Intro to The Automation Builder
Audienceful has support for easy marketing automation. This allows you to trigger automated emails or time-delayed drip sequences based on actions taken by your users. You can use it to set up:
- Welcome emails: Trigger emails based on a newsletter signup
- Email courses: Set up a multi-day/week/month series of emails triggered at various time intervals after signup.
- Onboarding/nurture sequences: Teach new users how to use your product or entice newsletter leads to convert to paid.
- Lead magnets: Incentivize signups by triggering a link to a PDF or ebook download after signup.
- ...and much more!
Every automation has 3 parts
To get started click the Automations tab in the sidebar. Then click the New Automation button. Once you're in the builder there's 3 things you need to set for a successful automation
- A trigger: this is the event that enters someone into the automation. It can be based on a user entering/leaving one of your audience segments (which are based on tags, custom fields, or conditionals).
- A timeline of actions: by clicking the + icon anywhere you see it, you can insert actions that fire in chronological order. You can stack email sends and time delays of unlimited length.
- An email theme: this dropdown will control the appearance and sending identity of each email in your sequence.
Later this year we're introducing a bevy of new powerful triggers and actions into the automation builder, so stay tuned for more!
Editing drafts that are in a live automation
With Audienceful, you can actually update your email content without ever pausing a running automation.
Simply open up any draft that's in an automation, and you'll see a bubble that says This draft is currently in live automation.
You can edit the draft however you'd like (all changes will autosave locally to your workspace), and when you're ready to push the latest version into your live automation, just click the link in the bubble.
Preventing emails from sending on weekends
If you're in the B2B space, common practice is to prevent emails from sending on weekends to avoid low-engagement when people aren't at work.
To set this up, simply click the Gear icon in the top right of the automation builder, and use the checkboxes to configure when you want automations to fire. Your automations will dynamically pause during any unchecked days.
At what time of the day will automated emails send?
Audienceful tracks what time of the day each subscriber triggered the automation, and uses that as the default time of day for future emails in the same automation (only for that subscriber).
This is recommended since it is the most accurate way to ensure your users will be most likely to engage with their email at this time, given most company audiences these days are global.
However, if you want to set a specific time of day for automation emails in a given automation, you can set it by clicking the gear icon.