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You often need to send specific emails in real-time based on customer actions. For example, after a customer subscribes, send a welcome email; after the customer starts the checkout and the payment is not completed, send an email to remind him to complete the payment; when the customer's birthday is approaching, send a birthday greeting email; send an email to the customers who haven't placed order in your store for some time; and so on.

If you send these emails manually, it is very difficult. Automation can help you send emails automatically. You only need to set up different workflows in advance, and the emails will be sent to the recipients automatically and on time.

When creating an Automation campaign, the most important thing is to set up the workflow. The workflow includes the following content: which customers will enter the workflow; when to send an email to the customer; and the content of the email sent. A common workflow is as follows.

This workflow includes the following steps:

A workflow contains multiple steps, but there must be one Trigger, and there can only be one. Trigger must be the first step in the workflow. After the customer's operation triggers the trigger, it will enter the workflow. Currently the following triggers are supported.

After the customer's operation triggers the Trigger, you may want to filter the customers so that only customers who meet the filtering conditions can enter the workflow. For example, if a customer adds items to the cart, and you want the cart amount to be at least $50 to enter the workflow, then you need to set a trigger filter as follows.

Triggers filters are based on Triggers, and different triggers support different trigger filters.

You do not need to set Trigger filters. If you set Trigger filters, customers will enter the workflow only if they meet both Trigger and Trigger filters.

Trigger filters will only check once after the customer qualifies for the Trigger. After the customer enters the workflow, they will not be checked by Trigger filters again.

After a customer enters the workflow, he or she may continue to perform some other operations in your store, resulting in a situation that does not meet the requirements of the workflow. For example, if a customer adds the items to the shopping cart and does not place an order, he will enter the workflow, then the customer places an order before the workflow sends the email. In this case, there is no need to send an email to the customer and the customer needs to be removed from the workflow, You can set the audience filters as follows.

Therefore, you need to set up audience filters. Customers who do not meet the audience filter will be removed from the workflow in time.

The differences between Audience filter and Trigger filter are as follows:

Customers move through workflow steps sequentially, starting at the trigger and moving downwards. When you have multiple actions, especially emails, it is important to add time delays between each action so that they do not all occur at once. For example, adding a 24 hour (or longer) delay between your first email and your second email in a welcome series flow will give someone enough time to receive and read the first email before receiving another.

You can set a delay to any number of minutes, hours, or days. To send a message immediately after the previous step, you don't need to drag in a time delay at all.

By enabling the Frequency setting, you may restrict customers from triggering the workflow if they did that already. For example, if you set up a workflow, after the customer adds the items to the shopping cart, if he doesn't place an order within 4 hours, an email will be sent. If the customer frequently adds items to the shopping cart, for example, adds an item to the cart in the morning, he will receive an email 4 hours later; then adds an item to the cart in the evening, he will receive another email 4 hours later. Receiving two same emails in one day may annoy the customer. You can set Frequency to restrict as follows, this means that the customer will receive at most one email per 2 days.

The Email component represents sending emails. You need to set the sender, sender name, mail title, mail content, etc.

After customers enter the workflow, you may need to send different emails to different customers. For example, if the customer has placed multiple orders in your store in the past 3 months, you provide a 10% discount in the email; if the customer has never placed an order in your store, you provide a 20% discount in the email.

Click and drag any action element on the left, you can place it on any of the positions where the add icons is displayed.

Click on the icon with 3 dots, and you will see the delete icon.

After you click on the button Save and Start Automation, the automation will start.