Automation Rule Explained

What is an Automation Rule?

With Platformly, you can create an Automation Rule so that when the automation rule is triggered and condition met, a certain action or set of actions occurs. Automation Rules are the key to automate the flow between different Automations, connecting your flow and making it "automated full-proof".

There are a variety of actions that can be set up, for example, Remove Contact from Segment, Add Tag to Contact, Change Deal Status and so on. Automation Rules are an advanced way of achieving even the most complex flows based on your needs.

Example of an Automation Rule

Imagine you have an optin form on your website inviting visitors interested in dog training to join your mailing list in order to receive further information on this service. You want to offer 2 training courses to these subscribers, an Initial Training Course and an Upsell Course, and you want to set up email automations so that when subscribers opt in the following occurs automatically:

Subscribers receives a series of emails about the Initial Training Course;
If a subscriber make a purchase of the Initial Training Course, they stop receiving further emails relating to the Initial Training Course and instead they receive another series of emails about the Upsell Course.

With Platformly, you can be achieve this with 2 Automations and an Automation Rule, which you would set up as follows:

Set up the optin form so that the tag “dog_training” is applied to each subscriber. You can read more about setting up tags here.

Create an automated email series for your Initial Training Course in which the trigger is "Contact is added to tag" with the tag "dog_training". This means that every time the tag "dog_training" is applied to a contact (in other words, every time someone opts in), this contact enters this automation and starts receiving emails in this series.



Set up a Global Condition in the Initial Training Course series for the automation to end if the contact contains tag "dog_training_upsell". This will automatically end the automation for those contacts when the tag "dog_training_upsell" is applied to them. You can read more about Global Conditions here.



Create a second automated email series for the Upsell Course in which the trigger is the adding of the tag "dog_training_upsell".



Set up a Global Condition in the Upsell Course series for the automation to end if the contact has purchased the Upsell Course.



You can then link the 2 Automations by creating an Automation Rule so that when a contact makes a purchase of the Initial Training Course, the tag "dog_training_upsell" is applied to them. You can create an Automation Rule by selecting Automation Rules from the dashboard and then clicking on the blue + button at the top right of the page to add a new automation rule.



Set the Trigger: Purchase has been Made - "Initial Training Course".



Set the Action: Add Tag to Contact - "dog_training_upsell".



Once the Automation Rule is saved, the result will be that contacts who have the tag "dog_training" and make a purchase of the Initial Training Course, will have a new tag "dog_training_upsell" applied to them, which will then trigger the Upsell Course email series. These contacts will automatically stop receiving emails from the Initial Training Course series and start to receive emails from the Upsell Course email series.

With Automation Rules, the possibilities are limitless. You could add another action, where a new tag is added to the contact, triggering off another series of emails to be sent out to the contact for example, "dog_training_products" tag. This is the power of using Automation Rules to automate the contacts flow between different Automations.



If you have any questions or need help setting up your email marketing automations, you can contact our friendly support staff at any time by clicking on the "?" icon at the top right of the page and selecting "Help".

Updated on: 20/04/2022