Integromat webhooks are a great way to connect any service to start your automations on Make (formerly Integromat) ) instantly when something happens on the other platform. This blog will show you how you can work with Integromat webhooks and other different hook types and what you can do with them.
If you're serious about automation - don't miss out of the power of webhooks. A Webhook is the connector between systems for realtime action.
Make (formerly Integromat) webhooks are a great way to connect any service to start your automations on Make (formerly Integromat) instantly when something happens on the other platform. This blog will show you how you can work with Integromat webhooks and other different hook types and what you can do with them.
First off, create a simple webhook by creating a new scenario in Integromat, clicking on the plus symbol, and then searching for “Webhook”. There are a lot of different systems coming up if you search for webhooks, because all of these actually offer webhooks as a trigger, which means they can kick-start your automation instantly when something happens on that platform.
Scroll down and select “Webhooks”. Here we have two different types of triggers.
One is the Custom mailhook. This actually provides you with an email address where you can send an email to. You forward an email, then you can use advanced logic in your email system. For example, in Gmail, you can have filters that automatically forward emails coming from a specific person or have a specific subject line. You can forward them to this custom mailhook, and it will automatically start that automation and also append all the email details to that Webhook.
You could use that information received by the Webhook to automate cool things with it. You can learn more about these things in the free workshop, which you can access through this link. It’ll teach you how you can use these mailhooks to your advantage, and how you can extract any kind of information from the emails.
But for now, we want to focus on Custom webhooks. A webhook is basically a URL that you can send data to. So the official definition here is “A webhook in web development is a method of augmenting or altering the behavior of a web page or web application with custom callbacks. These callbacks may be maintained, modified, and managed by third party users and developers who may not necessarily be affiliated with the originating website application.”
That sounds awful, right? It's so boring. But here is my very short explanation. In simpler words, “a webhook is a URL that you can trigger and append data to it. The webhook ‘catches’ the data, processes it in a way that you want and can even send data back.” -Webhook Simpler Definition. So that is my personal, simple definition of what a webhook is and what it can do for you.
Let's go into some examples first, and then I'll show you how to set this up because it might help you to understand what a webhook actually is. One good example is Shopify. You have all kinds of different events on Shopify. They could be articles, blogs, custom collections, comments, orders, pages, price rules, products, and smart collections.
For example, for articles, if the article was created, then you can send a notification to your system to take it out in that case and say “Hey, I got a new article. It was just created. I want to send it off to my social media” or something like that. So you get an instant notification when this event happens. There are other events that could trigger, i.e. published, unpublished, updated and more.
Of course, the most important one is most likely orders. When an order is created, order is confirmed, order is filled, order is placed, etc., you can use all of them and send a notification to your system and kick-start your automation.
If you're using a booking service, then you can send yourself a notification if a new booking happened, and then you can, for example, add it as a task in your project management tool. You can send a notification to Slack. You can prepare automatically some folders or documents that you will need for that call. You can do all these things instantly!
Another example is ManyChat. ManyChat is used for chatbot creation to develop all kinds of different smart chatbots.
Here you have an external request, which is basically a webhook where you send data to.
Put the URL of your webhook here and then send data, such as, full contact data or specific custom fields. You can send the data to a particular scenario on Integromat, and then you can do automation based on that.
There’s also the “add a request for dynamic content” where you can put in a webhook and body.
The main difference between the two is that the external request just sends data off and the dynamic content sends data and waits for 10 seconds to receive data back, then you can do further automation with that.
Let's get into how to set this up. We have the Custom webhook. Create a new one. Give it any name that you want.
You could check “Show advanced settings” and define the data structure. I recommend leaving it empty because Make (formerly Integromat) will automatically define the data structure. You could also get the request headers if you need them. There is also the “Get request HTTP method”. This is advanced, so you don't have to worry about that for now.
You can also use “JSON pass-through” if you want to modify the raw data of it. That's also not recommended in most cases, but I just wanted to mention them here, so you know that these options actually exist.
Now when you click on Save, you get the URL which you can copy to your clipboard.
Add it to the location where you send the notification from. That could be in Shopify under notifications or that could be in your scheduling system.
In our case in ManyChat, it’s over here.
Click on “Test the request” in ManyChat and back in Integromat it would say, “Successfully determined”.
When you send data once to that webhook, Integromat knows what kind of data to expect, and only then can you map it to the other modules.
To test, add a Set Variable module. Search for Tools among the modules, then “Set variable”.
Then we see that there's nothing from the webhook because you didn't send any data in the body. It just sent a notification but didn't attach any data.
Try it again. This time, add full contact data.
Go back to the webhook and click on the “Re-determine data structure” so Integromat knows what kind of data to expect.
Test the request again with full contact data.
Once data is successfully determined in the Webhook module, you see all the variables that are available from ManyChat. You can use this data to map inside other modules and do whatever you want with it.
For example, use the ID field and map it inside the Set Variable module. Type in a text, Subscriber ID:, before the mapped field.
Run the scenario once. Trigger it again by testing the request from ManyChat. You would see all the data coming in, and then you would see the subscriber ID and extracted ID value.
That way, you can automate anything! It runs instantly, which means it only runs when a notification is received, that is, when an event is happening. Only then will it continue and start your automation.
This is very helpful because Integromat is built based on operations. That means if you trigger the scenario based on a schedule, let's say at regular intervals every five minutes, then it would cost you one operation every five minutes, even if there's no data. But with Webbooks, then triggering the scenario happens instantly. You only use operations when there's an actual event.
Now that we covered the webhooks, there's also the Webhook response. It is what we are using for the dynamic content here. We send data back, like a response to that webhook by default.
If you don't have this webhook response module set up, it sends back 200 and accepts it.
Run it once and test the request again, then you would see the response is accepted and a 200, so that's everything that you would get back by default.
If you set up a webhook response, then you can set up something else. For example, 400 and Body is Failure.
So you got this 400 error code, a bad request, and the Response Body is failure so that way you can send data back.
I've got a different tutorial on how to create a BMI calculator where I explain exactly how you can use the webhook response. For example, with HTML. If you call the URL, it will do some automation in the backend, send it back to you and display a nicely formatted website with all the information that you have gotten from your automation. It's super helpful and the response is very good. You just have to keep in mind that most services expire. That means they don't wait forever for the webhook response. In that case, you might think about using a different way of returning the data instead of having the webhook response.
That’s it! Use Webhooks wherever you can because they work instantly, and you don't have to put them on a schedule.
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