Mailbag Contact Form

Home › Guides › Mailbag Pro: newsletters, CRMs and webhooks

Sending a WordPress contact form to ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign's API syncs a contact by email address — creating it or updating it — and can then subscribe it to a list and add tags that start your automations. You need your account's own API URL and API key, both found under Settings → Developer in ActiveCampaign.

What a good sync does

  1. Syncs the contact by email, with name, phone and any custom fields you map.
  2. Subscribes them to a list, if they agreed to hear from you.
  3. Adds tags such as the form's name, so an automation can pick them up — a quote follow-up, say.

How Mailbag Pro does it

Mailbag Pro, the paid add-on to Mailbag Contact Form, connects with your ActiveCampaign API URL and key. Per form, you choose the list, the field mapping, the tags, and whether to send only when the consent box is ticked. Because the API URL is one you type in, Pro calls it with WordPress' safe request functions, which refuse addresses inside your own network.

The free plugin has already saved the entry and emailed you before Pro talks to ActiveCampaign, and Pro works after the visitor has seen the thank-you message — so the sync never slows your form down.

When ActiveCampaign refuses

  • The key is refused — the connection is marked failing, the entries are kept, and you get an alert email, at most once a day. When it works again, Pro sends the backlog and one working again email.
  • ActiveCampaign rejects the contact's data — an invalid email, for example. That's not retried, and the entry shows why.
  • The service is down — retried after 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 2 hours, 12 hours and then daily, for up to 7 days.

Where to see what happened

Each entry in Mailbag → Entries shows a line per connection: sent, waiting to retry, or refused with the service's reason. It's the difference between suspecting that ActiveCampaign “sometimes misses one” and knowing which ones and why. See Mailbag Pro and pricing.

This is Mailbag Pro, the paid add-on to the free Mailbag Contact Form plugin. See what it costs, and what happens if you ever stop paying.

Mailbag Pro and pricing