Collecting email addresses at a wedding fair with a QR code and ChatGPT

Luke emailed me yesterday as I was about to solve for myself the problem he identified:

What software would you recommend to use for a marketing list? Again are their any zaps or workflows in setting up the marketing list?

Great question Luke!

I’ve been toying around in this realm for a while and have regrettably landed on the most expensive solution around: Active Campaign.

I’m going to show you how I created a Zapier zap to collect email addresses at a wedding fair and get ChatGPT to send each person an email instantly after they scanned the QR code and entered their email address. It was such a smooth and professional workflow, I’m really happy with it.

But before I show you how I created that I want to talk about email marketing for a moment.

Email marketing is amazing and horrible. It’s amazing because people who identify with you and how you roll can and will give you their email address, and you have the opportunity to bring value back to their inbox via marketing emails. It’s horrible because trying to land in someone’s actual email inbox and not their spam folder is an arduous exercise that even yours truly finds hard, and tiring, and annoying.

So you’ll try the cheaper products, then you’ll try MailChimp, and the rest of them, and marketing folklore tells us that if you are serious about this you end up on Active Campaign. so that’s where I am.

Whenever someone enquires with me, books with me, or if I interact with them at an open day or wedding fair, that email address heads into my Active Campaign contacts list and I try my hardest to bring them immense value and joy. Not spam.

So let’s have a look at this zap to collect emails at a wedding fair.It was 7:41am on a Sunday morning, I’m in my hotel room in Hobart getting ready to hit the wedding trail and Luke’s email reminds me that I haven’t made a workflow for that day’s marketing.

The goal was to create a QR code that people could scan which would take them to an ultra simple landing page on my Squarespace website that would collect email addresses. From there it would send that email address, name, and any message, to Zapier which would add the emails to my Active Campaign contacts list, a Google Sheet for backup, ask ChatGPT to write an email to that person about how we met at the Hobart wedding trail and give them a link to my information pack and create an opportunity for me to email them this week after the trail.

Enjoy the video!