Everything you need to know about beehiiv automations

Enhance your campaign-building experience with our powerful automations tool, offering unlimited flexibility, a modern interface, and an array of triggers, nodes, and customizable features to help you build highly-effective automation workflows.

Automation workflows, or automated journeys, are sequences that you can create for your subscribers to follow when they perform specific actions. Triggers indicate the actions that start the automation, and nodes are additional steps that expand upon those actions, giving you endless ways to customize your subscriber’s journey.

Automation workflow feature round up

Here are some of the many things you can do with beehiiv automations:

• Configure multiple triggers and nodes
• Add custom conditions to triggers and nodes
• Drag and drop steps into anywhere in the workflow builder 
• Set sophisticated time delays for each node
• Craft messages with all of the capabilities of our post editor 
• Create conditional branches within a workflow 
• Configure settings around re-entry 

Plus, you can set up robust welcome series, lead generation campaigns, re-engagement campaigns, upsell campaigns, churn recovery sequences, and more…

Watch and learn: How to Create a Welcome Series Automation

How to set up triggers

1. From the left panel in your account, go to Audience > Automations and then click on the New Automation button or open the automation you wish to edit. 

2. If needed, give the automation a name. Select the pen icon at the top, enter in the name, and then click Save automation. 

3. Switch back over to the Workflow tab to configure the automation. Click on Set trigger to get started.

4. An edit menu will appear on the left hand side where you can configure multiple triggers for the automation, or just one if that’s all you need.

Within each trigger, you can also set conditions by selecting Custom conditions.

This is where you can customize conditions to add more specific criteria to your automation trigger.

You can add as many triggers as you’d like for the automation while using this menu.

5. Review all of your choices and when all looks good, hit Save and you’ll see the trigger node populate with the configured triggers.

Once you’ve added in your selected node, you can configure it by selecting the settings icon found in the top right corner of the node.

This will open up the side menu in which you can edit the details of your node.

You can also specify a time delay at the top of the menu here, which means this step will be delayed until the set time from the previous step has passed.

Finally, be sure to hit Save on your node and then come back to toggle on Activate when you want the automation to start running.
Here's an example of a workflow that uses the Signed Up trigger with some time delay conditions: 

Configuring automation settings

Once you’ve set up your automation workflow, you can go to the Settings tab to further configure settings around how many times and under what conditions subscribers can enroll in your workflow.

This is where you can edit the name of the automation and create settings around re-entry. 

Automations Overview

After you’ve activated an automation and subscribers begin enrolling in the workflow, you can come back to the Overview tab to review data insights on the automation performance.

The Overview dashboard shows you:

• The number of steps in the workflow
• The number of subscribers enrolled in the workflow
• The number of subscribers that have completed the workflow
• The number of days since the last enrollment
• The completion rate percentage
• The average completion time
• An automation overview chart that you can switch between Journey and Performance views
  • The Journey overview will show your subscriber's status as Entered, In Progress, or Completed. 
  • The Performance overview (as seen below) will show the status of your email messages as Sent, Delivered, Unique Opens, Unique Clicks, and Spam Reports. 

 

Frequently asked questions about automations

Can I have an automation end when a subscriber replies?

Not at this time. Currently there is no functionality available to end an automation once a subscriber replies. Our Product team is reviewing the possibility of incorporating this functionality in the future, but we currently do not have a projected timeline of when it will be implemented.

Why are existing subscribers in my automation not moving into a newly-added node (or nodes)?

Once your subscribers have finished your existing active automated sequence, meaning they've received the final email in your automation at that time, then adding or activating a new email after that final email will not trigger them to move into that new step. The system sees them as having "completed" the automation at that point.

That said, any users who have not completed the existing automation yet, as well as new users who enter into that automation after you've added/activated any new email steps will move through the automation with those additional emails included.

Can I use one of my saved templates in the automation workflow builder? 

Not at this time. You will need to craft a message from scratch while using the automation workflow builder, but you can access all of your files in the image library and will be using the same post editor that you are familiar with.  

What other articles do you have about automations? 

Including the articles linked above, here are a few others about automations:

• Automation workflow triggers and nodes
• How to create an automation based on survey form responses
• All articles on automations