How to set up a welcome automation

Overview

Sending a welcome series to new audience members is an easy way to introduce Contacts to your brand, encourage engagement, and convert leads into customers by nurturing them along a journey from awareness to conversion!

In this guide

🚦 Before Getting Started

Create at least one list for new Contacts to be added to. We recommend using one list for all new contacts and creating a separate newsletter list for contacts to be added to once they complete the welcome automation.

Background information for welcome automations

Welcome automation triggers

The automation trigger(s) you select for your welcome automation depends on the methods you use to collect contacts’ information. The following triggers are often used in welcome automations:
  • Subscribes to a List
  • Submits a Form
  • SMS Consent Received
Depending on your preferences and marketing programs, you can use multiple triggers for a single welcome automation or multiple separate welcome automations.

SMS in welcome automations

In most circumstances, it’s best to use separate welcome flows for email and SMS. We recommend using the SMS Consent Received trigger to start an SMS specific welcome automation.

When contacts meet an automation trigger’s criteria, each node in the automation is nearly instantly queued up for the contact. Let’s say you have a welcome automation that uses the Subscribes to a List trigger with the following nodes:

  1. Email
  2. Wait one day
  3. SMS
  4. Wait two days
  5. Email

As soon as the contact subscribes to the list specified in the trigger’s settings, Sendlane generates a “schedule” for the contact based on the information available at the time. 

If the contact hasn’t provided SMS consent before or during the sign up process, the automation sees that the contact cannot receive SMS messages and will skip the SMS message in node 3. The contact will never receive that SMS message, even if they provide consent to receive SMS before the SMS message is scheduled to send, because the schedule was created before consent was given.

1. Create a welcome automation

Start your welcome automation setup by creating an automation and selecting the trigger(s) associated with your chosen entry point(s):

  1. Click the Automations icon
  2. Click New Automation
  3. Click Start From Scratch
  4. Enter a name for your abandoned browse automation
  5. Click Start
  6. Click Add Trigger
  7. Select your trigger; see step 2 below for important information on your trigger settings

2. Control the flow of contacts through multiple entry points

You likely give prospective contacts multiple ways to sign up for your email and SMS marketing programs, such as multiple forms, text-to-join keywords, and the marketing consent checkbox on your checkout page. Your multiple welcome automations may contain entirely different content or share content across automations. Depending on the setup of your welcome automation, there are techniques you can implement to prevent contacts from receiving redundant content or the same content multiple times.

If you choose to use multiple triggers (up to three) for your welcome automation, you can prevent contacts from being sent through the automation multiple times with the Limit Per Contact setting in your automation trigger:

  • Select Do not trigger when already in Automation if you’d like to allow contacts to re-enter the welcome automation at some point. If a contact unsubscribes from your content and re-subscribes later, triggering the welcome automation again, they will be sent through the automation again as long as they are not already in it.
  • Select One time only if you do not want contacts to ever re-enter the welcome automation. If a contact unsubscribes from your content and re-subscribes later, they will not trigger the welcome automation again.

If you choose to create multiple separate welcome automations, you can prevent contacts from completing more than one of your welcome automations by:

  1. Selecting One time only as the Limit Per Contact setting in your automation trigger, and
  2. Using an Update Automation > End Other action as the first node(s) in all welcome automations to end any other welcome automations

3. Add welcome automation actions and content

Start your automation with a Send Message action and select email or SMS, depending on which welcome automation you’re building:

  1. Click the + button under the automation’s trigger(s)
  2. In the lefthand sidebar, click Send Message
  3. Click Email or Send SMS (Send Email Notification is intended for internal notifications, not sending marketing messages)
  4. Complete your email or SMS node (see our guide to automation message nodes here, and check out our guide to tags so you can capture contacts’ interests based on their clicks)
  5. Add a wait node between subsequent messages

You can end your welcome automation in multiple ways based on the goal of your welcome automation:

  • Contacts make a purchase - If your welcome automation series includes coupons or other strong CTAs designed to encourage a purchase, consider ending your welcome automation with a goal that checks to see whether or not contacts have purchased and pulls them to a specified node, out of the automation entirely, or starts a new automation once they have completed a purchase. You might also consider using conditional splits to focus branches of your automation on specific products or interests, or an audience split to A/B test different versions of similar content. Check out our guide to tags to learn how to apply tags to contacts based on the links they click.
  • Contacts learn about your brand - If your welcome automation is more focused on informing customers about your brand than convincing them to buy from you, you may want to use update contact property actions to unsubscribe contacts from your welcome list and subscribe them to your newsletter list so they stay in the loop.

Whatever the goal of your automation is, you can keep contacts engaged by using an update automation action to start another automation.

4. Test and activate your automation

To test your automation:

  1. Activate your email nodes
  2. Activate your automation
  3. Meet your welcome automation's trigger criteria; If you used one of the more common welcome automation triggers mentioned above you can follow its testing protocol:
    • Subscribes to a List - Add your email address to the list the same way contacts will to ensure your setup will work for them
    • Submits a Form - Submit the form specified in the trigger's settings
    • SMS Consent Received - Use your phone number to complete SMS sign up the same way your contacts will

If you successfully completed your automation, you're all set! If you didn't receive messages you expected to receive, or otherwise didn't experience your automation the way you want your contacts to, deactivate your automation while you troubleshoot.

Additional Resources

For helpful content on crafting powerful welcome series emails, check out these resources from the Sendlane Email Automation Journal:

Did this answer your question? Thanks for your feedback! There was a problem submitting your feedback. Please try again!

Related Articles