How to use the automation workflow builder

Our automation feature lets you automatically send targeted emails to your audience based on actions that they’re taking, like signing up or clicking links in your emails, and important milestones in their customer journey, such as birthdays, anniversaries, or account updates. You can create workflows to send emails to your subscribers based on those actions and events. Taking it a step further, branching your workflow allows you to create a sophisticated, multi-email series that sends your subscribers different messages based on how they interact with previous emails in that series.

Pro and Lite customers can activate one workflow, while all other plans include unlimited workflows. Pro and Lit accounts also do not have access to certain triggers.

How to create an automation

Navigate to your Automation tab.
Click on the Create new workflow button.
Enter a name for your workflow in the first field.
In the second field, choose an audience for the workflow from your groups and segments. You can choose more than one, if necessary.
Choose your trigger event. A trigger event is the action that will cause the workflow to fire, such as clicking a link in a mailing or updating a contact field.
Use the Add action button to either choose a mailing to send through the workflow or add a waiting period. Once you add at least one mailing followed by one wait step, you’ll have the opportunity to branch the workflow, if desired.
Once you’re satisfied with your automation, click on the Save workflow button and switch the toggle from Inactive to Active.

You must save your workflow before activating it. If you activate first, it may malfunction and fail to fire.

Automation triggers

There are several different options for triggering your workflow. We’ve made a quick list of these options below, including a brief description of each one and links to more information about how to use them.

Signup: Triggers a workflow when someone signs up through a form.
Date-based: Triggers a workflow based on a date stored in a contact’s record, like birthday, anniversary, appointment, etc.
Contact import: Triggers a workflow when a new contact is imported into your account. This trigger is not available to Pro or Lite accounts.
Field change: Triggers a workflow when the data in a specific field in a contact’s record is updated, like if their City field changes from Knoxville to Nashville and you want to target them differently.
Link click on a specific mailing: Triggers a workflow when someone clicks on a link in a specific mailing that you’ve sent or scheduled.
Link click on any mailing: Triggers a workflow when someone clicks a specific link in any mailings you’ve sent or scheduled.

The contact import trigger is not available to Lite and Pro accounts.

Is there a trigger that will just start an automation when I tell it to?

Currently, there is no trigger that will start a workflow at the push of a button. However, you can use a field change trigger to achieve a similar effect.

Create a new short answer contact field. For example, a short answer field named Trigger.
Create a new field change automation.
In the panel on the right, select the Trigger field and click Next.
On the next screen, click on the first box labeled Please choose an option and select Equals. In the box below, enter No.
Click on the second box labeled Please choose an option and select Equals. In the box below, enter Yes. Click Next.
Click Confirm.
Add the desired mailings to the workflow.
Save the workflow, then activate it.
Create a spreadsheet of the contacts who you want to trigger the workflow. This spreadsheet should have 2 columns: One for email address and one for the Trigger field.
In the Trigger field column, enter No for all contacts.
Import the spreadsheet into your account.
Return to your spreadsheet and enter Yes into the Trigger field column for all contacts.
Save the spreadsheet and import it into your account. Be sure to check the Trigger field change workflows box when importing.

Once you’ve completed these steps, the workflow will fire.

Branching a workflow

Once a contact in your audience successfully triggers a workflow, they’ll follow the steps of that workflow in the order that you lay them out. If you want to send users down different paths based on how they’re interacting with earlier messages in that workflow, branching will let you automatically check for specific interactions before deciding which message they should receive next. Each workflow can have up to 20 branches.

Branching is activated by using either a Wait step or a Send mailing step:

Send mailing: This option allows you to choose one of your campaign drafts to send to the contacts in the workflow. You can customize the subject line, from name, and from address of the mailing.
Wait: This option will wait a specified amount of time (hours, days, weeks) before moving to the next step. Use this to add delays between emails and other actions.

To add branching to your workflow, you must first add at least one mailing, followed by one wait step. Once you’ve added both, hover your cursor over the plus sign and choose Branch workflow from the dropdown menu. In the pop-up window that appears, click on the Action menu and select either, Has opened or Has clicked. This will allow you to create separate paths in the workflow for contacts who opened / clicked and for contacts who did not open / click.

If you choose Has clicked, it’s important to keep in mind that this follows the same rules as a link click trigger, specifically these 3 rules:

Link click triggers do not work with mailings that have Google Analytics applied.
Link click triggers operate on unique clicks. Clicking a link multiple times will not trigger the automated workflow repeatedly.
Links to signup forms are not eligible for link click triggers.

Workflow audience

As mentioned above, you can filter the audience for an automation workflow if you only want certain contacts to be eligible to receive it. You do this by filtering your audience to only contacts in specific groups or segments. If you select multiple groups or segments for a workflow, contacts will enter the workflow if they belong to any group or segment that you’ve chosen.

Furthermore, if contacts move out of the groups or segments that you’ve specified for your workflow, they will no longer receive the emails in that workflow. This is a great way to make sure that people don’t receive messages in your workflow if they take an action that makes that workflow no longer relevant to them.

Activating / deactivating your workflow

After you create an automation and have activated a workflow, you will not be able to edit the trigger type, wait times, or selected emails. However, you can still make changes to the workflow’s audience, edit the subject line, sender name, reply-to address, and the content of the emails directly from the workflow builder.

Deactivating your workflow will immediately remove all contacts from it. No additional emails will be sent, and those recipients will not pick up where they left off if you reactivate the workflow.