How To Create an Automation Workflow

[00:00:00] In this video, you're going to learn how to set up an email automation workflow in your Profit Platform CRM. And so an email automation workflow is often also referred to as an email autoresponder. So in essence, what it is, is a sequence of emails that you're going to send out typically on a daily basis to people who subscribe to your list by opting in on your website. Once they hit that button to subscribe, then you're going to start sending them emails right away.

[00:00:32] And so let's get started. The first thing you'll need to do is to log into your Profit Platform, CRM. And so that is covered in another video on how to do that. So first of all, log in there. And then where are you going to actually create your workflow is under the “Automation” tab. So click here on Automation, and then you'll see the Workflows List.

[00:00:54] What I'm going to do is just start from scratch to create a workflow. And to do that, I just click this button here, “Create Workflow,” and I want to just go ahead and start from scratch. I'm starting from scratch because this is a custom workflow that I want to completely design from the beginning that's going to be for people who sign up on my website. And so for the website that I'm going to be working with, which is my Kitty Care Academy website, what I want to do is promote a course, and I'm going to do that using some emails that were built for me by the system when I got them through an add-on pack. I'm not going to go ahead and build the entire 30 day sequence here in this video, but I wanted to show you how you would get started on that. And then the rest of it is just basically rinse and repeat.

[00:01:38] So let's so let's go ahead and start to build this workflow. Now, the very first thing that you always need in a workflow is some kind of a trigger that is going to get people into the workflow. In this case, when someone signs up on my website, I've set it up so that they are automatically tagged with a tag called “new_lead.”

[00:01:56] And so that's going to be the trigger that's going to start this workflow. And if I just click on this here, it'll bring up the workflow trigger settings. And I can go ahead and search for a contact tag, which is right here. I could search for it or I could just click it because it's right here, so contact tag. I'm going to give it a name and the name I'm going to give it is the “contact tag is new lead.” And I have to select the actual tag now. So we're going to go here and say “tag is added” is the condition and the tag I want is this one here, new_kead. And that's all I need to do to actually set this trigger. As soon as a contact is added to my CRM, they will be tagged with the new_lead tag and it will start this workflow immediately.

[00:02:43] So that gets them into the workflow. And and so then you want to send them their first email, and in my case, that email is going to thank them for signing up and then also deliver to them the free guide that I promised to them when they signed up on my opt in page. And so for the style of PushButton AI site that I am working with here, it is a course sales site. And so I am going to first of all be giving them a free guide that is related to the course. And then my workflow sequence after that is going to send them additional emails to market my course to them.

[00:03:20] Now, to start this workflow, I actually want to start with a delay. I'm going to delay for a short amount of time, seven minutes, because that's actually what the opt in form on the website says after they opt in, it says “your free guide will be delivered to you in about seven minutes,” so I'm going to go ahead and do a wait action and the wait action name, I'm going to set to “wait seven minutes.” And the reason I'm doing this is because then as I'm looking at my workflow I can actually see that's what this step does, and I want to make sure that the action name actually is clear about what's happening. Alright, so I'm going to wait for the time delay, and I'm just going to set this to seven minutes, and that's all I need to do.

[00:03:57] So save that action, and then the next thing I want to do right after that wait time is over, is to send them an email. So I'm just going to type email in here, and “send email” is the next action I'm going to do. And this will be my welcome email, so I'm going to call it “Welcome email with free guide link.” And I don't actually have to set the “from name” or the “from email” because those are automatically set by the system, so you don't really need to set those. And in fact, as I mentioned in another training video on this, on how to set your from name, the way that the system is currently configured to support the best deliverability for your CRM is that we use a fixed email address and then from name that will be applied to each email that is sent by the system, so you don't need to worry about that.

