A trigger is the starting point of any flodesk workflow. Without trigger there is no action and hence no automation. In the ultimate guide on Triggers and Actions in Flodesk, you will learn everything you need to know about triggers and actions.
In the post titled 'Getting Started with Flodesk Workflow : Welcome Sequence', we have mentioned that Trigger is like flicking of a switch and Action is light turning on. For every action to take place in a workflow, there needs to be a trigger. And for the whole workflow to begin, there needs to be starting trigger as well.
Let's jump into Flodesk and learn by doing.
Login (or sign up for 30 day free trial) to Flodesk and click on 'Workflow' from top menu.
Then you will reach the workflow page with all the pre-designed workflows. Its almost feels like that, Flodesk doesn't want you to create a workflow from scratch.
If you look carefully, on the left side, under 'Browse All', you will see a small text saying "or start from scratch"
Click on that text and you will be redirect to another Flodesk page from where you can build your email campaign from scratch.
First you have to give your new workflow a name.
We are going to call it "The New Test Campaign".
You can call it whatever you want, as long as it is meaningful to you and on a later date you can identify the campaign based on its name, especially when you start to create a lot of campaigns.
We are ready to trigger and start our test campaign. You will come to a window like this.
You will see a text saying "Your campaign name" begins when you add a trigger. In this case it says "This New Test Campaign begins when" >> Add trigger.
On the right hand side you can see available Triggers. "A subscriber is added to segment(s)"
Oh, well, there is only one Trigger available. I'd say, at the moment, one of the limitations of flodesk is that it offers only one way to start a campaign and that is when a subscriber is added to a segment.
Whichever method you use, the bottom line is, subscriber has to be added to a certain segment in order for a workflow to start. So by smartly adding, moving and removing subscribers to and from segments, you can achieve very cleaver email marketing automations.
Let's get back to the trigger.
So we have gone ahead and selected a segment called 'from full page form' which we have created earlier in this post. Now it is time to look into Actions as Trigger is already set.
In order to add the next step, we have to click on the "plus" sign under the trigger.
When you click that, all available actions will open up.
From left to right, you can see, Email, Time delay, Condition and Actions are available. We will go through each of them from left to right.
When you click on Email, you will be able to add either a new email or an existing email.
If you have checked out the post Why you should use Flodesk Free Trial Right now, you must be familiar with how to create and use an email template in Flodesk.
Here in this example, we've decided to use a previous email we've created. So we click on "Duplicate an existing mail" and the Flodesk email window will pop up.
Once you select the email you wanted from the list (or created a new one either from template or from scratch), the email will be added to the workflow.
As usual you can edit the details of the email from this window as shown above. Now it is time to move on to the next action.
Click on plus sign to add the next action.
Here comes the time delay.
When someone joins your email subscription, you want to send them a welcome email immediately. But you don't want to send them the next email too, immediately. That is when the Time Delay comes into play.
If you are planning to send a sequential campaign to everyone who joins your list no matter when they join, such a welcome sequence, this will be the most common delay timer you'll be using.
On the left side, you have options like 1 minute, 2 hours, 7 days etc. Depending on your email marketing strategy and requirement, you can select one of these time delays.
Want to send mails to someone on Saturdays only? Want to send Transformation Tuesday emails? This is the time delay to use.
Right side of the screen gives you options to select the required day of the week.
Fancy sending someone Good Afternoon email exactly at 12:01? This is the timer you want to use.
Do you wish to send Christmas greetings or Valentine's day special offers? This is the delay timer you want to use.
Pick a date and time from the calendar and time option from the right side of the screen and you're ready to schedule a mail on a certain date.
Now those are the four types of time delays available on flodesk.
The real power of an email automation comes when you get to use the conditions.
This is when you can say, if this action is taken, I want that action to happen. For example, if someone opens your welcome email, you'd want to send them a discount, If someone didn't open an email, you'd want to send them the email again and so on.
Let's check the condition in action.
When you click on 'Condition', your options appear. There are four options available.
Depending on your requirement, you can pick one of these conditions.
This condition checks if subscribers are in a particular segment or not. If they are in that segment you have selected, we can proceed to our next step.
For example we can choose subscribers from a segment called "Interested only in ebooks". If the condition is satisfied, we can send them an ebook and not a podcast.
