As customer expectations continue to grow, big and small companies alike have to find the right blend of automation and human touch.
Ultimately, automation gives you time to focus on high-value human touchpoints within your business’s customer journey by taking repetitive manual daily tasks off your plate!
One of the most meaningful ways to use automation to do this is by creating processes that listen and respond to customers automatically.
You can manage your list, send a campaign, and then respond with an additional email campaign based on whether or not the initial message was opened, all with automation.
Here’s 3 steps to building your first automation.
The first step to creating an automation is selecting the start trigger. The start trigger determines how contacts are added to automations. Once the contact meets the trigger condition, they will progress through the workflow.
Let’s say you choose the trigger “Subscribes to a list.” From there you can select which list you want to monitor for new subscribers.
Next, you’ll begin to build the rest of the automation workflow using actions. Actions are the actual steps your contacts will travel through after they have accomplished your start trigger condition.
Add the “Send an Email” action step using the drag-and-drop builder. Once you have named your email, you can be pushed into the email designer by selecting “Start with a template” or “Start with a past campaign.” From here you can personalize and design the campaign in real-time.
You can do that at this point, or build the bones of the automation first and come back to the content creation later. If this sounds more like your style, you can simply select the “Save and design later” button.
Once your contacts receive the first email in your automation, it’s time to determine what conditions you want the contacts to meet before they receive any further messages in the series.
You’ll want to give your audience time to open the email. Add a “Wait” condition and configure it based on specified conditions or a specified period of time.
The next action step you can add to your automation is an “If/Else” condition. Setting up an “If/Else” condition lets you respond differently based on your specified conditions, i.e. based on your contact’s engagement with your initial email.
After your automation is configured and your campaigns are designed and ready to go, it’s a simple click of a button to go live.
- You can turn an automation from Inactive to Active with a click of a button in the upper right of the automation builder.
- Or, if you are on your main list of automations, you can easily go live by selecting “Make Active” from the dropdown menu to the right of any automation.
You’ll notice a small green dot on the automation, indicating it is live. 
By building intentionally you can easily apply these steps to marketing funnels, drip campaigns, and many other automations in your customer journey.
Day 14 - Task of the Day:
Attend our Automation Building Workshop!
This is a great time to connect with our experts! You can ask our team any beginner-level questions live, or for those who’ve been around for a while, you can attend to learn more advanced automation techniques, as well.
There’s something for everyone!
Our next one is Tuesday, September 24th at 11:30am CDT. You can register for this session, or another time that works for your schedule, below: