Troubleshooting Automations

If you set up an automation and you believe it's not working, this article may help you.

Issues related to subscribers' status (no consent)

If your automation is not triggering for all or some subscribers, there is a good chance that you are using a trigger and/or action that requires subscribers' opt-in. This is explained in detail here: Transactional x Marketing Email

To verify if that's the case, check the status of the subscribers that should've entered the automation. If it's Subscribed, then this is not the issue, and you can skip to the next troubleshooting section.

If it's anything other than Subscribed (i.e. Unconfirmed, Unsubscribed), then it's expected that the automation won't be triggered for them if:

You are using one of the triggers not related to Orders, Subscriptions, or Abandoned Cart, as listed below:

Users
- WordPress User Registers
- User makes a comment
Subscribers
- Someone Subscribes
- Tag added to Subscriber
- Tag Removed from Subscriber
- Subscriber Clicks a Link in Email
Customers
- Customer Buys a Product
- Customer Buys from a Category
- Customer Makes a Review

These triggers do require that the subscribers have signed up for your newsletters and, if Sign-up Confirmation (Double Opt-in) is enabled, they have confirmed their subscription. You can see the full list of triggers here.

Or even if you are using one of the triggers related to Orders, Subscriptions, or Abandoned Cart, which don't require user opt-in, but your automation has a Delay action followed by a Send Email action, then the automation will only run for subscribers with Subscribed status because MailPoet will see this as a marketing email. If the subscriber has any other statuses, they will enter the automation, but the email will only be sent once their status switch to Subscribed. If you don't have a Delay action between these triggers and the Send Email action, the email will be considered transactional and will be sent to all users regardless of their status.

Checking Automation Statistics

You can find more clues on why an automation may have failed for a subscriber by checking the automation Analytics. You can access it from the Automations list ( WP Admin > MailPoet > Automations):

Then, click the "Subscribers" tab to see the list of subscribers that entered the automation:

Look for the subscriber you suspect had an issue through the automation flow and check the Status column. You can find one of the following statuses:

Completed - It means the subscribers went through all automation steps successfully.

In Progress - It means the subscriber entered the automation and one of the steps within the automation flow is in progress. For instance, if you set up an email to be sent 12 hours after a subscriber purchased a product, it could be that they purchased the product, let's say, 8 hours ago, so the automation is waiting to complete 12 hours to send the email.

Failed - It means the subscriber entered the automation but one of the steps (a trigger or an action) failed to complete for some reason.

If the status of the affected subscriber is Failed, you can click the View Activity button on the right side to see the details about the automation flow for that specific subscriber. You will see a popup window like this:

In the example above you can see that the issue is that the subscriber was not subscribed to the list targeted by the automation.

Task Scheduler (Cron) Issues

If not only Automations but other types of emails aren't sending (i.e. Newsletters, Post Notifications, etc), this could be a more general issue with your task scheduler (cron). In this case, please review this page with further instructions.