[00:04:48] But I do need to put in a subject line, you can see it's a required field, so I do need to do that. I've already written a subject line and some content for my email, so I'm going to go ahead and grab that. Right here is the subject line I want to use. So we'll start with that. I'm just going to copy this and then come back over here to paste it in. And then we'll get to the body copy in just a moment, but let me just start here. Now one thing about this, in all cases, you will need to write your welcome email. We don't provide a welcome email, that is something that you would have to put together yourself. So I wrote this, and if you'd like, you can sort of emulate it, and you can just do that through copying it down for yourself from this video, if you'd like. So my subject line, “Welcome to Kitty Care Academy, FIRSTNAME, here's your Free Guide.'

[00:05:32] Now, this FIRSTNAME here is just a placeholder text I put in to remind me that I wanted to actually tag their first name. So I want to actually insert their first name here, which I can do through a tag. So what I'm going to do is delete that, and I'm going to use this little tag icon right here.

[00:05:50] And we're going to go to find their first name. Where that's going to be is on their contact record, and then what we're going to want to do is just select their first name. And then it will automatically put this tag right here into your subject line where it will insert their first name in here. Now, there's a great reason for this, is that when people see their own name in a subject line, it gets their attention. And so what that means is that they're more likely to open this because they're going to see it. They're going to see it came from kitty care Academy where they know they just went and signed up for something. And they also were already looking for this email, but this makes it just a little bit more personal.

[00:06:26] Now, the next thing that we want to do is select the template. And for this, I'm going to use the “basic email template” that I created in a previous training video. And I'm going to go ahead and just select that so that I can then use it to make the email body copy. So what I do now is click this edit button and it will bring up the template editor. Now, where I want to put my email body text is right here, and so I'm going to go ahead and select all this text and delete it, and I'm going to go over to my notepad where I had the text that I wrote, and I'm going to copy all of this text, which is the email body. It's actually not that long, it's a nice succinct email. The point is really not to do any selling, well, it does a little bit of selling you'll see, but the idea is to welcome them and deliver the free guide as promised. So, paste that in here. So now I have the copy here. Now I do need to make a few modifications to this copy.

[00:07:22] First of all, again, I need to put the tag in for the first name. So I'm going to delete that and I'm going to use the tag button, which it looks like it's hiding over here somewhere. So this is the tag button, it says “custom values,” so what I'm doing is inserting a custom value which is going to be their first name. So, and sometimes they're called tags. Sometimes they're called custom values in the interface. So what we're doing is use this to go and find the contact first name again, just like that. Pretty easy. And put that in. So that's taken care of. And now we got a couple other things I need to change. So first of all, if you read the copy here, you can see that it's saying, “thanks for requesting your no cost copy of meow mastery,” which is the name of the free guide. And so I'm going to go ahead and link this text right here, to the free guide that's on the website. So over on my website,

[00:08:10] the link for that is always this one, for any of our PushButton AI course sales websites, where you're giving away a free guide. And so what I want to do here is grab the free report

[00:08:21] and I'm just going to go ahead and copy this link and go back over to the CRM and then to make this text into a link, I'm going to go ahead and use this link text button right here. So I click that, and the URL I'm going to put in is the one I just copied, and then all I need to do is click Save. And that is now a link. Now, just as a stylistic thing, I like to also bold link lines like this in an email. So I'm going to go ahead and set that to bold.

[00:08:52] And now, if you look at the rest of this email, you can see that there is this additional link that I've got down here. Now, this is where I'm doing a little bit of sales. Okay. So I am saying, “our meow mastery guide is a great way to get started. And we also have an in depth course, so, to learn all about it, just follow this link.

[00:09:11] Now, I'm not saying to purchase it, but I actually do want this link to go to the sales page. So I'm going to highlight that link. Now I need to go back over to the site and go to the sales page. So the sales pages on these sites are always at this URL here, which is “/buy-membership”. So again, I'm just going to highlight this, I'm going to copy it from my browser, go back to the CRM, do the same thing. Click the link text, insert this, and hit save. And then select it once again and click bold just to bold it.

[00:09:46] Okay, so that's all I'm going to be doing for this email. And as you notice, because I used my basic email template it already has this footer in here with the spam compliant text that I created in a different training, so that I won't have to remember to put that into every email that I set up, it's already right here.

[00:10:05] Now, the last thing I want to do is, I don't want to click Save because that will overwrite the Basic Email Template itself. So what I want to do is save this as a new template. So I'm going to rename this to “Welcome Email.” That's all I need to do here. So now this will show up as a separate template in my templates list , but really the only purpose that it's going to be used for is that it's the welcome email.

[00:10:30] Okay. So we're going to go ahead and click continue and it will save. And so then to get back to the workflow builder, after I've saved this, and I can see it, it's saved as welcome email, then I can go ahead and close this, and it will be right here. So you can see in this little preview, a little hard to see, but you can tell that the content is there.

[00:10:48] Now, to make sure that it works, one thing I can do is to go ahead and put an email address in here and send it maybe to myself. One thing about that is if you put an email address in here that isn't already in your contacts, on your CRM, it won't put in a first name because it won't know what the first name is but it actually does add a contact. So, one thing you can do is go back and edit your contact that it creates as soon as you do that, so that in the future, when you send test emails, it will actually go ahead and insert that custom value for your, the first name. Finally, we just go ahead and hit “save action” and now that is saved, alright?

[00:11:27] The next thing I want to do is wait a day. So I'm going to set up another wait action. And I'm going to select wait from here, and this will be “wait one day,” okay? So that means we need to change this to one day. And then save that action, that's all we need to do here. So that's going to wait one day before it does anything else, and then, and then it'll do the next action.

[00:11:52] So this next action that I want to set up is again, sending an email.

[00:12:00] So this is going to be my first sales email. So here for the action name, what I'm going to do is, or I guess you could call it a marketing email, whatever you want to call it. And I'm going to call this the day one, because this is the first one of the marketing emails that I'm going to be sending. So I'm going to call it “day one course sales email” for the action name. Again, I don't need to set the from name or from email, and then I'm going to go get the content that I have for this email.

[00:12:25] Now, because I have an add on pack that I got for this site, one of the things included in that pack was the 30 days of emails, and those are on a page over here on the site that I can only see if I'm logged in as an administrator, and I'm going to scroll down to that in my pages, and here it is, emails, and all I need to do is view this to see the emails that were created by AI for me and put here. So here is the first one. So this would be the subject line. So all I need to do is just copy that and go back to the CRM and I'm going to paste that in here. Now, I could customize this. For example, what I could do is at the end of this, I could put their name, or I could put it at the beginning. So that's something I could do. I think I will just to demonstrate that. I can go ahead and say get the tag for the contact first name, and then I can do something like that. So what it would say if I sent it to myself would be “Jay, say goodbye to cat chaos, learn easy litter box secrets.”

[00:13:32] Then we're going to go ahead and select that basic email template again and edit it. Delete the body text placeholder, and then go over to here to get the body text. So I'm going to go ahead and copy this, and I will have to do some customization of this, but I'm going to go ahead and copy it over and paste it into the CRM before I do that.

[00:13:58] So there it is. I pasted it in. And so here's where we can do the customization to this email itself. Okay, so first off, let's start with here it says, “Hey there, new cat parent.” So that's fine, but let's customize it. So I'm going to change this to, “Hey there” and then go back and find the custom value insertion here. So do that contact first name again. So there we go. So “Hey there {{contact first name}}”, and then I'm not going to read everything in here, but you can see all of the content here that was written by the AI for you.

[00:14:31] So now I have different opportunities in here where I could insert the course link. I'm going to actually just skip and go only to the places where it says ” insert link to Buy Now.” So what it's saying here is this is where the buy now page should be. So I'm going to go ahead and just. I'm going to use a link similar to the one I used before, so I'm going to just change this to say, “go here to get all the details.” And then I'm going to highlight that and then as I had mentioned before, that link is going to be the buy-membership link. So all I need to do is click here, and paste in the by membership link right here. Let's save that. Then because I like to bold these links, we'll go ahead and select all that and then click bold. And that's, so that's it as far as a link, but I do also need to customize this. And so I'll just do a little signature. So I'm going to just sign off as “Jay at Kitty Care Academy.” So that's all I need to do to customize this email and have it be ready to send out to my contacts as they sign up.

