Automation/Drip Campaigns

About Automation Campaigns in BigMailer

An Automation campaign can consist of 1 or more emails triggered by an event. It can be setup as a simple confirmation for a signup action, often referred to as an auto-responder. A common use case for an auto-responder is a newsletter signup confirmation email.

The most typical trigger for an Automation campaign is a contact being added to a list, which can happen via: manual CSV file import, web form, transactional email, API call, or a 3rd party integration. The simplest way to test an Automation campaign is so add your test email manually using an "Add" tab under a given List.

The emails in a sequence can be triggered with:

1. A trigger condition based on engagement, AND
2. Optional time delay specified in number of hours, days, or weeks.

Each email in the Automation campaign can be in either HTML or text-only format and each email can be activated or paused at anytime. A sequence can also be re-arranged at anytime - you can drag an email step into a new position in a sequence but no history of changes in the sequence is stored (no revision history).

Email Scheduling Logic

The automation emails are scheduled at the time of the trigger, ignoring any delay rules. So if the trigger for an email step is "after previous email is SENT" then the email is scheduled as soon as the previous email is SENT, regardless of a delay rule. Re-arranging steps for a live sequence, or changing delay rules, will not have any impact on emails already scheduled.

One way to make changes to a live sequence is to copy the step you want to move, then pause original in its place and set live the new step in new place or with new trigger rule. This way you preserve stats for the original rules used.

Using the copy and pause method doesn't prevent any subscribers from receiving the same email twice, it's just a way to not mix up stats for states before/after change is made. You can try to exclude subscribers from the new version using campaign engagement on a segment as "didn't open any campaigns in X days" if there are no other emails being sent to a subscriber (e.g. transactional).

See our article for getting started with Automation Campaign for detailed instructions. Read more about examples of automated emails in our email marketing automation guide.