Getting started with automations

Overview

An automation is a series of scheduled actions and communications triggered by a contact's behavior and preferences.

With automations, you can create the perfect email and SMS marketing funnel to welcome new contacts, nurture leads and customers, or even update contact profiles.

If you want to send information about a sale or special offer, date, or event-specific content to your contacts, check out our guide to Campaigns.

In this guide

This guide will cover each part of an automation, how to edit or duplicate an automation, and review troubleshooting solutions.

What is an automation?
Automation components
Managing automations
Troubleshooting
Additional Resources

What is an automation?

An automation is a series of processes that are started by triggers set to respond to a specified action, event, or time.

When an automation is triggered, the automation nodes containing messages, wait times, profile updates, or other logic are scheduled for the contact who triggered the automation. This means that a contact's path through an automation is set as soon as they trigger it.

Let's look at how this works with a simple welcome automation:

When contacts subscribe to the newsletter list, the automation queues up the first email to be sent to the contact as soon as they've subscribed, and the second email is scheduled for 24 hours later due to the wait node between the two emails.

Now let's look at a more complex order placed automation:

This automation is triggered when someone places an order. The automation's first node is a conditional split that checks to see if the contact's order contains a gift card. If it does, the contact is scheduled to receive the Yes Gift Card email. If it doesn't, the contact is scheduled to receive the No Gift Card email.

Because automation nodes are scheduled at the time the automation is triggered, it's important to ensure that your automation is just how you want it before you activate it. Once automations are triggered, contacts' paths through them are set and can't be changed.

The only edit you can make to an automation that will be shown to contacts who have already triggered it is email or SMS message content.

Automation components

Automations are made of four components or types of nodes: triggers, actions, and logic and timing. Click on the name of each component below to read our guides for each component type.

Component	Description
Triggers	Triggers are user-based actions that start your automation. Every automation needs at least one trigger to begin the next steps of automation.
Actions	Actions happen due to a trigger's conditions being met, such as sending an SMS or email message, updating a contact's profile, updating an automation, or passing information with a Webhook.
Logic and Timing	Wait times, Goals, conditional splits, and Audience Splits allow you to use advanced targeting to send your contacts highly relevant content at the right time.

Review the following guides for detailed instructions on creating automations, and browse the Automations section of the knowledge base:

Managing automations

Review the following guides for detailed instructions on managing your automations:

Next steps

If you've been following the getting started with Sendlane guides, you've now completed guide four! We highly recommend completing the remaining of the guides in the order they appear below:

Troubleshooting

The add node button isn't working!

automations have a limit of 50 nodes. If your automation has less than 50 nodes and you can't add a new node, please contact your CSM or our 24/7 product support team!

My automation isn't starting!

If your automation is not starting when it should, make sure it is set to active. Check that the toggle in the upper right corner is green and says Active.

My automation email isn't sending!

Make sure your automation email is set to Active if contacts are not receiving emails from nodes they meet the conditions for.

My conditional split isn't flowing!

Some conditional split actions have built-in required wait times between actions. Review our conditional split guide for detailed information!

I'm getting an infinite loop error message!

The automation builder will prevent your contacts from getting stuck in "infinite loops," where one or more automation sends a contact back and forth through a flow. Avoid this issue by creating new automations with fresh content for your audience to flow through to boost engagement and avoid spam complaints!