[00:15:36] And so last step, of course, is to save it. So we're going to “save as new template” and change the template name to “Day one course sales email” and then click continue. Now it's saved and all I have to do is close this to go back to the workflow builder. So now this is all ready to go. You could go ahead and send a test email if you'd like, but then always even after you do that, you'll need to go ahead and click the “Save Action” button to save it, and now it is set here.

[00:16:07] So the next thing I would do after that would be wait another day. I'm not going to go ahead and continue to build all of the 30 days worth of emails that I would be sending, and we do recommend that you do use all of those emails for marketing your course.

[00:16:18] Now, because there will be 30 days of email here that would be going out to each contact as they are going through here, often people will ask me, “what do I do if someone actually purchased the course and I don't want them to continue to get the marketing emails?”

[00:16:32] And so, here is a way that you can solve that. To do that, you can create what's called a “goal event” and put it right before the end of the sequence here.

[00:16:43] And so all you do is click the plus button here, and we're going to find this special type of action which is called a goal. Okay, so goal event. So we're going to call this goal “contact, tagged as customer.” Then we need to select the type of goal event, which is going to be that a “tag was added to the contact.” And the specific tag that we want to add is going to be this one here, “customer.”

[00:17:10] Now this won't exist in your CRM by default, this “customer” tag. You'll actually have to create it, but that's really simple to do, all you need to do is just type it in here, so you just type “customer,” and then click “add new tag,” and it would automatically create a tag that can be used across your whole CRM in order to tag someone as a customer. In this case, since it already exists for me, I'm going to go ahead and click “customer.” and then I can just click back to the contact tag here to see the last piece I need to set, which would be the action I want to take. So this is actually correct. What I want to do here is just end this workflow. So there are other actions you could take, but this is the one that I really want to use for this case, is that whenever somebody is tagged as a customer, they exit this workflow immediately and they don't get any more of the emails. And then I'm going to save this action.

[00:18:02] And then I'll show you here in just a second on how you would actually tag them as a customer. Because that is a manual process, that's the part that's not automatic, when somebody purchases the course, you'll need to come into your CRM, find their contact record and then tag them as a customer. And then that's what will trigger this goal event to happen.

[00:18:20] So finally, one other thing that you may want to do at the end of your workflows is to tag the contact as having finished the workflow. This can help you with building additional smart lists that you can send emails to, or for segmenting your email list. So. I'm going to go ahead and click this plus button, and I'll show you how to do that, which is very straightforward to do. So what we are going to be doing is adding a contact tag. So we'll click that and the action name is going to be add tag and the tag I'm going to add is going to be “completed new lead workflow.”. So that's the action name I'm going to put in here, and the tag I'm going to select in this case Is again, one I already have created here in my CRM, but in your case, you would need to type this in and then click add new tag. So I'm going to go ahead and just select this tag. And I'm going to save this action.

[00:19:13] And we are almost done. I need to actually name this workflow, something better than “new workflow” and this big, long number. So I'm going to call this my “New Lead Workflow.” And final thing I need to do is set it to be active, so to do that, I just click this toggle to take it from “draft” to “publish” and then click Save to save all of the changes for the workflow and it is now live.

[00:19:39] So as a quick last piece to this lesson, I'm going to show you how you would set a tag on your contact. It's very, very straightforward to do. You could just come over here to your contact list, and What you'll do is scroll down to where it says tags. And if you click in here, then you can actually select the tag. So when somebody purchased, you could come into your CRM here, because you'll receive an email saying they purchased and you'll see that that happened. And then you can come in here, look them up and simply tag them as a customer. And that will automatically trigger the goal event to remove them from the new lead workflow. And there's actually no need to save anything, these tags, as you add them are automatically saved. So, that is all you need to do. And that will trigger that goal event that we set up to remove them from the workflow.

[00:20:31] And that's it for this lesson on how to set up an email automation workflow in your Profit Platform CRM.