12 Advanced Outseta Tips and Use Cases

Daniel Wirtz

1 week ago

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Over the past four years, we’ve used Outseta at Facilitator School to sell over $250k in online courses and training. This has been an incredible journey and Outseta has been a great companion.
Since I’m setting sail for something new in 2025, I want to share some of the advanced Outseta tips and use cases that I’ve discovered over the years. Let’s dive in!
A quick overview:

1. Conditional invoice content

Invoices in Outseta are created using HTML markup, which makes it possible to manipulate both their content and styling. I’ve used this to make small adjustments to better make the invoices clear to our customers, but also simplify the life for our bookkeeper.
For example, I’ve added a conditional “Business Invoice” tag using the following snippet:
{% if Account.CustomerType == "Company" %}
<span
style="background: #dbeafe; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; font-size: 14px; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 16px; padding: 6px 12px; position: relative; color: #172554">
Business Invoice
</span>
{% endif %}
And we’ve also added our VAT and—if provided—also the Tax ID of the customer.
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2. Multi-language transactional emails

We once run a custom training in German with a—obviously—German company. Some of the people in that team didn’t feel confident reading and responding in English.
Having high standards and wanting to offer a good on-boarding experience, we’ve quickly faced the challenge that the transactional emails—especially the sign-up/confirmation email—were in English.
But since Outseta enables you to tweak every aspect of the transactional emails, it was possible to quickly implement multi-language transactional emails. Here is how:
We’ve just duplicated the HTML of the confirmation email, translated it, and then wrapped the English and German version in conditional if statements based on a custom property called CustomerLanguage .
When CustomerLanguage was set, it only rendered the email in the respective language. And if CustomerLanguage wasn’t set, it showed the English email per default.
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3. Quick email list cleanup

Over time, emails that are undeliverable (e.g. when they contain a typo) and unsubscribed can take up significant space in your Outseta account. Potentially increasing costs since Outseta’s plans are based on the number of records in the CRM.
To get rid of emails with no value, create a new segment called “To delete” with the following conditions:
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Then, open the segment and look for “Actions” in the top right corner of the page. Click on the button and select “Delete people in segment”. When we did this the first time, it shaved a whopping 700 people from our email list.
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4. Drip campaign with custom property

The end of a course at Facilitator School marks a special moment for students, because they receive their unique course certificate. Something they have worked towards over the span of six weeks.
To avoid sending every student their certificate individually, I’ve set up a post course email sequence (using drip campaigns) that is anchored to custom people property called CertificateURL.
When a URL is added to that field, it automatically triggers a set of emails. Starting with a congratulation email that contains a link to the certificate that I’ve implemented using merge tags.
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Then a couple of days later, other emails follow with more guidance and next steps for the students.

5. Application tracking with Airtable

People who have trouble financing a course purchase (e.g. through job loss) can apply for a scholarship at the Facilitator School. At the start, we manually accepted or rejected scholarships. But after some time, it became tedious work, so I created a system with Airtable to better manage the applications.
Essentially, we’ve added an Airtable application form to our website. When the form was filled out, I’ve used the Outseta API to create a person record with the custom person property ScholarshipStatus set to “Applied”. This then automatically triggered an email telling the person that we’ve received their application and will reach out to them soon.
At the same time, I also fired a Google Workspace notification, so we see that there is a new scholarship application in the system.
In the notification, clicking on “Open Application” brings us directly to the detail view of the application.
 
