Marketing Automation

Learn how to configure automated marketing workflows.

Understanding Automation

This article will help you get started with marketing automation, or automated workflows.

What Is Automation?

"Automation" is an automatic workflow completed by Oncord, which can be triggered by an event such as a purchase, form submission, or when a contact is moved into a group.

Popular uses of automation include:

Sending a series of e-mail marketing messages over a period of time.

Sending an e-mail campaign to users who have abandoned their shopping carts.
Sending a welcome e-mail campaign to new contacts.
Sending follow-up emails to customers with unpaid invoices.
Adding contacts to Groups after they perform a specific activity.

How Do I Enable Automation?

The Automation feature is included with Oncord's Marketing features.
To enable Oncord's Marketing features:

Click the Settings icon, located at the bottom of the left sidebar of the Dashboard.
Click the "Features" option to review the features you have enabled.

Adding features and changing your Oncord plan is easy, click here for instructions.

Navigate to Dashboard > Marketing > Automation to view all your automated workflows, and create new automation workflows.

The Automation Trigger

The "Trigger" is the event that starts the automation workflow. We provide a flexible number of options for triggers including:

A new contact registering,
A user being added to a group,
A certain product being purchased,
Or when a form is submitted.

After defining a trigger, you will be presented with additional options related to your chosen trigger. You may then begin defining your automated workflow, which details the steps to be completed by Oncord after the trigger.

E-mail Automation

Creating an automated e-mail campaign is a great way to get started with automation. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will be creating an automated e-mail campaign which is triggered when a contact is added to a group.

Step One: Create the E-mail Campaign

There are two types of e-mail campaigns - Automations and Broadcasts. Think of Broadcasts as your newsletters or general e-mail campaigns, and automations as templates to be used by the automation engine.

The first step of this tutorial is to create the e-mail marketing campaign which will be sent by automation.

Navigate to Dashboard > Marketing > E-mail Marketing.
Click the "New Message" button towards the top of the screen.
Select "Automation" in the Message Type section, and create a new e-mail marketing message.

Step Two: Create the Automation

Navigate to Dashboard > Marketing > Automation, and click the "New Automation" button to get started.

Define a sensible title for the automation title field for your own reference. A best practice is to label the automation by the activity it is performing (eg. "On Newsletter Group Add > Send E-mail Campaign").

In the drop-down menu for the "Upon Event" field, select the option "Groups - When someone is added to a group". The groups you have configured through Dashboard > Customers > Groups will display, allowing you to specify which group(s) will trigger the automation.

For the first workflow step, select the option "Send E-mail to Customer". You will then change the drop-down message from "None-selected" to the automation e-mail campaign you would like to send.

To test the automation, you select the option "Test Mode", and specify an e-mail address to use instead of sending the message to the customer. Otherwise, select the "live mode" option to send the e-mail campaign to the contact.

When you are ready for the automation to go live, tick the option "Enable this Automation" and click the "Save Automation" button.

Congratulations

You have created your first automation! To test, move your own administrator contact record into the group you specified in the automation trigger and you should receive the campaign.

SMS Automation

Creating an automated SMS marketing campaign is a great way to reach out to your customers. For this tutorial, we will be creating an automated SMS marketing campaign that gets triggered when a new contact is created.

Note: Before creating an SMS Automation, please view the help article: SMS Marketing first.

Create an SMS Automation

Navigate to Dashboard > Marketing > Automation, and click the "New Automation" button to get started.

Define a sensible title for the automation. A best practice is to label the automation by the activity it is performing (eg: "On New Contacts Created > Send SMS").

In the drop-down menu for the "Upon Event" field, select the option "Contact - when a contact is created".

For the first workflow step, select the option "Send SMS to Customer".

Click "Create New SMS" to create a new message for this automation, and then edit the message as needed. (Related Article: How to Create SMS Messages)

To test the automation, select the option "Test Mode", and specify a mobile number to use instead of sending the message to the customer. Otherwise, select the "live mode" option to send the SMS message to the contact.