an automation.

Create powerful automations

With custom objects, you can enter a contact into an automation when a record is created or updated for the object.

Extend the power of your CRM

Incorporating your unique business data through custom objects help you more accurately model your business process in your CRM.

When your data is managed between multiple tools, apps, and proprietary databases, it can be hard to get the unified insights and actionable data you need to grow your business. Building custom objects or integrating with apps enhanced with custom object functionality lets you bring the right data into ActiveCampaign — and create a comprehensive picture you can take action on.

Sign up to learn more about custom objects.

The ability to create your own custom objects is only available to Enterprise plans. Log in to start using them to create dynamic automated experiences, or upgrade now to take full advantage.