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Then within Airtable, we had a kanban board view of all scholarship applications. New applications came in with the status “Applied” and when we moved them over to “Accepted” or “Rejected” it automatically updated the person record in Outseta, which then triggered the right drip campaign to be sent out.
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6. Multistep sign-up form

Outseta offers a simple and robust sign-up form. But at one point, we needed something extra to capture additional information and show conditional steps during the sign-up process.
With Inputflow I’ve created a conditional multistep form in Webflow that guided people through the sign-up process for one of our cohorts.
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The experience for the user was amazing, but the set-up was a bit complex. Let me try to guide you through it.
Essentially, we added custom ID’s with a “Form.” prefix followed by the name of the property in Outseta to all multistep form fields. For example, the “First Name” field got the ID “Form.Person.FirstName”.
Then, I wrote some custom JS code that went through all fields starting with a “Form.” prefix in their ID and placed their keys and values into a registrationDefault object.
When the user arrived at the end of the sign-up process and clicked on “Continue to pay” I injected Outseta checkout into the page with pre-populated values of all fields using the registrationDefault object.
This works, but there are some edge cases to consider. For starters, some fields—such as radio and checkbox fields—require custom logic to extract their value. So, I’m not sure, if I would recommend anyone to build something like this again.
But if you find yourself in a situation, where you absolutely need a multistep form, then go ahead and try yourself at a similar implementation. If you need help, reach out, and I’m happy to share the script I wrote with you.

7. General newsletter opt-in

Lead capture forms are a great feature in Outseta that we’ve used to grow our audience by offering downloads of guides and templates. It was quite late, when I realized that the lead capture forms are an excellent place to allow visitors to also sign up for the newsletter.
To add a newsletter checkbox to the lead capture forms, I simply created a new custom people property called NewsletterOptIn with the type “Checkbox List” and one value “I want to receive the Facilitator School Newsletter”.
Then I added this checkbox to all relevant lead capture forms, and we saw an immediate increase in signups. I can’t provide a specific conversion number, but I’m quite confident that it’s worth it to implement such a little checkbox if you offer lead magnets and run a newsletter.
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8. Flexible “Tags” custom property

While we are on the topic of custom properties, here is another quick tip: Add a custom “Tags” property to people and accounts with the type “Checkbox List”.
Now, whenever you need to make a temporary segment or find yourself having to manually segment people, you can use the Tags custom property to save you time.
For example, we once set out a booklet, but there was a bug that prevented a number of people from being able to access the booklet.
Instead of sending out the booklet one by one, I downloaded and opened the full segment of people in Google Sheets and quickly added the tag “bookletBug2024” to people who had problems.
Then I imported the list back into Outseta and was able to send a broadcast with the booklet only to the people who haven’t received it yet by creating a quick segment with people record that have the “bookletBug2024” tag.

9. Keep users logged in across tabs and visits

Per default, when a user of your Outseta powered website/app closes the tab and return to the page, they need to log in again. To avoid this, you can set the tokenStorage to “local” or “cookie” in the Outseta settings object.
<script>
var o_options = {
domain: 'your-domain.outseta.com',
load: 'auth, customForm, emailList, leadCapture, nocode, profile, support',
tokenStorage: 'local'
};
</script>

10. Track email provider conversations

One of my favorite features in Outseta is the activity feed in people and account records. It makes it super easy to track how a person is engaging with your marketing and website. For example, it was always easy to see who downloaded which lead magnet and in which time span.
To make sure we track important conversations, we’ve additionally used the custom bcc email ( that Outseta provides ([email protected]) to link important email conversations to the activity feed. Always good practice to keep everything in one place.
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11. Personalized email subject lines

When sending out emails in Outseta, it’s possible to personalize the email subject line using merge tags. Honestly, this tip has gone under my radar for a while, but it’s super useful.
It not only adds a nice touch to personal emails but it also adds a boost of engagement when you need to catch attention. And I haven’t tested it, but it should also work with custom properties.
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12. Prefix segments for better organization

Over time, we’ve added many segments to our Outseta setup. Some to trigger drip campaigns and some to organize our audience or track engagement. But at some point, we lost track of what each segment was doing exactly.
To resolve this, I’ve started to prefix segments. For example, everything related to our course was got the prefix“[FM]” (For Facilitator Masterclass) and all the lead magnets were prefixed with “[Lead Magnet]”.
This helped to bring back order into our segments, because now when you sort them by name, you see all related segments close to each other.
 
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