Hello and welcome back!
In this video, I'm going to be walking you through a few examples of creating an automation that does not have a trigger. I'm going to walk you through the process of building this from scratch.
SCENARIO
Now, you might think to yourself yourself "Why would I want an automation without a trigger?" To answer this question imagine a scenario where you only want to add people to the automation manually. For example, let's say that you have an event in your business, and you want to send event reminders to the specific people who said they were interested. Another example could be that you want to add people who said that they are not ready now into an automation that follows up with them in 2 weeks.
Before we begin, I want to show this first example of the automation for 3 reasons. The first reason is that I want you to know that you can create automations without triggers and add people to them manually. The second reason is again, to teach you more creative ways of using the automation. The 3rd reason is to show you a feature of StudioHub that not many people know about, which is an "event date". Let me show you.
{show event date by adding someone to an automation manually}.
We'll come back to this "event date" in a few minutes. Let's come back to the automation.
To start, the first thing we need to create is our automation sentence. Here's what I came up with for this example:
AUTOMATION SENTENCE
When a contact gets added to the automation, the automation waits until 1 day before the "event date" before it sends them a reminder. Then the automation waits 1 hour before the "event date" before it sends them a reminder.
SPECIFICATIONS
People should only be able to go through this automation once.
Let's begin building this.
NAME THE AUTOMATION
The first thing we need to do is name the automation.
We're going to name this automation "Event Reminder", then I need to click save.
TRIGGER
Normally, we would add a trigger to the automation, but because we're only going to add people to this automation manually, we won't add any trigger to it.
ACTION STEPS
Now let's add the action steps.
Make sure that you save each step as you start building.
- Wait (event start time) - 1 day before the event
- Send SMS - "See you at the event tomorrow!"
- Wait (event start time) - 1 hour before the event
- Send SMS - "See you at the event in 1 hour!"
SETTINGS
I mentioned in the specifications at the beginning of this video that I only want people to be able to go through this automation once. Since that's the case, I need to turn "Allow re-entry" OFF.
Since these are event reminders, it doesn't make sense to turn on the "stop on response", or turn on the "timing feature"
LAST STEP
Turn the automation on.
Save the workflow.
RECAP SCENARIO 1
That's it! Because you don't have a trigger, this automation will fire anytime you add someone to this automation manually.
The event reminders will message people before the event.
The way the automation knows when the "event" date is because you'll specify it whenever you add someone to the automation.
This automation doesn't just work for events. Check out this next example.
SCENARIO 2
This can also be used to set up follow-up reminders for people who said "Can you follow up with me in 1 month? I'm not ready yet".
NAME THE AUTOMATION
Let's name the automation.
We're going to name this automation "Follow up later", then I need to click save.
ACTION STEPS
- Wait before event date - Exact time.
- Send SMS - "Hi, you had asked us to follow up with you in some time"
- Wait 1 day
- Send SMS - "Hi are you still interested?"
SETTINGS
Maybe for this automation you want to turn on "Allow re-entry" because you might use the automation multiple times with the same contact.
Maybe you'll want to leave "Stop on response" off because you want them to receive the follow up messages, or maybe you want to turn "Stop on response" ON because you don't want to be seen as pushy.
LAST STEP
Turn the automation on.
Save the workflow.
RECAP SCENARIO 2
To recap, this automation allows you to follow up with people in the future.
Let's go over 2 more examples.
SCENARIO 3
Let's say you want to send reminders letting people know that a sale is about to end 7 days before the sale ends, 1 day before it ends, and 1 hour before it ends.
Here's how to do this.
NAME THE AUTOMATION
Let's name the automation.
We're going to name this automation "Sales Deadline Reminders", then I need to click save.
ACTION STEPS
- Set event date
- Wait before event date - 7 days before
- Send SMS - "7 days til the sale ends"
- Wait before event date - 1 days before
- Send SMS - "Sale ends tomorrow"
- Wait before event date - 1 hour before
- Send SMS - "Sale ends in 1 hour"
SETTINGS
For the settings for this example, because these are reminders for a special promotion, I will only be using this automation once. Because of this, I will turn off "Allow re-entry".
Because I want people to receive all the sale reminders, I will leave stop on response off.
It doesn't make sense to use the timing of the automation feature, since these are event reminders.
LAST STEP
Turn the automation on.
Save the workflow.
BENEFITS OF THIS AUTOMATION
I want to explain something here that might not be obvious.
In the first example, the event date was picked whenever you add the contact manually into the workflow.
In this automation, we are starting it by using the action step "set event date" at the top.
The benefit of doing this is that you can add people to this automation in bulk.
{Show an example of how you would add people to this automation in bulk}
Whenever you add people to the automation, the event date will be set by the automation. This saves you time because you don't need to select the event date one by one, like you had to do in the previous example.
RECAP SCENARIO 3
Remember to think "How does this apply to my business?". This automation isn't just for "Sale ends". You can use it to remind people about any deadlines.
Let's go over the last example.
SCENARIO 4
Everything we have done has been pretty complicated. What if you just want to create a simple automation for a sequence of emails and text messages. For example, let's say you want to create an onboarding campaign.
Let's finish with the simplest automation as the last step.
NAME THE AUTOMATION
Let's name the automation.
We're going to name this automation "Simple follow up", then I need to click save.
ACTION STEPS
- Wait 1 day
- Send Email
- Wait 1 day
- Send SMS
SETTINGS
For the settings, I only want people to go through this workflow 1 time, so I will turn off "Allow re-entry".
Because I want people to receive all the messages, I will leave "Stop on response" off.
I only want people to receive these messages Monday - Friday, 9am - 5pm. So I will turn on the timing settings.
LAST STEP
Turn the automation on.
Save the workflow.
RECAP SCENARIO 4
I wanted to show this last example because not every automation that you create has to be really complicated. Although I wanted to show you all the cool things that you can do with the automation builder, most times, keeping it simple works best!
CONCLUSION
With that said this concludes this automation lesson.
There's still more information left to cover, so I'll see you in the next video!