How to Set Up an Automation

What is the Automation feature?

Email marketing automation will help all marketers market to their customers at the right time and in the relevant context. Personalized, time- and context-relevant marketing enables merchants and marketers to achieve higher engagement and conversion rates.

You can use Automations to build drip campaigns, tag users, or add them to lists. All managed within one workflow!

You can also use them to send Transactional emails based on WooCommerce Order status changes, and these emails will be sent whether the subscriber is in "Subscribed" status or not.

How to set up Automation?

You can set up an automation from scratch or you can use one of the templates.

Creating Automation from scratch

If you decide to start from scratch, these are the steps to follow:

1. Choose a trigger

The first step is to select a trigger to fire the email you'll design to be sent.

Right now, we have four options for the triggers:

• When a WordPress user registers to your website;
• When someone subscribes to your MailPoet list;
• When a WooCommerce Order status changes;
• When a subscriber abandons their cart.

Each step added to the Automation can be selected and customized in the sidebar:

2. Choose what happens next

Then it's time to choose what actions will happen according to the trigger you chose and customize your automation.

The actions available are:

• Add a delay of minutes, hours, days or weeks for the action to happen;
• Send an email to the subscriber/customer;
• Automatically add or remove tags to these subscribers;
• Automatically add/remove these subscribers to/from a MailPoet list;
• Automatically update a subscriber's custom field to a particular value;
• Automatically set a subscriber's status to "Unsubscribed";
• Send a notification email to a set list of addresses (up to 5 recipients; i.e. for admin notifications when the automation reaches that point)

You can choose one or more actions for each automation, which means you can create a drip campaign for sending a series of emails, for example.

3. Design your email

If you have added "Send email" as one of the Steps for your Automation, you need to create an email to be sent or select a previously created one by clicking on the + Design email button.

It will redirect you to the Templates page, so you need to select one of them to move to our newsletter editor. Once you're done editing your email, click the "Save and continue button" on the top right menu on this page.

You can still edit the content of the email after going back to the Automations page, as well as previewing it.

4. Activate it

If you have added all the steps to your automation and everything is properly set up, you're ready to activate it by clicking on the "Activate" button.

You can also leave it as a draft to finish editing it later.

Order Status Change: Transactional email vs Marketing email

With the "Order status changed" trigger, you can start an automation based on the change of a WooCommerce order status. This change can be from one specific status to another, or for "Any" status to "Any" other status, or a combination (i.e. from "Any" status to "Completed") based on how you configure it.

If you are adding an action to send an email immediately following the order status change trigger, then this email will be considered "Transactional", meaning that it will be sent to all subscribers regardless of whether they are in "Subscribed" status or not.  On the other hand, for any subsequent "Send email" actions, or if there's any delay between the order status change and the send email action, then those emails will be considered "Marketing" emails.  Marketing emails require opt-in to send to subscribers, so will only be sent to subscribers that are in "Subscribed" status.

These two email types have different icons in the automation editor and descriptions in the sidebar:

Creating Automation from a template

You can choose one of the templates for your automation on the main Automations page:

You need to customize each step of the automation and then activate it.

How to check statistics for each email within Automation?

Click the three dots next to the email in the automation to see its statistics:

You can also see how many subscribers have been processed by automation on the main Automations page:

• Entered - how many subscribers started the automation;
• Processing - how many subscribers are in process and haven't finished the automation yet;
• Exited - how many subscribers completed the automation.

A note on Woo Express

MailPoet and AutomateWoo are included in the Woo Express offering. To make the user experience smoother, MailPoet automations are disabled in favor of AutomateWoo's automation - this includes the Automations menu item and WooCommerce emails in the Emails section. If you'd prefer to use MailPoet automations, there are three options:

1. Disable AutomateWoo.
2. Upgrade your MailPoet plan to a higher tier. 
3. Use the mailpoet_show_automations filter to enable MailPoet automations. 
   1. add_filter('mailpoet_show_automations', '__return_true');