Automation Example: Send a Series of Emails Over Time (Filtered via Email Preferences)

Details

If you have a series of emails to send over time, but wish to change what is sent based on a user's Email Preferences, an advanced automation is the tool that'll help you achieve this.

See how the Email Preferences function works - Collecting & Sending to Contacts With Email Preferences

Some examples of this could be:

• Send a series of nurture emails to prospects over time, but the system sends a different set of emails based on the users email preferences; such as whether the recipient is interested in dance, theatre or singing.
• Send a series of user manuals, how-to guides or recipe ideas over time to those that have purchased an electrical appliance from you, but send different emails based on the type of product (food processor, pie maker, microwave) that the customer purchased.

What This Example Will Cover

In this article, we'll be building on our Send a Series of Emails Over Time automation example, to send a different recipe club eBook email every 10 days whenever someone completes our generic subscription form and joins our Master List. However, the automation will be setup only to run if the user has the Recipe Club email preference enabled.

Here's what our Email Preferences area looks like, in the case of our example:

How-to Guide

Before you begin, you'll need to have your subscription form created, as well as your various emails built and ready to go. Furthermore, you'll also need to be using the Email Preferences feature.

1. Select Automation from the sidebar.
2. Select the Advanced Automation tab.
3. Click New Workflow.
4. Give the workflow a name and click Save.
5. Click New Step.
6. In the first section, set the action as A trigger against the following List and select the folder & list that contains your subscription form. In our case, it's our Master List subscription form.
7. In the second section, set the trigger as Subscribe.
8. Under Filter your Contacts section, click Add/Edit.
9. In the popup window, select the fields and criteria you'd like to use for filtering. In our case, we're going to only trigger this automation if the user has the 'Recipe Club' email preference set - so we'll setup our filtering step as follows...
   
10. Click OK.
11. In the third section, select Send the Contact the Message, then choose the folder & message you'd like the system to send.
    
12. In the fourth section, configure the timing of when the recipe club eBook email should send. In most cases, you'll probably want to set this to Immediately.
13. Click Save. The first step in our automation sequence is now complete - let's add some more steps for the other two eBooks in our automation sequence.
14. Repeat steps 5 - 10 (above) again. When selecting the action (in the third section) to Send the Contact the Message, choose your second email in the series.
15. In the fourth section, configure the timing of when the recipe club eBook email should send. In our case, well set this to send 10 days later.
16. And finally, repeat steps 5 - 10 (above) again. When selecting the action (in the third section) to Send the Contact the Message, choose your third email in the series.
17. In the fourth section, configure the timing of when the recipe club eBook email should send. In our case, well set this to send 20 days later.
18. Click Save. Once complete, our automation setup now looks like this:
    
19. Click Save on the automation setup screen.
20. Finally, click … next to the automation and choose Activate. Your automation is now ready and will run each time the form is completed and data meets your selected criteria.