Similarly if you have created a segment called 'Do not send marketing emails', you can create a condition if is satisfied removes them from a marketing campaign segment. It then helps you to stay away from sending unwanted marketing materials to uninterested subscribers.
So conditions can be used to send or not to send emails based on a customer segmentation.
This is a wonderful tool to know who is your more engaging customers and nurture them more. If someone had opened your email, it means they are somewhat interested in the content that you're sending them.
Using Flodesk, we can figure out the open status of exact email that we are interested in. All you have to do is select the interested email from the dropdown from the right side bar.
Note: This is when you realise the importance of giving meaningful names to your emails. If you are having a number of emails in a workflow, it will be easier to find them if they are named appropriately. Also it is a good data practice to name everything more meaningfully.
When you select the required email from the dropdown, if a user has opened it, you can move them to the next step. If they haven't opened, you take take another set of actions using this condition.
You can also add more than one email open condition. Just click on "Add another" on the right side bar and repeat the process.
An example would be to send a discount email to those who have opened and resend the unopened email to those who haven't opened.
Side Note : Email Open rates and status are not a very reliable metrics, especially with all the privacy policies from big names such as apple. Check out this article if you want to know more.
Just like the condition above, "Subscriber has clicked a link" shows us who are engaging with our content. When someone clicks on a link, that shows they are super interested. So we want to give them more.
From the right hand side, we first need to pick the email in the workflow that we are interested in, and then any of the links present in that email. If user has clicked on that particular email, we can decide what to do next using the 'Yes' and "No" nodes of our condition.
An example would be, if someone clicks a links to our page that talks about iPhones, we can send them more iPhone related info and not android info.
On the other hand, if we have a link saying "I'm not interested" and if someone has clicked it, we don't want them to receive more similar emails. We can remove them from certain segments.
Using this condition, you can start using custom fields - ie. fields other than first name, last name, email etc. You can create your own field - a custom field! And once you have that field, you can use this condition to check if there is a match.
If you want to collect the information about the country of your followers, you can create a custom field called 'country'. And if you want to see if they are from 'Australia' you can create a condition like the one shown above.
Take action if "A field matches' the field you have chosen from the list and give a value to compare. Here we have selected the 'country' field of your customer records. If anyone with 'Australia' recorded in their country field will be selected and the next step will be applied to them. Using this you can send special offers to your Australian clients.
You can also check if someone's first name is 'Rachel' and send them a special gift if you want. If you have collected your follower's interest and someone has picked 'Photography' from a list, you could match that field and send them your latest photography ebook. There are so many things you can do by matching a field value!
This is where you can utilize the power of hyper personalization of email marketing.
A Note about Custom fields : As of now flodesk is not offering any other data type other than text data for custom fields. This means, you won't be able to use birthday match, number match etc for your match field condition at the moment. In future this may change.
Get some reaction with taking some actions as your next step!
You can create 2 actions and they are
So you can add or remove a subscriber to required segments using this action.
Here are some of the examples how you can use it
By adding a subscriber to a different segment activates further automations. For example, if a subscriber clicks on a link in the welcome email sequence, you can add those subscribers to "25% discount" segment which will then fire emails with a discount code.
Here in the above example, we are adding all the subscribers who opened an email to "Hot lead from Australia" segment.
Now let's say we want to send those subscribers another email and see if they are opening and clicking the emails.
What would you do? You set-up an email, add a condition to see if they open the email and create another action based on that. Right? Let's try to do that.
In the above screenshot you can see that an email is added and now it is time to add a condition to check if the email is opened or not. Let's add that condition, shall we?
Instead of adding a condition, a Warning message pops up! It says "conditions are checked immediately. Add a delay before a condition so recipient have time to open their email. We recommend a minimum of 1 day."
So if you add a condition to check if an email has been opened or not/ clicked or not, without giving enough time, the condition will fail. The condition checks will run immediately after sending the email and everyone would come out as 'not opened the email'.
So add a delay of at least 1 day between sending emails and checking if it has been opened or not.
You can see in the above screenshot, the right way to add condition after sending an email.
Now you can repeat these steps however many times you want and create the email automations of your dreams. You will finally get something like this.
You are now familiar with all the triggers and actions in flodesk!! Congratulations!
If you have any questions, do let us know in the comments.
