Building an automation

An automation is a flow that starts by itself for each person and sends them emails over time. Go to Email › Automations and press New automation.

What starts it

• An event happens — something your app reports with the widget's track() or the API, such as signed_up.
• Someone gets a tag.
• Someone enters a segment.
• A date comes round — a number of days before or after a date variable, such as trial_ends_at.

Steps

• Send an email — one of your templates.
• Wait — for minutes, hours or days. You can set the time of day and weekdays only.
• Wait until — until the person does an event, giving up after a number of days.
• Yes / No — split the flow by whether they are in a segment, have a tag, or opened or clicked the last email.
• Update the contact — set a variable, add a tag or remove a tag.
• Send a webhook — post the contact to your own server.
• Notify the team — a notification in UserSignal for your teammates.
• Exit — end the flow here.

Goal and exit

• Goal — being in a segment or doing an event. When a person reaches it, their run ends and counts as a conversion. For example, being in the segment "Paying customers".
• Exit when — a segment or an event that takes people out wherever they are, such as cancelling.

Both are checked before every step, so nobody gets an email that no longer applies.

Other settings

• Can people go through it again? Once per person, or every time it starts.
• Time zone — the one used for "at 9:00" in Wait steps.

Going live

Press Go live. From then on, everyone who triggers it enters. You can Pause it at any time: people stay where they are and continue when it goes live again. Changes to a live automation apply to people already in it.

People who did it before you went live

For automations that start on an event, Add people who did this earlier takes in people who did it in the last days you choose. Each person enters as of when they did it: emails whose time has already passed are skipped, and the rest go out on the original schedule.

Following what happens

• Turn on People in the editor to see how many people are in each step now, and how many emails each step sent, with opens and clicks.
• The automations list shows how many entered, are in it now and reached the goal, and can be filtered by Live, Paused and Draft.
• Activity lists everything that happened, person by person: who entered, each email sent or not sent and why, each wait and exit.