You will be able to set exit rules and frequency limits so a subscriber in several flows does not get flooded.
A parent signs up for Priya's heuristics checklist on a Monday and books a trial class on Tuesday. That week she receives welcome email two, a trial booking confirmation, the fortnightly newsletter, welcome email three, the trial reminder, and a post-trial follow-up. Six emails in six days, each one sensible on its own, from a centre she had never heard of a week earlier. By Saturday she is wondering whether booking was a mistake.
Nobody planned that week. Each flow was built separately, each one made sense, and together they flooded one person. This lesson is about seeing the whole picture from the subscriber's side and setting rules so it does not happen.
Automations are triggered by events, and one person can trigger several events close together. A new subscriber who buys quickly is in the welcome flow and the post-purchase flow at the same time. A customer who goes quiet and then clicks a newsletter link might sit in a re-engagement flow and a browse reminder together. And newsletters keep going out on their own schedule throughout.
The tool does not warn you. Each flow follows its own rules, unaware of the others. So you have to look across them yourself. The simplest way is to pick a common path, such as "signs up and buys in the same week", and write down every email that person would receive, day by day, across every flow and the newsletter. If the list makes you uncomfortable, it will make the subscriber uncomfortable too.
The most important rule is about exits. An exit condition is a rule that takes a person out of a flow when something happens, usually the thing the flow was trying to achieve.
If a flow exists to get a purchase or a booking, the purchase or booking should end it. A customer who bought on day two should not get the day five email offering a discount on what they already paid full price for. A parent who booked a trial should not get "Still thinking about a trial class?" the next morning. Both happen constantly, and both make the business look like it is not paying attention.
Most tools let you set an exit condition on the flow itself, often called a goal or exit trigger. Where they do not, add a condition before each sales email that checks whether the person has already bought or booked, and skips the email if they have. You saw this in Mei Ling's welcome sequence test in lesson 4.4, where an exit set on the wrong tag let an offer slip through.
Some flows are dense on purpose. A welcome sequence sends several emails in its first week. A booking confirmation and reminder land close together. During those stretches, a newsletter on top adds noise.
Many tools let you exclude people in a particular flow from a newsletter send, or exclude anyone who received an automated email in the last day or two. Some offer a frequency limit, sometimes called smart sending, that skips a contact who was emailed very recently. Where your tool allows it, use one of these. If it does not, the manual fix is to exclude the "in welcome flow" tag from newsletter sends.
Not every overlap needs fixing. A booking confirmation is wanted even if a newsletter went out the same morning, because the person asked for it. The aim is to cut marketing pile-ups, not to delay messages people are waiting for.
Automations run quietly, which is the point, but it also means they go stale without anyone noticing. A welcome email still promotes the holiday programme that ended in June. A post-purchase email links to a care guide page that was moved. An abandoned cart email quotes last year's delivery fee. The flow keeps sending these to every new person who triggers it, for months.
Put a review in your calendar every few months. For each flow, read every email as a subscriber would and click every link. Check prices, dates, offers and names against what is true today. Look at each flow's results: if one email in a sequence gets far fewer clicks than the others, or a step triggers unsubscribes, it needs attention. Module 8 covers reading these numbers.
Here is Priya's example map, written after she noticed the flood. She listed every email a parent would receive in the first fourteen days if they signed up on day 0, booked on day 1, and attended the trial on day 5.
Before her changes, the parent got fourteen emails over the fortnight. After: the welcome sequence exits on booking, since its later emails pushed the trial they had already booked; the newsletter excludes anyone in the welcome or booking flows; the post-trial follow-up moves from the same evening to two days later. The parent now gets seven, each one wanted, with no two marketing emails on the same day.
In the activity below you will draw up the same map for your own business: every email a new customer could receive in their first fortnight, across every flow and the newsletter, then remove or delay anything that overlaps.
Map every email a new customer could receive in their first fortnight with you and remove or delay anything that overlaps.
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