Building an Automation
If you're new to Engage and haven't yet set up your sending domain and preferences, check out this guide first: Setting up Engage and then come back here 🙂
Engage Automations only take a few moments to set up and offer an unparalleled level of control over who you send emails to by leveraging Metorik's powerful segmenting system.
To get started, head to the Automations page.
When you click the New Automation button, you'll be given two choices:
Create from a template - learn more about Engage templates here.
Create from scratch - follow the guide or video below.
Setting up an Automation
There are several steps involved in building an automation. Here's the complete workflow:
Name & Resource
Resource: You can choose Customers, Orders, Carts or Subscriptions (if you use WooCommerce Subscriptions). The one you choose depends on who (and how) you want to email the audience.
For example, you'd choose Orders if you wanted to send an email one week after you get an order for a certain product. Or you'd choose Customers if you wanted to email customers when they haven't ordered in 6 months but spent over $200.
Name: Give the Automation a name for you to reference it by. Customers will not see this, just you.
Campaign (Optional): You can assign the Automation to a new or existing Campaign. A Campaign is simply a group of Automations to keep things organised and see reporting based on all Automations in the group.
Description (Optional): You can add a longer description that will show in the Metorik dashboard and help you remember what the Automation was for. This won't display to customers.
Define your Audience
In this step, you can use Metorik's segmenting system to define the audience for the Automation (who will receive the email). That is, what rules a Customer, Order, Cart or Subscription should meet in order for it to receive the Automation email.
As soon as a Customer, Order, Cart or Subscription meets the defined rules, they'll get the email.
To create the rules, you'll use Metorik's powerful segmenting system. If you're not familiar with it, we recommend having a read over this guide: Metorik's Segmenting System
Once you've added your filters, click the "Segment Customers" button to get a preview of the audience and ensure the email audience is as you had envisaged.
If you're happy with the audience preview, click the "Save & Continue" button to proceed to the next step.
Create your Message
First we setup the basics, like your email, subject and preview text.
To Email: In most situations the email will go to the customer's email address, however you would use "Custom email address" if you wanted to email someone internally, like emailing a vendor when an order for a certain product is purchased, or notifying your team when a high value customer has a large failed order.
If using Custom email address:
You can currently only enter a single custom address. If you needed to send the email to two separate addresses, you could technically add the second email as a BCC in the advanced settings at the bottom of the page. If you wanted to send to more, you may want to consider setting up an email redirect with your email provider, that will redirect the email to multiple addresses.
For a detailed walk-through on some of the use cases of the custom address field, check out our blog post - Metorik Engage's (not so) Hidden Feature.
From Email: Where emails should be sent from. If you've verified your domain during the Engage setup, you can easily send from any email on your domain. If not, you'll receive an email asking you to verify the new address before you can send from it.
Reply-to Email: When customers click the reply button, where should their replies go? You may want to set this to be a different address, like a help/support email, so you can receive email replies.
Subject: The subject of the email (customers will see this). You can use variables here to give the subject a bit of personalisation, like including the order number, or the customer name. Just click the icon on the right to see a list of the available variables.
Preview Text: This is the text that appears under the subject line when you're previewing emails in your email application. Preview Text doesn't always show, so make sure not to hide anything super important in there.
Configure extra settings and activate
At the bottom of the email builder you'll find a few additional, optional settings:
Discount — You can choose to add a discount to the Automation. Clicking the Add Discount button will open a dialog where you can configure the discount amount and restrictions. For more info, see the Engage Discounts Guide.
UTM Tracking — Choose to add or remove Metorik's automatic UTM tracking feature. Learn more about Metorik's UTM Tracking.
Advanced — Set the language/locale for this email, or add a BCC address for every email sent.
Extra Settings:
Send automation multiple times: If you're creating a customers or subscriptions automation, you'll find this setting. If checked, we will send an automation to a single customer or subscription multiple times. So whenever a customer stops matching the audience, but then later matches the audience an additional, separate time, we'll trigger the automation for them again.
More information can be found in the How many times will a customer receive an automation email? help document.
Creating the email
There are three options for creating your Automation email:
Email Builder is our visual drag-and-drop style email editor. You'll use this in most situations.
Basic Editor is a simple text-focused composer with limited layout capabilities.
Custom HTML allows you to add your own custom HTML email that you've built elsewhere.
Using the Email Builder
If this is your first Automation or email sent using Engage, we recommend creating your "email template" over in the Designs section of Engage first. You'll then be able to reuse this design across multiple future emails.
After clicking the "Email Builder" button, you'll be presented with a range of designs to get you started. You can select one of the existing designs, or click the "Start Fresh" button to create your email from a blank canvas.
In this example we'll "Start Fresh" to create our email from scratch:
The Email Builder interface is broken into a few key sections:
Email window – on the left you have a panel where you can edit the email, drag and drop sections. You can also toggle between the desktop and mobile versions of the email, and use the left and right arrows to undo or redo changes.
Sidebar – this consists of:
Content: click and drag these elements into the email window to build your email
Blocks: these are layout elements allowing you to create multiple column sections
Body: this is where you set the overall design and layout options for your email
Images: provides you with some free to use stock images
Uploads: is all your previously uploaded images
Using the blocks, text variables and some images, we've created our email:
Previewing your email
At any time if you want to preview what the email will look like, click the "Preview Email" button in the top right. From here, you can also email some tests to yourself or a team member to check how the email is received.
Activate your Automation
Now it's time to activate and send the automation! 🎉
Depending on how many orders/customers currently match the rules of the automation, you'll have the ability to send to the current matches as well as future matches.
More info can be found in the Automation Activation help doc.
That's it! 🎉
You've created your first Automation. Nice work! If you have any questions about the process, please feel free to reach out using the live chat feature, or the contact us button below.