Webhooks
Last updated
Last updated
As you probably know, Webhooks are one way that apps can send automated messages or information to other apps.
Let's look at a simple example presented by Zapier: "Webhooks are much like SMS notifications. Say your bank sends you an SMS when you make a new purchase. You already told the bank your phone number, so they knew where to send the message. They type out "You just spent $10 at NewStore" and send it to your phone number +1-234-567-8900. Something happened at your bank, and you got a message about it. All is well. Webhooks work the same way."
Makes sense? Great! Let's see how you can use Webhooks inside Appmixer.
Let's look at another example. Say we want to create a task in Asana every time a high-priority contact visits our website. The idea is to notify our sales reps about the user's activity, and empower them to engage with potential customers at the right time.
In this case, we use ActiveCampaign to catch the user's website activity and send a message to Webhook using ActiveCampaign workflow automation designer. The Webhook URL is automatically generated by Appmixer and is available to you in the inspector panel as soon as you use a Webhook component in your flow.
Note that you'll find Webhooks under the "HTTP" utility.
To bring our example to life, let's start by placing the components to the canvas.
Next, we will want to use the generated Webhook URL in the ActiveCampaign automation.
Notice that the automation trigger in ActiveCampaign listens for a website visit and – if the contact has a "Score: Overall" more than 100 – sends the data to the Webhook URL. This has nothing to do with how the automation in Appmixer is set up, rather gives you a full context on how the whole flow works.
Next, we'll want to connect the components in the Appmixer's flow.
Notice that there are fields to be set up in the Asana action. Let's make it a little bit easier for our sales reps and send some of the contact details directly to the Asana task name and description. This way, our sales reps will immediately know who to follow up with.
First, use Modifiers to set up the task name to: "Follow up with {contact's name}".
Second, let's add some more context to the task description using the person's email address and ActiveCampaign ID.
Once we start the flows both in ActiveCampaign and Appmixer, we should start seeing new tasks in Asana once a person with more than or equal to 100 points – based on our lead scoring system – visits the website.
The idea of our flow was to notify sales reps when a high-score contact visits a website. As you can see below, we now create a task in Asana every time a contact that meets our criteria visits a website. Work done ✅
As you can see, Webhooks are a very powerful feature that gives you all you need to make different apps talk to each other. You can also use Webhooks to build your own, tiny web servers, visually in Appmixer. And yes, you don't necessarily need to be a developer to do that.
Playing around with Webhooks, you may encounter some terms that may be new to you. We've listed all that may surprise you in Appmixer below.
Webhook One way that apps can send automated messages or information to other apps.
Webhook URL The URL to which the data is sent.
Response The port that allows you to send a response to the app that initiated the HTTP request to the Webhook URL. Note that instead of using the Response port, it is suggested to use the "Response" component instead to avoid visual line crossings in your flows.
Trigger The port that sends the data to another app(s)/utility in your flows.
Immediate response This feature allows your Webhooks to send a response to the app that initiated the HTTP request immediately. Note that if you want to use the RESPONSE HTTP component further in the flow, this flag should be turned off.
Now that you know how to use Webhooks in Appmixer, let's uncover some of the other core Utility Modules. In the next section, we'll stay in the "HTTP" module, and explain how some of the most common HTTP requests like POST, PUT, or DELETE work.
