All automations are composed of one or more Sequences. Sequences are a series of events that occur based on rules.
Rules are a collection of triggers and conditions that begin and end a sequence.
Conditions create triggers, and triggers set the rules in motion.
Add Sequence
To add a new sequence, click Add Sequence from the Edit Automation screen:
This will open the Add/Edit Rules overlay. This overlay has two parts. The top part contains the sequence’s information and the bottom part contains the rules that determine when a trigger is activated.
Sequence Information
Name and Description
The name of each sequence appears for each client in the Pipeline so try to keep this brief. The description can mirror the name or be more detailed. Both appear on the Automations list screen.
Restrict Entry To
In Automations, the term entry means becoming a part of the automation. You may have several Leads who meet the conditions to start (or enter) a sequence but if this automation is strictly for clients you might not want a lead to get the emails or follow-up forms, etc., that the automation creates. Choose here from a dropdown list of statuses of your clients and leads: active, former, open, and closed.
Allow Re-Entry
If you want to set the number of days between a client being placed into an automation again, click the slider and enter a number.
For example, you may want to restrict an automation to only one time for each client or lead. If you create an automation that occurs only the first time a visit is successfully completed for a new client, you might not want that client, upon having a second visit completed, to go through the process again.
Allow Re-Entry Default Setting
To help prevent unintentional infinite loops from being created in an automation, SA has increased the default setting for Allow Re-Entry to one day. You can still adjust the setting to as low as one minute.
Start/Stop Rules for a Sequence
Start a Sequence
A trigger is required to start any sequence. The list of triggers includes events that occur during normal operations, like completing a visit or creating an account. You may have one or multiple triggers that start any sequence.
Once you choose a trigger, another dropdown based on that trigger appears:
For instance, if a visit being completed triggers a sequence, the system needs to know which services you want to include. All of them? Only a few? Select the options you need.
Next, do you want to place any conditions on this trigger? Click the + CONDITION button to expand the dialog to include a dropdown list of conditions, based on the triggers that you are using. Maybe your sequence will start when specific services are completed, but only if those clients have or do not have a certain tag.
At this point, you can add another condition to further restrict who gets into a sequence, or you can add an “or” condition to include more clients or circumstances.
Stop a Sequence
After you finish customizing the start triggers, you have the option of determining what conditions will stop the sequence. You are not required to add stop conditions. It is entirely possible to create an automation that will automatically stop once after it is complete and a stop condition would not be required.
If you include stop conditions, remember that a client who meets this criterion will not cause a real-time stop or immediate update to the automation.
Meeting this criterion will simply stop the automation from running the next event in the process for affected clients.
Stop conditions also give you the option of setting or removing one or more tags when the stop condition is met. Just remember that this won’t work for automations that have been manually stopped.
When you’ve finished setting up the sequence, click Save Sequence. It appears in the main part of the Edit screen.
Sequence
Sequences have two parts: header and body. The header contains the title of the sequence; clicking the Rules or name opens the initial Add/Edit Rules dialog.
Use the slider at the top right to turn the sequence on or off. Green means the sequence is on, whereas red indicates it's off:
The bottom of the sequence will expand to display all the events you add from the left panel.