You will be able to break any email automation into its trigger, conditions, delays and actions.
Every evening after classes, Priya used to go through her enquiries by hand. A parent asked about P5 maths on Monday: had she replied? Had they booked a trial? If they came to the trial on Saturday, had she followed up? Some weeks she remembered everyone. Most weeks a few parents slipped through, and some of them enrolled at another centre while waiting to hear back.
That checklist in Priya's head is an automation waiting to be built. An email automation, which tools also call a flow, a workflow or a journey, is a set of steps that runs by itself whenever someone does something. You built one already in module 4: the welcome sequence. This lesson gives you a way to break any automation into parts, so you can design your own before you open the tool.
Every automation begins with a trigger: the event that puts a person into the flow. Common triggers include:
a signup through a particular form a purchase, or a purchase of a particular product a date, such as a birthday or the anniversary of a first order a tag being added, such as status: trial booked a click on a particular link in an email
A trigger should be something your tool can actually detect. "A parent is thinking about tuition" is not a trigger. "A parent submits the trial class enquiry form" is. If the event happens outside your email tool, such as a booking in a separate calendar or a payment in a shop, you need a connection between the two systems so the tool hears about it. Shop integrations do this for purchases, and lesson 6.2 covered where that kind of data comes from.
Once a person is in the flow, conditions decide which path they take. A condition is a yes-or-no question about the person at that moment. Have they bought since entering? Did they click the link in the last email? Do they have the customer tag? Is their child in P6?
Each condition splits the flow into two branches. People who answer yes go one way, people who answer no go the other. A flow can have several conditions in a row, but each one is still a simple yes or no.
Conditions are what make an automation feel responsive. Without them, everyone gets the same emails in the same order, like a recording. With them, a parent who booked a trial gets a reminder, and a parent who did not gets a gentle nudge instead.
Actions are what happens on each branch. The most common is sending an email. Others are just as useful: adding or removing a tag, waiting for a set time, moving someone to another flow, or sending a notification to you or a colleague so a human can step in.
Delays are a kind of action too. "Wait two days" between emails keeps the flow at a sensible pace, as you saw with the welcome sequence in lesson 4.2. Many tools also let you wait until a condition is met, such as "wait until the trial date, then continue", or wait for a set time and then check a condition.
The notification action deserves more use than it gets. Some moments call for a person more than for one more email. When a parent has attended a trial and not enrolled after a week, an email might help, but a short phone call or WhatsApp message from Priya herself often helps more. The automation's job there is to remind her.
Every tool has a visual builder where you drag triggers, conditions and actions onto a canvas. It is tempting to start there. It is better to start on paper.
Draw a box for the trigger at the top. Draw arrows down to each delay and email. Where there is a condition, draw a diamond with the question inside, and two arrows out, labelled yes and no. Put each email's purpose in a word or two. If you cannot draw the flow clearly on one sheet, it will confuse you inside the tool, and it will confuse whoever has to fix it later.
Here is Priya's example enquiry flow on paper. Trigger: the trial enquiry form is submitted. Action: send an email with the available Saturday slots and a booking link. Wait one day. Condition: has the trial been booked? If yes, send a confirmation with directions to the centre and what to bring, wait until the day before the trial, and send a reminder. If no, send one short follow-up email answering the questions parents ask most, then wait three more days. Condition again: booked now? If no, notify Priya to follow up personally, and end the flow.
That drawing has one trigger, two conditions, several delays and a mix of emails and one notification. It took her ten minutes, and it showed her that she had no plan for parents who booked and then did not turn up, which became a second flow later.
In the activity below you will draw one automation for your own business on paper, with its trigger, two conditions, the delays, and the actions on each branch.
Draw one automation for your business on paper with its trigger, two conditions, delays and the actions on each branch.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).